When you're baffled by bad beginnings, stymied by the unteachable, and running from impending doom, you'd better head for the hills

By Tim Cahill

Steen's Mountain: A good place to ride out the apocalypse

"An initial priority for composition facilitators is to peruse, for context analysis, the local papers, and taking it seriously." I read that sentence a total of, oh, maybe 20 times. The next day, this opening sentence and the essay that followed it were to be discussed in a class I was teaching in the techniques (if not the art) of travel writing. It was, and remains, the very worst lead sentence I have ever had the misfortune to read, and I remember it to this day, more than 15 years later, word for ghastly word.

Worse, I recall with a shudder the cruelty I visited upon its author, a sincere young woman who was a high school composition teacher only a few years out of college. This was at Indiana University, and the woman was taking my summer writing class because, she said, my articles on travel and adventure were popular among her students. She intended to absorb my lectures, such as they were, and convey their lessons to her fellow English teachers. Thus composition instructors could inspire students to produce assignments modeled, to some degree, after the sorts of articles they preferred to read.

In one of my first lectures, I'd said that travel didn't necessarily involve distance. It was a process of discovery and could as easily be accomplished in one's hometown as in the Congo Basin. Where might a potential writer find local travel writing ideas? Well, there were dozens of them every week in the local newspaper. And then I assigned the class to address this topic in an essay.

It was my first experience teaching writing of any kind, and I am afraid that clemency and compassion were not then among my small arsenal of virtues.

So there I was, standing in front of a class of 20, all of us holding this woman's paper as if it had been used some time ago to wrap fish.

"Any comments before we start?" I asked. There was a silence so complete it had an odor about it.

And then—degenerate beast that I am—I destroyed this woman, completely, and in public.

I turned to a student named Jones, who was a retired history professor and, it was obvious, a brilliant man. "Mr. Jones," I said, "could you silently read the opening sentence and tell me what you think it means?" I stood at the front of the class, ostentatiously staring at my watch while he read.

Finally Jones spoke. "I think it means writing teachers ought to read the newspapers," he declared.

"Me, too," I said. "But it took you 45 seconds to come to that conclusion. You know why? Because the sentence had to be translated. It is not written in the English language."

The author sat in stunned silence. She rose slowly, eyes glazed over with what would soon be tears, and commented, quite cogently I thought, on my teaching technique.

"You asshole," she said.

This was something of a surprise, since the woman was a lay teacher in a Catholic high school. Then the author of the worst lead sentence I'd ever read turned her back to me and walked toward the door. She was attempting to outrun her tears.

"Wait," I called. "Please. Let's talk about this. We want to learn how to communicate effectively with people."

The unfortunate woman stood in the doorway, turned her now tear-stained face to me—to the class at large—and said, "I don't want to communicate with people, you shithead. I want to have an impact on educators."

With that she slammed the door, hard, and was gone. Exclamation point.

Photo: Larry Ulrich