Reading, writing, ruing.

• Position: Up Front

On the first night of the class he taught at N.C. State, novelist Tim McLaurin showed up looking like a man who was still fighting cancer, not someone who'd beaten it five years before. His hair was wispy and thin, his eyes underscored by black circles. I wondered what had happened to the thick-shouldered guy with the denim jacket and desperado mustache I'd seen on the covers of his books.

His lecture, if you could call it that, amounted to him telling us about himself -- his books, his stints in the Marines and the Peace Corps, his time on the road as Wildman Mac, proprietor of a traveling snake show. Then he announced that he didn't think fiction writing was teachable; you either had the talent or you didn't. But the university thought it was, he added, so he would hold class two nights a week and grade the three stories we would each write during the semester.

The class style was one familiar to anyone who took creative writing in college -- the group grope. We would each pass out copies of at least one of our stories to our classmates. Then, collectively, we would critique it. For me, our most memorable class meeting had nothing to do with McLaurin's ramblings or the mechanics of prose. That night, the tall, raven-haired country girl who sat next to me brought two Big Gulp cups of Coca-Cola to class -- one for her and one for me, both liberally dosed with Jack Daniels.

But even she couldn't keep me interested in the class. Two-thirds of the way through the semester, I stopped going. I was working as a newspaper reporter and taking the course for fun, not credit. And my friend and I no longer needed it as an excuse to see each other.

I felt bad about cutting it, but not from guilt. I was disappointed. I guess I had foolishly expected some sort of epiphany. I had read McLaurin's books, and his boyhood memoir, Keeper of the Moon...