Now here’s an amusement:

Nineteen years ago, during my sophomore year at a college that no longer exists, a few of us decided to cope with the slow death of our school by publishing a literary magazine.  We weren’t familiar with terms like institutional precarity or chronic financial exigence, but it was clear – even before the final word came down – that our campus was grinding out its terminal throes.  Powerless to fend off the onrushing extinction, we felt that the only righteous course was to give vent to a palliative yawp of art.  We had no real expectations that our magazine would make any sort of dent in the world, but the idea bubbled up out of our gently decaying dorm (one building; all the guys on the second floor, women on the third) and spilled out over the tiny campus that we shared with an Polish seminary and a dull wealthy all-boys prep school.  I used to go out to their boat shed on warm autumn nights and piss on the racing sculls.

By late March, we had a fine stack of submissions drawn from the small clutch of remaining students, and we faced the task of deciding how to select which pieces would make the final cut.  Spring break arrived at the propitious moment.  Our small editorial cabal would print out all the submissions and drive north for a lost weekend in the Michigan woods, whose centerpiece would be a grand reading of all the submissions before a roaring bonfire, where, by a system of popular acclamation, we would preserve the ones selected for publication, and conduct the rejects to the cleansing flames.

From there it was a simple matter of gathering all the necessaries: heavy blankets and fine music, cookpots and forks and matches, cheap meat for the grill and a sack of oranges to ward off scurvy, glass bottles of green apple soda, and the box of hopeful submissions.  Our lone English teacher (rhetoric, composition, information literacy, creative writing, American & Brit lit, special-interest courses, internships, independent studies, writing center coordinator, den mother, bog witch) had offered us the keys to a ramshackle cabin not far from the Lake Huron shoreline.  It was a throwback gesture to her own original moment, I think – but if she felt the hot grip of labile, radiant possibility welling up from the abyss of memory, if the vicarious clamor to share our hour throbbed loudly in her ears, she said nothing of it.  She merely kept all these things, pondering them in her heart, and handed over the keys.

The fire pit was a raw gouge in the icy soil.  The best part of an oak stump had been dumped onto the scab of frozen ash and piled over with snow-crusted branches.  It fell to me to figure out how to ignite the thing, to proceed with our literary rites, but despite cramming every gap with paper and tinder and kindling, I couldn’t get the bastard to light properly.  My compatriots, meanwhile, were busy cleansing the nearby cabin of its accumulated grimes in preparation for a long night of words and fire.  They hadn’t bothered tackling the garage, which is where I found the five-gallon jerry can of gasoline.

Perfect, I thought.  Just a few quick spritzes on the obdurate wood to get things going.  Stand back and just mist the pit.  Don’t just dump it on.  Keep a safe distance.  No point in doing anything stupid.

When the gas can exploded and drenched me in a wave of searing flame, I shut my eyes and held my breath.  The rest is stories.

Now, nearly two decades later, I find myself dwelling on how grimly we clung to the dying husk of our school.  It was already crippled and doomed when we went north to do our bit of art in the woods.  The funding was gone, and the support systems had all but dried up.  It had hemorrhaged faculty and staff and students, and we that remained were the last salamanders in the embers of an idea that should have thrived and spread.  The only ones left, at that point, were the diehard believers, a community of seekers that could at least burn brightly, if briefly.  And so, in the face of reckless ending, why not marshal the powers of language into a barbaric, coruscating howl?  So what if it might be the last literary journal we ever made?  At least we would plant our flag, rest our boots on the barricade, set up a fine grin, and spit in the teeth of oblivion.  We were here.

Don’t draw the fire into the mouth, the throat.  Keep the fuel out of the lungs.  Then, the pain.  Only fragments of images now.  Running anywhere.  How far to the lake?  The face of a friend as he beat at my burning body with his heavy coat.  What happened to the box?

My office here at Alverno is a room that used to be a dormitory.  You can tell by the shape of the hall and the arrangement of the lavatories long before you get to the decommissioned bathtub just inside my door.  I am considered contingent faculty here, which is the fashionable term for people who do not know whether they will have a job from semester to semester.  Alverno was always small, but it is smaller now.  Most buildings are empty.  Not long ago, mired in financial precarity, Alverno found itself teetering on the edge of total collapse.  I remember reading about it when the news came down: entire programs, too many of them belonging to the humanities, jettisoned wholesale in a desperate bid for survival.  Only the most lucrative majors survived.  English and Creative Arts did not.  Much of the faculty who were not let go simply left, and I was brought in to teach out the shell-shocked survivors of now-dead departments who needed a class or a few arts-flavored credits to graduate.

Like many jobbing English scholars, my office is scattered with the accumulated jetsam of an academic life that really only signify to me, incomprehensible trinkets: the threadbare orange fleece blanket; the old chapbook from 2006 with the floorplan of a cathedral on the cover; a sign with tiled letters proclaiming “The Copernicus Center for Writers,” a four-leaf clover preserved in once-clear acrylic that had been flash-seared to an amber hue.  I teach at night, and so I am often alone in my building, which smells its age.  There are rooms full of old materiel – boxes of pencils and pens, old telephones, binders of administrative resources decades old, dusty chairs, defunct stationery, &c. – left to slowly yellow in the glimpse of the sun that filters through shuttered windows.  The chapel at the heart of the campus is still achingly serene, but hungry echoes crowd into every corner throughout the maze of hallways that lead to my office.  It is not always wise to be alone here, especially after dark.

Kindergarten was wrong; dropping and rolling does nothing when the fire is up under your clothes, sheltering there, eating you from the inside.  Dead leaves; dirty ground.  Where did the pain go?  Lying prone now beside an empty steel pot.  How bad is it?  Friends’ hands.  Slipping into shock under a rough wool blanket in the passenger seat of a speeding car.  The hospital, the needle, the vein.  Someone is screaming.  They’re going to cut the clothes off my body, aren’t they.  Shame.  I really liked those jeans.

My job, this semester, has been to manage a hybrid capstone course for both the English and Creative Arts programs.  In practical terms, that means I’m working with the seniors who watched their programs get cut out from under them, and who had yearslong relationships with their teachers abruptly severed.  Our central project  was the same as English capstones of previous years: the development, creation, and production of Inside / Out, Alverno’s literary magazine.

These students are glowing coals, trench-eyed and wrathful and salvific.  They are holy fools.  They are clinging grimly to the husk of their school.  Their funding is almost gone, and their support systems have all but dried up.  Their programs have hemorrhaged faculty and staff and students, and those that remain are the last salamanders in the embers of an idea that should have thrived and spread.  They are the only ones left, at this point: the diehard believers, for whom their community of seekers burns brightly, if briefly.  And so, in the face of reckless ending, why not marshal the powers of language into a barbaric, coruscating howl?  So what if, after seventy-odd years of student literary magazines, this year’s Inside / Out might be the last one ever made?  They have planted their flag, rested their boots on the barricade, set up a fine grin, and spit in the face of oblivion.  They are here.

The hot grip wells up from abyssal memory.  The clamor sounds loudly in my ears, but I will keep my peace.  We will not go north to consider a heavy stack of literary merit this year.  No: they will find their own strange refuges.  They will clean out their own grimy cabins, stock their own necessaries, dig out their own absurdities from abandoned garages.  They will burn in their own fires.  They will draw the fuel into their lungs.  And they will save each other.

Mark Twain is usually credited with saying – so he almost certainly did not say it – that history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.  There are far, far worse things for me to have become than my old English teacher’s rhyme (rhetoric, composition, information literacy, creative writing, faculty editor for Inside / Out, literary journalism, clericus vagabundus, bog witch).  It is a good path to walk, and I’ve even made friends with a few of the hungry ghosts in Alverno’s empty hallways, which feel more and more, with every passing week, like coming home.

We tell stories.

Dr. Brick

2025