Patricia Hampl
Class of ’68 (English)
In 1964, when I started as a freshman in CLA, the drive from our bungalow in St. Paul to the East Bank campus took my brother and me along Summit Avenue’s cathedral vault of old elm trees to the great sash of the River Road that unfurled itself all the way to the University. Deep below in its gorge, the Mississippi glittered toward the still-humble skyline of downtown Minneapolis that presented itself as an improbable silver mirage. There was no freeway yet, just this leafy translation from St. Paul’s little streets to—well, where did I think we were going every morning? Certainly not just to Minneapolis.
From the first moment, the University for me was crammed with possibility, as resonant and messy as my entirely invented but absolutely thrilling idea of New York. Everyone had warned me that you could get lost there, that the campus was unfriendly and impersonal and pushy, and there was nowhere to eat your lunch. This sounded terrific: I wanted to get lost in something big. I was glad CLA, my college, was the biggest college of them all. I was after the big city, the big time, the big chance to be serious about life and work.
The University did not fail me. It became, and in some way has remained, my Manhattan, the magical city of endeavor and possibility, a parallel universe that is not imaginary but where the imagination has property rights. I started as a music major, but before I finally graduated in English, I managed to tool my way through more CLA majors than is probably legal. (Besides anthropology and political science, there was a stint in Russian history, and how could I forget that passionate commitment—for one term—to French before my fickle heart switched—again for a single term—to German.) It was the world I was plowing through, of course, and the college gladly presented it to me, as only great cities in all their variety can do.
I also worked on the student paper, and one day in Coffman Union I watched with a kind of awe as an English professor I knew of (but who did not know me) ate an apple while he read a piece with my byline on it: my first reader. Such moments do not fade. They accumulate and form what finally becomes an education. And an identity: I’m a writer, I thought, as I watched the English professor munching and reading. I suppose at that moment I became myself—which is to say someone I’d never known before but have been trying to be ever since. I became my education.
Hampl is a Regents Professor of English and acclaimed author of many books, poems, and stories—including the memoirs I Could Tell You Stories, a finalist for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Romantic Education, a New York Times Notable Book. Her awards include fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations, and the Pushcart Prize. Her most recent work, The Florist’s Daughter, will be published by Harcourt in 2007. Besides her U of M degree, she has an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.
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