I didn’t take creative writing courses in college until my senior year. Partly this was a matter of bravado: I knew I was pretty good already, and the main thing I felt I needed was practice with the instrument. Partly this was the ‘country kid at the rich school’ concern of value-for-money: tuition was high, I could only take so many classes, and there was so much to learn, and writing I could learn through reading, and doing. And partly this was a matter of suspicion: I wrote and read a lot of genre fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and I was worried about ending up in one of those writing classes, the ones people grump about online, where you turn in your story featuring a spaceship or a wizard and your professor and classmates look at you with a degree of kind forbearance, as if you’d showed up to class in a propeller beanie, maybe with a stuffed lizard under your arm.

But my partner graduated a year before I did, and since we stayed together, all of a sudden I had a lot more time on my hands during the week, enough to maybe take five classes instead of four. My friend Powder mentioned that the Fantasy Writing class was really good and was taught by an Actual Published Novelist. So I applied, and was accepted.

Two weeks ago, I learned that John Crowley had passed away.

The New York Times published an obituary. Henry Farrell wrote a deeply moving essay. The prospect of writing anything myself has felt so heavy. It’s the wrong context in so many ways but I keep thinking, “there would have been time for such a word.” I’ve spent two weeks trying to feel my way through this or around it and I can’t. When I was younger I believed that meant I shouldn’t say anything at all, until I could face the thing in full courage and speak its heart truly and completely. This belief led me to make mistakes I wish I could unmake. The contrary impulse leads me here.

In the classroom John Crowley was wise and roguish, erudite and practical, tweed over open-collared white button-ups. He sat at the head of the round table. His intellect roamed far and high and deep and he’d appreciate the congruity of the concepts ‘high’ and ‘deep’ in the Latin altus but—and this to me is the mark of a life in story—his flights of imagination and of thought always returned to people.

He noticed patterns in our writing, in our thoughts. Our first exercise was to write a retelling of Hansel and Gretel; I was stunned by the profusion of ideas around the table, from horror to high fantasy to near-realism. I wrote the one that seemed most obvious to me, a sort of “Hansel and Gretel, post-human cybernetic space salvagers investigating a wreck haunted by an AI-witch” story of which I felt very proud. John gently pointed out that I had, in the process of giving Gretel extruded diamond claws and carbon nanofilament armor and space wings and micro-fusion-reactor-powered superspeed and lord alone knows what else, also shifted a key point of agency in the fairy tale from her character to Hansel’s.

Later in the same class I remember him breaking from our usual format to discuss the power of language in fantasy—how, for all the flash offered by apostrophe-laden complex made-up consonant clusters, there is a different strength in words like cup, throne, sword.

He set us exercises and he asked us to write, and to consider, and to revise. The grading rubric was simple: points for each story, points for written critiques, and the requirement of a substantial revision, and an explanation of same. I barely understood, at the beginning of the semester, that “substantial revision” meant something other than “read it seven times and take out all the words that aren’t pulling their weight.”

The class ended with the season. Before leaving campus I checked Little, Big out of the library. I read it for the first time over Christmas—one of the perfect times to read that book (the others being spring, summer, and fall)—and I learned something else about the man who’d been teaching me.

For me the hardest moment in friendship with a writer comes after I have read a book of theirs that awed me. Many books are good. It’s fun to rejoice over them. Many books are bad! That barely signifies; there’s a crack in everything (and there is also the question of individual taste).

But when awe catches you by the heart: how do you speak, after that?

I remember coming back in spring semester and stammering something about how deeply I’d felt the book, about how wonderful and epic and capacious and careful and loving it was (the further in you go, the bigger it gets), about how on top of all that, how overwhelmingly mindblowingly cool was Ariel Hawksquill?! (If you’ve read my other books I don’t think this will be a surprise). John’s response was all grace and class; he thanked me and he chuckled at my enthusiasm for Hawksquill: “the reviewers didn’t like her at all.” And I tried to elaborate on why she’d worked so well for me, and there we were, teacher and student.

That second semester was not a continuation of the “Writing Fantasy” course, though many students from the fall carried over. It was “Intermediate Short Fiction,” or words to that effect. He took me aside on the first day, and encouraged me, for this class, to set aside the obvious tools of what he called, at times, the “genres of romance”—all the set dressing of SFF. Spaceships and wizards and stuff. Coming from anyone else, this would have been the “propeller-beanie” moment, the “someday you’ll grow up and write real fiction” moment—even from him, it stung. But I trusted him.

That night I sat in front of a blank screen and a blinking cursor, and felt fear and uncertainty and then anger and then more and deeper fear behind the anger, and I did not know what happened next. There I sat without my pretty formalisms, the Golden Age rhythms of problem and solution, the Western-derived action beats, the New Wave noir and drug culture remixes, without the blueprints and the patterns, with nothing, it seemed, but a sense of just how much I did not know about how people worked, about how even I myself worked at all.

And I began to work.

If I were John, I would be able to write this with greater delicacy, and know or trust that I would be understood. The tools, the frameworks, and techniques of the genres are not even slightly at odds with the practice of true art—fiction, romance, poetry. But sheer technical facility can also serve as a kind of defense mechanism against the blank page, against ourselves, against the contents of our hearts. I was in a way like the young guitarist who learned every lick Jimi Hendrix ever played and could chain them together perfectly, endlessly, for hours, with such profusion and facility that it never occurred to them to bring forth something of their own. There’s nothing wrong with that, in its own way—the genres are storytelling traditions as much as they are any kind of capital-R Romantic Creative Project and there’s something deep and worth in the homage, the riff, the inversion—but…

Daniel Abraham has said that “genres are where fears pool.” This suggests to me that genre is in fact a kind of “waterworks of fear”—a way to take these pools of energy (fear, libido) and use them to move the engines of story. But what do you get if you’re enamored of building waterworks and you don’t know where the water is?

That year, I began to learn where the water was. For me at least. And I found, time and again, to my surprise, how many tools I’d learned from, say, Zelazny or Dunnett or McKinley or LeGuin or Wu Cheng’en, or from John Crowley, surfaced in my writing—and were not genre tools at all, but tools of prosody, of story, of language, of surprise.

Peter Straub came to our school that spring. John interviewed him in front of an audience. I sat in awe of their conversation—the books they’d read, and written, the lives they’d lived, the people they knew, the ideas they’d raise and spin and juggle. After, a few of us were invited to dinner with John and Peter at a small restaurant near campus, and the conversation… kept going! It wasn’t a performance at all. The dinner talk was just like it had been on stage, but enriched by privacy and whimsy and ease: talk of wine and food and writers and writing, publishing and music: a wellspring of taste, culture, warmth. We were welcomed in. I can only imagine my own splashing and inexpert contributions, but I have no memory of feeling less, of being treated as anything but a fellow traveler on this strange bookish road. That there were tables like this, that there were conversations like this! That it would be possible to join them!

And now Peter Straub and John Crowley have both left us.

John introduced me to the work of Dame Frances Yates and of Terry Bisson and of Italo Calvino and to John Clute’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy and to what I’ve since come to recognize as the Milford critique method and to so many other things and books and people. When I saw his name years after college, advertised on a poster for the now-defunct VeriCon, I showed up and bought a membership—and he remembered me, and invited me to my first ReaderCon. I met him there and within five minutes he had introduced me to Ted Chiang. By the end of the night, I’d met a host of other people I now am lucky to count as friends. He was welcoming in that way, to me. I had published very little at this point—two or three short stories, $15 markets here and there—and I had a long road to walk, but he brought me to the table and into the conversation.

The last time I saw him, we were in white tie and tails for the HMLA dinner at World Fantasy in Los Angeles, just before the pandemic, when my kid was a few months old. We chatted a bit. I thanked him for everything. He denied having much to do with any of it, expressed pleasant surprise at the path I’d taken and the sort of books I was writing. I kept meaning to write him about all of this and more, through the plague years, through the work of raising my kid. I kept meaning to write him about little things—I thought he might have been amused to know about the menswear store in Cambridge called Drinkwater’s. I knew he was having trouble with his memory. I suppose I thought, well, he knows all this and I know it. We were both there. But the work of writing it all down matters. I wish I’d done it a little earlier, that’s all.

I meant for this to be shorter, and I still don’t feel I’ve written the half of it. He was a wise and kind teacher. He opened the circle. He did great work and he kept doing it. I’m grateful to have known him. I still think Ariel Hawksquill is awesome. I need to re-read Little, Big. And the Aegypt Cycle. And Lord Byron’s Novel. And hug my family, and call my parents.

The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

I’ll be at WorldCon next week. I’m planning to head to the nFuse Bar at the Marriott at 6pm on Friday for a toast to John Crowley, if anyone wants to join in.