In addition to the slightly warmer temperatures and the rain, robins are scavengening around my bird feeders. Spring is finally here in southern Wisconsin.

I pulled out a folder of stories from college today, stories written for a creative writing class. I read through them to see if anything was salvageable for updating — I haven’t written a short story since college. That’s been a while. Interesting (to me, at least) was the teacher I had for that class: T.C. Boyle. He had just published his first collection (didn’t require we read it, but a lot of us did), Descent of Man and his first novel was on the way. Now that he’s well established, I found his comments about my stories more interesting than my stories. My memory of him as a teacher is fairly vague — other teachers had a greater impact on me. Mostly I remember him as very, very tall, very, very thin, with a strange middle name (Coraghessan), but he told us we could call him “Tom.”

Nothing of my old stories has any potential, but they didn’t seem as immature as I thought they would be.

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