BluestoneReview

Untitled Letter From Kate Jones

Dr. Merritt,

I’m trying to remember everything about everything. Like my first creative writing class, or before that when I received the only email from you in my college career that wasn’t shaped like a poem. Or when Mikaela, Laura, Breanna, Hasan, Jara, and I tried to throw you a surprise birthday party, but you decided to be early for Rhetoric the one time we were counting on you to be late. How you took the Literature and Healing class on a walk into the woods to find peace in nature or maybe we were supposed to be meditating, all I know for sure is that I took a picture through the rhododendron of the mountains beyond and, in that moment, in that place, I felt truly settled. But I keep flashing back to your office mostly, where Cor said I lived and would intermittently poke his head out of the ACE Center to yell, “Go Home, Kate!” At the start of each year, you would be able to see the tabletop in front of the window, but by the end, stacks of papers were towering, and the open windows would sometimes catch a few and send them flying. It just seemed like there was always something to talk about, some essay that I wanted to edit, some class that I really didn’t know how to write for, or something happening with the Bluestone. So I would spend afternoons there, between classes, and stare at that Merchant of Vince poster while you talked and think intermittently about how unlike- able all of those characters are and how no one really needs to demand a pound of flesh from anybody, even in fiction. One day, as I was headed to Rish to meet with Cor, I saw Laura with her hands full of a poster with a Mark Twain quote on it from your office. Later on, when I visited her in East River, it hung in the middle of her wall and we laughed about how silly it was that she had it at all and talked about how thankful we were that we had you as a professor. I remember when I turned in a truly dreadful Shakespeare essay about Midsummer Night’s Dream that was due over Easter break. You emailed me soon after I submitted that garbage to say something to the effect of, “You can do better.” So, we met in the quad and talked about Shakespeare and meter, and I think I finally got a B and an appreciation for the Bard.

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