The MFA program in San Diego was a disappointment. I called my undergraduate mentor, Darrell Spencer, to talk to him about the University of Utah's writing program, where Darrell had gotten his PhD. Darrell said, "I'll call Francois."
A few days later, Francois invited me to his home. "Bring some stories," he said. "The more, the better."
I brought five or six pieces — not enough, I quickly perceived — and watched with alarm as he dismissed them, one-by-one, out-of-hand: "It's a good thing you got out of San Diego," he said, dropping them onto his coffee table.
The last story he lingered over. It was the oldest work I'd brought with me, written at BYU for Darrell's class. "This," Francois said, tapping a page. "Work on this, don't ruin it, and submit this. This is writing."
I took his advice and a couple months later learned that I'd been accepted into the U's fiction program.
Immediately, his became the voice that most mattered to me — a voice I hear to this day: when I write, when I read, when I teach. His almost imperceptibly gentle hand guided me through my doctoral program; at crucial moments, he said incredibly kind things to me about my work, about my thinking — although I could always tell (bemusement being one of Francois' default modes) that he found me charmingly odd, an incurably Mormon American boy, or American Mormon boy, who by some absurdity of fate had read more than he should have and was now living through the consequences.
Over time, along with a couple of my dearest friends, he gave me the moral courage to try to reinvent myself — a struggle for reinvention that continues to this day, I suppose.
Some specific memories:
Breakfast with him at the Village Inn, where he liked to go because he could smoke with his coffee, a story of mine between us, soon-to-be-ignored, so that we could talk about photography.
A fiction workshop during my second year, when, in near-despair at the banality of our peer editing, he went on one of his glorious rants, blaming our banality on the fact that we were holding class in the Language Arts building. He then decided, clearly on-the-spot — "so that maybe you'll start to think like artists instead of academics" — that from that week forward, until the end of the semester, all of us were to go on Saturday mornings to the art studios on the top floor of the Fine Arts building, to practice figure drawing: "With luck, you might learn how to see, how to pay attention. Until that happens, we're wasting our time."
The liberating discovery that much of his personal library was made up of pulp fiction. When, once, I asked him why, he said, "Because the authors aren't trying to sound like English butlers."
The morning when, walking with me to class, he learned that I did my work on a Windows machine. "Of course you do," he said. "Because you're a Protestant. Umberto Eco wrote about that."
With my next student loan I bought my first Mac.
When he said in a fiction workshop: "I don't want your epiphanies to happen in Tuscany. I want them to happen at a 7-Eleven in Nebraska."
And, for me, most importantly: What he said to me just after telling me that I'd passed my exams. Today, if I could, I would tell him: Francois, I've become something of a ruin, which you no-doubt would have found interesting, possibly inevitable, but I've never forgotten what you said to me then — it has carried me through many dark hours. And regardless of what becomes of me, I won't forget your bemused generosity, or your passion or your art. You changed my life, or gave me the strength to change it — which is, in the end, the same thing.
He sometimes warned me to be careful of certainty, but of this I'm certain: when I say that he changed my life, when I say that I'll never forget him, I speak not just for myself but for decades of students and friends.
