I was a sophomore astatine the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars undergraduate programme erstwhile I archetypal encountered Stephen Dixon.
Some details I callback from his tiny and intimate people successful the basement of Gilman Hall were his ink-stained pants pockets, and however helium paced astir the schoolroom teaching america astir fabrication penning successful his soporific voice. In his benignant and understated manner, helium softly urged america to find the poignancy successful the everyday.
Later that year, I stood successful enactment for a signed transcript of his caller book—End of I, published by McSweeney’s—at the Barnes & Noble that had precocious opened successful the recently built dorm crossed the thoroughfare from the campus’s main entrance. I reminded him of my sanction truthful helium could personalize my publication (I hadn’t made specified an content connected him arsenic his student). A twelvemonth oregon truthful later, Professor Dixon retired from his astir 30 twelvemonth teaching tenure astatine JHU.
Soon aft that, teary-eyed and panicked, a 2nd semester elder connected the brink of graduation, I barged into the bureau of my poesy professor, Mary Jo Salter, begging her to archer maine what to bash with a grade successful what my pre-med friends affectionately dubbed “pre-unemployment”. She said: “Find a publishing house.” I’m beauteous definite I responded with: “What’s that?”
Miraculously, a twelvemonth aft graduation I managed to eke my mode into a publicity adjunct cubicle astatine the Knopf Doubleday radical of Random House (now Penguin Random House). Some years later, astir conscionable arsenic astonishingly, Stephen Dixon and I became pen pals.
I don’t retrieve however it started—I deliberation I whitethorn person asked different of my JHU professors for his email code truthful I could archer him however overmuch his enactment and that people had ever meant to me—but, for years, we were successful regular email interaction astir life, work, and his writing, which continued to determination retired of him until the precise end.
Stephen Dixon’s prose is arsenic mean and intimate arsenic speechmaking someone’s buying list. To me, that’s the quality successful it.
Professor Dixon’s emails were conscionable similar his fabrication writing—intimate and afloat of quotidian details. He referred to himself arsenic “a fussbudget worrywart,” helium gleefully told maine that his grandson’s sonogram photograph looked “like a bust carved from marble by Michelangelo,” and helium signed disconnected messages with sentences similar this: “The plumber conscionable arrived truthful I’ve got to go.”
And each fewer months, a bursting FedEx envelope from Baltimore would look astatine my table astatine PRH containing Professor Dixon’s typewritten chunks of caller and unpublished writing. While I told him that, arsenic a lowly publicist, I wasn’t successful the presumption to marque decisions astir what gets published, helium inactive seemed blessed capable to stock his caller enactment with me, which was an honor.
I erstwhile heard idiosyncratic accidental that if Elizabeth Strout wrote a buying database she would bargain it; I, a rabid Strout fan, person shamelessly stolen that enactment whenever I speech astir my favourite authors.
In galore ways, Stephen Dixon’s prose is arsenic mean and intimate arsenic speechmaking someone’s buying list. To me, that’s the quality successful it. His watercourse of consciousness spotlights, arsenic if thing exquisite and worthy of attention, each insignificant item successful a human’s life, from the elemental pleasance of having meal astatine a favourite section restaurant, to the pangs of caring for an ailing loved one, the changeless fearfulness of being a parent, and life’s abrupt interruptions.
A idiosyncratic favourite Stephen Dixon communicative is “Flying,” successful which a begetter realizes that helium and his girl are [literally] flying done the air—the begetter has nary program for however to onshore them, but doesn’t privation to interest the girl by admitting to his deficiency of power implicit the situation. I was galore years from becoming a genitor erstwhile I archetypal work this story, but loved it adjacent then. Dixon has this chiseled mode of portraying universally quality moments, and I loved the years I spent toggling betwixt speechmaking his published and unpublished works, and receiving his emails.
By the autumn of 2019, I hadn’t heard from Professor Dixon successful a while. Then I received an email from his daughters, who told maine that helium was successful hospice. They offered for maine to nonstop him a connection if I wanted to. It was different intimate grant for which, to this day, I americium precise grateful.
For those who haven’t yet discovered Stephen Dixon’s towering trove of writing, I anticipation they volition present with McSweeney’s upcoming work of 2 of his antecedently unpublished works arsenic good arsenic the re-publication of acclaimed novels and stories. His enactment is simply a beautiful, and urgent, reminder of the poignancy of life’s smallest moments.
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I., End of I., and Goodbye to Goodbye by Stephen Dixon are disposable from McSweeney’s.
English (US) ·