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Yurevitch

NO END
(A Literacy Narrative)

by

Theodore V Yurevitch

The story was about a turkey. The turkeys name was Tom and he lived on a farm. One day, he
discovered that he would soon be executedThanksgiving was the next weekso he escaped.
He flew the coop without saying goodbye to his family, or his friends, the pigs. Tom didnt care
that he left without telling the chickens theyd probably be slaughtered and served instead. The
chickens were stupid, in his opinion. It was the middle of the night when he left, and by morning
he reached the coast, docks, where he stowed away on a freighter and crossed the Atlantic.
Weeks went by, but Tom survived, and eventually disembarked in Venice. He became a
gondolier and soon knew the canals and bridges and marble arches like the back of his wing. No
one paid him much mind as he sang opera and rowed; no one tried to eat him or cared that he
was a turkey. But he missed his family. He saw the canals as a maze with no end. I wrote this for
a class in sixth grade. This was the first piece of creative writing I ever did.

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The teacher said it was good. Veryimaginative. Her name was Mrs. Stein. I was in
sixth grade and wondered if she was secretly the author of the Goose Bumps series, R.L. Stein.
The Internet wasnt something I had back then; I had no idea R.L. Stein was a man and Goose
Bumps wasnt my favorite anyway. I read other fantasy novels and science fiction. Stephen King
more than anything else. Six years passed before I let my imagination outside of my head again.
Throughout that time, I was not an exemplary student. I did not do homework or study or
read what was assigned, because I did not want to be told what to do. I told myself I would learn
on my own. When Hemingway was assigned, I waited till the semester was overtill it was
summer and I could sit on the sandy edge of the Atlantic oceanto read The Sun Also Rises. I
read what I wanted. When I didnt like a book, I shoved it under my bed. But there was one thing
I reread: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. My grandfather recommended it to me first.
Theo, he said in his long, low, Russian drawl. Readthis. It isinteresting.
But at the time, I didnt think it was interesting enough to read more than the prologue.
A few weeks after putting the book down, I saw my grandmother. Teo, she said, losing
the digraph th in her Dominican accent, I think you would like this. There are fish that fall from
the sky. Colonel Sanders is ano lo ssex worker. And the young boy always wears a
baseball hat. Like you.
She was right. I did always wear a baseball hat. My grandparents had been divorced for a
quarter century and lived on different ends of the country, but they both, without consulting,
agreed that this was the kind of book I should read. So I did and it dawned on me: you can do
anything in writing. I reread that book so many times because it reminded me that even when I
was alone, I wasnt alone.

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I realized back then that a piece of writing was a strange thing that existed only when
being done or read, but could have meaning even when long forgotten. I didnt have the word
process in mind, but thats the way I saw it. I decided that it was the only thing I could do
because it was one of the few things that I could never imagine being finished with.
At that age I surely thought I learned nothing in school. Now, I concede, I must have
learned something. I took home economics and leaned how to sew; I took shop class and

made a box out of wood. Still, I always learned the most from reading because books treated me
with respectit was up to me not only to read them, but also to make meaning from them. Now
that Ill soon be teaching someone else, myself, I know that I must never act like those teachers I
had no respect forthose who used their role as a platform for self-aggrandizement, and limited
the agency of their students.
It was a radical thing for me when I realized that I could stand up out of my desk. No one
could stop me. I want my students to know that they can get up and walk out of the class at any
time. It will be my job, though, to give them a reason to stay.
#
The second story I ever wrote was in High School. I was reading Infinite Jest, by David Foster
Wallace, at the time. Id found the novel in a Barnes & Noble and picked it up because it was
long. Half way through, Wallace hung himself. I still dont know how to describe that reading
experience, but you can believe me when I say that this changed it. A book was no longer its
own thing; books became living links to the writer, even if she or he was gone. I saw the
collaborative nature of the act of reading and writing. I finished the novel, but it wasnt over.
In Wallaces story, there are these assassins bound to wheelchairs. I used that in the
second story I wroteit was about a paraplegic man named Mark who would eat his dinner

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guests after shooting them with a harpoon gun. You are what you eat, it opened. Mark had
eaten a monster.
That story, I decided, wasnt good enough. I didnt write another one for a few years after
thatnot because I didnt have ideas, or want to, but because I didnt want to ruin ideas with bad
writing. The years turned and I left home, moved from New York to Nashville for college.
There, at Vanderbilt University, I studied History and English and encountered some of the
writers I still hold most dear: Gloria Anzalda, Alice Munro, Roberto Bolao, Don DeLillo,
Kazuo Ishiguro, Franz Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Julio Cortzar, Jorge Borges, etc.
(This list could go on for pages.) I took a fiction workshop for a semester and, through actual
writing, realized that I shouldnt have put it offonly by writing, continuing to read, and
reflecting on my reading through more writing, would I ever get better. My instructor, an MFA
candidate, told me this, encouraging me without the sort of empty clichs my old school teachers
had used. She didnt say I was good. She said that I should continue writing. So I did.
Every semester, I took more and more diverse workshopsfiction was always my
mainstay, the genre I felt was most suited to what I wanted to explore, but I wrote poems and
essays, nonfiction, too. I knew that I could most certainly write without these classes, but while
studying creative writing, I found the kind of professors I learned most from and whom I most
want to emulate. There were many whom I owe a great deal too, but the three most important
were Peter Guralnick, Nancy Reisman and Lorraine Lopez. Through them, I learned that the
teacher could conduct a classroom where active collaboration was occurringwhere leading
questions, which inherently are meant to limit exploration, were seldom used.
I was in my third year when I first took Peters nonfiction workshop. There was myself
and maybe nine other students circled around a table. The room was in a turret of this medieval-

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type castle. It was winter. Large windows let in cold light and framed black tree branches against
the blanched sky. Peter, an old man, was the last to shuffle in and sit.
This is supposed to be called nonfiction workshop, he said, but really, Id like it to be
called: what the fuck?
Peter taught us two things. (1) That writing requires empathy and (2) to be a writer you
have to write. The rest of the class was a collaborative struggle to figure out what we were doing,
what we wanted to do and what it all meant. What the fuck? would have be a fine title.
As I was finishing my undergraduate studies, spending most of my time writing my
History thesiswhich was on the rise of the tragicomedy as a genre under the reign of King
James Imy advisor, Lorraine Lopez, asked me if Id like to stay.
I told her I didnt understandI wasnt going to graduate?
No, she said, I can and will, but I could also stay for another year and be a part of their
graduate Creative Writing program. Id write a thesis and get a Masters degree, but more
importantly, Id get to work with the MFA candidates as my peers. I thought of the first
instructor who really gave me valuable feedback, years before. She had told me that I should
continue writing. At the time, she herself had been an MFA candidate. Of course I said yes.
#
Ive written hundreds of pages since then (stories, but a short novel, as well) and read hundreds
of pieces, too, but can easily say the best of them were Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan novels. No
other written project of late has evoked so much for me, explored so many critical themes
violence, feminism, motherhood, class conflict and writing itself, to name a few. But most
importantly, her work taught me that beauty is a sham. I grabbed that idea and, after finishing
Ferrantes work, returned to many of my old drafts, revising with an eye to excise what I now

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found phony: lyricism, purple prose, writing for writings sake. It didnt matter that a few of
these stories were already publishedI still worked on them.
I finished at Vanderbilt, but decided that I didnt want to be gone from that sort of

community for long. So I spent a year working at a bookstore. Reading, after all, is always more
important than writing, and helping someone find something important to read was important to
me. But that space was small, and although I still wrote every day, I wanted more time and
freedom to write. So I applied to programs and decided to come here. This brings me to now,
where I am ready to participate in a community of writers again. I already know what I want to
work ona lot of my thematic interests date back to my story about the turkeybut I also know
that through writing and thinking, by joining this community and teaching, those ideas will
continue to change as theyve always changed, as I knew they would even back then.
At the end of the story, Tom the turkey climbs the red brick bell tower in San Marcos
piazza. He can see the whole gothic city half-sunk in itself. Then he throws himself from the
tower. I was eleven when I wrote this.
I remember, my teacher asked: Can Tom fly? Can turkeys fly?
And I answered: I dont know.
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