Gone, But Not Forgotten

As I mentioned in my last post, my freshman year in college started off by having to take fundamental courses that I was not overly enthused about.

The dreaded English 101 was at the top of my "uninterested" list.

To my surprise, Professor Mitchell was a different kind of English teacher that I had not encountered in the past. She wasn't focused on grammar, sentence structure, and the other building blocks of English, but was geared more toward creativity. She was all about writing stories, and testing our ability to tell a good story through writing, whether it be fiction or nonfiction.

I received high marks for my off-color humor and graphic detail in the stories I wrote. She never mentioned all of the misspelled words or incomplete sentences. It was all about good storytelling.

She wrote a note on my final exam (for which I got an "A"), that said, Continue writing. You're good at it.


Emeritus Grace Clayton Mitchell passed away in 2006. Although, I never saw her again after that Spring in 1972, her encouraging words remained in the back of my mind until I started my first novel, almost thirty years later.