The Michigan Daily-Saturday, June 16, 1979-Page 7
Co in'spoerns, tales come to life
By NINA SHISHKOFF
Lyn Coffin was getting tired of rejec-
tion slips saying "We like this story, but
it doesn't suit our present needs." For-
tunately, she hasn't been getting many
lately. Her short story, "Falling off the
Scaffold," has been selected to appear
in The Best American Short Stories of
1979, an anthology edited by Joyce
Carol Oates. Just recently, a collection
of Coffin's poetry, Human Trappings;
was accepted by Abettoir editions for
publication in 1980. The Iowa Review
and the National College Poetry
Review will publish other selections by
the author-poet.
Coffin was a psychology major at the
University when she took a writing
course with E.H. Creeth, a professor of
English Language and Literature here.
He persuaded her to change her major.
She explains, "He told me I'd have to
choose between psychology and
English, because the social sciences
were ruining my writing." Coffin came
to see that social scientists stress the
use of jargon, and the passive voice.
"They say things like 'He made me feel
happy' instead of 'I was happy'." A
writer might put it 'I jumped up and
touched the ceiling with my finger-
tips'."
COFFIN MARRIED Creeth, con-
tinued in the English Department, and
is now a doctoral candidate. She
teaches literature and creative writing
courses, and works as an assistant
editor of the Michigan Quarterly
Review, as well, of course, as working
on her own material. She has been
awarded the University's Hopwood
Awards for Drama, Essay, Poetry, and
Fiction, and the American Academy of
Poets Prize. She is currently working
on a volume of translations of poems of
Czechoslovakian Jiri Orten, and on
finishing anovel.
Coffin believes a writer has only two
or three good basic story ideas, and that
these will turn up again and again in
his/her best works. "You may get a
good idea for a story, but it's a story for
someone else to write." She feels for-
tunate in finding out what her three
"proper topics" were early, so she
didn't have to waste time experimen-
ting with ideas that weren't for her.
"One of them is death. . . not death so
much as willed death." In many of Cof-
fin's stories, she deals with people on
their way to the grave. In "Scaffold,"
one of the characters is a writer, sen-
sitive to the fact that she seems fated to
die. The story is a correspondence bet-
ween the writer and her teacher, and
the poems she sends as part of the
"ssignments are death-obsessed.
There is a nice convolution there -
writer Coffin, interested in death as a
short story topic, writing a story about
a writer who is obsessed with death. As
it happens, the story within a story is
another of Coffin's topics. She likes
"bringing forms together, and playing
them against each other." "Falling off
the Scaffold," incidentally, was
originally a story told by one of the
characters in a novella Coffin wrote.
Therefore, a poem set in a story the
writer sends the teacher was "a poem
within a story within a story within a
novel."
THE THIRD topic is ambiguity in
sex. Part of the game in "Scaffold" is
figuring out the genders of the writer
and the teacher. As Coffin thinks about
it, she adds a fourth topic, isolation,
then lumps them all in the category
identity, and its loss or gain by death,
by gender, in art or in isolation.
As a teacher, she tries to come up
with new approaches. She doesn't
assign students to write descriptions of
inanimate objects, or four page two-
character dialogues. One day she
brought in part of her workload from
the Michigan Quarterly. Review: a
stack of unsolicited manuscripts. She
read the authors' cover letters to her
writing class, pointing out misspellings
and awkward grammar. It shouldn't
matter, she says, but it does. If the
author can't write a decent letter, she
doesn't hold much hope for the story.
She works her way through the pile,
noting that the first few paragraphs of a
submission are enough to tell her if a
story is bad. Judging a good story, she
concedes, takes a little longer. Her
students were aghast, imagining the
treatment they would get someday at
ROCKY HOI
MICIAGAN
T-O-N-I
AT MIDNI(
the hands of a harried editor, but Cof-
fin's instincts are well-supported.
She stresses to her class that an
editor's interest must be maintained. "I
wanted to show some of the warning
signs that alert an editor that a story is
going to be bad. .. A flashback on the
first page, a wavering point of view, or
a story beginning, 'On that fateful
night, I never dreamed that
someday.. ." She feels that schools
today stress self-expression too much.
"Writing is far more structured than
people think."
Coffin has to be careful when she
looks over one of her old stories or
poems. "Either it's bad, and I feel em-
barrassed, or it's good, and I say, 'Oh,
my God, I'll never be able to do it
again.' " At the moment, she's not
worrying; she has just completed
another short story.
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LYN COFFIN, a published poet and author, at home in Ann Arbor. Coffin, a pre-
doctoral student and Teaching Assistant in English, will have a short story out
soon in a collection edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
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