Literary Threats of Death and Seduction

I am only aware of a single threat made in earnest against my life. It was penned in my junior year of college, a year I will forever remember as my clumsy entrance to adulthood. I had just figured out what I wanted to do with my life, and believing I had the means for such a life at my disposal, I became a fairly outspoken and arrogant advocate of my own lifestyle.

"Became" may not be quite the right word, since I had been considered (by certain judgmental friends) arrogant for many years prior to this transformation. Let's say that my arrogance was heightened, and perhaps it was heightened to potentially self-endangering levels. But please bear in mind that to pursue the writer's life is to embrace arrogance. The two are inseparable as honey and bee-stings.

Oblivious to such artistic necessities, one of my peers in a fiction writing class - let's call her Margot - suppressed her growing feelings of rage for the majority of the semester. Her rage was manifold, including distaste for our hep-cat instructor, the many ineptly conveyed and cliche-driven stories, and the pseudo-intellectualizing of workshop. (The following is representative: "I really admire the use of music for mood in Bill's story because Eliott Smith is the man. I mean, he is the man.") Margot pinned these and other countless exasperations hoping, I assume, that under intense pressure her rancor would eventually yield a perfect diamond of artistic dimensions.

This was only evident following her submission to the workshop of a story whose plot was straightforward enough: a frustrated student kills each and every one of her creative writing classmates. Sadly, many were slaughtered in summary; I was one of the fortunate whose name would at least live on in literature. On the other hand, while the other named victims at least met their ends swiftly, the character named "Topher Michaels", whom I read as my doppelganger, suffers much longer. The narrator of the story, a highly unattractive person in every regard, first tempts poor Topher into visiting her dorm room. His libidinally-driven vulnerability leads to his demise; she carves him up with an axe, as I recall. Not even Professor Ratman is spared. By the plot's end, only Margot herself is in attendance. The story ends with a lyric passage on the beauty of silence.