Please, please, **please ** tell me you said, “Why, bless your heart” to her!
It would have fallen on deaf ears, I’m afraid.
My future English professor self seconds that. :dubious: look
Sampiro, when you get published, can I have an autographed copy? bats eyelashes
Find out what she thinks about Terry Pratchett. That’ll serve as a good benchmark for her sense of humor.
I bet she wouldn’t like T.R. Pearson, either. (And if any of you who like Sampiro’s style haven’t read A Short History Of A Small Place yet, run to your local bookstore.)
The problem, I think, is that she didn’t crticize detail (“this sidestory bogs things down” etc) as much as she criticized your whole style. You can’t work with crticism like that, so ignore it.
Although I gotta say, if the English profs in question are Lit types (as opposed to creative writing teachers), in general my advice to aspiring writers is to avoid them like the plague.
It occurred that part of it may be residual anger as well. A few months ago we got into a huge cyberfight over religion. She’s a nominal Catholic (born and raised Catholic but doesn’t really believe the teachings all that much) and she sings in the choir and is very active in a particular Catholic church in Alabama (won’t identify it, but) that has a particularly homophobic tow-the-line priest. She complained to me several times with rolled eyes about this or that comment he made in his last sermon about the evils of gay activism or the merit of gay reparative therapy and the evils of the Episcopal church for ordaining an actively gay man and other stuff that would generally make you want to suggest he wear a tiara rather than a collar so that he can be just a tad more obvious, and I said some things that diplomatically would have been better unsaid about “How can somebody with gay friends and gay relatives, who doesn’t believe this stuff, sing in a choir at the church presided over by a man who does? How can you take communion when you don’t believe in its mysticism and when by doing so you’re at least nominally assenting to the views of the church, even those you’ve said you don’t believe in?” and she hemmed and hawed and said something to the affect of “reform from within” and “the antiquity and tradition and ritual is more important than the sermons” and above all “the music is transcendant”, and the argument continued. It turns out she doesn’t like defending her views and essentially we agreed to disagree (but not really).
In any case our friendship has never been the same since then and I fear this may have affected her judgment.
Also, her comments on my making light of some relatives senility and my father’s death and other comments made me remember: she’s my age (late 30s), both of her parents are still alive, the only grandparent she can remember is still alive and doing well for an octagenarian, and she’s never had to deal with the death or total meltdown of anybody close to her or the sudden ant total evaporation of finances and the family’s fall from Social Grace or any of these things. I think this may also affect her opinions, because until you have to see the grandmother you once loved (my mother’s mother, not my father’s- her I flat out hated and the only time she was bearable was when she finally went senile) bake a pie using a paper plate instead of a pie pan or call the sheriff to come arrest the two black men who are fighting in her living room (Muhammad Ali and George Foreman) and keeping them at gunpoint til he gets there, it probably seems tasteless to make light of it. Those of us who’ve had to deal with death and Alzheimers and other tragedies (and I don’t for a second pretend that I had to deal with worse than most) of those we love know that seeing the humor in it, no matter how dark, makes it possible to remember that time without getting depressed or just mad as hell about it.
Hereagain, I’m not saying that her views have no merit, just that I’ve elected to ignore them. 
I totally agree with this. She’s not criticizing your writing so much as your whole style. There’s no way to get anything constructive out of that, so just ignore it.
Your Grandmother once called the sheriff to break up a fight between Muhammid Ali and George Foreman? Day-umn man, could your family histor get any more interesting! The more you talk about your family the more I want to know. That English professor be damned! Tell us more! MORE! MORE!
Do you realize how much like crack and meth your stories are? The more you allude to about your family, the more I want to know.
Dang! I may end up a drooling heap lying on the floor panting and sweating in front of my computer. I need more Sampiro stories!
Stop it! You’re making me hot! :o
Oh yeah? How bout if I were a drooling heap lying on the floor panting and sweating in front of my computer and dressed in leather! 
And stop making me sound bad! I’m trying to get Sampiro to send me more stories!
swoon
Another English teacher talking out of their ass. Who woulda’ thunk it?
Well, thanks to the magic of television they were there.
I don’t know if there have been any studies on it or not, but TVs and senility were interesting phenomena. Both of my grandmothers and my great aunts were old when they first saw a TV but they all loved it. My grandmother (maternal- the more or less sane one) was glued to her set for every soap opera and football game that came on (she also loved football) while her husband was the same way for baseball and anything with Cher (“That is one damned fine magnificent she-beast right there. She must have Indian blood in her. Nothing beautifies a white woman like an ounce or two of Indian blood. Damn. Just damn.”)
BUT, all of them (except for my grandfather, and the aunt who died suddenly in fire) all got hopelessly confused by the same device when their minds started slipping. My paternal grandmother (the evil one) told me about seeing a news report on a “colored midget trapped on a building ledge- but I think they got him off” (it was an episode of Diff’rent Strokes) while the other one called the sheriff to arrest the two black men fighting in her living room (the Rumble in the Jungle). (About the same time this prim proper little Baptist lady’s vocabulary started taking a turn for the colorful and aggressively sexual; my mother never took her out to eat in public again after the lady who had used euphemisms for toilet paper in the past casually told a waitress “My grandson Harold’s a preacher but he’s got a ding dong on him like a goddamned banana”.)
Anyway, she hopelessly confused the TV with what was in the Living Room, but it wasn’t always bad. As I mentioned she loved football, and Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan started coming to visit her every Sunday, so that made her happy.
Sampiro- her criticism sounds like it’s more about her perception of your tone than about the events you’re describing. Still, you may as well ignore that and keep writing.
Well, As an Editor and Writer[sub]of a tiny weekly community newspaper with a circulation of at least 7, three of whom aren’t in love with or related to me[/sub]with a Tremendous amount of Journalistic Education[sub]in an entire semester’s journalism course in high school 30 years ago[/sub] and Experience[sub]at least 6 years now[/sub],** I** feel I am more Well-Qualified[sub]than an orangutan[/sub] to say …
I really, really like your stories. They’re neat.
Seriously, everyone has different tastes and coming from a professorial perspective and with a possible chip or three on her shoulder, it would seem you’re right to take her critique with a grain or two or a whole shaker full of salt. I’ve throughly enjoyed the stories you’ve presented. You’ve mixed the right amount of humor with poignancy and left out the maudlin and angst. You’ve developed the characters with warmth and compassion so that the dark humor is seen from a perspective of caring not cruelty. You’ve also successfully described the setting in which the stories have taken place, which enhances the description of the characters and leads to an ability by the reader to really visualize an entire scene. It seems the most successful stories are typically those built on character development more than the details of the plot lines. You want to see what happens next to Aunt Bessie, not necessarily because you care so much for the events of the story themselves, but because you want to see Aunt Bessie’s reaction to a different situation and what will happen to her next.
O coarse, I ain’t no prefesser av england so mebee Iym al wronged/
I think your English prof is an example of how insulated ignorance isn’t confined to rural farming towns in Aladamnbama.
But I think what’s telling is that your writing is getting critical review. Notice she didn’t comment on grammar and punctuation. This was how your writing touched her, even if you couldn’t identify with it. Potentially, people around the world we be able to read your stories, and it will touch them in different ways. Even something you consider totally innocuous could have a profound impact. For example: a friend on my LJ from England talks about fishing. How cool is that? Somebody who lives 8,000 miles away from me actually fishes! Just like Roland Martin!
? We farmed cattle in Virginia (which, last time I looked, is even farther east than Alabama) and were farther than 10 miles from town (Fredericksburg, to be exact).
Well, it wouldn’t be a Sampiro story without one or two of those, would it.
And one not necessarily restricted to rural Alabama. I grew up in Ross Township, in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh.
And he’s another Yankee sayin’ you’ve got some good stories here. Keep up the good work (and I’m with swampy on demanding waiting for more.)