(Letter to my former English teacher after I had one of my poems accepted by an online magazine for the first time in my life.)
Hello Mike,
This is Mary. I hope you are doing well, and I hope you have received my postcard; as I said in it, I mailed my seasonal greetings rather early this year since I expect the following weeks to be busy for both of us. In case you wonder why I bother to write to you again this soon, it is because I received an email this evening, on my way back from a seminar, notifying me that one of my poems has been accepted by an online magazine, and it is the first time something of this nature has happened in my life.
I am in my second year of university now, and I seldom discuss my plans after graduation with anyone since literature sounds like an insane option for any sociology undergraduate; indeed, if there is anything more insane than literature, it is creative writing, the exact discipline I plan to pursue alongside literature for graduate studies. I would have laughed at the thought of doing an entire degree in writing at the age of seventeen, as the belief I held then was that the ability to write is somewhat like a godsend, one that could be neither taught nor learned. Yet seventeen was a year in my life where countless changes took place, and you had prompted one of the greatest changes. You, or your classes at least, have singlehandedly shaken my stereotypes towards writing lessons, and taught me that “to know how to write alone does not make a great writer”, an idea echoed on the Creative Writing programme website of my favourite institution. You must be glad to see that the seed you planted then has sprouted now; an MFA in creative writing is something I am working relentlessly towards now.
This, hence, is a thank-you note. I hesitate to call it a note since it is rambling as always, the same mistake I make again and again, before and after my A1 year. I thank you not only for your encouragements but also for your criticisms, not only for nurturing our creativity but also for disciplining them; had your timely restraints not been in place, I would not have refined each of my pieces, great and small, to such precision years after I departed your classroom. “To write as well as one can all the time” is a motto I have adhered to when I write essays, when I write prose, when I prepared my portfolio for applying to University of Iowa’s renowned Summer Writers’ Workshop, and when I composed the poem I sent to a bunch of magazines and eventually got accepted by one of them, after nine rejections. Walt Whitman had been a poet long before Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated his talent; I was not much of a writer before you became the first and only person to train me into one. In this sense you are greater than Emerson for, to change a few words of that line by John Dryden, “He raised a mortal to the skies/You drew an angel down.”
I am aware, though, that I am still far from taking the first step of my literary career, if it is a career I am privileged enough to set foot in at all. I am aware that the magazine that accepted my poem is but one that was established only in early 2023, I am still anxiously waiting to hear from the University of Iowa regarding whether I have been accepted to their summer programme, and as I look around I see so much work to do, so many words waiting to be written. It is my responsibility to make it happen; all you need to know is that you made its happening possible, and with this notion you are already what all English teachers ought to strive to become. If I am to visit our school someday as a published poet or writer, remember that today is the day my first publication took place, that you are the first person I told, and that most, if not all, of the credit belongs to you.
Be assured that you can expect postcards (and maybe poems as well) from me every year. Best of luck to all your endeavours, in teaching, in literature, in writing, in life and everything else.
With deepest passions,
Lu Liu (Mary)
16 November, 2023
