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Doris Betts
Sometimes I use the word mentor loosely; certain records you keep as intimate teachers. Some paintings are friends that nurse you through the rough patches. You've never met their creator and yet somehow they have a deep impact on your thoughts and how you navigate your life. You learn more from that stranger than you might from someone you talk with everyday. Perhaps that is a mentor. I've always been fascinated by the idea of an apprentice, of learning from a master artist because I did not grow up in a family of artists and I have sometimes felt that I was making my way in that dark quite clumsily without a guide. That may well be why I invented this program. In asking hard questions, there is a secret hope that someone else might show up with the all the answers. Wouldn't that make everything easy.
Once, though, I did walk into the room where the right teacher awaited me. It was Doris Betts. She was fierce and feisty. Quick to laugh, she told the truth, even when it wasn't nice, and she stood for something. I learned so much by just being around her. Deeply devoted to her family, her community, her work and her morals, she was a woman of character. She never believed that being an artist gave you an excuse to be something less than your best. On top of that, you had to be your own best editor. It wasn't that she sat me down and shouted these things at me. You just rose to meet her; she raised you up and saw more in you than you saw, and you wanted to give her all you could because she demanded the best in herself and expected you to return in kind. I remember trying to think up excuses to talk to her and questions to ask her. But I was always quieted and left her alone when I thought more about it because I knew what she was really trying to teach me. I had to answer my own questions. If I were ever going to be an artist of any salt at all, I would have to have a sense of authority with my inner life for myself.
At the moment I met Doris Betts, the last place in the world I wanted to be was school. I didn't think you could learn a damn thing about being an artist in school. Being an artist was out on the road, out in the wild, beyond the horizon line, in the lines on a fisherman's face. I stayed in school because I realized that Doris Betts was giving me more than a few secrets about what would be asked of me and what I would ask of myself in the years to come. I still turn to her fire, her goodness, her character, her example.
Doris Betts is a much loved, much lauded author of 3 collections of short stories and 6 novels, including Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Sharp Teeth of Love and Souls Raised from the Dead. Her short story The Ugliest Pilgrim won an Academy Award in a short film adaptation called Violet. For over 30 years, she made a profound mark on her students as a creative writing professor at UNC Chapel Hill. She is a mother of three, keeper of a flock of Arabian horses, upstanding citizen, friend, renaissance woman, and in short, one of the greats. To me, and I do not use the word loosely, she is my mentor.
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