Dear reader,

Pull up a chair. There’s a pot of tea brewing, and I set out an extra mug for you. The weather isn’t quite what I was hoping for today. What can I say — the Oregonian inside me still prefers overcast and drizzling.

I’m sorry. I’m rambling.  

This is goodbye. 

The end. The finale. The denouement. The coda (and I seem to take after Beethoven). After five years of writing columns for The Daily Emerald and The Daily Illini, this is the last one.

In my first column, years ago, I railed against active reading, the practice of constantly jotting notes or circling passages while reading. Since then, topics have included wolf reintroduction, the politics of education, Christine O’Donnell’s Wiccan controversy, illustrated stories and my undying love of tomato soup. I never fit into any particular role: Not the sports columnist, the funny columnist, the culture columnist, or the politics columnist — I was that guy in the corner, the dreamer, occasionally blurting out the kind of crazy, silly nonsense that doesn’t belong on an opinions page (much to the consternation of my editors over the years).

I never wanted to be a columnist; I wanted to write tales of imagination. But as so often happens, life intervened. Life wanted me to do homework and take on responsibilities and not have any time for writing frivolous tales.

But the itch was still there, right at the tip of my fingers, begging me to sit down, grab a cup of tea, pound at those keys and WRITE. Writers write, after all, and I wasn’t writing.

So I got myself a columnist position with the paper. It didn’t pay much (at all), but it kept me writing something week after week. It kept the itch down. And in defiance of my new-found position as a non-fiction writer, I saved each and every column in the “Stories” folder of my computer.

One week, by pure serendipity, my favorite writer, Ursula K. Le Guin, visited campus just after I wrote a column defending the genre of speculative fiction — like the sci-fi and fantasy stories for which Le Guin herself was famous. It was quite the esoteric column, with an extended metaphor of “hatching dragons” to represent the creation of stories.

I seized the moment. At the end of Le Guin’s talk, I handed her a copy of my column together with a project about her from my high school years.

The response came almost a month later in a short, hand-written, two-page note. She thanked me for what I had said, shared some of her own thoughts and ended by saying that she hoped I went on hatching dragons.

Ursula Le Guin, world-famous author, had taken the time to tell some punk mathematician with dreams of writing to go for it.

I’ve kept that letter next to my computer ever since and look to it every time I feel like a no-good hack of a writer. How can I even think of giving up, when she wanted me to go on?

There are few things more precious to me than inspiring imagination. It’s why I teach. It’s why I write. And Le Guin’s letter represents that inspiration to me.

But now the time has come for me to get off my overused soapbox and hand off this spot on the page to a new writer. Maybe it will be you, dear reader, or maybe your dreams lead you to a different place.

Whatever your dreams happen to be: Go for it. 

Just let me end my tenure with one final caution. In pursuing my own dreams of writing, I have met many other writers and heard many, many dreams of fame and success. They have an epic saga planned, book after book of heroism and adventure. They tell me they are going to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien, and their books will be the next “Lord of the Rings.”

But I don’t want to read “the next Tolkien,” when there’s plenty of Tolkien himself I haven’t read yet. And plenty more of Asimov, King, Chabon and others after that.

Yes, I love what Le Guin writes, and I take her advice seriously. She keeps me from taking the easy way out. Half the silly phrases I write are written because I think they would make Le Guin smile, should she ever read them. Half the stories I write are written to answer her own stories within the language of fiction. 

She inspires me to be a better version of myself.

But I am not her. And I am not going to be her. The stories I want to tell are different stories, not the same ones with a new name on the cover. And that’s how it should be.

Dear reader, my companion, my friend — I want to see you. Not the next Tolkien or the next Lady Gaga or the next Steven Spielberg. I want to see the unvarnished, unpretentious you.

It’s a big, wide world out there, and I can’t wait to see the dragons that you hatch.

Joseph is a graduate student in mathematics. He can be reached at [email protected].