When I was 18 my comparative literature professor blew my mind.

We all had to take two quarters of English or Comp Lit or Dramatic Arts or Speech (soon to be called Rhetoric), and I would have enrolled in English but the classes were full. It didn’t make much difference; all involved reading and then writing about what was read. We were supposed to be examining assigned texts, but I arranged to add or substitute items of interest to me. We were supposed to be writing literary criticism but I mostly despised that. Even now I think most lit crit is just a form of gossip. It’s okay if someone puts literature in its historical context, but I don’t want the biographical tidbits about the author; I figure the author can tell us what the author wants through the literature.

So I went my own way. I kept a journal. In it I tried composing verse in Spanish, I interpreted some of Yeats’s poetry, and I’m sure I described a few of my own opinions. I don’t have the journal any more; the professor kept it.

Anyway, the final exam was an oral. Each of us was assigned a quarter hour in the professor’s office. When I showed up for my 15 minutes the student ahead of me wasn’t finished. I was invited into the room and I participated in a spot-analysis of a Dylan Thomas poem. By the time we were done with that the student who was after me had arrived, so I expected the first kid to leave and the next guy to join us. But the professor asked the next student to wait, please, and she shut her office door.

“So tell me,” she said as she spun her chair my way, “tell me why you write like a man.” She reached for my journal and that gave me a moment to recover from shock.

“Uh,” I stammered, “I guess it must be because the authors I admire are male. I guess I’m modeling my style on what I like.”

Then the professor gave me lovely words. She told me it was time for me to start developing my own style. She said that I could use my femaleness, ride my own hormones even, to produce different effects. She let me know that a woman artist is likely to enhance her work by her emotional life, while a male will probably be distracted from his work by love.

She encouraged me, in the true sense of the word. She heartened me. And she asked to keep my journal, for at least awhile.

I saw her again, in different circumstances and with a different name, four years later. She still had the journal then. That’s okay with me. I have her advice.