Mason Memories

Finding Sanctuary from the Dragons

I started Mason’s graduate writing program just shy of 10 years after completing my bachelor’s degree. My undergraduate years in a small, New England liberal arts college—a “potted ivy,” we called it—had been a relative idyll of learning for the sheer impractical pleasure of learning. We gave no more than the occasional, passing nod to the notion that one day the gates of knowledge would slam shut behind us and we might have to earn a living and make our way in the world. I was particularly ill-equipped for that eventuality; as a child of teachers, the only world I really knew was school. Everything outside that realm was sketched in my mind rather like one of those 17th-century maps where the unknown is represented by an artistic flourish and a foreboding “there be dragons here.”

And then the day came, that sun-splashed June morning when the playwright Neil Simon gave our commencement address (“Don’t go,” he advised us), and I was flung to the dragons.

What followed was a decade-long lesson in how utterly, how categorically, how monumentally unsuited was I for life among the 9-to-5 cubicles, where the ability to recite Dryden and make T.S. Eliot puns carried remarkably little weight on my annual reviews. So while I didn’t actually weep in gratitude when at last I crawled bloodied and bruised into the embrace of the George Mason University Department of English, I was close.

In many ways, graduate school was nothing like my college experience. No dorm life, no cafeteria food, no all nighters (well, perhaps a few), no protest rallies in front of the president’s office. I commuted four hours round-trip to many of my evening classes. I had a husband and a mortgage. I had e-mail.

But grad school was like coming home nonetheless. The chalk dust! The photocopy packets! The motivation of the protagonist! I was once again among people who could use “ontological” in a sentence, and, what’s more, did so for a reason. Such people as Roger Lathbury who made it clear that one strayed from the Acceptable Rules of Comma Usage at the peril of one’s soul. Such people as Alan Cheuse, whose commanding editorial voice so terrified me that I started like a rabbit every time I heard it emerging from my radio with an NPR commentary. Such people as Jim Henry, whose Writing Cultures course led me to fascinating insights into subjects as disparate as the compositional style of World Bank memos and the social stratification of Disney World employees (hint: don’t mess with Snow White).

I learned many useful things in my time at Mason, including the nonrestrictive appositive, why Anna Karenina threw herself under the train, and what “ontological,” in fact, means. What has followed has been a decade-long lesson in how utterly suited I am for a life in which such things matter.

Caroline Kettlewell (MA English ’95) is a freelance writer and the author of two critically praised nonfiction books, the most recent of which, Electric Dreams, has been optioned for a feature film. You can visit her web site at www.carolinekettlewell.com.

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Do you fondly remember certain places within the George Mason community that exemplified the “college experience”? Were you befriended by a mentor or professor at George Mason who influenced your life? If so, tell us about it. Send your submission to Alumni Affairs, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 3B3, Fairfax, Virginia 22030. Please keep submissions to a maximum of 500 words.