She began contacting possible poetry professors from an old email list she’d saved from graduate school. Ha ha, wrote some of her old classmates, who’d remembered her drunken thought experiments. Marianne did not try to prove anything to these people, who had their own problems. A tiny minority had teaching jobs, mostly in small, Midwestern towns with winters that were beginning already. Others had moved on to real jobs: lawyer, accountant, graphic designer. A great many had gotten married, had children, and taken up fake jobs: cupcake baker, jewelry maker, graphic designer.

It was one of this latter set, a beautiful girl whose family owned wineries in California and who had married the scion of a Kentucky horse-breeding family, who suggested that they were barking up the wrong tree. Her poems and workshop comments always had something of the bluntness afforded to people of her class. This is a job for the desperate, she wrote. You need to find someone experienced, but who has made some career mistakes. Someone always on the visiting circuit. What about Lorraine?

Lorraine Kominski had spent a semester teaching at their school. Her first book had won the Yale Younger Poets prize, but that was a very long time ago, before Marianne was even born. Years of low-grade alcoholism and erratic workshop behavior had bumped her several rungs down the teaching ladder, from an Ivy League college to a SUNY school to the occasional visiting writer post offered by a sympathetic friend. She showed up late to class and was occasionally threatening or belligerent with her students. Sometimes she disliked a student’s poem so much that she would place it on the floor, cross her arms, and shake her head at it. Every now and then she published a poem about one of her cats in the New Yorker.

“No,” Eric said. “I don’t think she would be right. For our students.”

“She’s a very good writer,” Marianne said. “Landlord Death Chants was a great book. And I like those cat poems. I always cut them out and put them on my fridge.”

“Marianne.”

“And I think her teaching style might be what the students are looking for,” she continued. “Like fantasy baseball. Or space camp. You don’t go to space camp expecting not to throw up at some point.”

“You think these applicants are expecting to throw up? You think they want to be told how bad they are?”

Marianne thought for a minute. “Yes,” she said. “They want to wear a space suit, but they also want to throw up. They want to be nurtured, but they also want to be abused. Haven’t you ever been to church? Lorraine would be poetry’s holy roller.”

“Well, who even knows if she’s available?”

“She is,” Marianne said. “As a matter of fact.”