Remembering a Trinity Professor’s Passion For Fiction

A month ago, while doing the New York Times’ Spelling Bee, I enjoyed a moment of satisfaction keying in “denouement,” good for 10 points. I screengrabbed it with the intention of sending the image to the person who introduced me to the word.

Among the many wonderful teachers I had over the years, Dr. Coleen Grissom was a legend at Trinity University, serving there from 1958 to 2019. While the gravitational center of her legacy resides on campus, the breadth of her influence extends wide: branches that sprout offshoots that sprout greenery. 

Her class on 20th century fiction was transformative for me. For better and perhaps worse, it is the reason I do what I do. On the first day of class, she presented a clutch of words with which she hoped we’d become familiar. I remember “verisimilitude” on the list. And I remember “denouement.”

I had, by senior year at Trinity, spent ample time with the canon, a byproduct of being an English major. I feel like we should all enroll in literature classes again at age 50 to appreciate better the works we partially understood decades earlier. But Grissom’s syllabus wasn’t concerned with the past. It was a field in bloom. I wish I could remember all the titles, but a few: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Her class was neither a revision of the canon nor a condemnation of it. It simply asked if there might be benefits in a broader guest list, the sort of approach that could kindle a creative restlessness in her young charges.

More than advocating for a particular title, Grissom encouraged reverence for the discussion of these works. The environment she established made the works feel not like requisite reading, but they felt nevertheless like required reading simply because her manner invited buy-in from us. I struggle to name any one cultural thing I’ve felt such reverence for as each hour spent in her class.

When I returned to Texas 20 years ago, I thought I’d see more of her, but sometimes the three hours between Houston and San Antonio feels like 30. But because the San Antonio Express-News is a sibling publication to the Houston Chronicle, I’d have the occasional story run there. To hear from her about something I’d typed was a singular validation.

At some point during my four years at Trinity, there was a student art exhibition that made a collage out of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and some printed pornography. I don’t know how I recall the title, but it was “Tawdry Shells and Cheese.” The curation of memories is a curious puzzle not easily solved.

Upon graduation, I gave her a copy of Sendak’s book, devoid of penises. “Tart,” she said. “And warmly appreciated.”

She referenced the book before I moved to New York, telling me, “Your supper waits for you there.”

I wish I had a better denouement here. One in which I sent off that Spelling Bee screengrab instead of just meaning to do so. So, instead, I’ll offer up a quote that Roger, a teacher friend, commented on a social media post I made about Dr. Grissom. The quote is from John Steinbeck:

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist, and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”