Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin, my beloved creative writing teacher's obituary was in the paper today.

She made every one of her students pull the best from themselves and spill it onto paper -- made everyone feel like a Writer. Even seeing her years later as my teacher, after a life of alcoholism and scoliosis, you could feel the warmth of an earlier life around her -- a shawl of past sadness, worldliness, wild romances and big oceans. She was raw and forgiving and edgy and beautiful.

And now, in her passing, I find out that we lived in the same neighborhood in Oakland, me some 25 years after her. And I think back on how seriously she took my writing. I once turned in an incredibly sappy story about an older couple. She delicately commented on how frail the plot was; that nothing had really happened in my story. And I confessed to her that friends had been going through loses recently, all of their loved ones too young to die, just like the losses that I had experienced earlier in my life. And that maybe I just wanted someone to have a happy old-age ending for once. And she looked at me with a quiet smile, making it feel so okay to write for catharsis alone. Seems simple, but no one else ever did that for me.

I have missed her since college. I miss her even more now.