In 1989, Ted Turner created the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award
for a “fiction work offering creative and positive solutions to global
problems.” The winner was to be offered a $500,000 advance and publishing
contract. I immediately began work on my entry, entitled The Ginkgo, with the full intent of winning that competition. To
make a long story short, I didn’t win, or even finish my book, before Daniel
Quinn claimed the prize with Ishmael,
a novel he’d been working on for at least ten years. But I eventually finished,
then rewrote several times, The Ginkgo,
a story about a college student from a ranch in western Nebraska who comes to
the university and ends up writing four essays about a single ginkgo tree.
This student had to be a female, in fact a very intelligent and
rather secular one, for a whole variety of purely narrative reasons. In my
mind, this book is a visionary coming-of-age story about the burden of
traditions, the powerful lifetime influence of a liberal education, and the
human condition. I envisioned it being the next Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, at least commercially
and in terms of becoming a cult piece. My literary agent, however, called it
“an evocative book about ideas, exactly the kind of thing the American
book-buying public is becoming increasingly impatient with” and promptly
declined to handle it. Similar opinions were evidently held by the next
forty-two publishers who rejected it. All that backstory aside, The Ginkgo, subtitled An Intellectual and Visionary Coming-of-Age,
remains my best work, ever, and in my highly biased opinion, the most
important; it’s also now available on Amazon.com and Kindle.com.
In The Ginkgo, this coed
comes to the university, is asked to write four papers about a single plant, a
typical activity for my large freshman classes, indeed an exercise that we have
done for years, although the specific assignments differ from year to year. As
a result of her performance, she is selected by her prof as penance for all his
past sins, namely, all those cases in which he’s allowed, or even helped, a
truly brilliant young person become a physician or other health care
professional with a real job, instead of becoming a poet or philosopher who
could, and would, be the intellectual leader our nation so severely needs. You
can see immediately where the “creative and positive solutions to global
problems” part comes in; if there is anything this nation needs in the Third
Millennium, it is ideas, especially good ones.
To quote from the prologue to The
Ginkgo, which I re-wrote after my agent declined it: “What happens to
nations that get increasingly impatient with evocative books about ideas? Why
can’t I get that phrase out of my mind? I walk down town. The sidewalks are
filled with normal, everyday, people—lawyers, housewives, businessmen and
businesswomen, panhandlers, college kids, and nondescripts. Are they all impatient with evocative books about
ideas? What are they not impatient with? Murder, narcotics, war? Or are they
not impatient with money, politics, agriculture, health, the military, sex,
sports, or religion, the very subjects she was not allowed to write about
throughout the year she went exploring a tree, a museum, a sculpture garden, an
art gallery? Is it indeed possible that this society has degenerated into one
so impatient with ideas that it will neither read nor buy an evocative book
about them? I don’t believe this is the case. I believe my fellow citizens are
vitally interested in ideas. Why else would they flock, in droves, to churches?
Why else would they gravitate to certain politicians? Why else would they be so
quick to categorize then dehumanize their fellow humans? Believe me, we are
very interested in ideas; they are the hands that guide our acts, all of them,
both good and evil.”
In many ways, The Ginkgo
is symbolic of my teaching experience at UNL, and especially the emotional
impact of spending all those years at the Cedar Point Biological Station in
Keith County. Karen and I watched our children grow up out there; we came to be
in awe of the subtle beauty, especially the early morning and late afternoon
landscape colors, the sounds and smells, and the generous landowners whose
property my students used regularly; and, we eventually developed an idyllic view
of the Sandhills. This view developed, of course, because we were intellectual
visitors, not residents who had to make a living from the arid high plains. The
romance of western Nebraska is thus a luxury; all of our friends out there work
extremely hard, and most of the time this work is outright physical labor,
always with the chance of injury or devastating weather, and rarely with any
escape except for that hour in church on Sunday mornings.
Much of The Ginkgo takes
place in the Sandhills, on a couple of ranches, but the book really is about
teaching, mentoring in its most challenging, yet rewarding, way. Naturally,
because the Cedar Point instructional program has offered a lifetime’s
challenge and reward, the western Nebraska landscape and culture had to be
essential elements of this story. Just as naturally, by hanging around writers
and artists, often because of Karen’s job, it never seemed unusual for a
scientist to try his hand at fiction. Artists express themselves, in the
process making their statements about the world whether they intend to do so or
not, using whatever media seems appropriate. When a scientist believes he has
something to say, something important, about the business of education, then he
or she should also feel free to use any media to make such a statement. With a
little luck, the product is an evocative book about ideas.
In the excerpt that follows, the prof has gone to western Nebraska
in search of ideas, but in this case, the ideas are ones specifically designed
to frame the assignments this student will be asked to pursue. Thus a teacher
goes exploring into a student’s cultural background in order to come up with
the perfect teaching devices. We profs do, or at least should do, this kind of
exploration every day. What we don’t do regularly is drive a thousand miles for
the sole purpose of spending time in the landscape and society where our
students grow up simply so we can come up with the right test questions; such
thousand-mile trips happen only in fiction.
Other characters mentioned in “The Horse” are members of the
Johannes and Spindler clans. Carl Johannes owns a massive amount of land; he
and his wife have produced a number of beautiful and intelligent daughters, but
no sons. Dalton Spindler owns a much smaller ranch, but he and his wife have
four sons, ranging from the hard-working and responsible Terry to the
neer-do-well Gerry. Carl Johannes has his eyes not only on Spindler property,
but also on the ranch where The Ginkgo
coed grew up before she came to the university. You can see immediately where
this story is heading. The Johannes girls are all barrel racers with
magnificent horses from their father’s ranch; at least two of them have already
captured their Spindler boys.
It will help in understanding one sentence in “The Horse” if you
know that in the previous chapter the student—the main character in this
book—has intercepted the prof on his way into a large lecture section of
General Biology and demanded that he lecture about reproduction instead of the
scheduled topic because another student in her dorm has tried to commit suicide
by cutting her wrists as a result of an unwanted pregnancy. The Ginkgo deals, obviously, at least in
part, with some of our nation’s truly divisive hot-button issues. Now join me
in a Sandhills pasture for a conversation with a horse.
