In the winter of 1992, I carried a manuscript up the steps of the creative writing house at 68½ Brown Street in Providence, Rhode Island. I was only a sophomore, but I was going for it. I wandered the creaky house until I found the cardboard box placed outside his office door, a handwritten sign taped to the wall above it: “Submissions for Edmund White’s Advanced Fiction seminar.”
I peered inside the box at a fat stack of manuscripts. Admission to upper-level creative writing classes at Brown was a blood sport. There were regularly dozens of submissions for twelve spots, assigned at the whims of the instructor. I lifted the top of the pile and slid my writing sample in the middle to conceal the shameless note I’d scrawled at the top: “I am recently out of the closet and desperately need guidance from a gay mentor.” Edmund White, I’d heard, was a famous gay writer, and I didn’t assume he would be interested in mentoring a straight-looking bisexual girl with private school hang-ups, but it seemed worth a shot.