In the (approximate) middle of your life, you find yourself a visiting professor here for the fall term. Your title is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

Because you are new here, and because there are few creative writing instructors on the faculty, more than one hundred students applied for your Advanced Fiction Workshop, for a mere fifteen places.

Very carefully, you have read through these applications and their attached fiction samples. You’ve read, reread. Coolly professional, you ignored pleas by students claiming desperation if they were rejected, for it was their senior year, for instance, or they were longtime admirers of your work; you hesitated before accepting an older, General Studies student named Gavin Kroff, whose writing sample verged upon the obscure, for you’d seen that he had identified himself as an army veteran, and you wanted to give him, as you might have said if queried, the benefit of the doubt.

And so now you may tell yourself—You brought this on yourself. Indulging in a cliché. No one else to blame!

Says Kroff in a quavering voice, he’d like to speak frankly.

So naturally you concur. Of course.

“What I think is—in our seminar—Pro-fes-sor—I am not being treated justly by the other writers. And by you.”

To this blunt charge you can think of no reply. Not justly! The very words are unexpected.

It is true, you have withheld superlatives from Kroff. On principle you don’t believe in lavishing writing students with excessive praise, though (you assume) it is not very difficult for them to determine whose work you think is superior; usually, it is the work others in the class believe to be superior. In Kroff’s case, you are not condemning, for you never condemn; but neither do you praise his work. Your commentary is terse, diplomatic. You dwell on sentences, paragraphs. If there is praise, it is for a certain “originality” of language Kroff exhibits.

But now Kroff is incensed. Saying he’d been goddamned grateful to be accepted into the seminar with a world-famous professor. It meant so much to him he’d (almost) gotten down on his knees and given thanks—as if you’d reached out and touched his bare, beating heart.

Now he feels differently. He’s disappointed—disillusioned. Since the first piece of writing he’d given to the seminar for criticism there’s been a kind of … he’d call it a kind of prejudice—“Like racism, almost.”

Racism?

“Like, I am a white man—a kind of minority right now in this country …”

Quietly you try to point out that in the workshop there is a majority of “white” students. Out of fifteen students, at least eleven.

But Kroff dismisses this with a wave of his hand. Frowning severely.

“Like, a ‘white’ woman takes their side, you can count on that. All of you ganging up against me.”

Takes their side? Whose?