It was my first semester of college at a small state university for people who didn’t get into their top choice. I wasn’t particularly interested in school, but I was even less interested in making a career for myself as a bagger down at the local Walmart. At least until I met the woman who would be my creative-writing professor. She made being a Walmart bagger seem like a fine option.
My teacher, who I’ll call Sandy, wore too-big sweaters, dowdy leather clogs, and no makeup. She looked, most mornings, like she’d picked out her outfit from a pile on her floor. Worse, she usually had a Jeanette Winterson paperback tucked under one arm. She was the first openly gay woman I’d ever met. It may seem unbelievable that I could reach legal adulthood never having met a lesbian, but I’d grown up in a town with a population of less than 3,000 just over the hill from where Deliverance was filmed. Most of the women in my holler would never admit to an attraction to anyone outside their husbands, except maybe for Jesus and Dale Earnhardt.
