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In the spirit of getting something less grim on the timeline & procrastinating in organizing my basement, I present a thread of shit my environmental humanities professor said in our college nature writing workshop, as documented in my class notebook.
On audience: "You're going to write for a cab driver named Wendy from Poughkeepsie, New York. You need to seduce Wendy."
On revision: "What would Emerson say if he read this essay? Let him smoke a joint and weigh in."
On Thoreau: "This is a guy who walked down the road from his mother's house, pitched a cabin for two and a half months and made a big fucking deal about it."
On a classmate's black eye: "Oh, rugby. I was hoping that you had gotten in a bar fight and that you had decked the son of a bitch."
On millennials: "There are no astrologers in the room? Have any of you ever heard of peyote? What is wrong with this fucking generation?"
On humanity: "Bullshit. We're not part of nature. What the fuck are you thinking? But I'm kind of the contrarian."
"There's a part of me that when I hear the word 'ecotourism', something in me sort of dies."
On people who don't like dragonflies: "If that person exists, they shouldn't exist. We should kill them immediately."
On sweatpants: "It's sort of like jammies that are okay to wear to Walmart."
On the importance of moisturizing & his wife:
"She said she got tired of sleeping with an alligator."
"You become so reptilian you'll never find a good woman."
(To a classmate): "You're obviously comfortable in your masculinity, so you can start moisturizing."
"She said she got tired of sleeping with an alligator."
"You become so reptilian you'll never find a good woman."
(To a classmate): "You're obviously comfortable in your masculinity, so you can start moisturizing."
On the annual AAUW booksale in our college town: It's the loveliest olfactory event of the year in Walla Walla. You walk into that room and it's just old, dirty, dusty paper. My wife and I burst into tears."
On a classmate's ambition: "You've got a fly rod and you've hooked Moby Dick."
On a poignant scene from a classmate's essay: "Breastfeeds, runs out and shoots an animals, comes back and breastfeeds. God, I wish that would have happened to me! My dad was never that nurturing. Good thing - he would have been arrested."
On living in the rural West: "You know, you can always shoot tourists with a pellet gun. Those guys walk by, just hit 'em right in the ass."
On the futility of teaching: "One of my students left Whitman, went to Montana and shot a wolf!"
On writing as therapy: "Your pain isn't art. You will bring honor to your pain in the attempt to elevate it to the level of art."
On nature deficit disorder: "Timmy likes the electrical sockets, so now we have a national crisis because he'd rather be indoors with his electrical sockets than outside sniffing robin shit."
On the human condition: "Human beings were never made to be sober."
On truth-telling: "I think we should be a lot meaner to a lot more people when we write."
And finally, some wisdom that still guides the work I do: "Stories are ubiquitous. We can't live without them, the same way we can't live without food, water and air."
