Broadcast on WVPE-FM on 5/14/07
Like so many writers of my generation, I have spent a lot of time in classrooms, teaching creative writing. In my case, over thirty years. Being a child of the Sixties, I don't have many rules, but I do have one, at least for undergraduates. In my fiction writing classes, the first day, I tell them my one and only rule: I don't want them to write about anyone they wouldn't spend five minutes alone with in a room. That would spare me, I thought, from chain-saw wielding stories, tales starring psychotics of the popular culture sort.
But when Virginia Tech Professor Lucinda Roy talked about Seung-Hui Cho, her creative writing student who carried out the campus killings of 32 people, those of us in the academic creative writing community were particularly and personally affected.
Cho was an English major, a student of creative writing, one of ours. Roy and her fellow creative writing teachers took some appropriate measures. Unfortunately, for her and them, those prudent steps are likely to become the stuff of lawsuits.
One of Cho's classmates from a playwriting workshop has put Cho's writing on the internet and recalled speculation amongst fellow students that some day Cho could turn into a "school shooter." In one of Cho's posted plays, a chain saw makes an appearance.
Unlike the deaths in 1999 at Colorado's Columbine High School, school shootings at the college level share more similarities with work place incidents. In California, Arkansas, Virginia, graduate students in 1996, 2000, and 2002, killed professors who had supervised them. There are very few teachers over the last ten years who have not joked about students showing up with Uzis and taking revenge over some grievance, imagined or real. "Going postal" has become a too familiar cliché.
Semi-automatics have been a weapon of choice for most of these events. Universities are work-places. Disgruntled employees of a variety of businesses sporadically shoot their coworkers or bosses around the country. But Cho's number of victims has never been reached before. Classrooms serve as the barrels you can shoot the fish in. But "locking down" a campus as large as Virginia Tech may be futile, yet nothing is easier than canceling classes. That kind of news travels fast, since it pleases both the teachers, as well as the students.
Such work-related incidents prompted cynical comments from the professoriate, protective humor. But undergraduates weren't, until now, lethal. Suicides, yes; killers, no. Cho is a home-grown version of a suicide bomber. Americans remain stubbornly individualistic to the end; even our killers like to kill one at a time. But, the result is the same. The suicide bombers of the Middle East we hear about so often murder as many or more, but it is collective, impersonal. Cho looked at everyone he killed. The media package Cho sent to NBC was his version of a "martyrs" video.
Creative writing is unlike other courses universities offer. It isn't just the writing, but the writer, who is judged. Another thing I tell my undergraduates on the first day of class is that, counter to what they are often told, many people write badly on purpose. Because writing is revealing – of who they are. I ask for a writing sample that they have already written to read, because as soon as I read it, I will know something about them. In fact, quite a bit. Out in the world, away from the island culture of a university, a lot of people decide they don‚t want to reveal themselves that way and bad writing is often the mask they choose.
Yet, most students, like Cho, often reveal who they are. But it is difficult for a teacher to think a young person is a monster and it wasn't only Cho's writing that has been exposed that showed that, but his lack of contact, his absence of speech, his signing his name as a question mark, his aloneness.
It would have been difficult for Cho to make himself any clearer to one and all, but it is the nature of an institution of higher learning to think that the job of a university is to educate the young, make them better, improved. The 32 who died will haunt the consciences of many university teachers -- and, perhaps, most of all, creative writing professors. It is a hard blow for all of us to be taught this terrible way just how serious what we do is.
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