Benediction
How this food writer returned to fiction, and the importance of teachers and coincidences
I’m sitting alone at Manny’s, East 92nd and Second Avenue, on Sunday with a glass of Lagunitas IPA watching the Browns lose in their quintessential way, that is with a kind mediocrity that causes people to leave mid-game. I feel gentle fingers on my shoulder and hear “Are you Michael Ruhlman?”
This isn’t unusual — pretty much everyone in the New York City bar is from my hometown of Cleveland, where my work is well-known. I turn and see the face of a 66-year-old woman, thin, with straight dark hair. She’s immediately familiar, but it takes three beats for me to say, “Nancy?” I stand and hug this woman. Hug her with delight and surprise.
Reader, this is my fifth grade teacher — and the woman who first inspired me to write. Nancy Libman, nee Nancy Warren, Miss Warren, who at age 24 taught ten-year-old me at Fernway elementary school in Shaker Heights, Ohio. It was she who read the first short story I ever wrote and gave me a check ++ (two pluses, unheard of) on it. She called me to her desk privately, said she was amazed. Because I so crushed on her, I wrote another story called “The Impersonater” (sic, I never could spell) and dedicated it to her. And I simply never stopped writing.
This would be a fun coincidence in a city somehow built for coincidence, but to me, Nancy’s coming to me was a benediction.
I wrote all that following summer, 1974, listening to David Essex’s “Rock On” and Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” and Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” with my ear plug and transistor radio. It was then I knew: I wanted to be a writer.
I studied creative writing in high school. At Duke University I took one class, Writing Longer Narrative Fiction, with Reynolds Price, a protean man of letters who became my mentor, encouraging me long after Duke with letters I still cherish.
In my early twenties I wrote a coming-of-age novel which got me an agent, but that was all. She couldn’t sell it. I wrote a second novel which also never sold. Badly discouraged, I wrote to Reynolds, who urged me to be patient, said that if he knew of one good reason to discourage me, he’d do it.
But I was now 29, married, and needed a paycheck. I gave up trying to write fiction, lucking into a job as an editor at a local arts and culture magazine which required me to write a lot. I always wrote, virtually every day, and had been doing so since Miss Warren’s class.
I wrote about local chefs for the local magazine. I wrote about plays. I reviewed movies. I wrote about my old high school, an all-boy school that was defiantly all-male at a time, 1992, when anything all-female was considered good and anything all-male was considered toxic. The subject proved to be good enough to warrant book-length treatment, and I got my first book contract. That kind of moment is big enough that I remember the day I sat in my agent’s office, speaking with my new editor who assured me he was excited to buy my book — September 24th, not only my beloved dad’s birthday, but also that of my literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of my all-time favorite novel as well as countless gorgeous short stories.
I followed that book with one about culinary school which led to all kinds of culinary writing, and nearly 20 years of it, about food, chefs, and mostly cooking, and cookbooks. I had a knack for it — who could have known? I always urge young adults not to follow their passion but rather to do what they’re good at — that the passion flows in behind such forward progress and carries you places you never expected to go.
After Reynolds died in 2011, I began to write an essay about returning to my alma mater to attend the memorial, but to my surprise, it turned into a story about a writer returning to his mentor’s memorial. That fictional writer meets his college lover, and what happens changes both their lives.
Having written about food and cooking for so long, I felt a kind or renewed energy and excitement about writing this way. It became a novella, 170 pages. I began another, while maintaining my food-writing schedule. I confessed to a writer friend that I was writing fiction on the side. He said carry on, just call it your “secret project.”
And so I did. Eventually another novella followed. The collection, In Short Measures, was published a couple weeks ago. Reynolds is gone. My dear dad is gone. I wish they could have seen me achieve a goal that began when I was ten and in fifth grade.
So this past Sunday, I’m sitting in a New York City sports bar, and I feel a tap on my shoulder. “Are you Michael Ruhlman?” It is Miss Warren. I hug her.
In a recent New Yorker, George Saunders, one of the country’s finest writers of fiction, writes about his mentors, Tobias Wolff and Doug Unger. He concludes with this:
“Why do we love our writing teachers so much? Why, years later, do we think of them with such gratitude? I think it’s because they come along when we need them most, when we are young and vulnerable and are tentatively approaching this craft that our culture doesn’t have much respect for, but which we are beginning to love. They have so much power. They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But our teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost holy, which we never forget: they take us seriously. They accept us as new members of the guild. They tolerate the under-wonderful stories we write, the dopy things we say, our shaky-legged aesthetic theories, our posturing, because they have been there themselves.”
Looking back now, I see it clearly: Miss Warren took a ten-year-old boy seriously. And then she appeared 40 years later to let me hug her.
