Everything I loved about my freshman English teacher made me love writing.

Every time he picked up a desk and let it drop with a crash, screaming about symbolism, my heart raced, startled and excited.

Every time he slapped a ruler across his podium, its flimsy wood splitting into a splintery two, I was a little more intrigued by his lecture about subtext.

The fact that freshman year was the year we learned about Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” must have been planned. With each step we covered, it became more obvious to me that this class, these 55 minutes at the end of each day, was The Call, which Campbell defines as the step in which the hero is introduced to another world and drawn into something mysterious.

From then on, all I wanted to do was write. I was enchanted by the atmosphere my teacher created. At the end of the year, he let me and my friends paint the colorful faces of historical figures on his walls while we listened to Bob Dylan and the Portland summer sunlight streamed through the windows.

I wanted to do this for a living. I wanted to live in a world where all I had to do was describe life with colorful adverbs and quaint narratives. I was hooked.

But despite all that fanfare, all those startling, blood-curdling screams that lifted us out of our plastic chairs, the most important thing my teacher ever said to our sixth period class was, “So what?”

“So what?” he’d scrawl on our essays. “Get rid of the fluff.”

As I meandered through sophomore English and the dreaded junior literary analysis thesis, his incredibly loud and passionate words guided me. I’d go back to his room, its walls still smeared with our painty creations, and ask him to look over my papers.

Then one day he was gone, his classroom empty, the shades drawn. That day became a week, and then a month, and then people began to talk. Rumors circulated: an affair with a student, problems with the administration, another job, divorce.

“Well, we always knew he was a little weird,” people said. But mostly, we just wondered.

By the end of my junior year, I’d begun to doubt the existence of the world he’d created. If he was gone, so were the dreams that lived in my freshman heart.

Campbell said that once the hero has completed the goal of his journey, he is transformed and reborn as a new being with new insights. When I came to Northwestern this summer, I didn’t expect to find a world just as exhilarating as that class that made me fall in love with writing.

John Kupetz’s first lecture showed me that my expectations were clearly wrong. As I absorbed his advice about sentence structure and word choice, I felt for the first time since I was 15 that I was truly learning and not only did I now understand, but also I was sure that sitting in that seat one more minute would kill me because all I wanted to do was write, to do what John was inspiring me to do.

The first time John yelled during a lecture to wake us up, it occurred to me that he and my teacher were weirdly similar.

When John told us that the trend story was our talisman, a symbol of the journey that we were returning from (citing Campbell’s monomyth), I was convinced.

Again I remembered “So what?” as I wrote my stories, and with every corrected article I got back from my instructor I groaned when I saw a “fluffy” phrase scribbled out.

Every guest speaker we heard this summer with an amazing story reminded me why I love writing. Every other student around me who was just as excited as I was about it transported me back to that world that I knew when I was a freshman.

Here, I didn’t just learn about AP style and inverted pyramid story structure. I learned that my teacher was not, in fact, the only inspiring teacher out there.I learned that if you know what you really love, you can truly become the master of two worlds, as Campbell put it: you may experience both the human world, and the divine world of what you love.