Lately I have been thinking about my dad. He was a cerebral sort, and while my mother actively pursues local and global news, watches talk shows and various kinds of tv, my dad preferred Nature, preferably old episodes he had seen before. But my dad and shared a love for silly British comedy, and nothing made us laugh more than Mr Bean. The show had us on the floor, loudly guffawing at poor Mr. Bean’s antics, at his attempts to fit in with society, and abjectly, completely failing. Maybe my dad and I saw ourselves in Mr. Bean, hapless in our environment, trying to imitate as best we could social mores that were beyond us. My dad came to this country as a graduate student with twenty dollars hidden in his sock. He was assigned a blind man as his roommate at university, who duly taught him how to operate a coke machine. I imagine the university must have had a laugh, the blind man leading the super-shy Asian mathematician, but they probably never looked past the set-up, and saw the humanity. Later my dad had a fellow Indian as a housemate who blithely vacuumed up the cockroaches in their apartment, never understanding why they kept returning to the kitchen. There were many adventures in my father’s life, including the tattoo he acquired in Calcutta, the first of many defiances against the rules in a Tam-Bram’s life, the tattoo we were never allowed to ask about. In my life, too, I defied many rules, but probably not enough of them. And when we were pretty much tired of fighting the world, and each other, my father and I bonded as adults, laughing uproariously at the misadventures of Mr. Bean, the indefatigable misfits.

It has been a long while since I’ve posted here.  I give a one- day workshop at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, and so far three people have signed up. My numbers are small, sometimes just one person, sometimes nine, though mostly it is often three or four students.  What always surprises me is the alchemy that occurs when a group of shy writers take a chance on themselves and their writing, trusting the process, the appeal of an indie class. Trust happens almost magically, as I see it, as work is shared and received, creating paths for change, for new views.  A conversation begins about work, about confidence, about lives lived.  Each session runs for three hours, and lately I have been offering either one-day workshops or three- days.

I will also be teaching a Graduate Fiction a workshop for Emerson College on zoom, as I have been doing most summers. An intense class of a dozen MFA students that meets twice a week for three hours for six weeks is a dizzying difference to my local workshops, but alchemy occurs there as well. Here, students are responsible of two stories of up to twenty pages per term, which means we can cover about eighty pages a week with a hour devoted each story. We start late May, end in July.

Today, the campus was closed in response to the arrests of dozens and dozens of students protesting the killings in Gaza. The number of people arrested was 108, that potent Buddhist number that signifies a microcosm of the microcosm. ( update: 118 were arrested.) When students protest, the result can be democratic change or military brutality. At Emerson, all arrested people were released, and classes will resume tomorrow. I no longer commute to campus, so my connection is not through conversation but from newspaper accounts, and official emails. I am a part time faculty as well, which further distances my connection. There is an aching guilt in me that I am removed from this crisis, watching from afar from my rural home on the edge of an ocean, but I am made confident by the amount of students all over the country who are moved to act, which statement, I am aware, like much of this paragraph, is an over-simplified generalization of the kind I warn my students against writing. Still. Children are being killed. That is the truth in this world now. And it is in this truth we write.