I thought the story of "Fester" made an interesting contrast with a
case last year in San Francisco.

These are fearful times, especially with the news media beaming "fear ... fear ... fear ..." at us 24/7. If you can imagine bad things, you must be bad.

A lot of student writing is simply expressive -- that is, the student uses writing as a way of making sense of emotions that he or she is already feeling. Some students who won't revise a poem they wrote because they no longer feel the emotions that prompted the poem, or feel that making changes after the emotions have passed is somehow doing a disservice to the poem. It reminds me of Shakespeare in Love, which presents The Bard of Avon's creativity as a victim of whatever passion he happened to be feeling at the time.

I've always felt that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is a better source of creativity than "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," but then I'm not a Romantic.

Your essay got me thinking about some boundary-transgressions that go on in my own class. I moved that stuff to my own blog:

jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=3445

Jim's post reminded me, too, of the "Julius T." case, where a student wrote a "scary poem" after Columbine, that got him in serious trouble.

http://www.aclunc.org/aclunews/news0408/poem.html

I will have to sheepishly raise my hand. I was one of the grad students who read the sexually explicit scene for my thesis defense. I debated reading that scene, and didn't really know I was going to read it until the night before (when all of my fellow students begged me to read that section). Part of my motives may have been to shock, but I can honestly say that it wasn't just to shock Mike. (After-all, he had already read it.) I think part of it might have been to share that section with the "public." Perhaps exactly because it might be edited out when it goes to press. It ended up being a memorable reading that everyone remembered. Many of those people expressed an interest in reading the book as soon as it gets published. I guess that scene is kind of the filter. If you are still interested in the book after that scene, you will probably like the book. If that scene upset you, you probably would have hated the book.
I did cut out some scenes that were more gruesome and explict, but that didn't do much to advance the plot. I realized that those parts were just in there for shock. I looked at it like a movie love scene. If I could remove the scene and leave little effect on the story, then it didn't belong there to begin with. With the scene I left in, that gruesome act marks the intense turning point from which there is no going back. I also felt it was a technically difficult chapter as the POV had to shift from the human brain, to the wolf's (with an aside from the victim's POV). Getting the wolf's POV right was something I really wanted to with my novel. I would have made sure that at least one scene I read had the wolf-POV.
I am an unabashed fan of many of the splatterpunks of the 80's and 90's, but only if they are well written. I'm not a gorehound who loves anything, as long as there is blood and sex. I want to bring the level of excellence I see in literary novels into the world of horror. Dostevsky has brutal murder and/or rape scenes (ok, might be a bad example as he was sent to Siberia for his writing). My intent was to make the section horrible, but a horrible that you could not help but read through. Kind of like the rubber-necking at a car-wreck.

Thanks for reading the article and posting, Aaron! I still remember the scene you read quite vividly. Good, memorable stuff.

As a teacher and horror writer yourself, I bet you can imagine the predicament it puts the instructor in. Maybe not so much in grad school -- which is a pretty safe place for adult material -- but in other grade levels. Has a student ever turned in a paper that raised your eyebrows?

Yes, my students also know that I'm a horror writer, so some of them try to scare me. Just this last week I had my students tell campfire stories. One student tried to tell a story that would scare me. It involved me being violently sodomized (told, of course, in explicit detail). He tries to get a rise out of all of the teachers, so I didn't let it bother me. In situations like that, it is sometimes good to let the class tell him it was inappropriate. Part of it was to get approval from his peers and he found out that he went too far in their eyes. After that there wasn't too much I had to say, and he came up and apologized after we were done.
I myself am very careful about what I read in my classroom. I know their are parents who think I am an evil person who is going to hell for what I write. I always have to be able to argue for any story I have them read, any topic I have them write about, or anything I read to to them. This is a little funny as the person teaching before me had them read The Red Tent, and was going to have them read Lolita the semester that I ended up taking over.

i would like to screw 1 of my teachers(.)(.)