First, I wanted to make things. I drew maps of made-up islands. I drew cartoons. I started a newspaper, breaking stories on neighborhood dogs. I remember working hard to turn a cardboard box into a vending machine. To deliver what? I don’t recall.
I wanted to discover something. I lived near a pond visited by Vikings. There was a rock with mysterious carvings. I spent hours walking among trees, accumulating ticks. At home, I read Greek mythology. I watched every sitcom, even the ones I didn’t like. The days took forever. Boredom made my imagination relevant.
Then I moved somewhere faster, and I wanted to do things. I was in cars; I was on boats. I became interested in the Beat Generation with its reverence for speed, poverty, and excess. The interest waned, but I got hooked on sentences. John Banville told THE PARIS REVIEW that “the sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.” I agree.
At the University of Virginia, I discovered books were still being written. I’d never read a book by a living writer. I enrolled in fiction writing workshops, and their structure made sense to me: I had a lot of opinions and didn’t mind being criticized. More importantly, I was willing to track down every poem, story, novel, or play someone mentioned. I was also studying Latin, which taught me how sentences work. One professor, close to retirement or death, commanded us to explain the function of each word we translated. This was before the advent of the smartphone.
Imagine my excitement when I arrived to Iowa City and found sentences engraved in sidewalks. “We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut warned beneath my shoes, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Then there he was, pulling an ashtray from his coat pocket and holding court. He was pretending to be precisely what he wanted to be.
I took teaching jobs in Detroit, the Shenandoah Valley, New York, and Nebraska. Pacing before classes, I was like a stand-up comic refining his routine. Did you hear the one about Virginia Woolf, how she spent the morning inserting a comma and the afternoon removing it? I hooked some of my students on sentences; some students arrived that way.
I wanted to write a good sentence. It seemed as glamorous as anything else and still does. Becoming a Major League pitcher would never be attainable, but writing a good sentence might be. Each morning at my desk, it could happen. It could materialize unbidden, so all I would have to do is listen. Of course, the only thing to do after writing a good sentence is to write another or to try. I built my entire career–my whole life–on this principle.
Kevin Clouther is the author of the story collections WE WERE FLYING TO CHICAGO (Catapult) and MAXIMUM SPEED (Cornerstone). He is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he directs the MFA in Writing. He lives with his wife and two children in Omaha. THE MOMS (Regal House) is his first novel.
