This past weekend, with the shade trees of the San Bernardino mountains barely breaking the first scorching heat of summer, I attended a barbecue at which the creative writing faculty at CSUSB welcomed its very first class of MFA students.

There was K, who knows his Krautrock. V of the delicately devastating characters, who brought her man. She thinks he’s a writer, too, but he doesn’t. S, who left her longboard in the Jeep. E, buffeted and strengthened by decades in music (the other worst profession that provides a potentially happy life).

N. couldn’t come. She was at her desk in the property management office, trading away the first of the thousand hours she’s offered up in exchange for the chance to stay here.

I sat amongst them, watching them already joggling against and crossing wits with and learning from each other. Inevitably, story and poem ideas started spilling from their mouths. They are pitchers filled to overflowing. Tip them, and the words just come. It was inspiring and a privilege just to be there.

I think I got through twenty minutes before the paroxysm I knew was coming hit.

What are we doing to these people?

Stoking the insane belief that their (very real) talents will surely earn them a book someday, or even guarantee the survival of books.

Sometimes, I feel like one of the high priests from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cult, babbling words even I don’t understand in the hopes of raising a dead dream that existed eons before I was born and therefore can’t really be mine.

Only problem is, my dreaming THING has no cuttlefish head, no tentacles, not even any impossible geometry with which to wow an awe-less world. All it has is a voice. Sometimes, it’s my mother’s. Or my father’s. Sometimes, it’s the narrator on my old Alfred Hitchcock record (”Hello, Cecil, wait ’til Charlie comes…). Sometimes, it’s my students’. Very occasionally, it’s mine.

And all it does is tell stories. To anyone who’ll listen.

What are we doing to these people?

I, for one, am going to listen to them.

(Speaking of which– If you haven’t, yet, you should definitely check out Kay Murphy’s comments on my last post. She’s got stories about her stories to tell. They are well worth your hearing.)

(I’m in a summer daze, writing furiously, hence the sudden flights of fancy here. I promise something concrete next time.)