Early on a Thursday morning in the fall of 2011, I walked into my first class at Loyola University in New Orleans. It was a small windowless room in a building that looked idyllic on the outside but was tired, old, and stuffy on the inside. Fifteen or so students sat around the table in the room’s center, and we waited for the arrival of our professor.
It was a strange feeling, being back in the classroom. I hadn’t been in school since the spring of 2009, when the school I had been attending, the College of Santa Fe, went bankrupt amid the Great Recession. I packed my bags and went home to California, the first person in my family to attend (and subsequently outlive) a university. The ensuing two years were filled with part-time jobs back home and a leap of faith application to an AmeriCorps program that sent me to teach middle school in New Orleans. I fell in love with the city, and when my term was up I decided that I was going to stay there as long as I could, so I applied to Loyola and soon found myself touring its campus on St. Charles and feeling like I’d fallen into some intoxicatingly charming southern gothic novel (loyalty to my alma mater dictates that the novel must have been written by Walker Percy).
As a transferring sophomore student, I didn’t know anyone in the room that morning of the first day of classes. Nor did I know anything about the subject: a seminar on David Foster Wallace. I signed up for the class because the author was just one of those names like Thomas Pynchon or Gabriela García Márquez that sounded more like a challenge than anything else. I expected the professor—one Chris Schaberg, according to my class schedule—to come in and brace us for rough waters. But instead, he walked in in a lightly crumpled suit with his long hair askew and his very nineties glasses, grinned a wide grin and sat down.
“So, what are we doing here?”
Maybe the casu-lectual posture is familiar to people who grew up in academic circles or pursued the humanities, but it was truly disarming to me—and as I would only come to realize in hindsight as time passed, it was just sincerely who he was. Over the next several years, Schaberg would become my mentor, my thesis advisor, and my friend.
If I remember correctly, Wallace was new to Schaberg, too. It was another student in the class who had asked him to teach it, and so there was a feeling of us all being on this journey together. Schaberg had spent the summer reading Wallace’s entire oeuvre, and was champing at the bit to discuss it all with us. This was the sort of class where the discussion you had in the morning would sort of carry on Socratically in your head throughout the day. So I’d still be thinking about post-modernity and irony and the films of David Lynch even as I took the streetcar down to the French Quarter, where I’d set up my pitch in the middle of the street and lay out my juggling props.
My life in those years was oriented around two focal points: college and juggling. I’d learned to juggle when I was seven years old. It’s a skill that’s shaped and carried me through life ever since. When I arrived in New Orleans, I realized I would need to do something to supplement my AmeriCorps stipend, so I started going out into the Quarter on weekends to busk. Over those weekends I developed a loose and largely ad-libbed show. I’d tell jokes as I juggled balls and clubs, all leading up to a finale where I’d ask an audience member to lay on the floor while I balanced on a bowling ball and juggled knives over their heads. Before I threw the first knife, I’d deliver my “hat line,” the cue to let people know that they’re supposed to pay you: “Now remember, I’m risking this poor, poor volunteer’s life for the sake of my education. So the more money that goes into that bucket, the fewer lives I have to put at risk.”
People in the crowd would reach for their wallets, and dollars would flutter into the old minnow bucket I’d used as a tip jar. A minnow bucket is a tin bucket used by fishermen, perforated with holes so that water can run through it and a donut of foam set into the lid so it can float. I didn’t know what it was when I bought it, but I sent a picture of it to Schaberg. “A minnow bucket!” he texted back, with much more excitement than I’d anticipated. He explained that anglers could place their live bait in the bucket and set it in the stream so that it would be fresh when the fisher was ready to pierce it with the hook and cast it out into the water.
Sometimes Schaberg would come into class with a deep outdoorsman’s tan and talk about whatever thoughts had come to him while he was casting along the Mississippi River. He’d just had his first child in the years while I was his student, and it seemed like all of his thoughts led to the river or the boy. It was apparent to anyone who took his classes that Schaberg was a person searching for meaning, who didn’t believe he had any answers, and who wanted his students to get excited about the search. A fisherman can show you how to read the river to figure out the best place to cast your line, but he can’t tell you what, if anything, might emerge from the depths. That’s the nature of the fun.
One day, as my final semester was wrapping up, Schaberg took me out for lunch and a beer and graciously let me spew out all of my fears and anxieties about what was going to come next. “I’ll feel better about all of this once I’ve published my first book,” I said after a long and nervous rant.
“No you won’t,” he laughed. “You’re gonna publish your first book and then you’re just gonna sit around going, ‘Now what?’”
I left New Orleans after that final semester, ending up in Brooklyn and working various jobs as I tried to establish myself as a writer. I’d come up with a new essay, send it to Schaberg and he’d encourage me, offer his thoughts, and tell me who to send it to. This happened over and over, leading to most of my first publications, and shaping my voice along the way. I once apologized to him for texting and emailing him so much now that I wasn’t a student.
“Don’t apologize,” he wrote, “That’s what your tuition paid for.”
As the years passed, I’d text Schaberg videos of people fishing along the Brooklyn shore whenever I caught them pulling up a catch, and he’d send me selfies from his family’s cabin in northern Michigan, dressed in his fishing gear and holding the most recent bluegill he caught in his hands.
When the pandemic hit, I once again turned to juggling. Not for money, but as a respite from hard times, and a way to pass the hours. Schaberg mainly stayed in Michigan, and spent his hours on the water, with what had grown to his little brood of three kids playing in the mud nearby. I felt guilty for juggling so much and writing so little. If there was a silver lining to the apocalypse, it was supposed to be the time that many (though far from all) had been given to invest in creative pursuits. But I had no idea what to write about.
About a year after the lockdown, I received an email from Schaberg.
“You should pitch to this,” he wrote. He’d forwarded along an email from someone named Margret Grebowicz, who’d launched a new series at Duke University Press called Practices, books that traced the authors’ personal obsessions or life-long activities. She was looking for contributors. Schaberg was going to write about fly-fishing. At first he suggested I pitch a book on surfing, a hobby he knew I’d enjoyed for many years. Then one day, after I’d returned home from a day of surfing the Rockaways, Schaberg texted me: “Change of plans. Pitch juggling. Margret is excited about juggling!”
It hadn’t even crossed my mind to pitch juggling, which seemed too obscure an idea to find an audience. But within 15 minutes of reading Schaberg’s text (I was admittedly stoned, which in hindsight saved me from overthinking), I opened my laptop and sent a brief email pitch.
Margret wrote back to me. She loved the idea—and asked if I could get the whole book written in a month. One of the four authors from the first tranche had dropped out and they needed someone to fill the slot. “Can you make that happen?”
“Absolutely!” I lied.
“Don’t think too hard about it,” Schaberg texted me when I told him the news. “Just write it. You’ll be great.”
That had always been his advice. “Don’t think. Just write.”
That’s what I’m doing right now.
In hindsight, it was a herculean effort that I would never have agreed to if I’d understood it. Fortunately, I was writing about a subject I’d known my whole life. A month later, the draft was in Margret’s inbox.
You only get to publish your first book once. When I reached out to another writer friend to announce the news of Juggling’s release, he wrote back, “Congratulations/condolences. Which applies to the publication of every book, really.” I felt a wave of relief wash over me. My concerns over publicity and sales and whether or not even my close friends or family would buy the book, let alone read it, all just felt more tolerable as long as I could remember that this was probably how most people felt amid the birthing pains of their first books. I was right where Schaberg had said I would be: a debut author asking himself, “Now what?”
But at the same time, not everyone gets to publish their first book alongside their mentor. Juggling and Schaberg’s own entry in the Practices series, Fly-Fishing, hit the shelves at the same time. For each book’s cover, the author writes the title and their name in their own handwriting. I hated the idea at first, but my hatred changed when I held mine, and Schaberg’s, books in my hands. My writing is a childish scrawl that looks like the product of a kid who flunked out of the third grade; Schaberg’s includes these hooked F’s that look like fly-fishing lines. Individually, my cover now reminds me of that long, messy journey through bankrupt colleges and buckets full of pocket change, and Schaberg’s reminds me of a brilliant man who lives like the answer is somewhere buried behind the gills of a northern pike. But seeing them together, I see the whole arc of an education, of a mentorship, of a friendship, where a student becomes a peer, and the product in my hands stands as indisputable proof of what Schaberg had been telling me the whole time: You are a writer, and I’m sticking with you.
