Night, Neon by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Published: 2021-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

It is an old (urban) university, by American standards. On the bank of a river that has become mythic—“majestic”—in the American imagination.

Of land-grant, public universities it is not the largest, but it is one of the most prestigious, or has been until recently. Now a Republican governor and a Republican legislature have cut the state education budget by millions of dollars, boasting of “holding professors’ feet to the fire”—a metaphor the media finds amusing.

In the (approximate) middle of your life, you find yourself a visiting professor here for the fall term. Your title is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

Because you are new here, and because there are few creative writing instructors on the faculty, more than one hundred students applied for your Advanced Fiction Workshop, for a mere fifteen places.

Very carefully, you have read through these applications and their attached fiction samples. You’ve read, reread. Coolly professional, you ignored pleas by students claiming desperation if they were rejected, for it was their senior year, for instance, or they were longtime admirers of your work; you hesitated before accepting an older, General Studies student named Gavin Kroff, whose writing sample verged upon the obscure, for you’d seen that he had identified himself as an army veteran, and you wanted to give him, as you might have said if queried, the benefit of the doubt.

And so now you may tell yourself—You brought this on yourself. Indulging in a cliché. No one else to blame!

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