From TONY HILLERMAN SELDOM DISAPPOINTED

Tony Hillerman
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001 author
Harper Colins Publishers
page 233


"Friedman taught a writing course that focused on the essay. He was himself an author, which impressed me, and he saw promise in my work - which impressed me even more. Early in this course he asked me why I never wrote in the first person. I told him journalists are conditioned to be invisible, to be what Walter Lippmann called "the fly on the wall," seeing everything and feeling nothing. Try it, he said. Do me a memoir bit... I proposed a thousand words on something that had happened last months. No, he said."

Dr. Morris Friedman taught Tony Hillerman at the University of New Mexico, English department in winter 1963...

TONY HILLERMAN from SELDOM DISAPPOINTED answers "Where do you get ideas?"

Tony Hillerman
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers

page 253

The answer to the "Where do you get the ideas" question is that writer's minds are a jumbled, chaotic attic cluttered with plot notions, useful characters, settings for events, bits and pieces of information, overheard remarks, ironies, cloud formations, bumper sticker slogans, unresolved problems, bon mots, tragedies, heroics, etc. One's memory contains enough stuff to produce three or four longer versions of "War and Peace" if only once could sort it out and from it into a coherent fable.

That leads to the next FAQ. "When do you write?" One writes while peeling potatoes, driving to work, standing in line, suffering through a boring mo vie, eating oatmeal, digging out dandelions, trying to drift off into naptime sleep. Finally when the sorting is mostly completed and the next scene is set in the imagination, one goes to the computer and types it onto the screen.

I liken the writer to the bag lady pushing her stolen shopping cart through life collecting throwaway stiff, which, who knows, might be useful some way some day....

TONY HILLERMAN - SELDOM DISAPPOINTED

Tony Hillerman
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers


pages 262-263 about teaching in academia in the mid 1960's:


"The middle sixties were the ideal time to start if one was fated to spend almost twenty years teaching journalism at an university. Student lethargy still ruled as late as 1963, providing a taste of lecturing to a disinterested audience. But even then the long, loud, and lusty revolution was moving in. Before I could conclude that a professor's life tended to be boring, the late sixties were upon us and students were showing up full of fire, demanding to be taught something relevant, protesting war; the establishment, parking tickets, poorly prepared lectures, prejudices against pot smoking, unisex rest rooms, police brutality, and so forth.'

"Odd as this may sound, it was a wonderful time to be teaching. Students were interested, grade mania and the resulting grade inflation had barely emerged, the curse of political correctness had not yet paralyzed deans and department chairmen and corrupted the faculty. Teaching a roomful of bright young folks who yearned to learn and were willing to argue forced you to defend your position. Sometimes you couldn't. You were learning as much as they were, and it was fun. it wasn't until the early eighties that lethargy restored itself. The numbing dogma of PC hung over the campus, tolerating no opinions but anointed ones. With free speech and free thought ruled out by inquisitors running Women's Studies and the various minorities studies, the joy of learning had seeped out of students. With it went joy of teaching. Time to quit.'