UCLA Extension instructor taught importance of storytelling

Les Plesko, an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and a recipient of an outstanding faculty award, died Sept. 16. He was 59.

Plesko’s students said they knew him as an excellent teacher and devoted writer who used a blend of humor and honesty to encourage others to pursue writing.

He started teaching at UCLA Extension in 1995, said Carla Janas, assistant to the director of the writing program.

Raelynn Milley, who took Plesko’s two-year fiction writing program, said she purposefully enrolled in his classes because she loved his teaching.

Milley now writes a cycling magazine and said Plesko inspired her to pursue writing as a profession.

“He gave me the confidence to call myself a writer, not only to say it but to do it,” Milley said.

As a teacher, Plesko was blunt and honest about his students’ work, unwilling to tolerate any cliches, Milley said.

“He had a way of dissecting a sentence like nobody else could,” Milley said.

Kanani Fong, a Fullerton-based freelance writer, took Plesko’s courses for five years. She said he helped her become a better reader and writer.

“His gift was to get people to understand the importance of storytelling,” said Fong,

Milley said she remembers first walking into his class to find Plesko, a disheveled-looking man with wild, wiry hair and a cockeyed gaze behind a pair of glasses.

“I think the program will really suffer without Les there … he was a big influence on us all,” Milley said.

Fong said she liked Plesko for his humility, a quality that set him apart from the other instructors in the program. He would offer up his own writing samples for scrutiny alongside his students, Fong said.

“He really was an equal,” Fong said.

The biggest lesson Fong said she learned from Plesko was to make each sentence serve a purpose.

“We have to pay him tribute everyday by writing the best that we can,” Fong said.

Plesko’s popularity and credibility as an authority on writing extended beyond the classroom, into his own successful career as a novelist.

He was the author of three works, including the critically acclaimed novel “The Last Bongo Sunset,” about the dark realities of drug addiction.

“His books were dark. He had this way of writing his characters that made you feel as if you were looking through a pristine glass,” Milley said.

Plesko faced a lot of criticism in the literary scene because he didn’t seem concerned with publishing regularly, Fong said.

“He was more of an artist.” Fong said. “He wasn’t in it (the writing industry) to glorify himself.”

Before Plesko passed away, Milley gave him a shirt with the words “No more … cliches” written across the front. The phrase was well known as a saying of Plesko’s among his students, she said.

“I would have never had the courage to write if it hadn’t been for his class,” Milley said.

A memorial service will be held for Plesko at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice on Thursday at noon.