June 2009. My classmates and I are gathered in a dimly lit room in Rome, where our instructors, Stephanie Vaughn and Michael Koch, lead Cornell’s annual summer creative writing program in a charming villa in the center of the city. Stephanie has given us a prompt: write a story based on a myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. My story is based on Apollo and Daphne, and because it’s one of the more recognizable myths I listen to my classmates read with some anxiety, worried someone else has picked the same myth.
When my turn comes, I hunch over my moleskin, hiding my face as I read aloud. In my retelling of the Apollo and Daphne myth, both of the characters are teenage girls. One of them—the first-person narrator’s best friend, Andie—likes to hunt, and one day the girls go to their favorite spot in the woods so Andie can teach the narrator to shoot. After the lesson, Andie reaches out for the narrator, kissing her on the mouth. That’s when Greek myth kicks in. After the kiss, the narrator runs off, climbing up a tree instead of transforming into one like Daphne. The metamorphosis becomes instead a turning point in the narrator’s life, a sort of crossroads where she has to decide: where do I go from here? I leave her sitting in the tree, unsure what to do next.
When I finish reading, Stephanie says, “Wow,” and I look up to see her leaning forward over the table to catch my eye, to impress upon me how much she liked my story. She knows how much I need her validation—too much, I realize in retrospect, but at the time her high opinion of me and my work was all that mattered. I clung to that “wow” as proof that I was a good writer and that I was going to make it. As a student, that encouragement gave me the fuel I needed to keep writing and to apply to MFA programs. My graduate school application included a story that grew out of my Apollo and Daphne piece and later appeared in my collection, Night Beast. It would not be unfair to say that all of my success as a writer traces back in some way to that afternoon in Rome.
Now that I am myself a creative writing teacher, I can look back on that Wow Moment and see it from Stephanie’s perspective. I know now how rare and how invigorating these moments can be. How, after seeing hundreds of variations of the same handful of stories, coming across something new and exhilarating can pierce through the endless fog of grading and remind you why you love teaching. It’s thrilling and surprising, not in the least because you can never predict it. At the University of Iowa, I had a student from a very practical, parent-pleasing major like Business or Economics who, when tasked with developing the theme of war in their story, decided to emboss the shape of a rifle on a button rather than throw a hundred words at the problem. Details like this leave me stunned and grateful for the opportunity to work with young writers.
Today, I sometimes give Stephanie’s Metamorphoses prompt to my own students, curious to see how they will make these familiar stories new. I ask them when I assign the prompt not to reveal what myth they chose when they read excerpts out loud to the class. I want us to guess—to be stumped, surprised, wowed. As a teacher, I’m always on the lookout for that Wow Moment, that spark that heralds the emergence of a great new writer. Recently, I had a student who wrote a flash based on the Persephone myth in which Persephone is reimagined as a young woman living in a desert who gets lured into an underground tunnel by a family friend. Hearing the story aloud, I was once again reminded of that afternoon in Rome, of how Stephanie leaned forward to make eye contact and say wow. When my student finished reading, I knew what to do.