Resurrecting the Dead

I have few regrets about my life.  I figure if one is happy with the way life has turned out, then one must be grateful for all that went before, good and bad.  And so I am.  But of course there are a few moments one would like to go back and change.  For me, a major regret is that I never got an advanced degree.  That’s especially sad as I went through an entire master of arts program in creative writing, 1973-1974, did all the course work, and completed everything, including a thesis.  Since it was a creative writing program, my thesis was a novel.  Mine was called In Mighty Silence.  I worked on it for a year under the supervision of the writer in residence, Marilyn Harris.  At the end of the year, instead of submitting the novel for final approval and sitting for the oral defense, I decided, in a moment of noble foolishness, that the book wasn’t good enough.  I was going to write another one.  Ah, well, you can see where this is going.  So I did everything except the actual oral defense of the thesis, put the novel away—and then never wrote another.  Or another one for the masters program.  Not having the advanced degree didn’t seem to affect my getting a job in Oklahoma and Texas, but it certainly affected my salary for those 26 years I taught.  And I feel educationally “incomplete,” unfinished, as it were.

I haven’t dwelt on it over the years; what would be the point.  But there is that little niggling regret always in the back of my mind.  I wouldn’t be thinking about it now, or blogging about it, except, much to my surprise, I found the manuscript of the novel the last time I was in Texas, a manuscript that I thought was long lost.  It was tucked into a cache of papers I had stored.  When I went to clean out the storage space and toss most of the junk in there, I found In Mighty Silence.

And I have decided to retype it, revising it as I go, almost exactly 40 years on from finishing the novel, resurrecting the characters like zombies.  So far, it’s been an interesting experience, to say the least, and I’ve only just finished chapter 1.  The novel is better than I expected it would be; and it’s still not very good.  But I am plodding away on it, reworking it as best I can, trying to read the faded type through the yellowed paper, my marks and corrections, Marilyn’s annotations, missing pages, duplicated and altered pages.  I have no plans for publication, although should I get it into some kind of finished product I’ll have a few copies printed up for . . .  I don’t know why.  My “legacy”?  That seems hardly worth the time.  It’s probably just to get a sense of completion, even though I’ll not get the degree for it.  But having the book in front of me, printed up, copyrighted, bound with a cover, somehow makes the time I spent on it somewhat worthwhile.

I’ve done more foolish things for much less reward.