by Dan Manzanares
This past year at Lighthouse has been a banner one for me. I've learned more in such a short amount of time about the craft of writing and reading than ever before. I've become more of the writer I'd like to be.
The person most responsible for this exceptional year of mine is the Lighthouse 2015 winner of the Beacon Award, Benjamin Whitmer.
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We read a noir story where the main character is killed because he becomes a victim of his own clichés. Don't be that guy, Ben says.[/caption]
Ben took on the monumental task of stepping in to fill a void in the Lighthouse faculty when Lighthouse fiction instructor Cort McMeel's life abruptly ended. Cort's impact on my writer identity, although another story, is intimately linked to Ben's rise as my teacher. Ben and Cort were buds. Their affinity for Melville and noir gave them endless literary rides. But as the saying goes, "Life is short. Art is long."
Cort's death left me mentorless. Being a mentee is no joke. Some might say when it comes to creative work that that type of relationship is the purest one you can have. So, when Ben quoted Penzler in the first noir class I took from him, he and I (along with so many others) still freshly grieving Cort, saying that we must "remain compassionate in the face of hopelessness," the man had my full attention.
In the first class of Reading as a Writer: Blood Meridian I learned more about the history of America from Ben than I had in over thirty years of being an American.
In the first novel of Ben's I read (Cry Father) I learned how the world of noir cannot be fixed, and that the genre at large might be the last place an author can talk about race and class in a boots-on-the-ground kind of way.
These firsts changed and challenged me. They still do. I realize more and more that I love it when my work has working class stakes instead of bourgeois ones. But I must work hard to cut out the one to keep the other. Violent, yes. Hyper-violent, almost certainly. Although, deep down inside these characters is the notion that they know of a home to which they cannot return, and that drives them to such ends. Hiraeth is the word for that, and is Welsh. Saudade in Portuguese. English doesn't have a word for this type of desire. But it does have Harry Crews.
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Recommended by Ben. Turned out to be the second most brutal book I've read. Still, lovely sentences are a constant drip. Blood Meridian, of course, takes home the blue ribbon.[/caption]
**
In class or at the bar, when I ask Ben questions like: Why does Moby Dick have white skin? How come in Blood Meridian the landscape is described over and over as paper-like? He tells it to me straight. And I love that. Because I'm not looking for a nice answer. Such as, "Well, what do you think, Dan? What you think is just as valid."
No, no, no.
My life doesn't require nice, right now. Kindness, yes. Niceties, no.
I take workshops at Lighthouse for knowledge so I can write more and better sentences, not to get all bloated on ponder. I take classes from Ben because my brain reassembles for the better when the knowledge he has for us students hits it. Even though I know going in that Ben's workshops come with not only this price tag but another, heftier one, that of empathy, a truly fearsome thing, this reassembling empowers me. It heals.
Here's to you, Benjamin--glasses up! Our characters say: I don't want to know who I am. But you've given your students back to themselves.
The Lighthouse Beacon Award was initiated by students to honor a Lighthouse faculty member for teaching excellence, commitment to students, and dedication to the craft of writing.
Dan is Lighthouse's Creative Curator. He writes novels about gardens, Denver, explosions, and fetishized sex; and is currently seeking representation for them. He loves his Scotch neat, water back.
