Write what you know, the high school guidance counselor said to us 50 years ago. Write about your passions and your loves, your books and your goals. I wrote about my love of the English language, about Beowulf and kennings, and about how I would try to capture something of these old sounds in my own poetry. I applied to six schools. Five thin letters came back.
The only college that accepted me was Wesleyan. In the early 1970s, it was a school in search of an identity, an old-boys’ place in a small Connecticut town that had decided to remake itself, opening its doors to women and recruiting African-American students. As a result, enrollment doubled. Meanwhile, a new generation of faculty showed up, most of them fresh from Yale, rich with the language of new literary theory. My freshmanyear course catalog included such offerings as “Ouroboros: Themes of Self in Modern Literature” and “Landscapes of the Mind’s Interior.” Hayden White (long before he had achieved iconic status as a theorist of historical discourse) ran the Honors College, and he taught a course in which we students would be herded into vans, blindfolded, and driven out into the Connecticut woods. We would be left there, forced to get back to campus on our own. The course consisted of our stories
