Seven testimonials for a popular instructor
Rose Adair came to her seminar prepared, with a typed lesson plan, spare pencils, enough handout copies to go around, and a little traveling clock. She propped it on the conference table in front. If discussion was spirited and threatened to run over the allotted time, she intervened, wrapped up, and moved on. That way, when we got to the end of the hour or whatever, we had covered everything. But it never felt artificial, like she was sticking to a script. Everyone at the table had a chance to speak, and no one was slapped down. Except there’s always one who can’t turn it off, and repeats what they already said, and strays from the topic, until everyone is rolling their eyes and breathing heavily. In that sugar-sweet, high-pitched voice, Rose Adair said, “Please shut up, dear.” And they did.
*
“First impressions count,” she said. She meant a clean manuscript, but Rose Adair could have meant herself. Impeccably dressed from head to toe, with beautiful manners, here was a well-preserved specimen from bygone days, a real lady. In spite of the white blouse, the lace collar, and the syrupy accent, she was all business. That perfect posture came from a spine of steel. Anyone from the South knows you don’t mess with a real lady. Rose taught her class the way a captain commands a ship. A hint of insubordination? She nipped it in the bud. She was barely five feet tall and thin as a broomstick. Maybe it was the eyes. Rose Adair could stare down a timber wolf.
*
Rose Adair wasn’t a big name in the world of letters, but she got respect. She was a small, neat person, down to earth and unpretentious. When you met her face to face, all you could think of was lavender sachets and petit point embroidery. Yet the minute she spoke, everyone paid attention. She wasn’t loud, and she never raised her voice, but her diction was precise. You heard every syllable. She parsed sentences, sorted synonyms, and favored the specific over the abstract. She loathed mixed metaphors, and she heaped scorn on dangling modifiers. She liked H. L. Mencken and his “ample vocabulary,” but not the cigars. A constant refrain was “When in doubt, look it up.” Younger students thought she was old-fashioned, stuck in an era of white gloves, talcum powder, and proper English usage. Adair would peer over her bifocals and say, “Good grammar is good taste, and that’s all there is to it.”
*
Whether it was a short story, a feature article, or a book-length project, Rose Adair pooh-poohed outlines and diagrams, or anything remotely resembling a formula. A student once asked about the Adair Method, and she crushed him like a centipede. “There is no such animal,” she said. Actually, there was: rigorous research, exact language, and observed detail. “Once you know what you’re doing, you can break all the rules.” Sunday school and relentless Bible reading account for the way she phrased suggestions. On revision, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” When she said this, that same student giggled, ignorant of the source. By the time Rose Adair was done with him, he felt like a worm. Needless to say, that student was me.
*
“Comparisons are odious,” Rose Adair said, but when asked to describe her, I fall back on Eudora Welty—a daintier version, without the outsize reputation, the big house, and the social position. Adair was a schoolteacher much of her life, a low-status job she strenuously upheld as “molding the future of the nation.” She lived alone in a poky little apartment. Well, not quite alone. There was a cat, the tom she called Old Scratch. She talked about him by name without explaining who he was. “Old Scratch” was a nickname for the devil in the early 1800s. Rose recounted his strange tricks and inexplicable way of appearing and disappearing. I was confused until I caught on. Come to think of it, Rose had a few things in common with a cat. I don’t mean to be hateful, but she was finicky, and her voice could pierce a brick wall.
*
Other students called her Rose, but to me she will always be Miss Adair. At first I was afraid of her—this itty-bitty woman with white hair—then I developed a profound respect for her, and finally I fell in love with her. There’s no other way to describe it. I took her class about a dozen times, and I wasn’t the only returnee. She gave it different names, like Prose for Poets, Write It Down / Write It Up, and The File You Save, but it was really the same class. She would start by saying, “This is going to be a workout, not a workshop.” Then she put you through hell, like a drill sergeant. Not infrequently, a student broke down in tears during a manuscript critique. By the end, you felt purged of bad habits, like a colon cleanse. I think all the women formed a secret crush on Miss Adair. I can’t speak for the men.
*
Rose Adair meant so much to me when I was starting out. As a literary newbie, wet behind the ears, I had no inkling of what went into a finished manuscript, something you could send to a magazine, and they might actually buy it. Her practical hints were invaluable. Rose steered me to some good reference books. She explained industry standards for page layout and punctuation, and different kinds of product, what professionals in the business call “genres.” She pegged me right away as a thriller-horror-fantasy nut. While she admitted it wasn’t her cup of tea, she turned me on to some great magazines in my field. When I sold my first story to a pub called Sludge Universe, I proudly brought her a copy, and she graciously accepted it. I owe my success as a wordsmith to Rose Adair.
Author bio:
Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, and he worked as an architect in New York and Charlottesville. His flash fiction and essays appear in Bending Genres, Cold Coffee Stand, Fiction Pool, Fictive Dream, The Green Light, Mojave River Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Porridge, and Spelk.
Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash