George Saunders

So again, with my teaching now...

I'll try to never blame a student or negate anything they're doing because then your message can't get in.

But he allowed a beautiful space for me to learn the lesson on my own, internalize it, and make a resolution to do better.

And you say in your notes that he helped you get a place in college where you studied geophysical engineering.

Yes.

He literally made a phone call, just being the 70s.

He called the admissions department and said, I have a student who's got some real gifts, but he hasn't applied them.

Would you give him a chance?

And they said, all right.

And so I had to take, I think, some amazing 18 hours in summer school, all technical topics.

And they said, if you get above a certain grade point, we'll admit you.

But just the one phone call changed my life.

What were you doing there?

Well, this is a seismic company, so we would drill a hole, put dynamite in it, blow it off, and then record the vibrations on the surface.

And then you would process this signal in a sophisticated way and get a three-dimensional picture of the subsurface and then know where to drill.

But in that glorious process, my thing was they would bring in these long rolls of paper that they recorded, and I would just edit them for any kind of noise.

So I sit there for eight hours a day and edit these.

And we're sitting in the middle of the jungle in Sumatra in this makeshift camp.

Yes.

Yeah.