Memories of Jeanne Leiby

Introduction

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]tarting graduate school this year at Iowa State, I’ve been asked a lot where I did my undergrad. After I tell people, “University of Central Florida,” they ask, “The Florida Review? Jeanne Leiby?” And I say, “Yes. Yes.” And then they share a story—a spark—about Jeanne.

On the MFA roadtrip back from the Badlands of South Dakota, ISU professor David Zimmerman told me how he used to get back from his graduate night classes at the University of Alabama, and then he and Jeanne would sit outside their apartment building and talk about fiction late into the night.

“She listened to a lot of the Cure,” David said.

“That’s when she edited fiction for Black Warrior Review,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I knew, because Jeanne had told me at the Florida Review’s office where she’d ask me to turn up the volume when “Heroes” by David Bowie came on my computer while sorting manuscripts.

“Yeah, she was passionate,” David said. He looked ahead at the perspective disappearing into the road walled in by cornfields. “I mean, she believed writing matters.”

In one of the cafés on campus, my academic adviser Ben Percy said, “Jeanne’s tough.” And coming from Ben—a man’s whose voice is deeper than a grizzly’s growl—that means tough. Jeanne had published his story “The Mud Man” in the Southern Review. I had read it around the time I was applying to graduate schools and figured if Ben was good enough to publish, and Ben taught at Iowa State, then Iowa State must be good enough to go to.

It seems like everyone knew Jeanne. There’s essays and memorials and conferences, and even a chapbook contest dedicated to her. A lot of people remember Jeanne as tough and passionate and so many other hard working words.

If our catchphrase in Orlando is “It’s a small world,” then Ames’ should be “In the middle.” With that, I’ve wanted to hear more from people who knew Jeanne in-the-middle; after Alabama, but before Louisiana. What about Florida? What about her students at UCF? Her interns at the Florida Review?

I asked a few friends and former students if they would write something about Jeanne, because I know they had a spark from her, too. You can read their memorials by clicking on the tabs below. I openly welcome others who knew Jeanne to add to the memorials in the comments section as we remember her.

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[tabs tab1=”Ed Bull” tab2=”Ashley Inguanta” tab3=”Kristina Kopic” tab4=”Nathan Holic” tab5=”Vanessa Blakeslee”]

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[dropcap]J[/dropcap]eanne would give a speech to new interns at The Florida Review every semester. She’d tell them about the time a peanut butter and jelly sandwich came in through the mail, in a manila envelope, as a submission. That she picked it up and was—and this was Jeanne here we’re talking about—speechless. She’d ask, what exactly is the proper response when, as an Editor-in-Chief of a nationally circulated literary magazine, someone sends you their lunch via postal service? One of the senior editors promptly photocopied it, since the physical proof had a shelf-life. Jeanne would joke about maybe using the photocopy as cover art someday. Or the time another contributor sent in a fly. An actual insect, a fly in an envelope. She’d tell them (the interns) that 99.9{f601acc48c7c49652e30f2fab106e7de4a69edf8d5e7b04da5e5a3c80b338d5d} of what they will read from the slush pile will be so contrived and awful that it’ll make them want to blow their brains out. And then she’d tell them to just be honest, to pick what they truly liked, because she had chosen each of them for a reason. That she trusts them.

She’d describe what it felt like to call an unpublished author on the phone, personally, and let them know that they will be published in The Florida Review. That was something that she loved to do, you could just tell.

And then, at the end of the speech, she’d remind the interns that they were participating in a bona-fide money-exchanging-hands business, that people counted on them. She could get a little menacing if she wanted to. The Florida Review had become her baby, and this was a commitment to her baby, so don’t fuck it up. Essentially. She called herself “mean as a striped snake.” Which if a person only kind of knew her they would’ve bought it hook, line, and sinker. After all, ever see anyone who got in Jeanne’s way on something she cared about? If you had asked me in 2005, I’d have told you that their bones were probably at the bottom of Lake Jesup, gator-food.

But I think anyone who’s paid attention to this this long knew Jeanne well enough to know that the whole “mean as a striped snake” business was baloney. She genuinely cared about her students and interns, maybe so much that some of us, at first, kept a discrete distance because we mistook that devotion for some kind of fakeness, so accustomed as we are to fakeness. But time would go on, and the sign of insincerity that you were expecting never came. She was just: like that.

The day after, all I heard from every young writer I knew was how Jeanne had touched their lives in a sincere, caring, positive way. I thought I’d add my own. Most of my first workshops were with Jeanne. She read my first published story, and then a whole slew of awful messes after that.  I had just discovered that in college, you could swear and blaspheme and even write about sex, and other people had to read it. So that was a pretty embarrassing phase, looking back. And on those stories, she wrote pages of comments and in those pages there was encouragement and praise and plenty of buried medicine. I think of the way you wrap a pill in peanut butter to get a dog to take it. But mostly, she was just patient. She told me to revise again and again, and gave comments each time. When I threw something out she told me to write something new. When Downriver was published, she signed a copy for me with a terse little “Keep writing,” which I figure could come across as insincere if you didn’t know her, but if you did, if you had thousands of words of notes from her, if you had sat down with her for hours in her office to talk about writing and reading and The Florida Review and if you had just spent some time with her, then you would look at those words (God, her handwriting was awful) and only think that they were touchingly genuine.

In the years since she moved to LSU and The Southern Review I had, aside from the occasional long-range gestures at AWP, lost touch with Jeanne. By now, looking back on my undergrad degree, the memories are a little foggy and mixed together. And the day after the news, I went to my shelf to open my copy of Downriver. I couldn’t find it.

It’s only very recently that I’ve become confident about my writing. That I can on a good day look at something I’ve written more than a few hours ago and not wince and feel deeply sick to my bones. In the years after she left, I didn’t submit any writing to Jeanne, with one exception, out of that weird kind of embarrassment. But lately, since I’d started to feel okay about this whole writing thing, I’d begun to have slightly egotistical fantasies of writing something really good, like the one story that comes out smooth and you know you’ll never top it, that one story that only exists in a writer’s dreams and fantasies, The Perfect One (okay this is very egotistical), something that Jeanne finally would have been proud of, and sending it first thing over to The Southern Review. In the cover letter, a handwritten “thank you.”

Never did feel like anything I wrote yet was good enough. And then the news. I suppose the worst part of losing Jeanne, or anybody, for all of us, is that now there is so much that only could have happened or only could have been said. That handwritten “thank you” becomes forever hypothetical. But, hypothetically, I think Jeanne knew. I think she would have said that any “thank you” was unnecessary. It would have made her uncomfortable. Then she would have waved us away, and marched off toward her next project, her next readers, her next interns, her next students.

Ed Bull’s first undergraduate fiction workshops were with Jeanne Leiby at the University of Central Florida where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. He now lives in Atlanta, GA. His fiction and non-fiction stories have appeared in The G.W. Review; Our Stories; Red Wheelbarrow; 
Redivider; Roger, an art and literary magazine; and SmokeLong Quarterly. Read more at edwardbull.wordpress.com

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap] met Jeanne when I needed her the most, when I was 21 and lost in a world of dreaming. I dreamt of writing, publishing, helping others get published, and teaching. I dreamt of telling stories full of heartache and beauty. I dreamt of connecting with large amounts of people and making an impact on this world, and I believed no impact was too small, everything mattered. But I was doing none of it. I was stuck in a world I created, ruled by anxiety and depression. It had been years since I had a good friend or any type of human connection at all, and I knew I needed to change, but I didn’t know where to start.

“Get an issue of Writers’ Market,” Jeanne said to me after class. “We can look at it together.” And we did. We sat outside of the University of Central Florida’s English Department in Colbourn Hall. The sky was blue and the air was thick, and I remember feeling lucky to be in Florida, to be in college and finally, after years of floating, finding an anchor.

Not too long after that, Jeanne asked me to intern at the Florida Review. She told me my stories lacked movement but I “could write the shit out of a sentence,” and she wanted me to work with fiction. She told me my fiction writing was almost poetry, and that was something that defined my voice. I never knew I had a “voice.” I never knew someone so experienced, someone so strong, could take me seriously.

Jeanne took me seriously from the very beginning. She believed in my writing and she believed in my mind. She helped bring movement into my life. This was the beginning of my transition from dreamer to artist.

About four years after I interned at the Florida Review, when Jeanne was editor in chief, I saw her at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. Jeanne had been living in Louisiana, editing the Southern Review, during those four years. We were at the AWP book fair, and I wasn’t sure if she would remember me.  But when I said hello she knew who I was right away.

“I teach now, too,” I said.

“I am so glad you stayed in this,” she said, and told me about the new issue of the Southern Review, how Mark Richards was in it, and then we talked about reading his story “Strays” years ago, in her class at UCF.

Things were so different back then, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I never told Jeanne how she helped me feel welcome in this world of literature, of art, how she helped me find my anchor. I never told her how I’ve been using some of her –isms in my classes, like “windchiming.”  I never told her how I taught her story “Viking Burial” to my students, how much that story impacted them in terms of what fiction could be.

This summer, I taught “Strays,” telling my students about a professor I had who passed away who had taught me the story. In class, I went through lists of literary journals with my students, helping them write cover letters. I helped my students get internships at the Florida Review. I remember the hope I had for them, the hope I still have for them, to share their words and connect with others.

The last time I saw Jeanne, she was smoking a cigarette outside a hotel lobby in Washington D.C. at AWP. It was cold out and there were oceans of people, and there was a taxi waiting for me and I was pushing through the crowd, hurrying to get somewhere, now I don’t even remember where, and I hopped in that taxi without saying goodbye. And let me tell you, to this day I will always regret it, not saying goodbye.

Ashley Inguanta graduated with a BA and MFA from the University of Central Florida where she worked with Jeanne Leiby in fiction workshop and at the Florida Review. Her writing appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Nailpolish Stories, Bicycle Review, Corium, and Gone Lawn, among other publications. This year, Ashley earned an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train for their Very Short Fiction Award. Also, Ashley is contributing photographer at SmokeLong Quarterly.  Read more at ashleyinguanta.com.

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 [dropcap]T[/dropcap]his past February, at AWP in Washington D.C., I was walking out of one of the hotel bars when I heard Jeanne Leiby’s voice. It was hers all right, not only because it carried over all the background noise of a late evening full of writers in a bar, but also because she was saying, “When I worked at UCF…”—my undergraduate alma mater where I had interned for her. I stopped and glanced back to see Jeanne at a table, her dark eyes, smiling. She wasn’t looking at me, but I smiled back at her, by reflex responding to an old friend.

“That’s my mentor,” I said to my then-girlfriend who had stopped, too, a step ahead of me.  “She’s the reason I’m at Emerson.”

I turned around one more time. Jeanne’s hair was a bit longer than I remembered, the bangs still swept to her right—she looked good, she looked happy, and I saw no reason to interrupt her conversation to say hi. I would be graduating with my MFA in three months; I could shoot her an e-mail then, say Hi then say, I loved my grad experience, thank you and By the way, I saw you in passing. How are you?

At the risk of paining a cliché, I met Jeanne at a crossroads in my life. I was getting my B.S. in Psychology from the University of Central Florida with the intention of going on to a PhD in neuropsychology or experimental psychology, but two years in, I realized that I wanted to study more aspects of the human condition than laboratory research would allow. After a couple of months of agonizing, I refocused my grad school prospects on my second major—creative writing.

So I went to the Florida Review with internship paperwork in tow. I climbed up the concrete stairs to the third floor of the seemingly hurricane-proof, bullet-proof Colbourn Hall, where the tiny, windowless Florida Review office nestled. The entire English Department was on that floor, so I was already familiar with the bunker-like architecture, but beyond that, I had no clue what to expect. It was the spring of 2007 and right before the beginning of the semester, thus the building was largely empty. And there was Jeanne, sitting in her office in cowboy boots and leather jacket, reading a manuscript. She stood up to shake my hand and give me a crash course on how the magazine ran. I know that she must have been not much taller than me, not even with the heels of her boots, but somehow in my memory, in addition to her friendly smile and commanding voice, she always looms a head above me. I realized this only much later, but she was the first, real-life, working writer I’ve encountered outside of a classroom. This sort of imprinted on me. Although I’ve met many working writers since, Jeanne had set the bar by which I measure what it means to be a writer.

I’d never had Jeanne as a teacher, but during the spring and summer of my internship, she taught me more about writing—and really, humanity—than I’d learned throughout my undergraduate years. One of the first things I’d heard Jeanne say was that there was no room for ego in the office. To be honest there was hardly room for the two computers in the office and we likely created a fire hazard each time three people were present, though we routinely squeezed in four or five. A total staff of about thirty cycled through the space in a week. Though I don’t remember her exact words, I think Jeanne might have said, People need to leave their ego outside the door. It seemed to be the ground rule in getting the magazine out. More than that it set a tone of camaraderie rather than hierarchy in the space.

One morning Jeanne handed me a short-short manuscript she was undecided on.

“What did you think?” she asked after I’d read it.

It was a three-part story, quite compelling except that one of the parts fell flat. I said as much.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Jeanne said.

She didn’t publish it. Since then I’ve remembered that having two thirds of a good story is not good enough. She might as well have said, Rule Number Two: If the whole thing isn’t good, rewrite.

Then one morning Jeanne raised the bar and introduced a new implied rule. She walked in with a huge grin and proclaimed that she’d written to Antarctica. As administrator of the Florida Review website she had noticed that the site had gotten hits from all continents save for one—Antarctica. So she found this little research station, where scientists were doing something like collecting ice samples to measure the composition of the earth’s atmosphere over time and she e-mailed them with a link to the Florida Review. Apparently her explanation was convincing because the site got a hit from Antarctica. There was Jeanne, grinning in the tiny crowded office telling us quite literally to aim to reach the world, the whole world, nothing but the world.

Perhaps the only better piece of advice came when a few of the interns were graduating at the end of that semester.

“Don’t send your work here,” Jeanne said. “I won’t publish you for at least three years after you graduate from here.” It was a simple, assertive sentence telling us to go out into the world, not to cling to our nest, to go—how else could we reach the world, after all, if we didn’t go out into it. So when I was ready to go out into the world, I went to Jeanne to ask for MFA programs she recommended. She knew that my writing included much science and would often be considered science fiction (deciding against a PhD in neuropsychology did little to dissuade me from loving it) so among several other schools, she pointed me to Emerson College—a program big and quirky enough to offer support for a science fiction master’s thesis. On top of that it was located in Boston—a city I’d fallen in love with on a prior visit. So there was I on my crossroads and there was Jeanne pointing the way. I believe by this time she knew that she would be leaving for the Southern Review and that in itself was encouraging—she was going out into the world.

Jeanne could seem fearless like this sometimes. That’s why perhaps my favorite memory of her was her story about the mouse. It could have been a lizard, too. Either way it was a small, harmless animal and it got into Jeanne’s house.

As Jeanne told this story, there were about three interns in the office and maybe a senior editor, too, and she was standing in the middle of it, arms gesturing, her voice filling every crevice of the windowless, egoless space. Trying to recapture her account would fail miserably, but in summary, Jeanne apparently had a phobia of that little animal that I’m almost certain was a mouse, so one morning, she ended up in her front yard screaming bloody murder still wearing her pajamas. I’ve never actually heard Jeanne scream, but having heard her talk, I can imagine her shouting to have been an impressive spectacle. She knew her neighbors and called their daughter and had the girl go in and retrieve Jeanne’s clothing and her car keys. We roared in laughter at that story. She was a good storyteller on and off the page. And though I smile recalling that memory, I wonder whether those retrieved keys belonged to the same convertible she drove in April.

Chris Wiewiora was the first to send me the message with the news. I was working on my master’s thesis and doing lesson planning for the writing class I teach at Emerson. I was less than a month away from graduating—less than a month away from three full years having passed since both Jeanne and I left UCF at the same time. I was less than a month away from the e-mail I was going to send to say, Hey, thanks for pointing the way. I will never get to write that e-mail.

Instead, after having paced through my room–and yes, after having cried–I sat down and wrote an e-mail to my girlfriend, the one who had been there at AWP. At that time she was at a writer’s colony. By uncanny coincidence she is a woman who often wears cowboy boots and leather jackets and drives a convertible that doesn’t fare too well in bad weather. In the e-mail I wrote how the day before—in the afternoon when I wasn’t sure whether Jeanne would still have been alive—I had walked through the Public Gardens in this city I love and had come upon a bench with a quote by Jonathan Swift: “May you live all the days of your life.” I wrote to her to be safe and careful and to know how I felt about her even if we were at each other’s throats, even if I didn’t say it–all things I suspected she already knew. I wrote an e-mail that would probably have been horribly sentimental in any short story and Jeanne would have wanted it cut. But this isn’t a story.

I remember one story Jeanne told me more than all the others. She said there was this guy whose writing she kept rejecting. At first when she worked for the Black Warrior Review and then when she came to the Florida Review she kept rejecting him. When she told that part her face lit up, as if an old friend had followed her from journal to journal and she was glad to see him again, but nonetheless she wasn’t willing to lower her standards—she kept saying no.

“I’ve read some of his work in other journals,” she said. “I know he can write good work, he’s just not sending it to me.” And then finally after years, Jeanne said that he sent in a piece she loved. She called up the man, exuberant to finally talk to him, to tell him that she’d like to publish him.

“Hey, it’s Jeanne Leiby; I’m the one who’s been rejecting you all this time,” she said, recalling what had just happened earlier that day. “And then when I tell him we’d like to accept his piece he goes quiet.” The man told her that another journal had just called not even an hour prior and taken his piece. I think I might have stared quite wide-eyed, my mouth might even have opened in a silent gesture of shock and sorrow. But Jeanne, Jeanne finished telling the story, seemingly finishing her frustration and moved on with the next task of the day. She hadn’t compromised her standards. She’d missed a chance, but she didn’t lower her bar. She did what she did the best way she could and she kept going.

I inherited that bar she set, inherited it together with all those students and interns who have been lucky enough to work with Jeanne. I missed my chance to thank her, but I suspect she knew all along that her voice carried and that we listened.

Kristina Kopic read fiction for an internship with Jeanne Leiby at the Florida Review while attending the University of Central Florida, where she holds a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in English. She also holds an MFA in fiction from Emerson College. Currently, Kristina lives in Boston where she teaches at Emerson, Boston Architectural and Wheelock College.

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The Responsibility of Storytelling

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ack before Jeanne Leiby convinced me to come back to the University of Central Florida for grad school, I spent a year and a half working for a national fraternity headquarters. During that odd (and pretty awesome) time in my life, I got to hang out with a few fraternity brothers from the College of Charleston, one of whom gave ghost tours on the weekends. Each of his ghost stories was a fully developed experience with a complete cast of characters, various moments in each story reliant upon the sights and sounds of the city of Charleston to finish the experience: “And you see that building over there? That’s where it all took place. And if we step close enough, we can just make out the face of a child in the window…”

He told me that once, he got a little scatter-brained from giving so many back-to-back tours, and he accidentally told the exact same ghost story twice on a single tour; he finished the story, then forgot he’d just told it, and he literally re-told the entire story, beginning to end, every word and gesture just as careful as the first time around. “I’m so embarrassed,” he told his tour group. “Why didn’t you stop me?” But no one looked upset. In fact, they were laughing, clapping: “We wanted to see if you could do it,” they said. “That was incredible!”

Jeanne Leiby never gave a ghost tour, not to my knowledge, but I think she would have been one of those applauding audience members. Hell, she would have urged the tour guide to tell the story one more time, to see if he could bring the same energy and honest emotion for the third go-round.

That was Jeanne Leiby.

If you spent much time with Jeanne in social settings, you quickly realized that she was a storyteller in the most traditional sense of the word: she loved to tell stories. All the time. Loudly, and with passion. Arms spread wide, as if in an attempt to pull close her entire listening audience. Her set-up and execution as well-timed as a Chris Rock stand-up performance.

Spend enough time with her, and you’d even expect to hear the same stories again and again. Sometimes you’d expect the stories to be re-told over dinner when some new guest or friend was in town, but more often, you’d actually request them, eager to see Jeanne lean forward, squinting with determination, and speak with that all-eyes-on-me energy that she’d honed through so many years of teaching. Hey Jeanne, tell the one about your sister, and the road rage incident! Oooh, or do your impression of the Provost, the first time you met him! Or, hmmm, tell us that story about your father falling into the baptismal fountain!

And, just as with my tour guide friend, you’d look forward to seeing if she could re-create the same production as the last time you’d heard the story, the same specific details, the same strategic pauses, if she could channel the same emotion.

Hey Jeanne, tell them about me and Jay, what everyone says about us!

“Okay, okay,” Jeanne might say. “These two,” and she’d point back and forth between me and Jay Haffner, her two assistant editors during her first full year running The Florida Review. In those days, we spent our entire days crammed together in the FR office (let’s be honest: it was a converted janitorial closet), coffee in the morning, lunch at noon, Diet Coke and coffee in the afternoon, then three-hour grad classes (with coffee break) at night. All three of us, together all the time. Everyone in the English Department, of course, knew who Jeanne was, but Jay and I were just the two indistinguishable twenty-something grad assistants that followed her around all day. “The department is split,” she’d say. “I’ve talked to everyone to get their thoughts. Half the department has your names wrong: some people think that Nate is Jay, and some of them think that Jay is Nate, and there are a few that actually think that your names are Jate and Nay. But the other half of the department? They think that you’re lovers.” This probably shouldn’t have been such a funny story for two heterosexual men still trying to convince our respective girlfriends to become fiancés and wives, but to be included in a Jeanne story that would be told again and again: it was like earning a guest spot in a Jay-Z song, knowing you’d get constant air play.

Hey Jeanne, tell them about the time you first met my dog, at the Florida Review Christmas party, and he ate the button off your jacket!

Hey Jeanne, tell them about how you sold the script for Days of Thunder!

Hey Jeanne, tell us about that story you wrote in grad school, when your professor was silent until the very end of the workshop…and then he told everyone to flip to page three…and he pointed to a single line…and he said, “This sentence here…this is the story…this is the only line worth keeping.”

Hey Jeanne, tell them about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich submission, the housefly in the envelope!

But she was more than just a performer. Jeanne Leiby somehow managed to find some perfect story about everyone she cared about, and that story would be delivered each time she introduced you to a new friend or editor or writer or student. “This is Nathan,” she might say, one hand on my shoulder and the other outstretched to whomever she was speaking. “Let me tell you about the first time I met Nathan. I didn’t think much of him.” And she’d look over at me and laugh, and that was my cue to smile and shrug as she warmed up. “He was in my Fiction class back in—when was it, Nate?” “2002,” I’d need to answer every time. “2002! Oh, that was a good class, too, maybe my best class ever. Who else was in there?” “Jay and Catherine.” “Oh yes, Jay and Catherine. And Dan, too! Oh, and Lauren and Jesse! So many good writers in that class. But you”—and here she took her arm from around my shoulder and motioned at my clothes, head to toe—“you came to class every day in a polo or button-down. Khaki shorts. Always looking so clean-cut and proper. The fraternity boy. And that stands out in an English course, trust me.” At this point in the story, she would back away from me, considering me from an angle as if trying to figure me out. Every time. “It was such a good class,” she’d say. “But you…”—pointing at me—“you never spoke. You were just this guy in polo shirts sitting in the corner. You were the last writer up for workshop, I remember that, and we’d had such a good semester, and I just remember thinking: oh crap. This guy is closing our semester?”

And the story kept going, of course. Perceptions changed. Friendships formed.

But I’m not going to write that story here.

That story was Jeanne’s, and it was her story for me. Not my story for the world.

But this is the point: if Jeanne liked you and appreciated you, she took the time to identify the perfect story about you and for you, every one of these stories tailor-made to make you feel something. You laughed at the thought of an English Department confusing you with your best friend. You filled with pride. You felt yourself on the verge of tears, either from happiness or nostalgia or sadness, because every story she told was deeply felt, and when she re-told the stories, you knew she wasn’t just going through the motions…she was re-experiencing the moment every single time.

The thing about Jeanne, if you’ve never met her or if you’ve only ever seen her name on a masthead, is that she treasured the art and responsibility of storytelling. She didn’t believe in half-assing it, not ever. She hated lazy storytelling, wouldn’t have given F. Scott Fitzgerald a pass if he’d written a quick sell-out novel after Gatsby. She was a practitioner, yes, but she was also a protector, vigilant that the art and tradition not be abused. Run into Jeanne in a social setting, and she’d demonstrate her love for storytelling, but spend time with her in the classroom? In an editorial meeting? At a writing conference? Brace yourself.

On the first day of class in one of Jeanne’s Fiction Workshop courses, just after she discussed the assigned textbooks and the major assignments, she’d lose the friendly first-day smile. She’d grow suddenly serious. “If you’ve got any measure of talent, you can get a C in a writing course,” she’d say. “You do the work. You finish the assignments. But I’m not looking for average work, and the world doesn’t want to read average work. No, getting an A in my course requires that you display talent and courage.” Here, she paused to let the word “courage” linger in the classroom, many students now feeling uneasy. This was a Fiction Writing course, after all, and most of the class had been part of the talented, check-plus, easy-to-grade minority in high school English and freshman Composition; most of the class had been reminded, again and again, how great of writers they were, and now here was Jeanne Leiby telling them that talent was not enough.

Most of us weren’t sure what “courage in writing” meant, necessarily. “Courage” was just a word, abstract and intangible as so many other words she’d use to describe writing throughout the semester: “honesty” and “empathy,” for instance. What did any of it mean to 19- and 20-year-olds who still viewed storytelling through the lens of Hollywood blockbusters? My God, it was a frightening moment, there in that classroom, Jeanne Leiby demanding something more of all of us as writers and storytellers.

And more than anything, that’s how I’ll remember Jeanne. Not just as a short story writer, a creative writing teacher, an editor, a mentor, or even a great friend. She was all those things, but I’ll remember Jeanne most as a woman for whom storytelling was life itself. Stories bound us, helped us to experience and re-experience the joys of life, helped us to cope with and overcome the pains, helped us to appreciate one another and to show our appreciation, helped us to see one another—and the world—in new ways. And listen to me, listen to Jeanne Leiby: that is a treasure, that is a responsibility, and you don’t fuck with that.

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Future Abandoned: The Untimely Loss of a Rare Mentorship

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]eanne Leiby was one of my greatest mentors, yet I never had a single class with her. While I studied writing and later taught at the University of Florida for nearly six years, I was never a member of her staff at The Florida Review, nor a student in her fiction workshop. But I got to know Jeanne through classmates who worked at the journal, and she always seemed to be around, eager to talk about teaching and literature. I remember she stopped me in the hallway to congratulate me on my MA thesis defense, and I mentioned I still wanted to pursue an MFA somewhere but wasn’t sure about moving. “You should check out the top low-res programs, Warren Wilson, Vermont College, and a few others,” she answered. I was barely even aware of such programs and not even close to considering them. But I took her advice. Six months later, I arrived at my Vermont College residency and began one of the greatest adventures in my literary career.

That August I returned to Orlando and stopped by UCF to return a book to a friend on The Florida Review staff. Jeanne was in the office and told me my former creative writing teacher had just suffered a heart attack; he was stable but the English Department was reeling. We talked for a few minutes, she asked where I was working—I had a few tutoring gigs, but that was all, enough to barely scrape by. A sky-cracking thunderstorm broke out as I headed for home. Pulling out of the parking garage, my phone rang. It was the Chair of the UCF English Department. How on earth had he gotten my number, and why would he be calling me? “Jeanne Leiby stopped me in the hallway and said you might be available to take over some of Pat’s classes,” he said, “two sections of creative writing, starting next week. Can you do it?”

I agreed, set down the phone and began a blurry drive home in the drumming rain. I think I sang along to the radio and shed tears of joy the entire way. Because of that phone call, I quit the tutoring job and taught creative writing until the final semester of my MFA.

During those two years, I often sat outside the English department on Colbourn Hall’s third floor deck, grading student portfolios and drafting lesson plans. Nearly every day, Jeanne would burst out, lean against the balcony, light up a smoke, and start talking. Sometimes she spoke about The Florida Review, other times we talked about teaching or writing, or grad school. She was the first person who impressed upon me, in unspoken terms, how we’ve got to fight for literature, if we love it and want it to stick around. Eventually, we’d talk so long she’d pull up a chair, my stack of undergrad fiction abandoned, Jeanne waving her second cigarette as we jointly stumbled upon a writing epiphany. On the occasional afternoon when she didn’t appear, I found myself lingering on the deck, reluctantly packing up my work, and missing her.

So we became colleagues. And friends.

This isn’t to say I didn’t have my difficulties with Jeannie. She had the complex, at times contradictory and dare I say, maddening, personality of a creative. I know people who steered clear of her because she rubbed them the wrong way, and I’ll admit, at times I considered this when she was talking a blue streak about such-and-such-literary-device, or unreasonable person, perhaps an intern, etc. There were times when I wondered if she really gave a shit about me, my writing, and my friendship. But what won me over was her uncanny ability, just as I was beginning to doubt if she really gave a damn about what I’d had to say, to pinpoint exactly what I was wondering about, or needing to do. She was nearly always right.

She couldn’t have been more right, for instance, on one of our last talks outside the English Department at UCF. It was fall 2007. She had just accepted the editorship at The Southern Review. My boyfriend at the time was working in Costa Rica and wanted me to forgo teaching that spring and join him, and I was agonizing aloud over what to do. “Go to Costa Rica,” Jeanne told me. “It will be good for your writing.” Her words matched my mood. It seemed a natural time to part with UCF, especially since she’d be leaving too.

I spent eight months in Central America. I returned with the strongest story material I’d ever written, plus the first fifty pages of what would become my first novel. One of the stories I felt would be a good fit for The Southern Review, although Jeanne had forewarned me that, for her friends, the bar of getting into the journal was exceptionally high. But wasn’t it Jeanne herself who had taught me, at one of her famous publishing panels, that getting published was about patience, persistence and confidence in one’s work, coupled with humility? I sent the story, “Welcome, Lost Dogs,” to The Southern Review.

Two months later, I received a detailed email back from Jeanne with a breakdown of comments from TSR staff. The story was compelling but needed more “flesh on its bones.” At the end of the letter, she invited me to send a revision. She added, “I’ve asked this of writers, oh, I don’t know, Vanessa, maybe five times in my editorial career?” I was ecstatic, spent a month revising the story, and resubmitted.

Looking back, it’s lucky “Welcome, Lost Dogs” ever found a home at The Southern Review at all. I didn’t hear back from TSR and when I saw Jeanne in Orlando nine months later, she said they’d never received it. The envelope had likely got lost in the mail. Meanwhile, since I hadn’t heard back, I’d started sending the story elsewhere. I hurried home and resent the revision the next day. I saw Jeanne again a few weeks later at the Grub Street conference, but she mentioned nothing about my resubmission. I began to get nervous, thinking maybe I had overstepped my bounds—that no matter how great the story turned out, she wouldn’t go near publishing it because of our friendship.

Then two months later, I got the call. I had just sat down in a café with a sandwich. She began, “Vanessa, today I’m not calling you as a friend, but as an editor, because The Southern Review would like to publish ‘Welcome, Lost Dogs.’” She then dragged Jen McClanaghan, the Resident Scholar, to the phone to tell me how the staff insisted they publish the story, so I could be assured my work had succeeded by its own merit, aside from our friendship. Jeanne and I caught up for about thirty minutes. The sandwich went untouched. When I climbed in my car, U2’s “With or Without You” came on, and I burst into tears. “Remember this day,” she’d said. “You get so few of them as a writer. That’s why I call.”

How true her words turned out to be. For over the next six months as I worked with TSR on the final edits, I imagined “Welcome, Lost Dogs” as the first of many years of such exchanges between us, that writer/editor would be the next magical incarnation of our friendship, my first personal connection with an editor at a major American literary journal. I can guess Jeanne may have thought something similar—“I’m working on your contributor’s note. How cool is that?” she wrote in a Facebook message last fall. When I lacked the funds to attend AWP and celebrate the Winter 2011 Issue in which my story appeared, she told me how much I was missed. The story had received much praise. I couldn’t have been happier.

There is a passage in “Welcome, Lost Dogs” that kept floating to my mind the night I received the news of Jeanne’s death: “There are three kinds of grief: the grief of the definite, for what once was and is now gone, the grief of the indefinite, where there are no answers and so the worst is suspected, and the grief of inevitability, for what must be lost and whose future must be abandoned.” That someone as remarkable as Jeanne could be gone, flung from this life in a car accident on a Baton Rouge highway on April 19^th, 2011, was as incomprehensible as it was shocking. I found myself comforted and haunted, for the first time, by my own words in literature—a story whose conception and birth had nothing to do with Jeanne, and yet everything to do with her. In perfect literary irony I believe that story could only have been published in The Southern Review, was destined to be. What has made her loss so difficult, for so many of us, is the abandonment of that future with Jeanne Leiby—the Facebook messages she’d pass along for emerging writer opportunities and conferences, her support of the reading series I ran in Orlando, stopping by to visit her booth at AWP. It seems impossible to imagine a future without Jeannie.

And yet.

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