Lucia Berlin

I MET Lucia Berlin when I was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She was a generous teacher and a brilliant writer who, at sixty-one, had not yet received the acclaim she deserved. Her fiction workshop was held in the dilapidated English building in an obscure classroom whose door was hidden in a stairwell. I walked in and sat among a dozen or so other students at high school–style desks arranged in a circle. Lucia had long brown hair, bright blue eyes, an oxygen tank that was by her side wherever she went, and a back curved with scoliosis so severe a rib once punctured her lung. She was so far from famous that an internet search of her name yielded next to nothing. When I applied to the program, I read one of the only stories of hers I could find, linked from her bio on the university’s website, and knew I wanted to learn from her.

When I was that age, what I wanted more than anything was a mentor. It seemed like all the great writers had one: Richard Wright helped Ralph Ellison get a writing job. Gustave Flaubert introduced Guy de Maupassant to his famous writer buddies. Sarah Orne Jewett advised Willa