Life Studies

A college dropout working as a secretary sneaked into a poetry workshop led by Robert Lowell and changed her prospects forever. 

- Megan Marshall

I was the worst kind of student poet, nearly illiterate in contemporary poetry and writing to resolve a feeling of drift that had overtaken me the year before as a junior at Bennington College. And I wasn’t a student. My restlessness had led me to drop out of college—schoolwork, even at Bennington, which gave no grades, felt like too much pressure—and move to Cambridge, taking a room in a communal apartment at $27 a month (heat not included) and a secretarial job at Harvard, working in the college registrar’s office in the Holyoke Center, just one floor below the conference room where I was now sitting. Getting a position in one of Harvard’s many administrative offices, I’d heard, was an easy matter if you could pass the typing test.

That was the winter of the energy crisis, 1973–74, a particularly cold one, and the cost of heating oil had skyrocketed, making the low rent a doubtful bargain. From my room on the top floor of a River Street tenement, which swayed in the wind blowing up off the Charles, I checked the temperature on the electrified Coca-Cola sign across the river each morning before venturing outside, passing a long row of cars puffing steam as their drivers waited in line for the cheapest gas in town at the ARCO station up the street. The first glimmer of hope that I’d find my way arrived as a fleeting sense of joy that I wasn’t living in Southern California, where I’d grown up, dependent on a car to get anywhere, or Bennington, where it was so much colder. Still, I walked the mile to work at Harvard’s new ten-story concrete-and-glass administration building in the center of Harvard Square, saving bus fare so I could afford the steeply discounted therapy sessions that anchored my days.