On Bryce Milligan and Hailey Laine Johnson

Bryce Milligan is an author, musician, and publisher—the owner of Wings Press in San Antonio, Texas, where he’s been a ubiquitous figure in the municipal literary scene since 1977. You can read about his many endeavors in the extremely lengthy professional biography [archived version here] on his website. Perhaps the only part of his career you wouldn’t learn from that bio is the time he spent as a high school teacher, leading the Creative Writing program at the North East School for the Arts. This lacuna is notable due to the circumstances of his departure from that position. He was offered, and took, the opportunity to resign about three quarters of the way through 2001-02 school year, rather than be terminated for inappropriate relations with a student. I know about it because that was my senior year as a NESA Creative Writing major, and he was my teacher.

The student in question was Hailey Laine Johnson, and she has gone public about the experience on Facebook. Her account is embedded below. I’d encourage you to read it before continuing to the rest of this post.

I was told about Hailey’s post by another former high school classmate, one who thought I might wish to defend Bryce’s reputation. That was a reasonable supposition given my attitude back then, but an incorrect one. My feelings about Bryce Milligan have changed in the seventeen years since I was seventeen. I wasn’t present for most of the events that Hailey describes in the post, but I had my own interactions with Bryce, ones that from an adult perspective are perfectly consonant with everything she wrote. I want to share those experiences, and explain how profoundly I think Bryce Milligan transgressed.

Bryce took over the Creative Writing program at the start of my junior year, and immediately won over the students with his easygoing affect and aura of literary importance. All the books he had written. The books he had published. The writers he knew and the awards they had won. When Bryce arrived, the Creative Writing program seemed to transform from a quirky, special-topics English class into a gateway to life among the literati. He was a cool teacher; a guitar-toting, Dylan-quoting free spirit who spoke to us with rare candor. One who made us feel like peers more than pupils, and carried himself as sort of guru, initiating us into our authorial futures. To me, a teenager aching for the seriousness of adult regard, this was intoxicating. When I was sixteen years old, an authority figure need only validate me as an intellectual equal to win me over completely.

By my senior year, though, I had doubts. Not about the propriety of Bryce’s behavior, alas, but the wisdom of it. His social closeness with students went so far beyond the public high school norm that I started to worry for him. I felt that a teacher sharing so much of his life with students was inadvisable, but was at the same time thrilled to be treated as a confidant by a successful elder and mentor. I remember one day, during lunch (many of us spent lunch in his portable classroom), he beckoned me over to show me his hat. On the sweatband, in neat ballpoint handwriting: Hi, Bryce! 

“Laine wrote that,” he said, his voice buoyant with delight, “Can you believe that girl? She’s amazing!” Laine was a new freshman, fourteen-year-old Hailey Laine Johnson, and Bryce was swooning. I don’t know if that was the first time I told him that if he carried on as he was he would get fired, but it was certainly one time. And not the last.

As senior year wore on I got increasingly angry at him. Angry for selfish reasons; if he got himself ousted over some new girl, it would fuck up the rest of my senior year. But his obsession seemed only to grow, and hazy rumors of questionable behavior began to spread. One of the times I told him he needed to cut it out or else lose his job, he responded, “She’s a muse, E.J. Even if I do get fired, it’s worth it. This has given me enough for ten years of writing.”

Those words have echoed in my mind ever since, as I’ve aged, progressed through school, become an educator myself. Each time I’ve remembered them, the more predatory a violation of the boundaries between teacher and student they’ve seemed. I’ve seen their shadow in my vision whenever I’ve encountered a misuse of the power that comes from standing at the front of a classroom. A visiting instructor is sowing resentment among his class by showing obvious favoritism? She’s a muse. A graduate TA with a history of violence is dating one of her students—again—and no one seems to care? Muse. My personal metonym for all the ways one can reveal themselves to be unworthy of pedagogical authority.

But at seventeen, the structure of this violation wasn’t clear to me. What was clear was that a man I looked up to was doing something stupidly reckless, and endangering my high school experience for no good reason. I wanted it all to go away. I wanted Bryce to stop romanticizing, I wanted the aggrieved to stop complaining, I wanted Creative Writing class to go back to being an uncomplicated good thing that I could feel special for being a part of.

If you read Hailey’s post, you know more details of Bryce’s unconscionable extracurricular behavior than I did at the time. I avoided the rumors. I kept myself willfully ignorant of any available details. But, of course, others did not. The situation became a quiet scandal. The administration got involved. Parents got involved. Other students got involved. (It’s my behavior toward another student at that time I most regret. My classmate, Laura, spoke out against Bryce. I condescendingly criticized her for increasing the likelihood of our school year being disrupted—the one time I remember actively privileging my own convenience over Hailey’s experiences. Laura quite rightly told me to fuck off. We were never really friends again.)

I already told you how this ends. Bryce was given the option to resign rather than be fired for cause. It’s possible he courted the sympathy of his superiors the same way he did from me, by saying, “If I were to be fired for this reason, my wife would leave me.” I don’t know. I do know, though, that shortly before his resignation he spoke to my parents at their house, wanting to give his side of the story. My mother reports Bryce to have explained that it was physically impossible for him to have done anything wrong in his relationship with Hailey, because, you see, he was impotent due to his alcoholism. My mother, herself a lifelong educator, was as unimpressed by this excuse as one might imagine. She informed him there are lines a teacher simply doesn’t cross, and wrote a letter to the school.

Bryce resigned. The administration avoided public incident. Time passed. The students grew up. I grew up to decide that it’s super fucking creepy when men in their forties weave elaborate aesthetic justifications for blatant, doe-eyed crushes on fourteen-year-old girls. Hailey grew up into someone with the bravery to share the details of how Bryce Milligan used his muse—a process that I now know involved prolonged grooming and sexual harassment of a minor. The person she describes, with his gifts, exhortations, and “artistic” fetishization, is one that I recognize. It’s a shape that fits seamlessly alongside my own experiences of the man. I believe all of it.

Originally this post ended with the previous paragraph, but now I have more to add. I reached out to Hailey and we spent the afternoon chatting. She mentioned that Bryce had contacted her after her initial post. She put up a video about that experience. During our conversation, she also shared his message with me, and gave me permission to publish it:

Let’s take this apart. He opens with “I’m so very sorry for what happened,” but follows that up with an intriguingly ambiguous “I’ve rarely set foot in a classroom since because of it.” Why has he rarely done so? Because he can’t trust himself in such a situation not to take advantage of young girls? Because doing so risks exposure of that which had been successfully kept quiet? More importantly, what is he sorry for, his behavior during “what happened,” or the limiting consequences thereof on his ability to teach?

If one didn’t believe Hailey, one might read his avoidance of classrooms to mean he feels he must protect himself from future false accusation, but Bryce himself undermines that reading in the next line. “I know there is nothing I can do to make it up to you” he writes, indicating he believes himself to have transgressed in some manner. But having made this admission, he backpedals. He recalls theirs being a vaguely innocuous relationship that was “about creativity,” and implies that if Hailey believes otherwise it’s the result of post-hoc rationalization. Despite this insinuation that any abuse of power on his part was all in her head, Bryce follows by saying that, whatever he did in service of “creativity,” it’s something for which he doesn’t deserve forgiveness. Not that it stops him from immediately requesting forgiveness anyway. Taken at face value, that’s an example of entitlement so stark it could almost serve as a definition: “I feel I’ve an inherent right to request you give me something of which I am objectively undeserving.” But I think it ought not be taken at face value.

This message, with its blend of nonspecific apology, blanket denial, and plea for immediate absolution, reads to me not as contrition but as damage control. It’s an attempt to make a problem go away. I wrote previously that the experiences Hailey described in outing Bryce Milligan’s abuses fit seamlessly with my own memories of his inclination for self-centered romanticizing of teenage students as fuel for his artistic life. I include this addendum because it goes beyond assurances from adolescent memory. If one believes Hailey, as I do, the intent behind this message is clear. If one does not believe Hailey—as I already know some who will be reading this don’t—then this message forces one to ask how exactly Bryce believes himself to have wronged her that he should seek a forgiveness for which he assesses himself undeserving.