Weekly Read: “The Plagiarist” by Hollis Seamon
BLR‘s Weekly Read newsletter brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week’s read is “The Plagiarist” by Hollis Seamon, featured in Issue 7.
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“Why?” Althea leaned toward the splotchy-pale student who sat in her small office chair, his wide khaki thighs overflowing its seat. “You had to know you were doing it. And you had to know that, this time, you’d be kicked out.”
The boy’s face flushed an unhealthy plum and tears began to roll down his cheeks. He kept his eyes focused on his boots—they were leaking slushy, salty water onto Althea’s blue rug. Ever so slowly, he nodded.
Althea flung herself back in her chair. Jesus. The poor slob. The poor stupid kid. She closed her eyes. Her heartbeat was thudding in her ears again—boom, boomedy, boom, boom, boom. Her head made it into a little song, a high whining soprano melody over the imperious bass. Then, her long training forced her to scan it: dactylic, a particularly obnoxious meter. She put a hand to her chest and coughed. Coughing, she’d read somewhere, was supposed to stop it, this runaway pounding of a deluded heart. It didn’t. She coughed again. The EKG electrodes, glued to her chest, jiggled. She opened her eyes.
Why this story?
“Every so often, you stumble on a story in the slush pile that seems to have every duck in place. When I read ‘The Plagiarist,’ I knew immediately that we had something special here. I loved the interplay of mortality and poetry—not poetry in the sappy sense, but poetry in the practical daily sense
of an English professor who lives and breathes it, and also grades papers on it.
The juxtaposition of the student’s desire for words and the professor’s desire for reassurance about health was pitch-perfect. And then, of course, there was a cameo appearance of a dog that clinched it for me. (Whenever a pet is a real character in a story, I perk up.) I first read this story over twenty years ago, and can remember nearly every detail. I’ve used the story with my interns in the hospital, and even went to the trouble to track down every poetic reference. One of our reviewers wrote: ‘expertly written, gripping, intelligent.’ I couldn’t agree more!”
– Danielle Ofri, BLR Editor-in-Chief
More from Hollis
Hollis Seamon is the author of a short story collection, Corporeality, a gold medal winner in the 2014 Independent Publishers Awards, and a young adult novel, Somebody Up There Hates You, which was named a 2014 Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association and received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. (Fun fact: Somebody Up There Hates You grew out of Hollis’s other BLR story, “SUTHY Syndrome” from Issue 16.) Additionally, Hollis has published a previous collection of stories, Body Work, and a mystery novel, Flesh. Learn more about Hollis on her website.
“The Plagiarist” was reprinted in The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. A free reading guide for the anthology is available on our website. Here are some of the questions about “The Plagiarist” that appear in that guide:
- What is the power of language in this story?
- How is it used in poetry, in word play, in communication, in silence?
- What does the teacher learn about herself?
- What does the student teach?
- Is Althea sick?
- What makes us healthy and what makes us ill?