That Time I Terrorized an English Teacher (But Not on Purpose)

Photo of an antique typewriter that's part of a museum display.

It is officially spooky season, and so far it’s been a pretty scary week. In the publishing world one of the biggest book distributors (and the very biggest for libraries) Baker & Taylor is going belly up and yet another small publisher, Quirk Books, is getting bought up by a larger publisher, Andrews McMeel. So in keeping with the scary theme, I thought I would tell you about the time I gave one of my high school English teachers nightmares.

Some time during my high school years, my school decided to revive its gifted and talented program. For those of this in the program it was a sort of independent study where we were paired with a teacher so that we could work on a project that we were interested in. I know I’m going to blow your minds here, but what I was interested in was writing. Shocker!

I enjoyed writing slice of life essays about my somewhat nutty family and our various misadventures. (Again, you probably don’t find this all that surprising.) So, I was paired with one of my former English teachers, and proceeded to write about some of my family’s exploits. She enjoyed the anecdotes but challenged me to branch out and try something else. After all, the program was all about pushing us to learn and grow. Still, I’m guessing she came to regret her request that I try my hand at writing fiction.

Maybe she was thinking that with the funny family stories I had shared with her so far, my fiction would be something equally comical, but I decided to go in a different direction, a very different direction. The story I submitted was a dark, creepy thriller. On its own it might have been enough to inspire nightmares, but it was the subject matter that was especially cruel for my teacher. I swear I never had any of intentions of frightening her, but looking back on it now, I can’t believe I didn’t see how that would be perceived.

That’s because the main character of my story was a creative writing teacher. There were a lot of differences between the character in my story and my real life teacher. For starters the character was a man, and my teacher was a woman. My character taught some sort of adult ed. night class and my teacher taught high school English. Completely different! But also I suppose there were some similarities.

The premise of my short story was that my main character was at home one night grading the assignments his students had handed in, and as he was reading the story submitted by that one sort of creepy guy in the class he started to get freaked out because the story he was reading was about a creative writing teacher at home grading papers only he wasn’t alone in the house. There was a killer in the house, and the description of the house in the story he was reading was pretty much identical to his actual house, and well let’s just say things did not end well for that creative writing teacher.

Yes, really this was the short story I submitted to my English teacher when she asked me to try my hand at fiction. Again, I swear I never meant to freak her out, but I can’t imagine what she thought of me after that. Anyway, it’s a good reminder to readers everywhere that writers have overactive imaginations, and are definitely NOT the characters they write about in their novels and short stories. And my apologies to anyone teacher or otherwise who thought they saw themselves in any of my fiction. It’s all made up. I swear!

Despite the season, here’s hoping you’re having a sweet week and not a spooky one!

— Alissa