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Tess Catalano "Take Back the Night" and other academic essays, 1982

1982-12-10 Ms. Shephard Page 5

   As I worked on it, I began to discover more and more about Ms. Shepard. She was good friends with another woman in the English department, Ms. Brown. Aside from being an English professor, Ms. brown was into construction. She made furniture. In fact, she made the chairs in Ms. Shepard's office. Together they had designed and helped build the house that Ms. Brown lived in. I learned that Ms. Shepard spent an awful lot of time at Ms. Brown's house. I knew this because I had also found out that Ms. Shepard drove a brown Scirocco, and it was parked in Ms. Brown's driveway a lot. It wasn't long before I realized that by altering my course just slightly, I could walk past Ms. Brown's house to and from the dining hall. 
   I continued to write for Ms. Shepard, and she continued to criticize my work (as it were). I had tried to continue the Martha theme by writing about when we were on the basketball team together, but I could never refine what I wanted to say from all the extra things that came out. So I moved on to poetry. I still had the same problem, everything was too rough, too expansive. That's not to say that some of the things I wrote weren't good. I was rather pleased with a long poem about how I hated society. It was inspired by "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" which we had read in class earlier that week. That turned out to be a big mistake because Ms. Shepard was doing her dissertation on "Prufrock", and "found Eliot's work to be definitive"
   One day in class we read two poems by D.H. Lawrence. Afterward, in her office, we got into an argument about whether true works of genius needed any refinement. ( I was really getting tired of having to work on a piece, and besides the criticism she was giving me wasn't really helping.)
   She said that a true sign of brilliance was writing and re-writing and re-writing again, until what you had was great. Then re-writing it once more, "to give it a spontaneous quality, to make it natural,

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As I worked on it, I began to discover more and more about Ms. Shepard. She was good friends with another woman in the English department, Ms. Brown. Aside from being an English professor, Ms. brown was into construction. She made furniture. In fact, she made the chairs in Ms. Shepard's office. Together they had designed and helped build the house that Ms. Brown lived in. I learned that Ms. Shepard spent an awful lot of time at Ms. Brown's house. I knew this because I had also found out that Ms. Shepard drove a brown Scirocco, and it was parked in Ms. Brown's driveway a lot. It wasn't long before I realized that by altering my course just slightly, I could walk past Ms. Brown's house to and from the dining hall. I continued to write for Ms. Shepard, and she continued to criticize my work (as it were). I had tried to continue the Martha theme by writing about when we were on the basketball team together, but I could never refine what I wanted to say from all the extra things that came out. So I moved on to poetry. I still had the same problem, everything was too rough, too expansive. That's not to say that some of the things I wrote weren't good. I was rather pleased with a long poem about how I hated society. It was inspired by "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" which we had read in class earlier that week. That turned out to be a big mistake because Ms. Shepard was doing her dissertation on "Prufrock", and "found Eliot's work to be definitive" One day in class we read two poems by D.H. Lawrence. Afterward, in her office, we got into an argument about whether true works of genius needed any refinement. ( I was really getting tired of having to work on a piece, and besides the criticism she was giving me wasn't really helping.) She said that a true sign of brilliance was writing and re-writing and re-writing again, until what you had was great. Then re-writing it once more, "to give it a spontaneous quality, to make it natural,