John Schultz: From Start to Finish
“Take a place.
Listen for far off sounds. Now listen for closer ones.
What are the smells? Tastes? Tactile sensations?
Now take a moment. What do you see?”
This is the abridged version of how John Schultz, fiction writing professor at Columbia College Chicago, started every class. He wasn’t just a mentor--he wrote the book on it; Writing from Start to Finish: The ‘Story Workshop’ Basic Forms Rhetoric-Reader. Story Workshop--if it doesn’t sound familiar, it wouldn’t hurt to bone up on it. That’s what he taught. Unlike other methods of teaching writing, it encouraged students to write without inspiration, to just work through the babble of our thoughts and build better habits through writing. It’s this method that made me the writer that I am today.
Twice a week, I would take the elevator to the 12th of 624 S. Michigan Ave, the fiction writing department, to attend his class. Back then, I had this blue, felt bag that I had bought a few years earlier--only after my first couple of years in Chicago, the bag had received numerous tears and abrasions, tethered together with stickers and pins, and jury-rigged with carabiners to keep the strap attached. It smelled both musky and bitter, due to cigarette smoke and loose tobacco respectively. I was thinking about trashing it, one day while waiting for the elevator, when John Schultz came up beside me.
“I like your bag, Behn,” he said in his deep, throaty candor. He was well-groomed, in a sweater and a sports jacket--but back then, I just looked like a DIY punk. I don’t think I even owned a shirt without some permanent stain on it.
“I think it’s time to get a new one,” I responded. “This one’s run its course.”
“You should keep it. It has character.”
So I dragged it to class, day-in and day-out. I was working on a terrible short story most of that semester. It was about a dog who tried to protect a boy. But with every class, it was John who kept moving it forward--he asked, “Why does the dog want to protect the boy?” “Why is the boy in danger?” “Where is the boy’s family?” He asked every question that I had ever considered and too many that I hadn’t.
It was at our student conferences, where he met with me alone, that he asked me the most important question of my entire college experience in the study of writing. He said, “Why do you want to tell this story?”
I had never asked myself that--I just wanted to write, knew that I had to, couldn’t sleep without it. But it was at that moment that I knew that I hadn’t really found my voice yet. You know, voice? The stylistic and thematic minutiae that separates your work from everyone else’s? But that was just beginning.
On Sunday, John Schultz died at the age of 84. Today, we buried him. It had been nearly ten years since I started at Columbia College Chicago’s fiction department, and many peers that I lost touch with dressed to the nines to see John out. Looking around the chapel, that had quickly grown into a standing-room-only situation, while his students and family spoke beautiful truths of him, I felt as though I was once again at home.
Y’see, I’ve never had much of an extended family. They’re either very rural or very religious, neither of which strongly appealed to me. Besides, the loss of my father splintered my immediate family in my teens and the domestic issues that resulted were only just being mended when I moved to Chicago. But it was at Columbia College Chicago, in the program that John Schultz had built, that I first discovered what a home was supposed to feel like. All the professors looked like aunts and uncles that I hadn’t seen in ages, the other students like my bigger brothers and sisters. But John Schultz and his wife, Betty, were our patriarch and matriarch, our ancestors who accepted us, regardless of what we were. And it’s through us that their story will live on.
I never finished that story from John’s class, but I wrote several more after I had found my voice. I even discovered myself through those writings. I never threw out that bag either. After all, it has character.