Before sitting down to write this blog post, I went to the bookcase in my writing room and pulled out a tiny cloth sack of worry dolls. I hadn’t looked at those dolls in a long time, but even so, I knew exactly where they were and instantly plucked them from the shelf’s clutter. Then I emptied the worry dolls onto my desk: six cheerful, diminutive characters made from bits of stick and fabric, their crude faces dabbed on with ink. They couldn’t stand on their own, but I propped them as best I could against my stapler so they’d be in my line of sight as I wrote this post.
Wendell Mayo, one of my former MFA professors at Bowling Green State University, gave me these worry dolls during my final semester in the program. He gave the same set of dolls to the other four fiction member in my year’s cohort, as well, while we were in the home stretch of working on our theses. We were under a lot of stress at the time, and Wendell knew it; the dolls were his way of offering support and reassurance.
It seems a bit silly now to say that the MFA program was stressful. This was a funded studio program that each of us attended thanks to the kind of luck and privilege that allowed us to take a two-year break from the “real world” to focus on our own literary and academic growth. Still, it was stressful. We had course requirements to fulfill, papers to write, undergraduate classes to teach, and other assistantships or duties related to the program. All this was in addition to the real reason we were there: to write our own fiction and, ultimately, turn in book-length manuscripts that would serve as the theses we’d defend before graduating. We all had full plates, and by that final semester, most of us were exhausted and ready to be done.
Enter Wendell’s worry dolls, which he handed out during Advanced Fiction workshop to encourage us to embrace our writing above all else. Of each of our theses, he told us to simply “let it be what it needs to be.” I’ve never forgotten those words and all they imply—how a writer shouldn’t strongarm her work into what she wants it to become but rather allow it, organically and through layers of creative evolution, to come into its own.
Wendell’s Advanced Fiction workshop was a haven that final semester, a class where the five of us could discuss our work in depth and start to consider the future awaiting us after graduation. It felt appropriate to end our MFA experience with a small class containing only our year’s cohort, led by Wendell; in fact, it mirrored the class the five of us took together our very first semester, Techniques of Fiction.
In Techniques, Wendell had encouraged us to write in our own voices, as only we could, and he celebrated with great gusto whenever we succeeded in doing so. In my journal during that time, I relayed how I was so excited about a new story I was writing for Wendell’s class that I couldn’t sleep. That was what Wendell did for his students—he helped us overcome the petty competition or insecurities that are often inherent in MFA culture and instead prompted us to give ourselves over wholly to our work.
Many years before I entered the MFA program, I had a writing teacher who urged her students to “write with a hot heart and a cool head.” Wendell was that hot heart. In that first semester in the MFA, when some of us felt too intimidated to write new things, afraid we’d fail, Wendell encouraged us to let go and just write. And it worked. Some of the stories I drafted that first semester in Wendell’s class would go on to be published (including this story resulting from a postmodern assignment, as well as a story from his fairy tale assignment, which gave me a newfound affinity for Rumpelstiltskin and was published here and recorded here).
Publishing wasn’t generally seen as the main focus of our work in the MFA—learning and growing as writers was always paramount. Even so, in our Advanced Fiction workshop that final semester, Wendell presented some of the most hopeful advice related to publishing I’d ever received. “Honor yourselves and your work by submitting your best stories to the best publications out there,” he told us. He urged us to aim high, to raise our expectations for our own careers, and to move forward into the literary world with confidence.
He also taught us the importance of paying attention to details. In class, we took turns reading each other’s work out loud, often pausing sentence by sentence to discuss how the story was working on the line level and what tiny adjustments might make the work clearer or more original. And by having us study one another’s work so closely, he gave us the gift of not only improving our writing, but of getting to know one another. Two of the other writers in that room have since become some of my closest and dearest friends, and it’s hard to imagine my life today without them.
He gave us so much. That final semester, in addition to the worry dolls, Wendell presented each member of my cohort with a final parting gift: a framed picture of Marlo Thomas, in character from That Girl, standing before a fountain with her arms victoriously tossed into the air. Wendell jotted a personalized message on each picture to congratulate us on earning our MFAs. That gift referenced an inside joke in our class, but more broadly, I like to think it was a way for Wendell to show us how much he cared about us. Today, this picture hangs in my writing room above my actual MFA degree. I hung it that way at the start, as if I intuitively knew that the support of a teacher like Wendell would always be worth more to me, in the long run, than any degree.
Wendell Mayo passed away on May 6, 2019, one year after he retired from Bowling Green. He was sixty-five years old. When his death was announced online, an entire community of writers who once studied under Wendell expressed shock, grief, dismay. Wendell touched so many people, encouraged the writing of a multitude of stories and books, and helped scores of us appreciate the writing life and what we might contribute to it. In addition to all this, he leaves a legacy of his own writing, as well, including new publications still forthcoming. His work carries on.
When I think of Wendell now, I think of his jokes, his positivity, his encouragement. I remember how he’d pick up the pages of a student’s story to study it, to read a passage aloud that he found particularly strong. I remember how excited he was about a particular assignment he’d given his undergraduate writing students. And I recall one of the last things he ever said to me in person, made in reference to my taboo stories just after my thesis defense: “You are a badass,” he said, and thus gave me a compliment I still hold onto whenever self-doubt creeps in.
But most of all, I think of how he managed to show us, bit by bit, how to love the process of writing as much as he did, and how to build a fulfilling life out of that love.
As of this writing, only a few weeks since Wendell’s unexpected passing, I look at the worry dolls on my desk. These dolls that came from my former teacher are splayed in a series of playful positions, little bits of color and joy lighting up my day—just one of many gifts Wendell gave me and so many others.