#48: what it takes

Dear Readers:

Here at long last is the boredom & the horror & the glory. The less I write this newsletter the harder it is to write! Studies bear this out: the secret trick to doing more writing is to do more writing (but not too much writing!).

This summer I taught a class about applying to college for Chicago Public Schools students. They dazzled me and I told them all my application secrets and made them one of the best handouts I’ve ever made in my life.

One of the things I hate most about helping kids apply to college is the lies the colleges tell. I told the students this summer that elite $90k-a year colleges are the cigarette companies of the 21st century; they advertise specifically to kids knowing that their product could ruin the kids’ lives. They will lure in a kid, watch passively as the kid takes out $350,000 in loans for tuition, room, and board, and invite the kid to major in anthropology. They have kids sign “early decision” contracts claiming that the kids— 17-year-olds who possibly have never been on an airplane and probably don’t know who Bill Clinton is—are legally committed to attend if accepted. If the school doesn’t give them as big a financial aid package as they expected, or if they give them no money at all, that contract makes the kid think they must attend anyway. The students told me that many of these elite colleges call themselves “no loan” schools. This is a trick to get the kids to apply and get laudatory articles written about them—they’re saying that their financial aid packages consist entirely of money you don’t have to pay back. But if you read the fine print, the college almost invariably has something like *this is only for pell-grant eligible students, or “In addition, you will be expected to contribute from your personal assets, such as savings and investments, if any. The contribution amount per academic year is set at 5% of your total assets as reported in your financial aid application materials.” Your assets! like, you, the KID! Wow, thank you SO MUCH, Stanford. Thank you, for the opportunity to give you my lunch money.

So really I’m not the person to teach a class like this. But sometimes helping people apply to college feels like what I was born to do. Because you can talk openly about stuff you’re usually not supposed to mention: money, grades, test scores, family situation, terrible secrets that you may feel you need to include on the “Additional Information” section of the Common App. Actually, though, it’s not the talking that I love so much (though I do love talking about these things with them); it’s the writing. This is the purpose and the power of writing. Once you WRITE IT, “it” becomes words. Not that it’s only words, but it’s also words. It’s like how people say, give it to God. They’re not saying God is going to take it away; they’re saying he’s going to share the burden. That’s EXACTLY what writing does, to my mind (and heart). When you give it to writing, it’s no longer only not some horrible (or wonderful!) thing you have to hide inside your mind. It’s also words you wrote, like the words everyone else wrote. Your Common App isn’t glowing green because of your weird shit; it looks the same as everybody else’s: words.

But, BUT, BUT, I told the students, you don’t owe these colleges anything. You don’t owe them your vulnerability, honesty, or money. They are asking for those things from you from their literal ivory towers. You haven’t done anything wrong, and they haven’t done anything right for them to have this power over you. I told them, you are the last people in our society who hold these institutions in high regard. If you withhold your regard from them, they will have nothing left, reputationally. By all means, I told them, WRITE this stuff. But you don’t owe them your no-holds-barred story, and that might not be what they want, anyway, even if it seems like that’s what they’re asking for.

Maybe the best advice I’ve ever gotten about anything was from a wonderful poet, Martha Collins, who had no reason to help me. She was my ex-boyfriend’s former professor. She had never even met me. My ex-boyfriend asked her to help me because I was trying to return to school to get my MFA, but I didn’t know how to describe on my applications my wreck of a transcript from Michigan’s MFA program. The transcript basically told a story that wasn’t true: my name was at the top of the transcript, so it must have been my fault. It looked like I had done something awful, or done awful work. When I thought about it, I felt like I had to change my name or start my life over—or at least write an extremely detailed essay that proved once and for all that it wasn’t my fault. Martha and I had a phone conversation where she told me I should not explain what happened at Michigan on these applications, but instead write, “for a variety of reasons.” So I did. “For a variety of reasons,” my transcript is not the transcript I’d like it to be, but it’s what I’ve got. Never complain, never explain, to quote the Queen. It worked. And later, when I applied to Ph.D. schools, I had to use the same phrase again, and it worked again. They don’t want to hear some long confusing story; they want to KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have what it takes. I had what it took; I just also had a scary grad school transcript.

I met Martha Collins in person about 10 years later when we were living in Ohio. I was teaching creative writing at Heidelberg and she came to Oberlin to do a poetry reading. I told her how much “for a variety of reasons” helped me. 10 years must seem like a lot to the kids I teach, but it seems too short to contain all the places I went during that time. All the places “for a variety of reasons” wedged the door back open for me to go.

Sincerely,

Lucy