Tom Spanbauer: Everything You Need

MFA VS Kitchen Table, Writing, Teaching, and What I Learned

The first time I took a writing class from author Tom Spanbauer, I didn’t yet know who he was. Maybe I didn’t know who I was. That’s how young I was, back then. I was a girl with a bike who worked for minimum wage all over Portland. I hung art and made sandwiches and unlocked the metal grate on stores and counted out change and smiled at strangers and walked or rode through the city at all hours. He was a stranger who gave out his hand-written phone number on pieces of paper down at the Gay Pride Parade. “He just moved here, from New York,” somebody said, with a gentle shrug. “I hear he’s a nice man.”

His writing workshop cost thirty-five dollars for ten weeks and would meet once a week. It sounded cool.

I hesitated.