I just found out that my first fiction teacher, Barry Hannah, died today.
Barry changed my life.
I was 35. I had ended up back in Mississippi for a complicated set of reasons involving my dead father and an old college friend-turned-boyfriend. I had started writing some personal essays for the little local paper just to ease the boredom.
One Saturday, Barry stopped me in The Grove at Ole Miss to compliment me on my writing. It was one of those moments where the world outside of the bubble of the two people involved gets all fuzzy and silent. There were no towering oak trees. There was no marching band in the distance. I stammered my thanks, said something about wanting to take a class with him, and he said, “Come on.”
He let me in the class, and I was smitten from day one. With him. With writing. With how I saw the world when I was writing. I wrote lots of horrible stories, at least one that was Hannah-esque (Barry himself pointed this out to me and I was mortified; such a rookie mistake).
When I decided to apply for an M.F.A. program, he wrote a recommendation letter for me. It was much better than any of the stories I sent in with my application.
While in Montana, I wrote him every so often, the last letter after he had been diagnosed with lymphoma. He wrote back, telling me how coming so close to death had converted him. I’m making it sound like a cliché, but Barry was incapable of cliché.
We didn’t write to each other after that. He had been converted. He had a new life to tend to. I got caught up in my own new life in Montana. This is how things go, I guess.
Fiction hasn’t become the center of my life as it felt like it might back in Mississippi when life was slow and uncomplicated and aimless.
But because I had the honor of studying with him and knowing him, I am more myself than I was before I met him.
I will be forever grateful.
