I am reading a short story in a magazine I admire. The story, like this post, is in the journalistic present, as if everything is happening all at once. I, too, have written in the journalistic present, and I’ve come to distrust it.

I don’t like the journalistic present tense because we experience our lives as a narrative, with beginnings, middles and ends. Narrative is a contrast that blissful childhood state when we assume that things will go on more or less as they are: our parents will be with us, our house will remain and the only thing we’ll have to learn is how to please ourselves and others, without making a mess.

Sooner or later we discover that we really can’t understand anything unless it is in the past–a thing that happened, a beginning that ended, an event whose importance may change as we grow older, but remain back there, in that house, with our parents, in that mess.

We acquire what happens to us through our five senses, which means that there is likely a great big pile of stuff that we miss because we don’t see it, it doesn’t fit into our ears, it wasn’t the kind of thing we’d put into our mouths, it had no recognizable odor and wasn’t anywhere near our skin. This stuff that we miss is a great source of the short fiction that I read in college, where, certain that my literary efforts would eventually preoccupy a professorial lecture, I wrote stories about young people who visit friends, wander into a familiar wilderness or go to what they believed was home, and notice more of what they previously ignored, or had been incapable of noticing.  It wasn’t that my characters couldn’t go home again–I retained obsessions with my parents’ divorce, my high school girlfriend (who is now my wife) and the science fiction and fantasy writers I felt were as important a literary force as the naturalists and realists I met in college. My characters went home, sometimes relentlessly. Every time they did, they were forced to admit that what was home was a narrative that had ended.

I sent those short stories to the magazines I admired. The stories came back, rejected. I read the short stories those magazines published and tried to figure out why those stories were published and mine weren’t. When I began to write for newspapers and magazines, I saw that those who were published had won an important award, written a best seller or attained a national reputation, and, therefore, helped sell the magazine. Was that the only reason?

I return to the short story. It’s set in a strange, slightly menacing wilderness area that reminds me, not of strange, slightly menacing wilderness, but of a person who is not comfortable where he lives, and is projecting that discomfort on to the setting. This could be the author’s intention, or an insight to the author that, like a flash of skin at the edges of a mask, is a part of an illusion I’m not supposed to see.

The short story ruled the American literary scene in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Popular authors, most of whom did not find immortality in college literary classes, were paid as much as $40,000 (yes, Forty Grand, as the great short story writer Damon Runyon would say), for a few typewritten pages. This sum could be doubled or even tripled if the story was turned into a play or movie.

Whether these writers thought what they were writing was junk, or art, did not matter to them as much as their need to make a living until they made their living and discovered that those people they based their stories on–the blithely affluent Gerald Murphys who inspired Fitzgerald, or Hemingway’s lasting infatuation Slim Keith–did not appreciate their fictional portraits. So great, however, was the art of these and other writers of that era, that it is largely through the fiction that these people are remembered today.

Far more magazines existed in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Few survived into the second half, when I was born and began reading science fiction and fantasy published by authors who were dismissed by my English teachers as hacks. The major difference between the hacks of yesteryear and those of my youth was their prodigality. Instead of few typed pages, they had to grind out 75,000 word paperback novels. Some of these authors (I met a few) had literary pretensions, but their efforts were treated as disposable by just about everyone but their fans. A very few hacks experienced the thrill of “breaking out” of their genre and selling science fiction to mainstream magazines that paid as much for their story as they got for a novel. How you did this wasn’t easy.  I heard of one science fiction writer whose friends staged seemingly accidental, but ultimately successful run-ins with the short story editor of one prestigious publication.

But, at writers conferences, where I shared a dais, or a panel discussion (I was moderately well known as a regional journalist and mystery author), with some of these editors, they all said, “you just have to write a great story.

And yet, when you look back to Dickens and other literary giants who were popular in their lifetimes, you can find the same stuff that animates the comic book adventures of today. The entertainments that make the most money today spring from comic books, video games, toys, theme park rides, literary fantasy (“Game of Thrones”), and space opera (“Star Wars”).

None of which you’ll ever see as short fiction in the magazines I still admire. I want to feel grateful that in the same metaphorical movie multiplex where supervillains and superheroes throw things at each other, is a smaller, quieter theater where kids who go home again discover the end of one narrative and the beginning of another.

Or something like that. Not only do these films exist, but there are so many on the streaming channels that you may not live long enough to see them all. If you tire of the films, you can read books, some of which are reviewed in the magazines I admire. A major difference in the rites-of-passage, coming-of-age stories I read in college, and those being published now, is that the settings are in cultures as exotic as anything we can imagine on an alien world. Characters are mixtures of this and that, not so much flawed as uncertain of who they are. Their search for understanding yields new narratives that temporarily confirm notions of identity, but the endings remain disquieting and unfulfilling.

I grew up believing that art was necessary, that great art would change us for the better, that delight in the sense of wonder might unite us and save us from our vain pursuits, and that persistent, sincere effort of the highest quality possible would bring success, if not a livelihood, and that awards, national reputations or best-selling products would happen in time. I did fewer wrong things than right ones. I find myself in a world with too much art in it, and stories whose presence in magazines remains inexplicable.

After the first few paragraphs I want to give up on the story. The characters don’t interest me. The description of the setting does not provide that “ludic” moment when I leave my world and enter the author’s fictional domain. The plot doesn’t move forward as much as it wallows around, with a flashback that is supposed to show me how things have changed.

But I persist because this is a magazine that has published some of the best short stories ever written. I want to honor the choices made by the editor who, I presume, waded through mountains of submissions, most unsolicited, to bring this to print.

That might not be the best way to appreciate art. You can miss things if you go into a museum, or attend a concert, and quietly demand an understanding of why this work is offered and that another, perhaps your own, is not.  You want first impressions to confirm your best hope–that great art is deserving of its medium–and your worst fear–that your efforts are insufficient, unworthy, second rate, inept.

The importance of the magazine short story died in toward the end of the Twentieth Century when it became the laboratory rat of creative writing classes. Suddenly more people wanted to write short stories than read them. The Internet resurrected the short story, and every other form of art that can be converted into electronic pulses. There are so many short stories on the Internet that you won’t live long enough to read them all. An unknowable quantity are available without charge. You don’t have that you-paid-for-this, might-as-well-get-your-money’s-worth goad to finish the story. The only things will know that you’ve stopped reading the story are the machines owned by the Internet warlords that record everything we do in front of a screen, forever.

The history of art can be explained by money and what we now call technology.  Artists have meager needs, but they must be met or the pen doesn’t move. Some of history’s wealthiest people–the Medicis, the Guggenheims, the Fricks, the Gettys- live on just because they bought stuff, or supported artists. That some of these wealthy people may have done nefarious things tends to be overlooked. Great artists have been great sinners, or have been pointlessly cruel to those who loved them, but the art remains.

Many kinds of art would not exist without the technology, which now is a part of nearly everything we say and do. Science fiction used to be about the effect technological changes may have on current social norms. Though we can find accounts of trips to the moon as far back as the Second Century AD, we wouldn’t have movies about space ships if we didn’t have a way of seeing moving images which, before the invention of the motion picture, was done with words. We wouldn’t have those words if they weren’t written down and reproduced inexpensively on paper in books and magazines.

But we’d still have stories, told wherever human beings gather. You’d think, with all the possible motifs, tropes, cliches, myths and metaphors, we’d reach a point where every story was told. Some would say that we have. You see these people waving a single book, typically a sacred text. You hear them insisting that everything you need to know is inside, and that to look elsewhere is a sin. Alas, you can read a text again and find new meanings. You can go home again, and find new meaning. The best narrative endings are meaningful. We feel that whatever brought us to this point has been worthwhile.

I continue to read and, about eight paragraphs in, I find a description of a sexual act. The act, and the words that describe it,  would not appear in this magazine some years ago.  Famous battles against government and cultural censorship are part of the folklore of the Twentieth Century.  Some artists suffered when their work was branded indecent or obscene. Others profited. William Faulkner attained a national reputation with the publication of Sanctuary, a novel with a brutal rape scene. I read Sanctuary in college. I didn’t think it was Faulkner’s best, and the rape scene seemed gratuitous–something Faulkner tossed in just to shock people. I found Henry Miller’s ravings about his paltry sex life monotonous. James Joyce was definitely writing about sex in Ulysses, but did he have to? Hemingway’s sex scenes were silly.

The long battle to write freely about what people do with their privates, in private or in public, was not altogether won. Nowadays there is such an art to finding and proclaiming offense, on the Internet and off, that I wonder how many great things may have been accomplished if people hadn’t burned up so much energy and bile. I’m not doubting that the offenses were real–the art of making enemies goes way, way back. The art of living with enemies, regardless of our responsibility in creating them, remains a work in progress.

I read this story and ask if it was necessary to include a vulgarity. Almost immediately, I qualify vulgarity, a word that descends from the Latin for “common” and “ordinary” that unfairly implies that such detailed depictions are common and ordinary. They are not. What is most common is the description of sex through taboo language. What is better is the use of metaphor, simile, implication and wit. Like many human endeavors, human sexuality is ultimately beyond description. When it is contained in a written narrative, the reader gains inadvertent insights into the narrator by what is left out.

I continue reading and the first-person narrator suggests a way the story may turn out, and then immediately discredits that ending as the kind that would be typical if this story were fiction, which is isn’t. But it is.

I’ve encountered similar tropes in thrillers in which the naive, fresh-faced hero is told by the grizzled veteran that what they have experienced isn’t what happens on TV, or in movies, that this is real life.

But it isn’t. I quote the title of David Slavitt’s short story collection: Short Stories Are Not Real Life. Real life is ultimately beyond containment or summation in any art form. Real life is too frequently messy, meaningless, pointlessly cruel, surfeit with failed climaxes and unresolved tension. We turn to art because of what the author leaves out.

Why did the author leave in that pointless aside about this story not being fiction? Was this an attempt at the irony that leads to the alienation inherent in Brechtian drama? Or did the author assume that I was so far into the story that I would trust his character to be capable of trite observation?

A few pages later the narrator is about to make a decision that, if made, will confirm the desperation, pointlessness and hopelessness of all that has happened so far. The position of this decision suggests that I am nearing the climax of the story. The decision is made and–surprise!–the preceding action wasn’t desperate, pointless and hopeless after all. A story in which characters spend most of their time reacting, with few attempts at action make things worse, leads to an ending that does not resolve tension or conflict, but isn’t so bad, as endings go.

If a story becomes a quest for the reader, must it end in banality?

Reading this story has not made a qualitative change in my life. It has not lit up the sky, as I had wanted to do with my work. It has not delivered to me a sense of wonder.  It has not challenged received values and then comfortably restored them, as is the custom with most television comedy and drama. Super people haven’t thrown things at each other. I have not seen the inside of a space ship.

I have seen the inside of a simple, somewhat uninteresting human situation, in a magazine that, despite short stories that I’d rather not read, every once in a while, publishes one that tells me, writing stories is a worthwhile thing to do.

Maybe next time.

I was feeling especially grumpy. In the words of Jean Shepherd, I was dejected, disgusted and despondent. Then I got an e-mail from a program director for a senior adult community. Was I still teaching and would I like to do a lecture for the group?

For a while I did not reply. I never thought I would ever teach again because teaching high school English had been so was emotionally shattering.

It had nothing to do with the kids, or the stuff I taught. I gave three years of my life to teaching tenth grade English for kids who aren’t good at reading and writing and, for too many reasons, may never be.

Before I stood in front of these kids, I had taught undergraduates and graduates.I had lectured to senior adults about history and biography. I taught karate. I helped kids at a community college find some reason to practice writing until the nonsensical matrices of English grammar began to make sense. I went to the best graduate school in the area to take education classes and I passed all the examinations necessary to get a teaching license.

I did this because my wife teaches high school. We met in high school. I was well aware that things happen in high school that can make the future happen a little bit faster. In high school I became an autodidact: a person who teaches himself.  Later, as a journalist, I proved to myself repeatedly that I could learn just about anything, if I gave myself enough time, and that if I found the sense of wonder in what I learned and shared it with readers and students–then everyone benefited.

Or almost everyone. I was also aware that education creates paradoxes, and the biggest is that some students are not ready for what is being taught, or they don’t want it and they try to fight it as hard as they can. I knew this because I was not ready for much of what my teachers put before me, and I did fight some of it until I stopped fighting and just let it in.

What shattered me about high school teaching was my relationship with administrators. For all its many rewards, teaching is relentlessly demanding and difficult, and when your supervisors are trying as hard as they can to demean you and denigrate your efforts, leaving it all behind seems to be the best choice.

My wife said the school was just a bad fit for me, and that I would probably find another school whose administrators understood me better. It can take a while before any teacher finds a school where she feels he belongs.

In my long life I have never become good at failing. I typically blame myself when things don’t work out the way I’d like, even if much of what occurs isn’t my fault. I fall into dark moods. Worst of all, I reject things that I once valued, as if the act of having faith in those things betrayed me, or was somehow false.

When I left that school, my indomitable urge to learn, died. I could no longer focus on the books I used to read voraciously. Unresolved stress led to two heart attacks.

I lost my faith in myself as a person who loved finding out cool things about the world, who truly enjoyed sharing those things–not to show people how much he knew, but because, as the I Ching says, pleasure shared is pleasure doubled. There’s more than enough misery and misfortune clouding our skies. When you find something wonderful about life, or when somebody shows it to you, you reconnect with hope and joy. Like the kid who fights all that good stuff in front of him, you find the little bit of delight that moves you forward.

I lost faith in the sense of wonder. What was it, if not a momentary emotional response that so quickly dissolves into irony, paradox and bitterness?

This request that I teach again surprised me. The senior group was in New Jersey. I had been one of their favorite guest lecturers over the years. I specialized in historical and biographical subjects: kings, queens, Hollywood stars, disasters, triumphs, entertainers, artists, history’s hidden villains and unsung heroes, and some of other fascinating people whose lives helped create the world in which we currently live.

But I gave it up after moving to Virginia, because the last time I made the long drive north, the car broke down and, though I rented a replacement and delivered the lecture (on the life and accomplishments of Emily Post), the car trouble had left me addled. On top of this, I had tried to use some of the techniques I had been taught in grad school and none of them worked. The people liked what I did, but I felt I had let them down.

And now I was being asked to do it again. I thought about it. The fee was the same–but I had never, ever done these lectures for the money. For me, this was a chance to find out fascinating things about a person, place or thing, and share them.

I had been reading about the Roman statesman Cicero but thought that his writings on growing old were a bit shallow. I had also read recently about the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who selected Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius as his successors. Of the two, Aurelius was intriguing because he left behind the Meditations, a manuscript of aphorisms, bromides, Stoical thoughts, observations, dour thoughts on death and reflections on power and leadership that he never intended to have published. Somehow they were and they have inspired theologians, philosophers and world leaders to this day. Aurelius is occasionally sour and sometimes puzzling, but some of his writings have an uncanny way of speaking directly to his readers.

Then there’s the irony of an emperor who could have and do just about anything, who maintained an almost humorlessly austere and honorably responsible lifestyle. His son, Commodus, would go on to be the exact opposite of his father. One of the worst emperors ever, he would send the Roman Empire into its slow decline.

I hit the books and, because we had a different car, had an uneventful ride north. I recognized a few faces in the audience. I gave the talk, doing what I did for so many years.

And it worked beautifully. It felt good to be in front of people. I could tell from their faces, and their responses, that they enjoyed listening to me.

Everybody benefited.

On the way back home, I had that confident glow when you know in the deepest part of your being that you’ve done the right thing.

I first learned about word processing at a local newspaper, where, every day or so, some overcaffeinated future Pulitzer winner would push his or her chair back, pound the innocuous beige plastic of a terminal (this was before slim, flat-screen single computers could do it all) and yell, “NO! NO!”

What had previously lived on a green screen with yellow letters had vanished forever, and the response from human beings was not good. Representatives of the species howled, cursed, kicked inanimate objects (metal trash cans were a favorite of the assistant editorial page editor) and swore that no amount of new technology could replace the typewriter. After about two minutes, one of the people would saunter in from their severely air conditioned lair–casually, blissfully, as if he just came out of a yoga class and wait strategically until the profanity ebbed and say, “Next time, hit the save button.”

Contemporary word processors are supposed to save what you do automatically. You find the latest version, pull it up and see that it’s all there EXCEPT for the great string of prose that you had labored upon for the last hour because, last night, before going to bed, you had just read a schpritz from one of those fancy prose stylists and you wanted to show the world that you can swim with the big fishes. That’s gone. Forever.

I’ve been through this so many times now and I no longer go quite so crazy. Yesterday when a post for this blog vanished a few seconds after I had finished it (and was not saved, for reasons I’ll never know), I sighed wistfully, remembering so many piles of text that had similarly vaporized, and how the only practical response is “it wasn’t meant to be.”

From a philosophical point of view, that’s a rather weak rationalization. It presumes that things happen for reasons, that some outside, presumably supernatural force is in charge, this force only wants good things for everybody (despite the observance that what happens you may not be so good for me, and vice versa) and that what could have been a mere goof, or a mistakenly tapped key, or, a causally causal connection that Charles Dickens’ Scrooge would explain as “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato,” was, in truth, a divinely sanctioned act whose ultimate benefit may not be immediately apparent but would, in time, present itself as a greater good.

Until then, it’s best to do something different and, maybe, when emotions return to the midpoint, you can attempt to repeat what you know you cannot duplicate fully. Or not.

I think life is more about chances than choices. A chance for a writer starts with that scary thing: a blank page–digital or actual. You also need something that will make a mark on that page that, you hope, will remain consistent for a while. I say this because I have had too many broken pencil points (and no sharpener anywhere), dry pens, and typewriters that break in ways that can’t be fixed with a ribbon change or a bent paperclip.

Finally, you must recognize the time you have to fill the page. That usually means you must endure distraction, an inspiration that isn’t fully understood, an urge to do research that you must stifle or you’ll find out all these cool facts about delft china or plant-based toxins common to Central America without writing the scene that uses them, and forget about checking e-mail, letting your social media pals know you’re about to craft the greatest work of art the world will ever know, or going to the kitchen and opening the fridge.

You just have to start, knowing that you’re not ready, the writing conditions could be better, you may not be feeling as healthy as you should be, at any moment the phone could summon you to the shop where what you thought was basic maintenance is now a major auto repair, or you just had a publishing industry gatekeeper reject your last work with one of those blandly cordial notes that indicate to you that the person in whom you had put all your hopes didn’t bother to look at what you’ve sent.

You have to start.

Now.

This is not the first poem you have seen

This is not the first poem I have written

It is more like a locomotive, the first acquired, silent in a shed, replaced by machines with bigger numbers.

When the big steam-puffing thing chugged into view, people thought

This is going to take us places!

What if it goes nowhere?

If we were supposed to have locomotives, we would have been given locomotives in the same way we’ve been given legs, feet, toes (but not shoes and socks) and the holes in our heads.

It smells funny, like the hot, rusty iron odor of blood.

If it breaks, who is going to fix it?

This is going to make us a big pile of money!

This is going to do what others never did!

This is the first of many!

Remember how it sounded when it moved?

Number ONE, number ONE, number ONE!

With the ending of the statewide teachers’ strike in West Virginia (for a five percent raise on a salary that is still among the lowest in the nation), I see again how many people in this country hate teachers.

I admit to some prejudice against the haters. I have had about five (or six) great teachers in my life. All were charismatic, electrifying lecturers and, most important of all, did not compel me to ingest the required curriculum as much as they showed me how what was being taught was valuable, necessary and important to me personally. The message I got from all is that having the time and places to let yourself be educated is a great gift that begins when that lightbulb of understanding goes off in your head, and does not end, especially when you find yourself as old (or older) than your teachers, and you think back on what they did and who they appeared to be, and you marvel at how the wisdom they were passing on.

This said, I can understand why teachers are a target of so much characteristically American animosity. Though the United States may be among the most educated societies in the world, and have colleges so prestigious that foreign students struggle for admission, most Americans believe that life’s greatest lessons are not taught in a classroom, but in the “real world.” We tend to have more respect for “self-made” individuals who began their social climb somewhere behind the starting line, than those who went to school, hit the books, collected credentials and became successful doing as they were taught–even if the majority of self made individuals in this country did precisely that.

We also revere those who exceptions who quit, do badly in school, or are misjudged by their teachers. Among the most famous are Albert Einstein, whose childhood teachers complained that he lacked focus and would most likely fail in later life, Henry Ford, who left school at 15 and became only fascinated with engineering when his father gave him a pocket watch that Ford took apart and reassembled, and Steve Jobs, the consumer products visionary whose dropped out of Stanford but was permitted to sit in on a calligraphy class, which, he later claimed, helped him realize the theory of design that had made some (though far from all) of his Apple technology products so successful.

Add to this a quasi-religious ideal, expressed in fusty mysticism by Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, that anything you really need to know you can learn by living in, and observing “Nature,” a homegrown American turn on the Protestant ideal that God speaks to us all, if we would only draw ourselves away from distraction and temptation and listen.

I confess I shared some of the haters’ skepticism about the efficacy of teaching the arts in a classroom. I became a writer by writing, because my heroes were writers and I wanted to be like them. As an adolescent, I had the chutzpah to call up some writers on the telephone. Others I met at science fiction conventions. I visited one who lived a few bus rides away and, as I have written elsewhere in this blog, apprenticed myself to another.

Every writer I met told me the same thing: you learn by reading and writing and sending your stuff out to editors who will reject it repeatedly until they accept it. This remains true, though nobody tells you how awful rejection can be; that publications will try to cheat you out of what little money they pay you; the days, weeks and months when you don’t know how you’re going to pay the bills; how much your stuff is change when it finally sees print; and the peculiar envy and condescension that management–editors, publishers, the people who make money from what you do–has for those who make the stuff they need to sell.

I took only one writing course in college and, based on a single short story, I passed it in the first week. Though I always considered writing to be my calling, I began teaching because I liked to share the experiences I acquired as a self-taught writer who wallowed in the real world. I believed (erroneously) that the tender shoots that bloomed in sheltered academic writing courses were not as hearty as what sprouted from “real world” soil.

Alas, it’s all writing, and what matters, in the long run and the short, is if what is on the page speaks to you, and to what degree you are guided by your ability to listen. But I was a young kid starting out on a journey as a teacher, and, like most who begin an adventure, I had every reason to believe my expectations would be met.

That’s when I ran into a quote from the witty Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

Though most in current English literature classes, and a few more who have graduated, don’t know who Shaw was, I most certainly did. I read many of Shaw’s plays in high school because they were funny and, more important, because they took accepted notions of what was morally right and proper and turned them upside down. In the relentlessly chatty world of Shaw’s plays, you could be delighted and annoyed at the same time.

And everyone knew, when I was a child, that Lerner & Lowe’s My Fair Lady, a staple of musical theater whose Broadway cast recording I had listened to on my parent’s record player, was based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, which, everyone also knew, was based on an earlier Greek legend.

In Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, an attempt to transform Aristophanes’ Fifth Century B.C.E. Greek comedy into a late-20th Century musical (it was originally presented in a swimming pool at Yale), the god Dionysus (played by Nathan Lane in the 2004 Broadway revival) is disgusted with the quality of contemporary dramatic material and travels to the underworld with the intention of bringing back a playwright who write better.  Dionysus has a tough choice: Shaw or Shakespeare? Shakespeare wins.

Shaw hated going to school in Dublin. He eventually left to work as a journalist–which he learned by doing–in London, becoming one of the city’s most popular theater critics. Even before his plays became successful, he was notorious as a socialist, contrarian and wit. He was extraordinarily prolific and lived on to be a charming, if peculiar and contradictory elder statesman among the Irish.

Shaw’s quip about teachers troubled me not just because the playwright did not teach. When you’re doing anything in the arts, you have moments when you feel you’re not producing enough, not working hard enough, not doing all that you wish you could do in order to achieve the fantasies you had when you started your journey.

And, as anyone who has tried to show anyone how to do something knows, there are times when teaching seems like a complete waste of time: you’ve repeated yourself so many times, and still, the student doesn’t understand.

Finally, Shaw speaks to the rarefied snobbery that professionals use to put themselves above the dilettantes.  True creativity–the kind that produces great art that changes the world or makes people spend money–cannot be taught. You either have it, or you don’t, and those that don’t should admit it and do something else.

You see this snobbery in editors and publishers who, when you put them in a place where they feel they can’t be overheard, talk about the awful stuff they rejected. How could anyone imagine that such dreck was worth writing?

In the science fiction field, the snobbery has been immortalized by late writer Theodore Sturgeon lives on as the founder of Sturgeon’s Law, who, in responding to critics who said “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud,” agreed, but added “ninety percent of everything is crud.”

Was I among the cruds because I hadn’t sold a science fiction short story? Was I a crud because a literary novel on which I had worked diligently for two years was rejected by a publisher of thrillers? When you’re self-taught, you know that learning anything worth doing can be difficult. You also know that talent may open the door a crack, but what keeps you in the game is persistence and dedication.

And just about anybody can be persistent and dedicated. In truth, most published writing is filled with those who produced and produced and produced until they became successful enough to produce less frequently.

So I came up with a line that appealed to those who asked me to do more teaching. I refuted Shaw.

Those who can, should. Those who can teach, must.

Because teaching is also an art, and we all have experienced teachers who were not good at the art. A teaching administrator proclaimed to me that the reason so many people hate teachers is that these people have had bad experiences in classrooms. The haters also believe that teaching is something that anyone can do. “So,” this administrator paused, having no doubt said this same thing to far too many people, “if anyone can build a house, do you want just anyone to build yours?”

Do we hear some of the same snobbery in this remark?

I later tangled with this administrator, who wanted me to teach his way, or not at all. He is one of the reasons I don’t teach any other way but my own.

The people I have taught have published. They have written stuff that they and other people enjoy. Some of them have gone on to teach.

We go where we’re needed, whether or not we understand that when we arrive.

When I began to hang out in newsrooms, I quickly learned that every journalist hated covering the town meetings, in which school boards, zoning commissions, city councils and county boards of ‘dis-‘n’-dat sat stone-faced on an elevated platform as the rough-and-tumble-dried stood and spoke, one at a time, about the issues that concerned them.

Because I mostly wrote features instead of hard news, I was never assigned a town meeting. But I knew those who did. They left the newsroom bright and cheery as the sun set. They came back at 10 p.m. dull-eyed and slack-faced, clutching a cup of take-out coffee, knowing that even if they captured accurately everything that was said, spelled every the name correctly, and got it all in before the 11 p.m. deadline, their work would be chopped down until it was barely two paragraphs, and then, most likely, get cut further, or not even appear in the the next day’s local news section because a last-minute advertisement took up the space.

What would happen to their reporting? Was it cached somewhere, just in case someone who spoke at the meeting went berserk and shot up a neighbor’s above-ground swimming pool? Would the unpublished article be referenced if one of the officials on the board ran for a position in state politics and won?

What everybody knew, but really didn’t care about, was that these meetings were a crucial part of small town American life, even if what happened at them was as far from the sentimental scenes on Norman Rockwell magazine illustrations as the front page news they aspired to report.

Here you saw the newly elected struggle to keep their composure as they were reviled by those who did not vote for them. Here you heard the rage and frustration of citizens who really did have something better to do than wait their turn to complain about the way a law was enforced, grumble about the neighbor’s above-ground swimming pool–erected in obvious violation of zoning regulations– leaking chlorinated water into their vegetable garden or assail the hypocrisy inherent in the proposed budget. Here you watched a person look back nervously over his shoulder to see if any those who had promised to show up and lend moral support, actually showed up to watch him speak for them. Here you heard a self-proclaimed payer of taxes “taxpayer” talk about truth, justice and the American way, relate it to an issue that had absolutely nothing to do truth, justice and the American way, and then walk out because he was not in the least interested in hearing from anyone else.

When what I believed would be a temporary flirtation with journalism became a series of difficult marriages, I came to know some outstanding political reporters. From them I learned of a different side of the profession, where these meetings were a way to learn how American democracy actually worked.

Go to enough meetings, I was told, and you begin to recognize who really has the power. Go to a few more and you can connect the dots that link the powerful with the influential, the people with money to the people who protect or tax that money. Finally, you understand what is called constituent services, how those in power further the survival and good fortune of themselves by taking care of those who support them.

Forget about what you learned in high school civics about the “checks and balances” created by the authors of the US Constitution. In local politics, the checks are what staffers cash to get “street money” to pay for votes, suppress dissent and make things happen whose cost can’t appear in public records. The balances are fictions–claims made in speeches and proclamations–that, no matter how often reporters prove them false, are intended to help us believe that ours remains the best of all worlds.

And the greatest fiction of all is the belief that democracy is about “the people” being in charge. This wasn’t true in Athens, where the custom of permitting male property-owners sitting on a hillside the privilege to say Yea or Nay over how money from silver mines may be spent (the Athenians chose to build warships with which they created a small empire that lasted for a few generations until they lost a war against the Spartans, who were ruled by a pair of kings, who made sure that Athens would be a tyranny until it was conquered by the Romans) created the idea of rule by the people.

But we want to believe it was. And the great thing about attending a public meeting, as I did recently, is that as long as this belief can be indulged, people who really don’t have any power can feel that they have some control over their destiny.

It can be a beautiful, and ugly, thing to see. It’s beautiful when people stand up and say things that tug at your heart. Let’s do more to help the unfortunate! Let’s give a raise to the people who do the most good! Let’s have a parade or a proclamation to show how much we want to honor those who work so hard for us!

It’s ugly when someone vents anger at the powerful, no matter how much the powerful may deserve it, or spews a dark cloud of discontent about taxes, zoning or the neighbor’s barking dog. Because the anger reminds everyone that politics has limits, the most important being that it isn’t a source of permanent personal happiness. Local government does not exist to please us. Rather, it makes things possible that would not be possible any other way.

We may not like the result. We may grumble at the placement of a traffic light where we previously zoomed on by. We may wonder why the people we elected to not raise taxes have raised them again this year. We may discover that the commonest of common sense cannot explain how any of our tax money has been spent. We may notice, if any of us stand up and make a little speech, that some of the powerful are looking at their watches, or their cell phones, or their tablets, or they’re passing notes to teach other, because they just can’t endure another person telling them what they should be doing.

We may tell ourselves that if things were just a little bit different, we would run for public office, win and make everything right!

What these politic reporters told me was that few people in politics ever agree on what is right. We hope that people of good moral character are elected, and that these people surround themselves with vestments cut from the same cloth. But the purpose of an election is not to deliver the best person for the job. It’s to create a path to power that is clear enough and seemingly fair enough so that we don’t have civil wars every six months.

At best we who are not powerful may be able to empower those who seem to share our values. At worst we can count the days until we cast our vote for the next person.

But we get a chance to stand up and say something. I urge you to try it. I did, a long time ago.

And it really made all the difference.