Chapter 68: Professor Rice

I looked out at the class of twenty-six undergraduate students taking Creative Writing 301. The ‘3’ in the course number indicated that course was mainly for juniors or seniors. Sophomores could sign up the course with permission of the instructor. There were nine young men and seventeen young women. Eight of them were Caleb, Warren, Derek, Bryce, Amber, Tracy, Wendy, and Blue. They sat in the first two rows and looked especially attentive.

The young men were all in jeans or Bermuda/Board shorts, and mostly some t-shirt representing a concert they’d been to. They all wore sneakers. This was mostly the school uniform for the young men.

The young women were mostly dressed in short shorts with a nice top, and flip-flops. There were a few tight-fitting yoga leggings in the class and only a couple of skirts. I noticed that every feminine toenail that I could see was painted a pretty color. Maybe I have a foot fetish.

I started class briefly telling about myself – my education, work career, shifting to authoring, and then I showed copies of the books that I’d written over the past six years, including Polyamory, Relationships, and Others. I mentioned the Coping with Changing Times book that Jake and I were working on co-authoring. I specifically did not mention the Extended Family, or my unique living arrangements although I had the feeling that the Family members in the class might have already chummed the water with that information.

I put up my first slide – a copy of the online syllabus for the class. I walked the class through that page and the subsequent ten pages which dealt with the content and assignments week-by-week for the class. I also tossed in comments about grading the various assignments, as well as what supplemental reading outside of the course textbook I expected them to be prepared to discuss in class.

My new friend Dean Myles, my mentor in the English Department, had told me to limit my assigned reading to no more than a thousand pages for the semester. I’d ended up with just over that number after trimming off some articles and a couple of books. I had indicated to the students that about half those pages were to be ‘scanned’ rather than read in depth. I talked about the difference.

There were a few questions and then I hit them with what I called my Journalism 101 Axiom – the first paragraph of something terse that you write should contain the Who, Where, What, Why, When, and How about the story – or at least some of them. I was a no-nonsense type of guy, and thought that way. That’s what the department gets for signing up someone trained as an engineer in the corporate world to teach English. I abbreviated the rule as ‘W5H’ and wrote that on one white board.

I then projected up a picture of a plane that had landed in a snowstorm and slid off the runway in Chicago a year earlier. I said, “Take out a piece of paper and write one paragraph that the picture inspires you to create. Notice that I didn’t ask you to necessarily describe the scene or what happened. I used words like ‘inspire’ and ‘create’ on purpose. Take five minutes and see what you have. There are no wrong answers to this.”

I strolled around the room as everyone frantically looked at their blank sheet of paper. As the time went by, one-by-one they started to write – at first, a few words, and then more flowed towards the end of the five minutes. I was calling out the remaining time.

I picked on Caleb first. “Caleb, what do you have?”

“Errr, kind of facts but I tried to inject some emotion into the scene. ‘One-hundred passengers on United Flight 566 into O’Hare this morning narrowly escaped death by snowstorm and ice. Their plane slid from the runway this morning collapsing a landing gear, and damaging one wing and engine. Other flights that planned to use the same runway were immediately rerouted. Fire and rescue vehicles were on the scene in seconds and aided the plane’s emergency evacuation. Passengers had to stand in the freezing weather waiting for buses to take them to the warm terminal.”

I looked at my roster and picked a name of someone I didn’t know yet, “Mary Beth?” I looked around the room to see who’d respond.

A studious girl with glasses started to read, “I felt the purist form of fear and my life flashed before my eyes today at nine a.m. I faced death as the airline seat I was in, along with the hundred others around me, slid sideways along an icy runway in Chicago at two-hundred miles per hour. I got in the crash position as a flight attendant screamed at us over the plane’s audio system. My ears hurt from the sounds emitted by the crashing plane as we slammed to the ground and came to lopsided stop. All I heard then were the shouts over the PA system to ‘Get out! Get out! Leave everything and get out NOW!”

I was impressed. I asked the class, “Was one of those better than the other? Don’t say anything out loud, but think about that question. Was one more factual than the other? More emotional? More personal? What kind of audience of readers did each of those paragraphs appeal to? Was one more creative? This is a creative writing class. How will you know creative writing if you produce it? Answer just the last question, please.” I turned to the class again.

I pointed at one young man, “Your name?”

“I’m Mark. I think creative writing is somehow different – better – from whatever a reader would consider normal.”

“Nicely said,” I stated. “So, one purpose of this class is to get you to write outside the box when you consider your target readership. By the way, who is your target readership in this class.”

There was a chuckle and Caleb said, “You are!”

I laughed along with the class and agreed. On that note, I ended the first class. The graduate class went about the same only with many fewer students. I only had seven in that class – two men and five young women. The seminar had eight students – all women and all wanted to become best-selling authors. I started that session by talking about the ‘Tyranny of a Blank Page’. I passed each of them a blank page and asked them to write a best-selling novel before the next class. I tried to sound serious. I got panic looks in return.

At home that evening, Blue teased me about sleeping with the students that wanted good grades, and suggested that might involve all the women in the class. She said, “You’re ‘hot’. It wouldn’t be difficult for any of the girls to think about getting dicked to get a grade boost.” She laughed and flounced off to refill her wine glass.

Well before classes began but when I knew that eight of my family members would be in my class, I let them all know that I’d be holding them to a higher standard compared to the rest of the class. I explained to Amber one day, “I want any outside observer, such as Dean Myles, to see that I didn’t cut any of you ANY slack in grading your work. In fact, I’d want him to be questioning why I didn’t give you higher grades than what you got.”

Amber posed anxiously, “Does that mean that none of us can get an ‘A’?”

I kissed her forehead, “No, it means that if you get an ‘A’ on an assignment that you really earned at ‘A+’, and if you get an ‘A+’ you really deserved national recognition for perfection.”

Friday night, each of the family women in the class made it a point to try to fuck my brains out. We were all overcompensating in one direction or another. I must say, it was a great evening.

Monday, my third classes for undergrad and grad, I discovered that I might have a problem. A very pretty young woman who I leaned had the name Sky sat in the front row, adjusted her short skirt, and flashed me for most of the undergrad class. I had no doubt that it was intentional because she often smiled and even drew my gaze into her eyes and then down, so I’d have to look at what she was indicating – a hot and damp female pussy. I tried to ignore the blatant sexual message she was sending but I did feel some response below my waistline.

Sky came up to the desk after class after I was gathering up my laptop and other teaching materials. She just stood and smiled at me in a warm way. Amber and Tracy came up, too. They obviously knew Sky, probably from other classes because they addressed her by name. Like them, she was sophomore taking the class with special permission.

I looked at Sky and raised my face and eyebrows, as though to invite a question or comment, if she had one. She then figuratively hit me across the forehead with a two-by-four. She said, “We fucked last year or maybe longer ago. I really liked it and would like to do it again with you.”

I had been voluble and loquacious for over ninety minutes as I taught. Sky had left me speechless. I looked at her and tried to remember some situation where I might have had sex with the really attractive and diminutive blonde. My memory was in lockdown. Nothing came to mind; well, except the memory of seeing her flashing pussy a few moments earlier.

Sky put her hand on my arm. “It’s okay that you don’t remember. I don’t mind. We were all kind of loopy anyway. Like Amber and Tracy, I belong to Kappa Delta Alpha sorority. You were at a toga party and a lot of us at the party had rather free-wheeling sex with other people. I was one of the people you tapped that night, or I tapped you. Either way, we both seduced each other and fucked for a while. You were memorable.”

I nodded slowly. “I remember the party at the Phi Theta Rho fraternity house – the only time I’ve ever chaperoned. I probably wasn’t a very good one since I got involved in the party activities perhaps more than I should have.”

Sky laughed, “Oh, no. You were perfect.” She paused and went on, “Anyway, keep my request in mind. I really would like to be with you again. You have been one of my best lovers – maybe the best. More than that, I have a growing crush on you.”

She turned and strolled away and out the door of the classroom. Amber said, “You should nail her and maybe even bring her into the Extended Family. She’d be fun to have around, and she’s a bigger slut than the rest of us put together.” She laughed and then she left for her other classes, too.

I had always liked the idea of a friendly and close relationship between teachers and students. Thus, I thought of ways to socialize with my students. The third week of class the weather forecast was sterling, so in each class and in my seminar, I invited all my students to come out to the house on Saturday afternoon to swim and hangout. I emphasized that it was BYOB, but that I’d provide snacks and soft drinks. I intentionally made it sound like this was the first of many times I’d make the offer. I also made sure they knew that this wasn’t a command performance.

Saturday, the temperatures were in the high eighties and the sun was bright and intense. Beside the eight members of the Extended Family taking my class, ten other students showed up – two guys and eight women. Sky was one of the student women, of course.

Sky glued herself to my side, in fact. I mostly hung out at a table in the shade on the patio, making myself available to the various students that had attended. Chris and Robyn were over and also enjoyed talking to the students. I made sure that those in attendance knew that Chris was one of my editors and worked for the company that brought my books to market. I resolved to have her come and help me at a class or two.

While the women in the house knew about the afternoon gathering and had dressed conservatively, especially in their bathing suits, Mel didn’t. She came waltzing out of the house about three p.m. wearing only her monokini. She made a beeline for me, planted a knock-your-socks-off kiss on my lips with lots of tongue, and then said aloud, “Oh, I didn’t realize that there were ‘muggles’ around today.”

Muggles was a word borrowed from the Harry Potter books. In our case, it referred to people not in the Extended Family and not necessarily sexually liberated.

Mel shrugged. I tried to pass off her exposure to the others at the table with me, by saying that usually we were very ‘European’ around the pool on warm days. Mel shrugged and then went swimming. Meanwhile, Mark and another male classmate named Cory were drooling over Mel’s fabulous breasts. She was young, pert, stacked, and had just the right amount of sag and jiggle to make a dead man rise to the occasion. The Family men, such as Caleb and Warren, tried to act suave and disinterested, although all of them had nailed Mel at one of our evening gatherings at one time or another.

After my European explanation, Sky asked whether she could get more of an ‘all-over’ tan. Not thinking too far ahead, I shrugged and said, “Sure.” Her bikini bra disappeared in seconds, leaving me staring at another set of perky, hot, fuckable, suckable young tits. I also tried to act suave and disinterested, in this case in Sky, probably unsuccessfully since I also got a chubby in my athletic shorts. I remained seated

Sky’s ‘reveal’ made me assess her a little more carefully overall, too. She was a sexy, zaftig blonde, maybe five-foot-two, and tightly packed. She had more energy than a nuclear powerplant, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had been a cheerleader all the way through her junior high and high school in Tennessee. Moreover, she had a beautiful face that you could stare at for hours and never tire.