In a crisis, words are crucial

Last week, poetry and prose were sources of healing at Virginia Tech. Nikki Giovanni, Lucinda Roy, Edward Falco – these writers in the school’s creative writing program brought a healthy dose of reality (and comfort) to endless numbing hours of TV babble and cliche. The shooter was an English major who took writing classes. That brought the media stampede to the gates of the Ivory Tower. Instead of finding a gaggle of monk-like scribes hunched over their writing tables (or PCs), we saw a feisty group of real people who care deeply about their students, their school, their world.

Nikki Giovanni read poetry at the campus convocation following the shootings. Her We are Virginia Tech was a rousing anthem of a poem, one that drew equal doses of tears and cheers. I saw her interviewed on TV several times. A gracious, beautiful, tough human being. She had been disturbed by Mr. Cho’s attitude and his writing. She had complained to the administration, finally demanding that either Mr. Cho goes or she goes.

I also saw Paula Zahn of CNN interview Lucinda Roy. Cho’s writing had disturbed her so much that she reported him to the administration. Zahn asked Roy if the university did enough to address Cho’s problems. Roy said she wasn’t interested in causing more pain at Va. Tech by assigning blame. Zahn told Roy that she didn’t answer her question. Roy told her, very graciously, to go ask someone who wasn’t grieving so much. In other words: Go jump in the lake, you cold-hearted ditz!

Ed Falco wrote an e-mail to his students in which he comforted and advised them. Falco is a pioneer in hypertext writing and e-books. I saw him speak at the University of Wyoming in fall 2005. First and foremost a writer, he’s enjoyed experimenting online with the interplay of text, music, photos, and video. While he said that "in the future...we’ll be doing our reading on screens," he also acknowledged abandoning the world of hypertext to return to print.

"I was spending a lot of time alone in dark rooms with a computer," he said during his UW visit. "That seems unhealthy."

Obviously Prof. Falco’s sense of empathy didn’t disappear into cyberspace. Cho was his student in a script-writing class. After the shootings, he wrote this to his students:

"Cho's behavior was disturbing to all of us -- and the English Department tried, with the best of intentions, to both get him help and to make the appropriate authorities aware of his disturbing behavior. We did all that we thought it was reasonable to do.

"There was violence in Cho's writing -- but there is a huge difference between writing about violence and behaving violently. We could not have known what he would do. We treated him like a fellow student, which is what he was. I believe the English Department behaved responsibly in response to him. And please hear me when I say this: it was our responsibility, not yours. All you could have done was come to me, or some other administration or faculty member, with your concerns -- and you would have been told that we were aware of Seung Cho, we were concerned about him, and we were doing what we believed was appropriate.

"Look, all our hearts are broken. There's no need to add to the pain with guilt."

Sure, some of this could be seen as self-serving. Maybe the professors and the English Department and the VT administration did not do enough. Zahn did ask Roy a great question: "How did Cho get to be a senior?" The faculty reported him in 2005. Two years passed and he was about to graduate this May. It doesn’t take a writer to look at that and say: "What’s the story inside the story?"

Still, I look at the writing faculty at Va. Tech and see people that I could trust in a crisis. The university president, in his convocation speech, said that words were inadequate at times like these. I disagree. Words are crucial, as demonstrated last week by Giovanni, Roy, and Falco.