Hey, ho, let’s go!
Reading Assignment for this class: “The Beginning of My Life” and “Family” chapters from Teardrop Road
Why are we telling this story?
Who are we talking to?
What are we trying to change?
WHAT ARE WE SAYING?
We are not telling stories
This entire video is theatrics. And if you listen to the music, all the music is theatrics. They are telling a story.
Your reading assignment for this class was “Family” and “The Beginning of My Life.” I can’t think of a better analogy for what we’re working with here. She heard what I said and she walked with it. Instantly changed everything about her life on a breath, on a dime, on a hair. Everything turned.
Now if you read “The Beginning of My Life,” and I’m gonna assume you have, then you know about the romantic way we started our relationship. You got a look at me and my wife at the beginning. We were totally dedicated to each other. It goes into detail in the second volume of my book, Normal Street, it goes into detail, but we were all-in from the very beginning. There’s girls like Bekah out there. Not interested in playing games, not interested in any kind of manipulation. They’re not trying to make you do anything. And that’s how it got started.
I don’t know if you know this, but she did come back that morning. It’s a hilarious story. It’s also steeped in evil. You’ll have to read my wife’s poetry books to understand that evil, but it’s steeped in evil. First thing I did after greeting her that first morning, which meant giggling, laughing, and kissing, first thing I did was I walked her across this big driveway to my parents’ house and I introduced her to my mother.
At this point, I think we’d been together for twelve hours, and I slept through most of it. So let’s say this, I stayed up talking to her for about three hours the night we got together. We spent about 20 minutes saying hi when she did come back. And then I took her to meet my mother. Who does that? Who introduces their girlfriend to the mother after 3-4 hours and twenty minutes of being awake with them? Soulmates do that.
I had a purpose. My life suddenly meant something. It wasn’t about parties with my friends and underage drinking anymore. It was about this girl and what we could do.
Did you hear that? Let’s focus on what I just said, the line I just said. What we could do. So many relationships are based on what I can do. Can I get this guy to do this? Can I get this girl to do this? Instantly with Bekah the language was completely different. It was what can we do.
I’ve stood before the Archangel Gabriel. He came to me in a vision, or more, maybe more than a vision. It’s in the chapter called the Hornblower. He told me to wake up. And a couple weeks later, Bekah. I had finally taken what I wanted. Purpose. When her hand was in mine, and her hand fits perfectly in mine, when her hand was in mine, I had purpose. What could we do?
Suddenly you’re not pointed directly at each other. You’re standing beside each other and pointed at the world. What could we do? Well, we’ve been doing it ever since. Purpose. I’m standing here in front of you. She’s, well I’m not gonna tell you what she’s doing. But she has purpose as well. I can tell you she is writing poetry. It’s gorgeous.
Have you ever seen a dust devil? Do any of you know what that is? In the desert, sometimes the wind will do just the right thing and it’ll lift sand up, dirt up, into a short, small little tornado. It’ll dance. It’s an interpretive dance. It’s trying to tell us something. The dust devil, when you see it, is trying to tell the story of the desert.
They’re real, not fantasy, I think. I think they actually exist, maybe. They’re not really dangerous. I think. I’m speaking out of ignorance, and absolute authority. If you’re gonna be a writer, you’re gonna need to learn how to do that. If you’re gonna be a writer, ignorance and authority walk hand in hand. One’s always talking. The other sighs a lot. But they love each other and they’ll work for you.
The dust devil is making a dance, and I just wanna stand in front of one. It’s an interpretive dance. I’ve seen one of those before. Dust devil moves in a way that explains what it’s like to live captured in the desert. That’s what it’s like listening to one of my wife’s poems. It’s like standing in front of a dust devil. It has a way, it has a sway, it has a kind of dance to it. Sometimes that dance is silent, except for the whistling wind. Sometimes that dance is punctuated by powerful, almost violent drums. Lifting of the operatic voice. Scream of a banshee. My wife’s work dances to the purpose that she has chosen.
I’m gonna read one. Just like all dances, it has a rhythm to it. It has rhyme to it. It has a way of punching the air and calling it in. But I’m gonna read you one of my wife’s poems. Because when she writes, she has a purpose. And that’s what I’m trying to explain to you.
If you came this far to write romance books, make them count. Show the difficulties of love so the people who are reading them can learn how to find it. If you came this far to write poetry, well, then your work is gonna be studied, word for word. Every comma has some kind of meaning.
I was in a writers group one time. We were dissecting a poem, and another poet said about the piece we were critiquing, “This word is too heavy and it’s too orange for this placement in this line.” And she was right. That word was way too orange for that sentence. If you’re a poet here and you’ve come this far to try to learn how to do what you’re doing, then pay close attention, because it’s time to strap your boots on. And you need to wipe the blood out of your eyes. Because the battle that you’re fighting is going to change the world. Every one of you here has something to say. Even if you haven’t been saying it up to now.
I hope you can look at yourself when you go home tonight, look at yourself in the mirror. And even if you wanna write comedy, you wanna write romance, or both, I hope you can see in your eyes when you look at yourself in the mirror tonight, I hope you can see in your eyes what I’m looking at right now. There is a calling. And all of you need to listen for it.
Priests and holy men, holy women. You talk to a preacher, she’ll tell you at some point in her life she heard a calling. I heard it. I heard it. I heard my calling. I remember my calling. I’m gonna read my wife’s poem to you. She picked it out herself. I’m telling you right now, she could’ve printed out the titles of all of her poems, spun herself in a circle three times and thrown a dart, and whichever poem she hit would’ve fit in this class. But she’s taking dictation now. Dogs are sleeping, my Rottweiler is not purring. Bekah is taking dictation, so I’m letting her choose what poem she puts in here. In this class right now, We’re driving down the highway. We got our baby in the backseat. She’s our wifey / In the middle of the delivery / Man she saves me / To this day I don’t know why / She picked me up / When I was down on the road / With the wind when it blowed.
“Of Course”
by Rebekah Teller from Song of the Leviathan
He isn’t doing very well.
He has a new story to tell.
He says he wants to talk to me.
He learned a lot in therapy.
There’s this disorder he has called
Dissociative Identity,
With different personalities
Who all take different casualties.
I’m so relieved. It all makes sense,
Mixed messages and arguments
That never seemed to have an end
Regardless if I made amends.
It’s like we finally have a map
And we can find out where we’re at,
Then all we need to do is learn
To plot a course and see the turns.
But first he needs time to explore,
To learn to navigate and more.
So I look back through where we’ve been
And try to see the shifts and bends.
I tell him everything I know
About each time he really showed
A different laugh or voice or cry,
Through all the years we didn’t thrive.
And I know he feels so alone,
But I still feel like I’m his home.
I promise to support his needs,
To try to be his family.
Family is something new
To hearts like ours who always knew
Our lonely nights just went unseen
And happiness is just a dream.
But I can dream a little more
And watch him learn to plot a course.
And if I’m good and if he can,
We’ll find a way to win this land.
See how smoothly I moved this into this? Now we’re talking about part of your reading assignment, the short story “Family.” This is a masterful transition. I move from one topic to another. Not by putting in some smooth saying, and a quiet collection of words, but by throwing down a glowing monolith. There’s a lot of different kinds of transitions. Some people will tell you that all transitions are coy. They’re not. Sometimes when you transition from one topic to the next, it’s a flaming road. My wife’s poem is that flaming road.
I said earlier, what could we do? We. The two of us. My wife and I. Back when she was my girlfriend and we stood in the parking lot, my arm over her shoulder, her arm around me and we looked out over I-44, and together we asked for a purpose. And even though, years later, in this poem and in the chapter “Family,” me and my wife had broken up two times and we were just friends, it doesn’t change the we. We had, when we got together, we had, you guys should’ve seen it. Okay, you shouldn’t have seen it, because this is a PG-13 class, but we had ideas and we had a concept. We had a new way of looking at things than either one of us had grown up with. It was like we walked out together into that great big driveway parking lot. I put my arm around her, she put her arm around me, and we just looked out, our gaze way over I-44 and into the world.
We had each other, but we didn’t know what we were doing yet. We didn’t know what we were fighting yet. We had each other and we weren’t afraid. You might’ve read the entirety of Teardrop Road, and you can imagine how afraid I’ve always been. Violence is a way of my life, be it physical, emotional, or mental. I’m being violent on all of you right now. All teaching, all instruction is violent. It’s violent against ignorance. No matter how smooth the conversation. No matter how chilled out the teacher is, or how raging, how many melodramatic fists hit the table. All teaching, and all learning, is violent.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t scared. I had her. We had been at my mom’s house for about two hours, so we’re fourteen hours into our relationship, and we are not ready to take on the world. Let me make that clear. We are not ready to take on the world. The world is too big. I was not ready to take on the world. Neither was she. We were together, and we were waiting for our calling.
So then the “Family” chapter. She’s looking at the man she loves, finding out he’s so much more complicated than she imagined he was. And she remembers that moment when we were ready for our calling. It’s mental health. It’s child abuse. It’s true love and soulmates. It’s writing. All of it comes into full focus and she sits there and looks at me and talks to me. I want you to think about the things only you are prepared to talk about.
See, everybody in the world has a cause. Some will say they don’t, but when you talk to them long enough, you can boil it down to one thing they’re trying to push forward. Test that. Find a person who says they don’t have a cause and talk to them. Buy them a beer. Bake them a pie. Sit on a porch swing with them, the perfect twilight with the fireflies and the crickets warming up, or work a menial job with them, talk to them as you work a punishing day at a junkyard, and you’ll, if you know the right questions, you’ll get to the core of their cause. Everyone in the world has a calling. We all have a calling, and we’re all working towards it, whether we want to or not. The ones who really make it, who make their impact on the world, they have a calling, they can recognize it, they can hear it and they move forward on it. That’s me and my wife.
Do you know what we call me around the house? Around the house when we’re talking to our children and we’re talking to each other, me and my wife both refer to me as the Lunatic of Fantasy. I’m the Lunatic of Fantasy. I’ve written eight books with scenes that take place in hell. I also wrote a drinking song about goats.
I’m the Lunatic of Fantasy. Heard my calling long ago and I answered. And let me tell you, because that’s a pretty big span, that’s a pretty big spectrum. Let me tell you, this is my calling. I was given a puzzle by God. I met my wife, I felt real love for the first time.
Sorry, I was just distracted, my bullador farted. That’ll happen too, things will distract you when you’re talking about your purpose.
I met my wife, and I felt true hope. Next semester I have things to show you about true despair, and I learned true despair. I saw the face of true darkness. And when I was all put back together again. Ish. I truly got a look at why I write and what I do. I have at least eight books that take place in hell. That’s probably low, that number. It’s a hell of my creation because no two hells are the same.
And then, I have real love. Ellen and Tulbo are two people who experience real love. And what I figured out is that I have a purpose and my purpose is a discussion with the world. And the discussion is, let’s say a boxing match, although that’s a little too Carmen. In one corner is Hope, in the other corner is Despair. How do you walk a world with Rebekah Teller without pure trembling hope? And how do you look at a past like mine without all-encompassing despair? I’m trying to work it out.
I’ve written 38 books. 35 of them take place in the same fantasy world. I’m not going to tell you how many I have planned, but it’s a lot more. I know the last words that I’ll ever write. I’ve been saying these two lines for so long, and it’s all about despair and hope. It’s all about showing the world. And the easy answer is, you give the world hope, and there’s a smiley face emoji at the end of that.
But I’ve been through too much darkness to just fake it. One of these sentences is the last line I’ll ever type in my fantasy world. But I don’t know how the whole thing plays out. I don’t know, in the end, what wins, in my life and in my work. Hope or Despair. It’s what we’re trying to find. It’s what we’re trying to figure out.
It all comes down to these two lines. I’m gonna pick one of them. Everything I do, every chapter and word that I type, every dinner I make, every class I teach to you, everything I do is headed towards one of these two lines:
“He looked down on the smoking, reeking wreck of the world, and he laughed.”
Or maybe, after all of the words I write and all of the books I finished, the classes I’ve taught, the times I’ve hugged my kids and laughed with them, all the threats I’ve made to the blank page, and every bourbon I’ve drank, this’ll be the line:
“He looked down on the smoking, reeking, wreck of the world, and he said, ‘I can help.’”
My purpose is to work all that out. And my purpose is to help my wife and her books and her world.
I don’t wanna look up from this screen, and I don’t wanna look all of you in the eye. Because maybe, just maybe, it worked. Maybe this lecture worked. And burning within the eyes of every student in this class is the true power of their purpose. I just can’t look at you all and watch your eyes blaze. Because the sheer power of the purpose in this room might melt me. But Citizen Cope says, the son’s gonna rise in a while / in a while you’ll be feeling fine / and everyone in here is driving down the highway. In the back seat a child is being born. Let’s talk about your battle cry and get the hell out of here.
Battle Cry
My friend T is a nurse. She worked in oncology. She was surrounded by death all the time, people saying goodbye, it was hell. See HIPPA laws do this thing where if you aren’t on staff when there’s a death, you don’t get to hear about it. So she’d go into work and spend all her time with someone, a patient, get to caring about them. The next day they’re gone. She doesn’t know if they’ve been transferred somewhere or if they died. And because of HIPPA laws it’s illegal for her to ask.
Play with that idea for just a minute. Just think about that. That’s a horrible way to live a life. So, her life was so dark and she had to smile through it, tell everybody they were gonna be okay. She had to lift the spirits of her patients and her co-workers. It wasn’t until she started reading my dark fantasy that she started coming out of it. It made her life livable again. Experiencing the darkness of my work and being able to talk about it and get the full story, and discuss it with the people around her, was a release she had never had before.
So one day, she’s at work and she sees too much, the stress is too high, the wrong person passes away, and she just breaks. Her plan is to quit, walk out. She grabs her purse to do that very thing. And instead she looks at the head nurse and says, “I need 20 minutes, just give me 20 minutes.”
She went into a conference room. She pulled out her Kindle and read the chapter I’d written the night before. It was an Aaron the Marked chapter, and it was extremely dark. Aaron’s her favorite character. It was extremely dark, by the time she was done reading it, she was ready to go back out into the impossible job.
That night my friend T saved somebody’s life. My friend T did that. I’m not taking credit for it. But I hope you can see how important your writing can be and the impact it can make on people’s lives. Because I do take credit for Aaron. He came after countless years of pounding keystroke after keystroke. I take credit for Aaron. Aaron put my friend back together again.
Now, he would’ve done that when she got home if she had quit that night. And maybe somebody else would’ve saved that person. I can continue to minimalize myself by saying after a good night’s sleep and reading Aaron, talking to her loving husband, she would’ve gone back to the hospital, they would’ve hired her, maybe written her up. I can sit here and minimalize myself until my writing doesn’t mean anything, and I can make you all watch and I can make my wife type it. But the truth is, there was a nurse and her will had broken. And something had destroyed her career. Aaron put that back together for her, and she went on to do great things. So I’m not gonna minimalize that. I’m not gonna say all that, because it kept her feet on the hospital floor instead of the pedals of her car. And she was there when that person needed to be saved.
I won’t take credit for the person, but I’m still friends with T now and she won’t rest if I don’t at least take credit for the nurse who was there that night to save them.
I’m gonna show you a video now. This is the face of the person you’re writing for. They don’t have a calm, peaceful, perfect life. Let’s not waste their time with “Your Mama Don’t Dance.”
By now we’ve all heard, it’s becoming a cliché, everyone is fighting a war you know nothing about, so be kind. Well, this is what I’ll say to you. Everybody out there is fighting a war we know nothing about. They need things to inspire them, and they need things that are real. That’s our job. That is a job we chose as writers. That is what we signed on for when we picked up the pen.
When I show you this video, look into their eyes. They all have thoughts. They all have concerns. There’s things that scare them. There’s things they have to work through. People in their life that they can’t help, they can’t live with but they have to. You have a chance with everything that you write to say something to those people, these people. Let’s not waste their time. Their time is too valuable. Their time is too precious.
This is who you’re writing for. Factory worker, nurse, high school student, they deserve for your work to mean something, to say something. To inspire them in some way, or save them somehow. Your work has to be there, be there for them when nothing and no one else is.
Doesn’t matter what genre you write. The inspiration you give your reader is real. Your aim should never be to just tell a story. Why would you want to do that? Just a story, a puff. No real impact to it at all.
You’ve fought your way through high school. You fought your way through all your years of college to get your degree. You studied all that literature. You read all of those amazing books. You wrote paper after paper, countless hours studying, and you could’ve dropped this class on the first day, when you found out it was being taught by a lunatic. How many times have you had to hear me say hey, ho, let’s go, and how many more times will you hear it?
And you crawled through all of that, clawed your way and climbed, you free climbed through hours of reading, sacrificed hours of sleep. How many of you had jobs when you were going through college? Family obligations? You fought and punched and screamed and kicked, clawed and roared through all of that, and you’re just gonna tell me a story? You earned better than that.
You owe it to yourself to take all of these skills and all of these things that you’ve learned, and use them to make a difference. You don’t owe that to me. You don’t owe that to the world. I can tell you you do, that you have a great burden. I can tell you you have this great burden to the school that taught you and to the world out there to write work that means something. And that’s bullshit. It’s divine feces. You don’t owe it to me. You don’t owe it to them. You owe it to yourself. Because you trained and you fought and you’ve armed yourself now. And you have a purpose and all your weapons to fight your way through the world with your purpose in mind.
Forget about me. Forget about the school, forget about everybody who paid for you to be here. Forget about your student loans. Just think about you, because you earned it. So use it. I’m not worried about you wasting my time. But I’m haunted every day since I walked in this class—I was haunted by the specters of wasted time here, looking at my Rottweiler and my bullador, hearing the slight taps of Bekah’s fingers on the keys. Here, right now, I’m haunted by the idea, staring wide eyed at the hallucinations of the ghostly specters of you wasting your time and your education. It’s the reason I wrote this entire curriculum. It’s the reason I’m here. If the college has agreed to let me teach this class, they would’ve let me teach any. I chose to be here right now in front of you, teaching you this.
There’s a famous quote, I’m gonna get it wrong, because nobody gets it right. It’s an idea more than a quote, and it’s something I’ve clung to through all of my teenage years, and I still cling to it now. “When the game’s on the line, and you have time for one more play, and that play will decide winning or losing, do you hope the quarterback throws the ball to you or the other guy?”
After everything you’ve been through to be sitting right here in front of me now, tell me you want the ball. Tell me that there’s a world out there, word out there, story out there, that you can give us to save us all. If a person in trouble has time to read one story, and it’s gonna save their life or they’re gonna lose it, do you want your story to be in their hands? Do you want the ball?
I’ve been working on this class for about nine days. I’ll finish tonight. I guess this section of the lecture was always gonna be in there, I just had to find it. Do you want the ball? Because I wanna throw it to you.
Writing Assignment
Battle Cry, due in 2 classes, choose one:
i) Series of words, six or less
ii) Statement, 80 words or less
iii) Mission statement, 190 words or less
NO LONGER, I do not want an assignment turned in to me that’s longer than 190 words. If you want to impress me, do all three.
This has to be something you can repeat to yourself. Something you can fold up, put in your wallet or your purse, your sock, something you can make a wallpaper out of for your computer.
If you’re going to share with me yours, I’ll share mine. You’re going to read this in the book I chose for you to read for this class, Seeds of Tarako. Some of you probably already have. It’s Tarako’s mantra, his prayer. But although you may have read it, you haven’t heard it from the guy who lives it. So let me give you my battle cry. I made a wallpaper of this. I think about this so often. I read this every time I sit down to write something. This is my battle cry:
Of winding roads we walk
To lying folk we talk
Toward a death we stalk
To our great deeds we flock
And though we fear
And though we weep
We will not stop
We do not sleep
Reading Assignment
Reading assignment for next class: “In View of the Dead” and “The Man on the Bridge” chapters from Teardrop Road
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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