The Lantern and the Latch

Thoughts On the Indelible Power of Artistic Mentorship

Before speaking of mentorship, some time-sensitive notes.

First, Texas. I am so sorry, so heartbroken for everyone affected by these devastating floods. My heart breaks for all, truly. I really don’t have any other words. I, like so many of you, am wholly overwhelmed by the news cycle. I am flooded and paralyzed by it.

Second, in these painful times for humanity, I look for simple practices to stay grounded and sane. A few weeks back, I wrote about a subversive gratitude practice described in Melody Beattie’s book, Make Miracles in Forty Days, which I learned about from Holly Whittaker (whose Substack is called Recovering). Holly said, more or less, that Make Miracles in Forty Days is an incredible book with a terrible title.

Well, I ordered it, and I’m wondering: Would any of you be interested in joining me in a forty day intensive to work through this book? To do a collective miracle project?

How exactly will it work? I’m not sure yet. I just got the idea this morning while thinking about how to press on in the face of constant world calamity. So I haven’t worked out the details of how we’ll move through the book and the practice, but details of these collective projects are pretty easy for me to hammer out after all these years of leading groups, so, if you’re interested, and trust me to walk with you through this subversive gratitude practice, please let me know in the comments (or via email).

If the interest is there, I’ll put something together for us.

Meanwhile, now, I want to talk about mentorship. What’s gotten me thinking about mentorship is my own profound gratitude for the guidance (already, in this short time!) I’m receiving from my new literary agent, Laurie Abkemeier. She told me from the outset that she is a highly editorial agent, which thrilled me, because I’ve had limited mentorship in my journey as a writer, and I crave it. Already her notes on the quickly developing proposal and the full sample chapter are so affirming. Notes! From someone who cares about my work!

It’s not unlike love. After all, attention is love, as we know.

I suppose I might feel more gratitude than average for this kind of editorial attention. I’m an extremely independent person, and a self-taught writer (I didn’t get an MFA until I was almost 50 and had published several books and hundreds of essays, and held several editorial positions with magazines). I’ve had this stubborn quality of needing to do things myself, needing to chart my own course.

But as I’ve gotten older and grown more involved in literary community, I’ve found myself feeling wistful and yearning when others speak of beloved mentors, whether they be agents, teachers, advisors, writing partners, or editors. Working with Laurie and feeling the strength of someone else’s investment in my work, investment undergirded by experience and knowledge, is … well, I think the best word for it is comforting.

I feel like I’m being supported in a literal way—that is, someone else is bearing some of the weight of this thing that matters to me so much. Someone else is holding it up to the light, considering it, protecting it, imagining it into its fullest state of being.

I have felt that feeling a few other times in my life. Certainly when Sue William Silverman, my creative thesis advisor in grad school, saw me through the final stages of the first draft of The Part That Burns.

Before Sue, there was Dorothy Allison at Tin House (and really, from the first time I ever read Bastard Out of Carolina). Dorothy, who said about my essay, “Four Dogs, Maybe Five,” “You know this is a book, right?” I didn’t know that, not consciously, until she said so.

Before Dorothy, my good friends Tom Bartel and Kris Henning, publishers (at various and overlapping times) of City Pages, The Rake, and Minnesota Parent, who saw my skill as a writer and editor and believed in me and gave me room to take artistic and editorial risks while refining my ear and learning on the job.

Before Tom and Kris, there was John Engman, my first (and only official) poetry instructor when I was an undergrad, before I dropped out. John taught me that so much of poetry is what happens when we are carrying tomatoes from one house to another. He also saw the beauty of my sentences and how I hid behind them. He was the first person to gently bring that defense mechanism to my attention.

Before John, there was Zarmig Geisenhoff, known to her students as Zee, who taught journalism at St. Paul Open School, where I attended as a junior and senior in high school, before I was put in foster care and stopped attending school. Zee was legendary for her toughness, so I was nervous the first time I turned something in for the school newspaper. I don’t recall what the article was about. But I do distinctly recall how Zee reacted to it, which was to say that I was the best high school writer she’d ever had come through her class. Friends, can you imagine what that meant to a kid who was lonely, terrified, hiding a catastrophic home life, and on the brink of being given up to the foster care system? My god. I think Zee helped save my life.

Before Zee, there was the ninth-grade English teacher whose name I’ve forgotten, the extremely strict one who promised to knock off one letter grade for each day of lateness for our oral presentation on a novel, but who, after hearing my three-day late presentation on Where the Red Fern Grows, wrote to me that despite his better judgment he was not able to lower my grade on such a beautiful speech—and that, additionally, he was worried about me and that I should let him or someone else know if there was something going on at home.

Before the ninth-grade English teacher, there were my sixth-grade teachers, whom I wrote about recently in an essay for Kelly McMasters’s Show Me Your Diary series, in which I shared a poem I wrote in sixth grade, and said about it:

[My] teachers’ reaction to that poem (despite what I now see as excessive adjectives!) was honestly the moment I knew—really knew—that I would become a writer.

Before sixth grade, there were other teachers whose recognition of my use of language meant something to me, stuck with me, helped me see some semblance of a path ahead. Helped me see some semblance of myself.

So, I’ve been thinking about mentorship—and I’d love to hear about your mentors and memorable moments of mentorship if you’d care to share.

The Lantern & The Latch

Thoughts On the Indelible Power of Artistic Mentorship

You don’t know it at the time, but the first time someone reads your work like it matters, your body records it. Your lungs will remember. Your throat, your skin. Someone said: I see you trying. And suddenly, trying becomes sacred.

Mentorship is not a staircase. It’s a clearing in the woods. Someone older or just further along has hacked at the brush for years, and when they see you wandering in circles, they point to the place where the bramble gives way. You still have to enter. You still have to risk the thorns. But now you know there’s somewhere to go.

We pretend writing is a solitary act. But every sentence carries the fingerprints of those who touched us: teachers, lovers, ancestors, ghosts. This is the secret lineage. This is the true bibliography.

A mentor says, “Cut this paragraph,” and you feel like they’re asking for your heart in a jar. But when you test the theory and remove the paragraph, and the piece breathes easier, you might realize that they were teaching you the ethics of clarity and the melody of the unsaid. They were teaching you where the reader lives—in the space you cleared, not the one you clung to.

Some things, you can only say aloud in the presence of someone who’s already walked through fire. They will nod at your scorched story. They will not flinch. They’ll say, “Put that in the poem.”

A good mentor doesn’t make you into them. They hand you back to yourself—but steadier, stranger, sharper, and more brave. They make your voice more yours.

The apprenticeship is never one-directional. The mentor is transformed, too. Your hunger nourishes them. Your new eyes teach them how to see again. The good ones will tell you this, and thank you for it.

In the old guilds, apprentices swore oaths. Today, we pay in other currency: tuition, Substack subscriptions (thank you!!), loyalty, attention, late-night emails, the sweetness of gratitude folded into a sentence. But we still make the same exchange: our effort for their time. Our rawness for their scarred but sacred maps.

And then one day—maybe suddenly, maybe after years of writing and waiting—you become the one holding the lantern. Someone newer to the path stands before you, uncertain but brilliant. You recognize the look in their eyes because you wore it once: hunger mixed with disbelief. You clear your throat. You say the first real thing. The work begins again.

When you bring a mentor a story you’ve never shown anyone, something with blood on it, they say, “More of this.” They don’t blink. They don’t tell you to tone it down. They push the pages back across the table and say, “Keep going.” Even more so, however, they expect you to—and will usher you toward—transforming the blood into something beautiful.

The best mentors don’t leave fingerprints all over your work. They erase their presence. They ask questions instead of making declarations. “What are you trying to do here?” “Is this the real version?” “Why the distance in this paragraph?” “What if you gave more detail here?” “What if you struck this line? Would that last resonant image ring out more clearly?”

They don’t tell you what to write. They show you how to listen.

Real mentors don’t change your voice. They dare you to claim it. “There’s a tonal shift here,” they might say. “I hear something right under the surface of this. I wonder what might be trying to emerge, what might want to be said?” You don’t know yet. But their asking invites you to look.

Sometimes you recognize your mentor not by what she says, but by the look on her face when you read your last line out loud. By the beautiful silence that sings in the wake of your words.