by John Willis
I once said that if I made a list of people who have taught me the most and laid it beside a list of my favorite people, the two would look almost identical.
So to say that Okla Elliott taught me a lot about being a writer is to say that he was a favorite of mine. Seldom have I felt so simpatico with the ideas of another. We had many good conversations. And I meant to tell him how much he helped me with the first draft of my novel. Not by giving me feedback on it, but by recounting his personal process—by methodically illustrating how he would reread his last pages, then add a few pages, then move to this essay, and then to that story. By describing what it looks like to be a writer always in motion. These were posts accompanied by workaday details. He’d call them boring, but they never were. They were instructional, interesting, and full of gratitude.
Sometimes, when I have learned of somebody’s death, I have felt myself reaching out for them, as though I could catch and hold them—as though I could pull them back from a cliff. When I heard this awful news, it was different. More specific. I felt myself reaching after his heart and his mind. I thought about all of his works in progress and the enthusiasm behind them. Each unfinished story: a mariner lost in the hull of a ship.
We will never know them. But what he already taught me, I’ll never let go of.
Thank you, Okla.
Return to Tribute table of contents.
Return to issue 11 table of contents.