Recently, I was part of a Writers Come Home celebration at my alma mater, the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana, in conjunction with the school's Homecoming celebrations.

I was reunited after more than 30 years with the only professor of all my professors whose name and curriculum I recall -- the magnificent Mark Costello, not the writer of The Big If but of the Murphy stories. He remembered things I had not; and one was a deep delight. There was a policy in his seminar classes that no one writer's work might be work-shopped by other students more than once in a given class. But he recalled that my fellows became my fans (painfully shy and secretly only 16 to my peers' 17 or 18 years of age, I wouldn't have dared look up long enough to know) and asked to read my work more than my allotted rota.

During the three semesters of Creative Writing Professor Costello taught me (the only three semesters of Creative Writing I ever took) I received what I think was an outstanding start on a career as a writer of fiction that would not begin for another twenty years.

Because as a high school junior, only 15, I had competed for and won a National Council of Teachers of English award, so I had my choice of good scholarships at eastern universities. I think I'd have thrived at a small private school for girls, like Smith, for example. But my parents discouraged me; and at the end of the day, I would have been too homesick and childlike to be that far from home in a world of sophistication that my children understand but I would not have.

Still, until that day last month, I felt a kind of burr under my saddle when others spoke of illustrious colleges where their "papers" were stored, while I have donated mine to a beautiful little Carnegie library in Wisconsin.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I may not have letters after my name; but I think I learned my craft from a master – even if I don’t practice it like one.

In any case, eyebrows peaked when I began my remarks.

After thanking Mark Costello, for whom I feel a tenderness and admiration I cannot quite articulate, I spoke about my time a few years ago on the fiction jury for the National Book Awards.

Of the five writers on the jury, three had been students of Mark Costello -- Bob Shacochis, David Wong Louie and I. And one of the short-listed nominees that year was indeed Mark Costello who had written 'The Big If;' and it seemed for a good long time that this was the odds-on favorite to win. But I fought for the work of two other writers whose books had plots as well as stunning, supple writing; and the final winner was Three Junes by Julia Glass.

It was a woman, and it was a woman’s first novel. Which brings me to my topic.

Last summer, an author who signed herself only as 'Jen," but who was, it quickly became apparent, Jennifer Weiner -- author of immensely popular and witty romantic comedies including Good in Bed and In Her Shoes debated online with Dwight Garner, a senior editor of the New York Times Book Review. She asked, tongue in cheek but quite seriously, about the secret set of criteria that apparently appertained to the truth that more male than female authors saw their work reviewed in the New York Times.

Back and forth it went (on the website called papercuts.com, where you can find it archived). Why was it obligatory to review the new Don D. but not the new Jodi P.? Was it somehow assumed that works by men would comprise subjects of more scope and depth, while "women's" topics would be daintier, closer to home, of less significance to a world in which (to quote Dr. Johnson) a man must have his sea voyage or his war in order to feel realized? Despite Tolstoy having written about a lovely, foolish woman's adultery and suicide, and Andrea Barrett's having written memorably of a stunning ocean voyage... it is true that it is somehow presupposed that even commonplace things take on greater scope and significance when a man is the one who tells the tale.

It wasn't an unfamiliar debate. Laura Miller and Francine Prose had assayed the same basic questions -- albeit absent the question of reviews -- in essays published by Harper's magazine. While suggesting that the suspicion with which women were still regarded as "serious" writers was part of a larger cultural issue, critics of THOSE essays pointed out that the New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath had suggested that men simply write more books thank women.

Which is simply not the case.

In any case, this was my topic at my alma mater.

When I spoke, I told the room at large that I agreed with the general opinion that to be taken seriously as a writer, a woman must be able to write regularly about more than the things we all experience -- human connection, pity, sacrifice, courage, personal injury.

She must be able to “write like a man,” about subjects that interest men – about cars and horses and crimes and wars and golf and fly fishing and war and exploration of the sky above or the sea floor below.

And yet a man who sets out to write about home and hearth and even the most esoteric lot of a woman – witness Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden – is considered a prophet, possessed of an extra sensory organ of perception.

Here we are, on the brink (perhaps) of electing a KNOWN woman to be the Commander in Chief of the United States and leader of the free world and still somehow, we assume that it will need to be a man -- and not one of us girls -- who writes the Great American Novel.

If I had gone to one of those tonier schools, perhaps I would have learned to think better And I would have been able by now to have figured this out.

yours,

Jackie M.