Few words about Ben Rybeck.
Your Mom still there?
Ben Rybeck was in two of my graduate classes,
a fiction workshop and a screenwriting class.
I was also his manuscript advisor.
He was a great student, smart and hungry,
rebellious and challenging in all the right ways,
and always hardworking.
In the fiction workshop he wrote edgy high-octane stories
that took huge risks, had some spectacular writing,
and didn't always come together.
He was a passionate, committed reader of his classmates' work.
He wrote perceptive comments on their stories
and gave them heartfelt criticism in class.
He worked all the time.
He read widely.
He was the same way in the screenwriting class, which he
took in a different semester.
For his MFA manuscript he wrote 150 pages from a point of view
of a young François Truffaut.
Parts of it were brilliant.
Though he'd already exceeded the requirement,
he decided what he had written was not good enough
and started something new.
This new piece was astonishingly good.
In it, I saw that he had brought together
everything he had learned about narrative, rhythm, pace,
texture, situation, and scene from the fiction
and screenwriting classes, and made a quantum leap
in which he wrote the first 100 pages of a poised, risky novel.
It was like watching a gymnast who
had synthesized separate pieces of a routine into something
whole, and fluid, and transcendent, and greater
than the sum of its parts.
It showed that he'd already learned more about narrative,
and learned it better than many writers ever do,
and that he'd made it his own.
I'll tell a story, and hope I'm not being too personal.
He was a cigarette smoker.
Sometime after a mutual friend of ours, another teacher,
had died of lung cancer, he too had been a heavy smoker.
I gently chided Ben during a class break
to give up cigarettes.
The next time I saw him, I noticed his pallor had changed.
He looked much better.
He confirmed that he'd stopped.
Later he emailed me that he'd had a couple of relapses
when he'd gone out for a drink.
So he stopped drinking.
Now he told me he just got up very early in the morning
and wrote until the middle of the day.
Passion, energy, talent, and commitment driven by will.
His reading here tonight from his first published novel
incarnates the values of an authentic ending.
The realization of the elements of the story,
so that they earn their meaning, are
inevitable and yet a surprise.
Except that, in my case, this ending is not a surprise.
It is exactly what I expected.