Page 64 - WTP VOl. XII #1

On The Invisible Palm (continued from preceding page)
should take up the most energy, is written at about the same depth as the other scenes—all of your scenes are occupying about a page and a half, and the climatic section only two. This ending section should have at least three or four pages devoted to it. You see?” His right hand made arcs in the air now as he described the course the story needed to take. “You
give insight into character and theme. Artists call this chiaroscuro.” It was a word we would hear many times in the coming semester.
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We retired to the campus snack bar with Andre after, just the few steps away from the library. We leaned into the counter with our orders—burgers and fries and Cokes, and sat at the round tables; usually it was crowded, with the radio playing current hits and
the sounds of pool—the snapping of billiard balls, the dropping and throaty rolling sounds as they fell through the tables. I always tried to sit near Andre to make sure I heard what he was saying.
“Always beside Andre, on that
front table, there was a record book where he kept notes about us— he wrote in a steady, artistic cursive with looping capital letters— and a small volume of Chekhov’s stories.”
“Hemingway did the same thing you guys are doing when he was in Paris,” he told a group of us, after
the class where he’d focused on the idea of propor- tion. “He looked at paintings in museums and
made connections between what the painters were doing—the balances they were striking—and what he was doing on the page. He was constantly training himself.”
One coed—my former high school companion—said she’d read an article that criticized the workshop- ping process, that said classes such as ours created “cookie cutter” stories that just imitated one another. She wondered how our mentor felt about this.
“There are a lot of purists who put down the idea of classes and workshopping,” Andre said. “Usually these are critics rather than artists. Somebody should ask them—what were Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and all the rest doing on the Left Bank? They were authors, getting together, discussing stories. It was the same thing you’re all doing. That’s how you learn, man.”
He had a way of making us feel that we were embarked on an important journey—I think he
felt that we were. We talked in the Bradford snack bar until the light fell, until the orbs of the campus lights outside hovered beneath the violet winter sky like small spaceships.
Hurka was a creative writing student of Andre Dubus in the early nineteen-eighties, and afterward he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He went on to publish short stories in numerous literary journals, and his memoir, Fields of Light: A Son Remembers his Heroic Father was a winner of the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. His new memoir, called On the Invisible Palm of God, about his long friendship with Dubus, will be published in 2025 by Vine Leaves Press. Hurka teaches creative writing at Tufts University.
just need to give that section more attention, more specificity, and the power of the story will change right in front of you.”
The author and the rest of us nodded at this, looking at the pages—it was clear, the way our teacher explained it.
Always beside Andre, on that front table, there was a record book where he kept notes about us—he wrote
in a steady, artistic cursive with looping capital letters— and a small volume of Chekhov’s stories. Often, he picked up the Chekhov to read us a character descrip- tion or an atmospheric passage to demonstrate how Chekhov brought characters to life, how he balanced and gave proportion to his work. He frequently quoted Chekhov’s saying that a single moment can change a life forever. And he wrote another of Chekhov’s admonitions on the board: Don’t tell me the moon is shining: show me the glint of light on broken glass.
“Always remember the importance of light,” Andre told us. “The contrast of light and dark in a scene can
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