Dear Professor Snodgrass
Another version of the preface to my novel-in-progress "Hunter Saint"
Hunter Saint is a novel project I’ve been working on since May. I’ve framed it a couple of different ways thus far. Initially, Hunter sends the journal he kept at Camp Woodward, a small Baptist camp in Oklahoma, to his boss, Jenni, but I felt like that was a bit weird and probably unrealistic. In this version, Saint writes a “documentary” of his final summer as a staffer at Camp Woodward as a way of making up for a creative writing assignment from his last semester of college. Below is the email Hunter sends to his professor prefacing the narrative.
September 1st, 2017, 11:19 A.M.
Dear Professor Snodgrass,
Again, thank you for agreeing to take my creative writing project at the end of the summer, after my several lame attempts to generate something this spring. You were asking for a “documentary view” of a memorable experience I’ve had, and while maybe it was a bit presumptuous to assume the most memorable experience was yet to come, I’m glad you gave me the three months of wiggle room. Because it turns out I was right.
You said at the beginning of the spring semester that storytelling was about getting into someone else’s shoes, trying out the world from their point of view, and seeing how it fares with your own. You additionally said it was your hope for the class that we’d learn that kind of imaginative skillset by the end of the semester.
On a theoretical level, I’d like to say I learned to imagine life from the eyes of another human being, and could tell you, like I just did, that the best stories help us do just that. But maybe there was further purpose in delaying my final project, because I can safely say that before this summer I have never really been challenged to walk a mile in another dude’s boots. Maybe I thought it was supposed to be easy—this shift in viewpoint. Or that getting inside another person’s mind wouldn’t entail radically deconstructing my own mental maps of reality. That sounds intense. Mainly I want to say that this summer was a beautiful challenge—not just for me but for everyone at Camp Woodward.
As you’ll see in the following pages within my summer documentary of Camp Woodward, where I’ve worked every summer for the past four summers, I had a chance to get clubbed over the head with the fact that I’m an imagination novice, that while I learned a lot at Winston’s College and am proud of my Bachelor’s in the Biological Sciences, I still got a long way to go in the journey. You mentioned in class that you’re agnostic on the question of God, Professor Snodgrass, and I respect that. You might be surprised to learn that this summer showed me that I was a staunch atheist when push came to shove. At least in practice. And that’s where I sort of stumbled upon the God personage—the Person on the other side of the river.
Maybe by the time you reach the end, you’ll sort of get what I mean.
All the best,
Hunter Saint
