Mentor
I didn’t take Frank Conroy’s class when I was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in the years since it has become a cardinal regret. The longtime director’s engagement with student fiction was reputed to be total and unsparing, and was, itself, an essential piece of the workshop’s larger prestige. I avoided Conroy because his persona implicated my constant improvisation of myself, creatively and socially, as someone who belonged in the same program that had turned out many of my favorite writers. I felt like a fraud and my anxiety made me into one. Maybe I worried that Frank would be able to tell. Worse, maybe I worried that he wouldn’t mind saying so aloud.
Supposedly, all of us of there felt like impostors to one extent or another. Even, it seems, Tom Grimes. Mentor memorializes his long relationship with Conroy from its beginnings in the slush pile to the intimate friendship that sustained both men over the years. Along the way, the two men often had to negotiate their relationship against the roles given them; student and teacher and, eventually, professional peers. You get the sense that Grimes needed to write this book more than he needs you to read it, and that ends up being a point in Mentor’s favor. A driven candor elevates the inside baseball of literary prospect up to something sweet and painful. Grimes sought Conroy’s approval instinctively from the start, and getting it made his mentor’s instruction at times almost secondary. “In a sense, I didn’t need it. His presence was all that mattered.”
While Grimes attributes his need for Conroy’s approval to his relationship with his father, the underlying dynamic might be more universal. The workshop is most of all a place where artistic potential, that romantic infinitude, begins its entropy into definition: success, failure, or an in-between obscurity. Much of the difficulty of being there, of talking about the place at all, derives not just from this charge, but everyone’s awareness of it. What’s important about Mentor is that it takes the freighted terms of a place like Iowa and a man like Conroy and examines their character not with the grand stakes that make for a debate but the intimate ones that forge an artist.
Despite my own avoidance of Conroy while at Iowa, he still found a way to give me advice. He entered my dreams. I was shuffling around the program office with my knees in the throats of my shoes, pushing them forward as I searched for a class roster with my name on it. Frank intercepted me, towering at full height like a Kodiak, and from the side of his mouth he told me this: “At your age, I’d be cutting the deck every which way I could.” It still strikes me as something true. Even only barely knowing Frank Conroy, I know he was always good for saying something true.
