A couple of my students may be asking for Incompletes, their personal lives rearing up stressful obstacles to doing the work they should be doing. I'm always ready to be flexible on such matters. After all, I had something close to a nervous breakdown in grad school and dropped out myself, and if it had not been for my department chair, Kester Svendsen, I might not have been readmitted later. But Svendsen put a letter in my file to reinstate me whenever I reappeared. Lucky because he died of cancer while I was rehabilitating (and becoming a writer in the process), so couldn't have stood up for me in person. I owe Svendsen a lot -- and try to return his favor to my own students.
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