I’m writing from the end of my sixth semester at Arkansas Tech University.

The fall has been good to me, especially where my students are concerned. Teaching creative writing isn’t easy. Learning to string sentences together, to craft narratives, really requires only two simple steps: reading and writing. Both solitary acts, sure, but a good teacher can still help guide you along the way.

I’ve had some good teachers: Jack Butler, Jay Curlin, Doug and Amy Sonheim, Johnny and Susan Wink. These are the people who kept me on track, whose lessons and lectures I still try to emulate.

Just this past week, I performed my best Johnny Wink impersonation by requiring all my students to memorize and recite poetry in class. When they groaned (like I did two decades before) I told them what Johnny told me, how poetry is “good furniture for the mind.”

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I told them about Sonnet 64, too. I compared the final couplet to Jason Isbell’s If We Were Vampires. For my money, there are no better ruminations on the heartbreak of loss than that poem and that song.

After Isbell, I brought up Susan Wink, Johnny’s late wife and self-proclaimed Queen of HEL (an acronym for her History of the English Language course). I told my students how Susan couldn’t make her way through all 14 lines without weeping.

After witnessing Susan's tears, I memorized Sonnet 64 myself. I still whisper it to my children some nights before bed. I recited it to my students when I introduced their upcoming assignment. And then, two weeks later, on the day of the poetry recital, one of the students said it back to our class.

The cycle spins on. The gift I gave my students is the gift that was given to me. It’s more than just words. I deal in furniture. Beautiful furniture for the mind. And recently, my feng shui paid off.

It came in the form of three separate publications, three stories penned by my students that were all accepted into literary journals this fall.

Jon Ross Anderson had his first-ever short story, “Through the Hills,” published in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature.

Ken Teutsch published, “The Parable of the Sheep and Goats” in the same edition. Ken is a nontraditional student who enrolled in my Intro to Creative Writing course “just trying to get a little better at writing,” as he put it on the first day of class.

Finally, Kacie Lopez is set to publish “Transference” in an upcoming volume of Exposed Bone, a literary journal hailing from the Pacific Northwest.

I urge you to look these authors up. Read their work. Meet their characters. Experience the worlds that they’ve created. Above all else, I want you to know that real yarns are still being spun. The future of literature is in good hands. Promise.

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