From Joan Uda at the Helena Independent

I LOVED this remembrance. Hank Nuwer

At the Water’s Edge
By Joan Uda - 05/19/07
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut died last month aged 84. In the mid-60s, I was his student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I spent two years studying with Kurt, and regarded him as my friend as well as my teacher. He said nice things about my writing. I thought he was wonderful.

Kurt was a writer, not a critic, and he was all about writing and publishing what you wrote. He ran his classes with little formal criticism. I recall him holding up a James Joyce story one day and saying, “This is so great, so perfect, all you can really do is look at it and admire.”

Kurt urged young writers to forget artsy pretensions and write to earn a living. “Some guys call me a crass commercialist,” he’d say, “but nobody writes to stuff it in a trunk.”

I have quite a few Vonnegut stories, such as the time he and his wife came to dinner and I worked for days on the dinner.

Then there was the time I had an appointment with Kurt, and the temperature dropped to 30 below. My car wouldn’t start. I called and he offered to pick me up. His car was running, he said, because he had a new battery. He brought the old one inside and stuck it in the oven to warm it up. “Would you believe?” he said. “It just fell apart.”

Kurt tried to help me by sending my novel to a contest, which I didn’t win. He put me in touch with a man in New York City looking for a writer for a long-running soap.

I corresponded with this man for weeks, but he eventually — and correctly — decided that I was more concerned with social issues than with writing for his show.

My favorite Vonnegut novel was Mother Night (1961). I liked it because it was so dark. I was young, and dark appealed. The author’s foreword contained my favorite Vonnegut quote.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

I spent years thinking about that, and concluded that it is, in Kurt’s quirky way, true. It convinced me that I could become who I wanted to be by pretending to be that person.

It loosely parallels an experience of John Wesley, founder of Methodism. When he was a young Anglican priest, Wesley confided in a friend that his faith was weak, that he was not “a convicted believer.”

The friend said Wesley should keep practicing his spiritual disciplines until his faith caught up with him. That’s always worked for me too.

Kurt was not overtly a religious man. When I knew him, I wasn’t religious either, at least not on the surface.

But Kurt was all about kindness. His one “sermon” was that we must be kind to each other. “It’s what we have,” he’d say.

I agree. Kurt is an important influence in my spiritual formation. I owe him. Thanks, Mr. Vonnegut, and goodbye.

Joan Uda is a retired United Methodist minister who lives in Helena. Her email address is joanuda@yahoo.com.