FRIDAYEXTRA !
The Daily Astorian
Friday, November 13, 2015
Weekend Edition
Submitted Photos/Illustration
A teacher would record writing advice on a cassette tape.
HIGH
FIDELITY
Writer recalls lessons learned
from ‘that one teacher’
sufferable for Winn to read, much less critique. It
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could say into the tape recorder: “You have a little of
this attitude that ‘nobody is smart but me’ and that
kind of attitude is not fun to be around. I don’t get a
good response that a reader gets into that kind of atti-
tude.” That might have been the best piece of writing
advice I’ve ever received. I think about it every time
I write a new book. I just published my 14th and it all
began 35 years ago with Doug Winn in a high school
creative writing class.
I might also add that Winn was my first pub-
lisher in that he started a literary review at Oregon
City High School. I get the feeling he paid for it
himself. I will never forget the thrill of seeing
my stories and poems printed in a bound literary
review for the first time. It began a journey that
I am still traveling today and is also the reason I
produce literary reviews with my students. That
public outcome is crucial to the development of
a young writer. Seeing your work exclusively on-
line is hardly the same. It’s the ink that hooks you.
By MATT LOVE
Special to The Daily Astorian
W
ere you lucky enough
to have that one teacher
who changed your life?
I was. I owe him every-
thing and try to my inspire
students the same way he
inspired me — by directing
their creative talents to the right places.
In 1980, my junior year at Oregon City
High School, I landed in a creative writing
course taught by Doug Winn. It was his rook-
ie year as a teacher. He required us to keep
journals and often made observations in the
margins. He also dictated a commentary on
cassette tape about our writing.
On one of the tapes Winn told me something
about my writing’s voice reminded him of Kurt
Vonnegut and that I should check this author
out. Hearing this, I rushed to the school library
and found the novel “Breakfast of Champions.” I
picked it up, thumbed the pages, and noticed some
peculiar drawings, including one of the American
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I devoured “Breakfast of Champions” and the
rest of Vonnegut’s novels. I’d never read anything
like them: the voice, satire, time-bending, moral
outrage, revisionist history, and the bursts of rib-
ald sexuality. I discovered Vonnegut at the precise
moment I was about to enter a period of rebellion
that easily could have led to trouble. His words
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fection and, I think, a direction.
Experimenting with voice
E N
H O U R S •
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Next Winn recommended Norman Mailer.
I’d never heard of him. I took the bus to Port-
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store, a place Winn insisted I explore. There,
I bought “The Executioner’s Song,” “The
Armies of t he Night” and “The Fight.”
Sexus, Plexus and Nexus
As graduation loomed, Winn found me at school
and handed over a present: used copies of Henry Mill-
A page from Matt Love’s high school yearbook.
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Nexus .” Without any sort of preface to Miller except
I opened with “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer’s to say, “I think you’ll like this guy, now go out and
third-person account of his chaotic participation in a 1967 become a writer.” That summer I read the trilogy
protest march against the Vietnam War. In this book, I read and have never forgot my initial experience with
sentences such as: “He had in fact learned to live in the sar- Miller. His candor addicted me like a drug and
cophagus of his image — at night, in his sleep, he might dart I’m still hooked. I never bought into all of Mill-
er’s pronouncements about human sexuality, but
out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus.”
Immediately, I began emulating Mailer’s third-person point the intensity of his passion has never left me.
I also never forgot the charge Winn put to me
of view when writing about myself. As I read those bombas-
tic pieces today, I imagine the power shuddering through me my senior year. It took time and maturity, but
DV\HDUROGÀHGJOLQJZULWHUH[SHULPHQWLQJZLWKYRLFHDQG through the books he introduced me to and his
how the narrator might integrate himself in a piece of jour- recognition of my passion for writing, I believe I
nalism. You could plunge into a story, observe, enact a small, HYHQWXDOO\IRXQGWKHSDWKWRIXO¿OOZKDWHYHUOLWHU
but vital role inside it, serve as its reporter, and catalyze its ary promise he held out for me.
elements. That’s pretty much how I would describe the main
Matt Love lives in Astoria and teaches at Asto-
editorial thrust of everything I’ve published since and how I
ria High School. He is the author/editor of 14 books
teach creative writing to my own students.
about Oregon, including “A Nice Piece of Astoria:
‘Nobody is smart but me’
A Narrative Guide,” and “The Great Birthright: An
At times, my Maileresque prose must have bordered on in- Oregon Novel.”
E K
W E
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