My Fictional Nightmare Came True
(Murder at Michigan State University)
Right after the horrendous mass shooting at Michigan State University, I got contacted by friends from as far away as Germany asking if I was okay and saying I must be shocked.
I was okay, safe at home while the gunman was on his rampage, but I wasn't shocked. I had been dreading a campus shooting at MSU for years now and wrote about one in a novel that was a Midwest Book Award finalist: Assault With a Deadly Lie.
I'm an MSU alum, did my PhD there and have taught at State various times for over a decade. I had season tickets for the football team for a while, did plenty of "Go Green! Go White!" shouting and even went to the Rose Bowl to see our team beat USC. As a student, a senior graduate teaching assistant, then an assistant professor, I was in and out of the two buildings that were crime scenes probably hundreds of times.
I left teaching to pursue a career as a full-time author and reviewer and that career eventually got me invited back to teach in the English Department. Why? I'd published more books than the entire creative writing faculty put together--and of course more than any single faculty member. That's what the chairman of the department told me, and I assumed he was right.
I loved being in the classroom, the thrill of imparting knowledge, helping students write better and read more carefully, and the joy of unexpected laughter and community. One four-hour class was so instantly companionable that everyone exchanged email addresses at the end of the first class and chipped in to get a coffee maker and coffee for the mid-class break every week. I volunteered to bring the cookies.
I taught Jewish-American literature, creative writing, and crime fiction. All my classes were filled with enthusiastic, smart, funny students with their lives ahead of them. But news of school shootings around the country always made me think of whatever class I was teaching at the moment—and how they might be traumatized, wounded or killed. I knew the run-hide-fight protocols well because I read the DHS and police websites, and anything else that could help prepare me for disaster.
I was always aware of the closest exit and knew that if we couldn't get out of the classroom, the heavy table that was at the front of every room could be stood on end to attempt blocking the doorway. But I worried about whether that would be effective and also worried how quickly students could get out of the uncomfortable chair desks if we had to escape. . .
This undercurrent of wariness led me to investigate owning a gun, to take a gun safety class and go to two firing ranges. I even went gun shopping,though I ended up not feeling ready for the responsibility of owning one, and more than that, the chance that I might have to shoot a real person rather than a target.
All of that went into my suspense novel which ends with a grotesque mass shooting at a fictional university like MSU. Unlike me, my hero did have a gun and defended himself and others when there was no other choice. I think I wrote the book in part to exorcise the idea of a shooter on campus, but as the years passed and gun violence at universities went on and on, I kept thinking "MSU is next." And hoping I was wrong.
When I was teaching at Triton College, one morning a student came in wearing a red Northern Illinois University sweatshirt and dark glasses. The day before a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall, killing five and then shooting himself. I said “are you in camaraderie?” She said “I lost two friends yesterday.” She was shaking. I took her into the hallway and she collapsed in my arms, sobbing in sheer agony. Holding onto a 19-year-old who’s friends were murdered is something I’ll never forget--and hope I never have to do again. I don’t know what happened to her all these years later, but I always think of her with each recurring one of these things. I was close to finishing my book on the Bath School bombing at the time. This young woman showed me the face of 1927 Bath. I told her that she now had a duty, just as the survivors of the Bath killing. Remember and bear witness. Tell the stories of her murdered friends. I seem to be rambling here, but writing about mass murder always reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s ending of Slaughterhouse-5: Poo-tee-weet.
I left teaching long before the commencement of school shootings. Now I watch in horror and dismay lines of school children linked hand-in-hand as they are escorted from a crime scene, people who had only gone out to buy a loaf of bread at a local supermarket standing frightened and/or mourning , movie-goers cowering at mall entrances wondering if the next time they go to see a film, it will be their last. They do not know. They do not understand. They try. But many cannot any longer.