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It was Friday afternoon.  No papers to grade.  No homework to collect.  No faculty meetings to attend.  I was forty-five minutes away from the weekend.  The kids and grand kids would be over Sunday to watch the Steelers game on television but Barbara and I were going to get out of Pittsburgh that night and spend a romantic overnight vacation at this little resort hotel we had found in West Virginia.  I was straightening up my desk.  There was a knock on my office door.

“Come in.”

“Professor Hamilton?”

“Come in, Lisa.  Come in.”

“I don’t have an appointment.”

“I was just shuffling papers.  Sit down.”

She sat down.  “I’m thinking about applying to graduate school.”

“All right.”

“I’m thinking about getting an MFA in fiction writing.”

“You certainly have the grades.  I’ll be happy to write you a letter of recommendation.”

She said, “But is that practical?”

“Going to graduate school?”

“Thinking I can make a living as a writer.  Thinking I can live off of writing short stories or novels.”

“Yes, yes I see your point.”  She had talent.  Real talent.  And more importantly she had discipline and a need to write.  She was my best student.  I gave it to her straight.  “No one makes a living writing novels or short stories.  Especially flash fiction.  The writers you read or hear about who sign contracts for big money are the exception to the rule.  99.9% of all professional writers make money teaching or tutoring or have some other source of income.  If my wife didn’t work and if I didn’t teach our family would have starved to death a long time ago.”

“I have all your novels.  I love them.  You’re such a wonderful writer.”

“Well, thank you, Lisa.  Thank you very much.”

“You really pay a price,” she said.  “Don’t you?”

“You pay a price for anything you want badly enough.”

“Okay.  Thank you, Professor Hamilton.”  She got up to leave.

I said, “You want me to start putting together that letter of recommendation for you?  A recommendation from me would carry a lot of weight.  Especially here at Pitt.”

“I don’t know what I want to do.  I don’t know if I want to go to graduate school.”

“Well, you let me know.”

After she left I sat looking out my window over the campus and the city of Pittsburgh.  I’d been teaching at the University of Pittsburgh for eight years and knew Lisa was the kind of student the university wanted in its MFA fiction writing program.  I stayed in my office an extra hour and put together a strong letter of recommendation for her just in case.