John Orser: The English Professor Who Changed My Life
Die By Wire is dedicated to John Orser, my freshman English professor at Corning Community College.
John was first person ever to tell me I had a future as a writer. This was bizarre.
After all, I was a science and math geek. What’s more, I had always been a weird science wonk (International Science Fairs and blacking out the entire neighborhood when an experiment fried the Mississippi Power & Light transformer on the pole outside).
I took freshman English at CCC because I had to, not because I wanted to.I wrote a piece of short fiction because I had to, not because I wanted to. Then Professor Orser called me to his office and told me I had a lot of potential.
Really?
Creative writing, I thought, belonged only to oddballs with a desultory connection to reality. Despite John’s words, I continued in math and science when I transferred to Cornell University.
While I wasn’t looking, John’s words kept worming their way through my life. Sure, I had actually earned money by being a reporter — supporting myself at CCC by working for the Elmira Star-Gazette. But journalism seemed more like a term paper to me, something where data had to be arranged in a correct, complete and contextually accurate way. I continued newspaper reporting, putting myself through Cornell as a reporter for the Ithaca Journal.
To be sure, Professor Orser came back at odd moments, but at Cornell organic chemistry, quantum bonding orbitals, protein folding, Coriolis effects, neurobiology and more science crowded out his words.
Then something happened.
My love of journalism outgrew my love as a scientist. I changed my major at the end of my junior year. All my major courses became electives and I took all the courses for a communications degree in the final two semesters of my senior year.
I had enough credits for a degree in biology with a concentration in ecology, evolution and systematics, but Cornell does not allow double majors. That hammered a wedge between the right and left sides of my brain. Kierkegaard loomed. Either/Or popped up. Choices must be made. Leaps of faith taken.
Although my coursework fully allowed me to consider myself a scientist, the lack of that earned degree robbed the work of legitimacy and divorced my new world of words from my former life with math and science.
So it was that the writer only John Orser could see took over. After a brief teaching stint on the Cornell faculty, I returned to my home state of Mississippi to serve as a top official in the administration of the state’s first non-racist governor: Bill Waller.
Less than a month after arriving in Jackson, I started a novel. A thriller so bad it’s long been destroyed.
Orser’s words never let go. I started another terrible novel in 1974 — The Trinity Implosion –just after arriving in Washington to serve as News Secretary to moderate Republican Congressman Thad Cochran. (A moderate Republican! Imagine that! It’s a thought too unbelievable to put in a novel these days. Fortunately, Thad’s still around — still moderate, more intelligent than ever and blessfully beyond the ideology-über-alles GOP “mainstream.”)
There’s a whole ‘nother story about how a novel as bad as The Trinity Implosion could possibly get published. Fortunately, the very few paperback copies that may still exist are hard to find. I have but one. And that’s enough. Maybe one too many.
At any rate, I kept on writing fiction and the seed that John Orser had planted deep in my head continued to grow. It grew most quickly in 1979 after I accepted a position on the faculty at UCLA to teach journalism and serve as the faculty adviser to a superb university student newspaper: The Daily Bruin.
Two years later, my first best seller — The Delphi Betrayal — was published. And Professor Orser’s prescient fantasy became reality. Another pivotal figure appeared to make that happen: editor Patrick O’Connor who saw a bestseller in that book — but only after he assigned freelance editor Kathy Gordon to teach me how to shape it into a proper page-turner.
Too many times, we think of people who shaped our lives too late to let them know how vital and lasting they were. I’ve given Kathy my thanks, but lost touch with Patrick before I had the chance.
Fortunately I thanked John in person back in 2009 when Corning Community College selected me their Distinguished Alumnus of the Year. (To my absolute shock, they also asked me to deliver the Commencement Address for their fiftieth anniversary.)
So it was, that I thanked John at commencement and for lunch the next day.
The lasting lesson from this is that words can change lives.
Thank you for those words, John!
