Misdirection is still a direction: Thomas King as a teacher

Editor's Note The exalted Thomas King's influence as a writer, lecturer, bon vivant, and harpoonist is well known and justly celebrated, but little is known about the glories he achieves as an educator. Who is Sir Thomas of King when infront of the student body and what kind of magnificent interventions does he make in the lives of those lesser than him? What sublimifications does he manifest in those he instructs?. I asked my colleague Helga Blücher, lately of the faculty in Literary Greens at the University of Romainz and the author of Lettuce Be: Motifs of American Indian Sovereignty and the Preparation of Garden Salads in Early Post-Millennial Indigenous Literature, to discuss the matter of the lordly King's teacherly impact on one of his former students. After numerous rejections, we finally located one such student who was willing to go on the record without resorting to either false names or moustaches. Carter Meland first entered the shadow of the stately King in the early 1990s as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and after a year of classes pledged his troth to the Grand Cherokee and was awarded the opportunity of doing the redoubtable author's research and grading his undergraduate papers. Meland says he tried to reason with the mighty one, explaining it might be a better use of his time if he graded the papers of the students enrolled in King's class rather than King's own sophomoric work from twenty years earlier but, Meland claims, Sir Thomas only harrumphed in his then youthful face and returned to tatting the doilies his cats loved to shred.