It was on a Sunday night, about twenty-four hours before a shooter killed three students and injured five others on the campus of Michigan State University, that my daughter had a meltdown. My wife and I were about to head upstairs for bed after finishing an episode of Mad About You when she came into the room in tears. She was concerned about school.
She had failed two quizzes in her Russian class. Her Russian professor expected her to speak college-level Russian when she could barely speak at a kindergarten level, and she was flunking her classes. The online assessments for her math class tested material that had never been assigned and wasn’t mentioned in lecture. She was unhappy. She had no friends. She just wanted to live her life and have fun. Who wants to work this hard when they’re nineteen? She had missed out on being a normal high-school kid during the COVID shutdown, and now she was exhausted, anxious, and worried about flunking out of college. Why not just drop out, take a few years off, work, save money, travel, and hang out with the few close friends she still had.
Though our hearts were breaking for her, we did the good parent thing by saying what we thought were the right and proper things to say. We will support you whatever you decide, but are you sure this is what you want? Most kids who leave college before earning a degree never go back. The earning potential of a college grad is significantly higher than those who don’t earn a degree. In five or ten years, you won’t even remember feeling the way you’re feeling now. Why not wait a week and see how you feel, then finish out the semester if you can manage it and reassess. Our comments seemed to help. She decided to put off her plans of dropping out and see what the semester would bring.
Not twenty-four hours later, my wife and I were in bed for the night. My daughter knocked on our bedroom door at about 8:30 pm, frantic with worry. There was an active shooter on campus. Her social media feeds were blowing up. Her friends who lived in the dorms were in danger. My niece and nephew who lived on and near the campus were in danger. Officials were directing students to shelter in place, hide, run, or fight.
Along with the Michigan State Spartan community around the country and the world, we stayed up half the night tuned into social media feeds, official news outlets, and police scanners. Nearly every police department in mid-Michigan was called in. Rumors and false information made the rounds, inciting hysteria and panic: attacks all over campus, multiple gunmen with explosives, manifestos posted online hours before by lunatics promising punishment for students. All were false, but we followed every twist and turn throughout the night until the truth gradually came to light: one shooter who left campus shortly after the second attack at the Student Union building, leaving in his wake three dead, five injured, and a terrorized Spartan community.
We found out later that the first classroom the shooter entered was the class my daughter had dropped a few weeks before the start of the semester. It was the exact classroom in Berkey Hall where my daughter would have been had she not dropped the class, the same classroom at the door of which the shooter appeared, robot-like according to the instructor, and began shooting. If she hadn't dropped the class, my daughter would have been there.
I found myself yielding to despair. Why wouldn’t I encourage my daughter to leave college under these circumstances?
The cover art for Clockhouse, Volume 10, by Gina Gidaro is a photograph titled “Left Behind.” Gina writes, “I took this piece in January after finding these remains in my front yard.” These remains: a butterfly wing and the twig of a tree shorn from its branch. I see my daughter in this image. I see us both—our fears and anxieties, our public and private spaces violated, our inner lives disrupted by events outside of our control. What is an appropriate response to such challenges?
Ten years ago, Clockhouse published its inaugural volume. In its forward, titled “A New Community,” coauthors Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Julie Parent, and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto wrote, “When we think about the origins of story and storytelling, we remember Joseph Campbell’s idea that storytelling was rooted initially in our need to teach our children how to function in the world.” I’ve tried to teach all of my children to think critically and raise their voices responsibly, not just for the purpose of individual achievement but also for the good of whatever community they are a part of. As Clockhouse’s mission statement puts it, our responsibility is to each other, to “an eclectic conversation about the work-in-progress of life.”
Like many college freshmen, and students of all ages, all over America, my daughter feels at times not only a bit over her head but completely submerged by the challenges of how to function in her world. In this 10th volume of Clockhouse, these twenty-seven stories, poems, and plays attempt to help her. From an overview of the entirety of the human enterprise and its reasons for being in Todd Heldt’s poem “Why,” to an exploration of finding certainty amid ambiguity in Sondra Olson’s “About Hope,” we offer these stories as a way of moving toward grappling with the challenges of our present moment, a way of helping not only our children but all of us to function in this world. As Terry Dubow’s narrator explains in his story, “Cancer Lite,” the stories we tell ourselves create versions of ourselves. Or, as Janet Jiahui Wu writes in “islands,” we sleep on the strands of being. As Doug Bolling expresses another way to think about responding to our challenges of the moment in “Where Things Bend,” we make our dreams out of a butterfly called [the] future.
The Sunday after the MSU shooting, my wife and I drove my daughter to campus. Classes were set to resume the following day, and even though she didn’t really want to step onto campus again, she had reluctantly agreed to go. We parked in the IM-West parking lot in front of Spartan Stadium and walked across the street to “Sparty,” officially “The Spartan,” the bronze statue of an athletic Spartan warrior, an icon on campus since it was first commissioned by MSU President John Hannah in 1941. Around the base of the statue, flowers were arranged ten feet deep, accompanied by posters, stuffed animals, a menorah, and burning candles. Incense perfumed the air. A student musician quietly played the cello in tribute. Students and parents, like us, came and went, all solemn, paying their respects, offering silent prayers, bringing more flowers, more posters. Telling stories. I was moved and felt buoyed in my sorrow and sympathy.
Being present in such a sacred space—a space reclaimed from violation through community and storytelling—my daughter felt encouraged. By being a part of the university community that has, since the shooting, changed its slogan from “Spartans Will” to “Spartans Strong,” she has become stronger. She did go to class that week. And she seems to be doing okay.
Telling stories. Reclaiming space. This is what Joseph Campbell meant. Ten years ago in its inaugural issue, Clockhouse called for “a union and communion between writer and reader, . . . a soul arousal, a testing ground, a new community, a call for change.” That call all those years ago seems even more relevant and vital today. I tell my daughter, and remind myself, that this is the only way forward from our anxieties and fears. The conversations initiated by the writers published in the volumes of Clockhouse these past ten years and in the volume you now hold in your hands represent a community both ancient and new. They are the voices crying out for understanding and empathy. There is a way forward from this cultural moment we share. Just as it was ten years ago, just as it was a hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago, the way forward has always been the same, has always beckoned us to listen, share, and engage. As long as we are able to come together in community, in story and storytelling, we reap the reassurance of renewal, unity, and hope.
Ken Damerow, Editorial Director
She had failed two quizzes in her Russian class. Her Russian professor expected her to speak college-level Russian when she could barely speak at a kindergarten level, and she was flunking her classes. The online assessments for her math class tested material that had never been assigned and wasn’t mentioned in lecture. She was unhappy. She had no friends. She just wanted to live her life and have fun. Who wants to work this hard when they’re nineteen? She had missed out on being a normal high-school kid during the COVID shutdown, and now she was exhausted, anxious, and worried about flunking out of college. Why not just drop out, take a few years off, work, save money, travel, and hang out with the few close friends she still had.
Though our hearts were breaking for her, we did the good parent thing by saying what we thought were the right and proper things to say. We will support you whatever you decide, but are you sure this is what you want? Most kids who leave college before earning a degree never go back. The earning potential of a college grad is significantly higher than those who don’t earn a degree. In five or ten years, you won’t even remember feeling the way you’re feeling now. Why not wait a week and see how you feel, then finish out the semester if you can manage it and reassess. Our comments seemed to help. She decided to put off her plans of dropping out and see what the semester would bring.
Not twenty-four hours later, my wife and I were in bed for the night. My daughter knocked on our bedroom door at about 8:30 pm, frantic with worry. There was an active shooter on campus. Her social media feeds were blowing up. Her friends who lived in the dorms were in danger. My niece and nephew who lived on and near the campus were in danger. Officials were directing students to shelter in place, hide, run, or fight.
Along with the Michigan State Spartan community around the country and the world, we stayed up half the night tuned into social media feeds, official news outlets, and police scanners. Nearly every police department in mid-Michigan was called in. Rumors and false information made the rounds, inciting hysteria and panic: attacks all over campus, multiple gunmen with explosives, manifestos posted online hours before by lunatics promising punishment for students. All were false, but we followed every twist and turn throughout the night until the truth gradually came to light: one shooter who left campus shortly after the second attack at the Student Union building, leaving in his wake three dead, five injured, and a terrorized Spartan community.
We found out later that the first classroom the shooter entered was the class my daughter had dropped a few weeks before the start of the semester. It was the exact classroom in Berkey Hall where my daughter would have been had she not dropped the class, the same classroom at the door of which the shooter appeared, robot-like according to the instructor, and began shooting. If she hadn't dropped the class, my daughter would have been there.
I found myself yielding to despair. Why wouldn’t I encourage my daughter to leave college under these circumstances?
The cover art for Clockhouse, Volume 10, by Gina Gidaro is a photograph titled “Left Behind.” Gina writes, “I took this piece in January after finding these remains in my front yard.” These remains: a butterfly wing and the twig of a tree shorn from its branch. I see my daughter in this image. I see us both—our fears and anxieties, our public and private spaces violated, our inner lives disrupted by events outside of our control. What is an appropriate response to such challenges?
Ten years ago, Clockhouse published its inaugural volume. In its forward, titled “A New Community,” coauthors Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Julie Parent, and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto wrote, “When we think about the origins of story and storytelling, we remember Joseph Campbell’s idea that storytelling was rooted initially in our need to teach our children how to function in the world.” I’ve tried to teach all of my children to think critically and raise their voices responsibly, not just for the purpose of individual achievement but also for the good of whatever community they are a part of. As Clockhouse’s mission statement puts it, our responsibility is to each other, to “an eclectic conversation about the work-in-progress of life.”
Like many college freshmen, and students of all ages, all over America, my daughter feels at times not only a bit over her head but completely submerged by the challenges of how to function in her world. In this 10th volume of Clockhouse, these twenty-seven stories, poems, and plays attempt to help her. From an overview of the entirety of the human enterprise and its reasons for being in Todd Heldt’s poem “Why,” to an exploration of finding certainty amid ambiguity in Sondra Olson’s “About Hope,” we offer these stories as a way of moving toward grappling with the challenges of our present moment, a way of helping not only our children but all of us to function in this world. As Terry Dubow’s narrator explains in his story, “Cancer Lite,” the stories we tell ourselves create versions of ourselves. Or, as Janet Jiahui Wu writes in “islands,” we sleep on the strands of being. As Doug Bolling expresses another way to think about responding to our challenges of the moment in “Where Things Bend,” we make our dreams out of a butterfly called [the] future.
The Sunday after the MSU shooting, my wife and I drove my daughter to campus. Classes were set to resume the following day, and even though she didn’t really want to step onto campus again, she had reluctantly agreed to go. We parked in the IM-West parking lot in front of Spartan Stadium and walked across the street to “Sparty,” officially “The Spartan,” the bronze statue of an athletic Spartan warrior, an icon on campus since it was first commissioned by MSU President John Hannah in 1941. Around the base of the statue, flowers were arranged ten feet deep, accompanied by posters, stuffed animals, a menorah, and burning candles. Incense perfumed the air. A student musician quietly played the cello in tribute. Students and parents, like us, came and went, all solemn, paying their respects, offering silent prayers, bringing more flowers, more posters. Telling stories. I was moved and felt buoyed in my sorrow and sympathy.
Being present in such a sacred space—a space reclaimed from violation through community and storytelling—my daughter felt encouraged. By being a part of the university community that has, since the shooting, changed its slogan from “Spartans Will” to “Spartans Strong,” she has become stronger. She did go to class that week. And she seems to be doing okay.
Telling stories. Reclaiming space. This is what Joseph Campbell meant. Ten years ago in its inaugural issue, Clockhouse called for “a union and communion between writer and reader, . . . a soul arousal, a testing ground, a new community, a call for change.” That call all those years ago seems even more relevant and vital today. I tell my daughter, and remind myself, that this is the only way forward from our anxieties and fears. The conversations initiated by the writers published in the volumes of Clockhouse these past ten years and in the volume you now hold in your hands represent a community both ancient and new. They are the voices crying out for understanding and empathy. There is a way forward from this cultural moment we share. Just as it was ten years ago, just as it was a hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago, the way forward has always been the same, has always beckoned us to listen, share, and engage. As long as we are able to come together in community, in story and storytelling, we reap the reassurance of renewal, unity, and hope.
Ken Damerow, Editorial Director