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Chapter 20 from Bill Owens' upcoming book "Chicken Heads"
I made it into my junior year at Chico State and still had not signed up for freshman English. That fall, I took a creative writing class. The teacher was John Gardner, a boyish twenty-seven-year-old novelist. He looked like he could be one of us. His book, The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), created quite a literary stir, and he received a Fellowship in Fiction.
In the creative writing class, I was an outstanding student. John liked my poems and short stories and decided to publish a few of them in Selections, the college literary journal.
I was recently at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and saw a copy of Selections in a locked bookcase. The price was $5,000. I have a copy of Selections.
That fall, before classes started, I received a letter from the college registrar. It stated that if I didn’t sign up for freshman English, I couldn’t register for any classes. So, I signed up for English 1A but flunked the class. In the spring, I took the class again and failed. I couldn’t pass the spelling test or write a complete essay.
To purchase: A Book of Poems by Bill Owens - Illustrations by Karen Barry
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