“You just witnessed the single most amazing moment of my life.”
I’ve seen many young lives transformed during my two decades at the College, but I’d never heard those words here until Lucas Zromkoski ’15 said them to me during last April’s Wabash Writer’s Workshop.
I should have seen them coming. It was the second day of the three-day intensive workshop, and Lucas had just spent more than an hour listening while five of his peers and Dan Simmons ’70—the College’s most successful professional writer—critiqued Lucas’ short story, “Shatter.” The students were honest, meticulous, tough, and helpful with both their praise and criticism.
Simmons was taking it down to the word.
“I’m going line by line here, but that’s what I do when I like a story,” he said before he offered specific suggestions and wondered aloud about word choices to improve the piece. Lucas listened intently, jotting an occasional note for his revision, determined to make the story better.
Then Dan looked at Lucas and said, “God, this is good. Congratulations.”
Lucas calmly nodded his head and joined the students walking out the door for coffee and snacks. A few seconds later, though, he returned to the table. This young man, who a day earlier admitted he’d wanted to be a fiction writer since he was a kid, turned to me with eyes as wide as Christmas morning and said it: “Mr. Charles, you just witnessed the single most amazing moment of my life.”
It was that kind of week, that kind of workshop. Earlier, during a public reading, Simmons had shared his reason for returning to Wabash, volunteering his time despite the fact that the proofs for his novel, The Abominable, were late and waiting on his desk back in Colorado.
“I’m looking for a few good men to be professional full-time writers,” he said, noting there are fewer than 500 such writers in the world. “The world needs writers, and we need a Wabash novelist for the 21st century. I believe that Wabash, the quintessential liberal arts college, is the perfect incubator for the 21st-century novelist.”
He said the move from amateur to publishable professional writer was analogous to an electron moving from one orbit to another, a quantum leap very few have made.
Then he and the students went to work.
It was the sort of interaction those at the College who know Simmons have envisioned for years. They knew that, regardless of his continued financial success (Dan’s book, The Terror, is in development for a series at AMC), the best gift the College’s greatest practitioner of the art and craft of writing could give was his time.
Read more about the workshop at WM Online.