This is Teacher Appreciation Week and I’m giving a shout-out to the writing professor who changed my life. Her advice and guidance in college echo in my mind years later now that I’ve been teaching at Michigan State University as a guest for half a dozen years. I had dreamed of being a writer since I was in second grade, but it wasn’t until I took my first class with Kristin Lauer at Fordham University’s small Lincoln Center campus that I fell in love with writing itself.
She was my first and best creative writing teacher and was endlessly inventive in her choice of assignments. But more than that, she was a model for how I would teach when I entered academia myself right after graduate school to teach before I quit to write full time.
I’ve heard of writing professors who make their students tremble with fear and even cry. Not Dr. Lauer. She didn’t believe in pointing out everything that was wrong with your work, in bullying you like a hyper aggressive coach, in making you tough because “the world is tough.” She never insulted or belittled students. Her approach was to use humor and encouragement. She tried to work from the inside out of your story or sketch, to see it the way you did, and to help you improve what was best in it. Her overall goal was to create a community of learning, not set students against each other as rivals.
I took every class she taught, including an intensive inter-semester course looking at literature through the perspective of Karen Horney’s psychology which explores morbid dependency and cultural neuroses. Thanks to her, I read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and loved it; I still have the paper I wrote about that amazing novel.
I read two authors in her American Novel survey course who’ve never left me: Henry James and Edith Wharton. Dr. Lauer is one reason why years later my second mystery The Edith Wharton Murders has two fictional Wharton societies at war with each other. In a tribute to her, I made my sleuth the author of a Wharton bibliography, just as she was. I also based one of the continuing characters in the series on her because she loved mysteries so much and I wanted to feel her presence in the books as I wrote them.
She predicted that I’d publish and win prizes some day if only I wrote something emotionally real. That was my El Dorado, the mystical goal that I reached with my first publication. It was a story drawing on my own life as the son of Holocaust survivors, a story I needed to tell but was afraid to.
I had already graduated and was in an MFA program, but she midwifed the story because she knew I was anxious about broaching the subject matter. She made me read a bit to her on the phone and she’d comment and then urge me to keep writing and keep calling her. That story won a writing contest judged by Martha Foley, editor of The Best American Short Stories, and was published in Redbook, which then had an audience of 4.5 million readers. It wouldn’t exist without Professor Lauer’s dedication, commitment, and mentoring.
And I wouldn’t have had the career I’ve had or be the author I am today. After MSU’s English department invited me to start teaching there, I realized that Dr. Lauer’s imprint was still so strong on me that I was teaching the way she did, interacting with students the way she would. I feel her presence most strongly when I’m working one-on-one with a student doing an independent study or a senior creative writing thesis. She’s still alive and we’re in touch, but when it comes to teaching and mentoring, she’s become a kind of guardian angel.
Lev Raphael is the author of two dozen books in genres from memoir to mystery.