Writer, Professor and Pen Pal: Josefine Kals Remembers Stephen Dixon

I was a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars undergraduate program when I first encountered Stephen Dixon. Some details I recall from his small and intimate class in the basement of Gilman Hall were his ink-stained pants pockets, and how he paced around the classroom teaching us about fiction writing in his soporific voice. In his kind and understated manner, he quietly urged us to find the poignancy in the everyday.

Later that year, I stood in line for a signed copy of his new book—End of I, published by McSweeney’s—at the Barnes & Noble that had recently opened in the newly built dorm across the street from the campus’s main entrance. I reminded him of my name so he could personalize my book (I hadn’t made such an impression on him as his student). A year or so later, Professor Dixon retired from his nearly 30 year teaching tenure at JHU.

Soon after that, teary-eyed and panicked, a second semester senior on the brink of graduation, I barged into the office of my poetry professor, Mary Jo Salter, begging her to tell me what to do with a degree in what my pre-med friends affectionately dubbed “pre-unemployment”. She said: “Find a publishing house.” I’m pretty sure I responded with: “What’s that?” Miraculously, a year after graduation I managed to eke my way into a publicity assistant cubicle at the Knopf Doubleday group of Random House (now Penguin Random House). Some years later, almost just as astonishingly, Stephen Dixon and I became pen pals.

I don’t remember how it started—I think I may have asked another of my JHU professors for his email address so I could tell him how much his work and that class had always meant to me—but, for years, we were in regular email touch about life, work, and his writing, which continued to pour out of him until the very end. Stephen Dixon’s prose is as ordinary and intimate as reading someone’s shopping list. To me, that’s the beauty in it.

Professor Dixon’s emails were just like his fiction writing—intimate and full of quotidian details. He referred to himself as “a fussbudget worrywart,” he gleefully told me that his grandson’s sonogram photo looked “like a bust carved from marble by Michelangelo,” and he signed off messages with sentences like this: “The plumber just arrived so I’ve got to go.” And every few months, a bursting FedEx envelope from Baltimore would appear at my desk at PRH containing Professor Dixon’s typewritten chunks of new and unpublished writing. While I told him that, as a lowly publicist, I wasn’t in the position to make decisions about what gets published, he still seemed happy enough to share his new work with me, which was an honor.

I once heard someone say that if Elizabeth Strout wrote a shopping list she would buy it; I, a rabid Strout fan, have shamelessly stolen that line whenever I talk about my favorite authors. In many ways, Stephen Dixon’s prose is as ordinary and intimate as reading someone’s shopping list. His stream of consciousness spotlights, as if something exquisite and worthy of attention, every minor detail in a human’s life, from the simple pleasure of having dinner at a favorite local restaurant, to the pangs of caring for an ailing loved one, the constant fear of being a parent, and life’s sudden interruptions.