Recently I saw a post on Facebook where the poster said that she’d done everything she had ever done without any help from anybody else. “Nobody gave me anything,” she wrote.

That made me sad. If that was indeed true, she had a much rougher time than I did, even though we came from similar circumstances. It seems that every time I needed a hand, somebody was there to provide it.  And that’s a blessing I am very grateful for.

One of those people was Josefina Niggli, the lady who ran the writing program at Western Carolina. Before Josefina got it, it was called the Journalism program; she renamed it Professional Writing.

By the time I met Josefina in the second quarter of my freshman year I had already been invited out of the Music Department and the Chemistry Department, and was rapidly wearing out my welcome in the Math Department. Gary Carden, the editor of the campus literary magazine, lived across the hall from me in the dorm, and for some reason he asked me if I had anything I wanted to submit. Probably because I was on the staff of the school newspaper.

I submitted a short story which was accepted, and the magazine at about the same time the twenty-four-year-old head of the chemistry department wondered over bridge what I thought I would ever do with a chemistry degree. Especially since I wasn't very good at it. Since I couldn’t give Dr. Squibb a reasonable answer I started wondering what I would do next.

One afternoon Bob Abbott showed up at my dorm room door and said that Josefina Niggli wanted to see me. I wasn’t really sure who she was, had never spoken to her, and hadn’t even thought of investigating either English or Writing as majors. When I got to her office, I saw that she had a copy of my story.

“It appears that you might have some talent,” she said. “You may enroll in the professional writing program if you want to.”

I learned later that the only way you got into Josefina’s program was by invitation. If you enrolled without an invitation, she’d ask you to leave. She wasn’t in the business of teaching writing; she was in the business of teaching writers how to make a living at it.

In the three and a half years I studied with her, I—and after we were married, Linda and I—became close to Josefina and Mama Niggli, and we learned a lot about her rather strange background. (I’m not going to include much of it here since my memories of our conversations don’t jibe very well with her Wikipedia entry. I don’t know whether my memory is faulty or the person who wrote the Wikipedia entry didn’t know what he or she was talking about. However, there’s enough agreement to get the point across.)

Josefina’s father was an engineer, and her mother was a concert violinist. She was raised in Mexico and educated there in a German convent. She sold her first story in English when she was sixteen. She was fluent in English, Spanish, and German, and sometimes didn’t seem sure which language she was speaking. (One of my jobs in college was to sit right in front of her desk and signal her when she lapsed into Spanish or was about to put the wrong end of her Marlboro in her mouth. She paid me in Marlboros.)

She wrote a novel entitled Step Down, Elder Brother (starring Ricardo Montalban and Cyd Charesse) that got her a spot in a Hollywood studio’s stable of writers. Then she went to UNC at Chapel Hill (where she became friends with Betty Smith) and finally to Western Carolina.

She was a professional writer, having sold novels, screenplays, poems, and articles. Her purpose in the Western Carolina program was to help somebody else do that. But she went a lot further that the position required. Her office door was open to us, her home was open to us, and she spoke kindly to us when it was needed. And she was brutal when she critiqued our writing. She taught us to do the same thing.

She didn’t teach me to write. She contended that nobody could do that, and I agree with her. But she did take a real interest in me, along with a number of others, and helped us believe that we could write something worthwhile without having to starve to do it. For years after I left Western Carolina, I would send her ads, brochures, and scripts that I had written. She always marked them up and responded, not to change those pieces, but to help me do better next time.

I generally assumed that Josefina was right, but at least one time she was demonstrably wrong. At the end of my senior year, the drama department was handing out awards. I was getting one for some photography work I had done for them. Linda, who was very pregnant, and I were sitting on the front row when Josefina read the citation, ending with: And because this is the night of the full moon, Chuck and Linda are not here because she’s having their baby.

Evidently Mama Niggli was a strong believer in lunar influence on births.

Josefina was just one of a lot of people who came into my life when I needed them. For those people who feel that they’ve never been given anything, I wish I could share. I’ve been given more than I deserve.