National Book Award/My Prof

Up for the National Book Award tonight is Our Kind, a novel by Kate Walbert. I wouldn't bring this up if Kate Walbert hadn't been my creative writing professor in 1998.

I didn't like Kate Walbert. She gave me lower-than-average grades, seemed lost in her closet world of writing on the Connecticut ranch, came off as dreamy and boring. I was spicy, on the latest trend, energetic; she was stuck in the past, heavy on description, disconnected with reality. She gave me a B+ on one story I wrote that later won a prize and $200, so I questioned her judgment. Worst of all, I was scared off from creative writing until a year or two ago...simply because of my bad experience with her. One of the things I regret about college is NOT majoring in English or literature (how often do you hear that?), and Kate Walbert was certainly a factor in that.

Now Kate wasn't ALL bad. I wrote her a letter challenging the too-low-for-me grade she gave me in her class and she changed it. To be fair, I'd bet a lot of her comments were right-on, although I've wisely disposed of the evidence. And, judging from the intro section of her book I skimmed on Amazon, her book appears to be juiced with more pizzazz than I previously thought she could generate in a lifetime.

Good luck tonight Kate!