Magazine - summer 03 - St. John's College

26
{Student Voices}
A Work in Progress
clark saylor
by Kea Wilson (A09)
Most St. John’s students
spend their last night
before freshman year
trying to cram that last
sweater into an overstuffed
suitcase and get
those last 20 pages of the Iliad read. I
spent mine at a $2 million benefit gala in
Miami, where Placido Domingo shook my
hand and Vanessa Williams gave me a kiss
on the cheek. A week earlier, I had flown
to Florida as a finalist in a youth arts
competition to which I had submitted a
short story on a whim. Twelve master
classes, eighteen hotel lunches and one
ridiculous photo-op in a botanical garden
later, I found myself at this surreal party
with a medal hung around my neck, starstruck
and eating hors d’oeuvres with the
playwright Sam Shepard. Three hours after
that, I boarded my plane to Albuquerque,
still unsure of what had happened to me.
From the moment when I landed to the
moment I write this now, I’ve been a little
embarrassed about telling
this story. But I’ve been
embarrassed, too, of
calling myself a writer at
all, and especially so since
I first dragged my trunk
onto the Santa Fe campus
and began to call myself a
Johnnie. No 18-year-old
with an ounce of perspective
would ever presume to
say she had gained the
experience, insight, or
originality necessary to
call herself an artist by the
time she had finished high
school, no matter how
many awards she had won,
or how much encouragement
she had received.
No 18-year-old who’s just
finished reading about the
burial of Hector in the
lobby of the Sunport would
even dare to think that she
was an artist, regardless of
where her plane had just
arrived from.
After three years at
St. John’s, I’ve often
wondered just how many
students have had
Laurel Price (A09) makes
times for music and drama
along with her studies at
St. John’s.
moments like these. While I’ve managed to
write almost every day since coming to St.
John’s—despite my embarrassment and
often my own best efforts to quit—many of
my friends have either banished their
guitars to the dark recesses of their dorm
room closet, or else been too caught up
with Newton to ever take it up in the first
place. From my original 28-student
January freshman class in Santa Fe, at least
six left to pursue some form of a career in
the arts. I’ve been the editor of a literary
magazine, a member of a filmmaker’s club,
and devotee of a dance class that have all
lapsed due to a lack of student interest or
energy. When I first decided to apply to St.
John’s, I was especially swayed by a video of
then-Santa Fe Dean David Levine (class of
1967), posed in front of the Meem Library:
he said that “there should be no realm of
human endeavor that we should feel
ourselves excluded from” once we have
completed the St. John’s education. Why,
then, is the artistic realm of human
endeavor so cut off from many Johnnies—
and could we make art, even if we
wanted to?
Making Time for Art
Needless to say, I didn’t come to St. John’s
to be a writer—and I’d venture to say that
even fewer students come to the college to
play the clarinet, or act, or more generally,
for any reason other than to read great
books and attempt to understand them in a
community of intelligent people. After all,
I had spent the past four years of my life
learning to be a writer at a fine arts high
school, where I had saddled myself with a
creative writing major at age 14. By the
time I graduated, I had taken enough
English and creative writing credits to
fulfill St. John’s entrance requirements six
times over, not to mention written a portfolio
of my own terrible amateur writing
that had a page count roughly equal to that
of War and Peace.
When I applied to college, there was no
doubt in my mind that I knew how to write,
{ The College • St. John’s College • Summer 2008 }