Way to Kick the Demon’s Ass Matthew Komatsu remembers Sherry Simpson’s gifts as a writer and teacher
herry Simpson died Wednesday morning. There. I put the words down on paper. I tried to think up a more clever way of writing it. Something flowery and poetic that somehow captures the essence of a human being, and her passing, and what she meant to those who knew and loved her. Something—I don’t know—more appropriate for the death of someone so important to sending me on my way as a writer. But it’s all I’ve got. I don’t think she’d have minded me writing about her death in this way. She was like that, wasn’t she? Still is, I suppose, in all of our heads and hearts. You know exactly what I’m talking about: that irreverent-but-also-tender-but-don’t-forgetto-watch-out-for-that-wicked-sense-of-humor-when-youleast-expect-it thing I came to call “Simpsonesque.” That’s how I’ll always see her, anyway. Not afraid to shut shit down in a workshop if things got sideways, but also free with her empathy (and maybe a Kleenex). And god, what a wit. I met Sherry in 2014, when I joined UAA’s MFA program. And I have to say, that from the moment we met at the opening night of the summer residency, I had a big fat writer’s crush on her that I don’t think will ever leave me. She was here, and then she was there, never a lanyard away from the camera that captured our two-week residency and all its exhilarating highs, and second-week exhausted lows. All the while, leading workshops, craft talks, and exercises. Somehow balancing it all and yet still finding the time to mind all of her delicate writers and the existential soap operas we presented her with on what must have been an hourly basis. What is a practicum? Do I really have to read twelve books this semester? Am I really going to have to send you no-shit “mailings” on a monthly basis? It must have been exhausting. In fact I know it was, because every summer I’d come off the residency like an addict off a hit: manic with creative energy that needed guidance. And it never failed that Sherry would refuse to answer my self-indulgent emails until at least early August. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. She answered. Especially my first and last year,
26
A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S P R I N G 2021
when she was my appointed mentor. But close on the heels of the UAA Residency, she attended another residency as a faculty member. That residency, she always pointed out, was basically a vacation compared to UAA’s because all she had to do “was show up.” I like to picture her there. For some reason, she’s wearing a hat, which makes no sense because everybody knows the weather in the Pacific Northwest is dogshit, and if she ever wore a hat, it probably would have been something made by Grunden’s because it never stops raining there as far as I know. Nevertheless, there she is in my head: smiling in a sunhat beneath redwoods (again, I don’t fact-check daydreams) and as her phone cackles with yet another panicked email from another panicked UAA MFA student whose dog has eaten all the books they should have read that month, she simply switches the phone to silent with a smile, and sips at a gin and tonic. The reality is that Sherry Simpson always had time for us. “For me” is what I should say, since I’m writing solely from my experience. My first residency was cut short by a military deployment, and instead of sitting through my last workshops— and program director David Stevenson’s always-baffling last day movie viewing selection—a military cargo aircraft flew me to East Africa. The base had a coffee shop with garbage internet. But I went there every day to read, and write, but mostly I went there hoping that if the internet actually worked, that maybe when I opened my email, I’d find a response from Sherry. In fact, I just went back and looked at my email. Sherry emailed me dozens of times during my months overseas, sometimes a couple times a day. The writing and reading I did over that deployment was heady, formative. But more to the point, she is etched indelibly into my memory of that time. Together, we whipped two essays into shape, both of which were not only published, but would go on to be anthologized more than once. And I’d be hard-pressed to point out a recommendation by Sherry that I didn’t follow. Those initial successes bred follow-ons that continue to this day, as one of the essays she helped me write is just now going to press in an anthology by Brevity. So you will excuse me if I go on believing that without Sherry, there is no version of reality in which Matt Komatsu writes much of
