I've started quite a few posts in the recent weeks but not finished them. At times, I think I'm losing faith in the ability of writing to do anything, but I know better than that. Just last week, I taught Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and that surely proves the possibilities, at least, of what a human being can do with the written word in the world. (Notice... "I taught..." I am TEACHING a college class now - something I yearned to do for most of my adult life, something that felt impossible for me... I should be writing about THAT, and yet I am somehow overwhelmed into writing paralysis of a sort.) Well, then - I'm not losing faith in a general sense. But this weary malaise too often threatens to take me over. It comes in part at least from working on reading and writing for so many of my waking hours. It comes from the fraying connections with people I've been close to, people I miss so much. It comes from feeling that maybe there's nothing more to try for, an illogical idea, but it rolls on in at times. It comes from certain absences, and from accepting those absences "for now" - a deferral too easy to let last into perpetuity.
And I am losing faith in my OWN writing - because writing itself sometimes puts me in this frame of mind. Writing hurts. So I don't know how truthfully I represent anything when I'm in this frame of mind.
I'm trying to teach my students to write truthfully and to write with careful, specific detail. I told them about little talk versus big talk, except I screwed up and told them Ray Bradbury talked about this in his book on writing, but later, Justin told me it was Chuck Palahniuk. I haven't corrected that mistake. But I told them that they need LOTS of little talk - all the details that make for a poem or a story - and big talk used very sparingly. Yesterday, I talked to them about how we need textual evidence to support claims in these papers, and in "creative" writing, we have to write that textual evidence ourselves in our own texts. Either way - "academic" or "creative" writing - applying the big talk / little talk rule helps. Don't go on and on making statements about how "life" is, and don't write self-indulgently, at least not outside of your journals.
The professor at my undergrad university with whom I felt uncomfortable used to say that we needed to make our writing a "gift" to the reader. I often doubted him, though that precept always came back to nag me. My writing is TESTIMONY, I thought, and that's it's own kind of gift - one that people like him wouldn't understand - I thought. Now... I don't know. There are so many things that I wonder about maybe getting wrong. I mean, was he really in error over that one - making one's writing a gift? I suppose the question is what kind of gift and for whom.
Yesterday, as class was ending, I asked some students how they thought it was going so far - if they were finding the workload about right or too much, what they thought about the readings and any thing else. Three stayed for a few minutes to say that the class is "different," that the readings are about right, that they actually enjoy them and feel excited to write. One said that in another class, there is so much to read and so many questions to answer that he just plows through without thinking much about it other than to get it done. That same guy said he never liked English in high school, but now is excited to write the first paper.
This brings to mind images from one of my favorite poems, a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa called "Sunday Afternoons." He writes of being sent outside with his siblings while his parents fought in the house:
They’d latch the screendoorsA first year student has written this in a letter to me: "I always hate creating a piece and then turning it in feeling as though I have done a very decent job, only to have it returned back to me with deductions and red splattered across the pages." I had them write me letters to hand in by the second class-meeting, and many expressed in various ways an idea of themselves as not very good writers and some pain with that. They hope that somehow this will be different... And they are afraid to hope.
& pull Venetian blinds,
Telling us not to leave the yard.
But we always got lost
Among mayhaw and crabapple.
Juice spilled from our mouths,
& soon we were drunk and brave
As birds diving through saw vines.
Each nest held three or four
Speckled eggs, blue as rage.
Where did we learn to be unkind,
There in the power of holding each egg...
Writing is an act of communication. What happens when some people are told repeatedly that their writing is of little value, that it is deficient? Are we to engage with one another as full human beings or as producers of objects that we each coldly assess? Shouldn't we be helping one another express ourselves as well as possible in service to a deep ethic of care for one another and for our truths? Or shall we press in with our petty or not so petty power and crush what we can of the blue shells?
I am trying to unlearn being unkind, having learned it from too many places. I am trying to retain what kindness is left in me, or even to somehow grow it up. I write because I've been lucky enough to know kind people who hold the speckled blue eggs oh so carefully, or even leave them in their nests while standing near to encourage and protect and cheer on the transformations into creatures who fly and sing.
Most everyone has "writer's block" - don't they? Why? Where do they learn it?
I remember reading in, I think Up The Down Staircase, a girl wrote a love letter to her teacher. He didn't know how to deal with it, so he corrected her English. A couple of your paragraphs reminded me of that. Also relevant, Becky told me she doesn't want to go back into academia. She found it so negative because the job of professors is to tell everybody what they're doing wrong, including telling other professors where they are failing. That's a tough nut to crack. As an editor, I find that my job is to tell people how to improve their writing so they can get a degree. I wonder how many of people I work with actually look at my suggestions, rather than just accepting them because I said so.
ReplyDeleteWow, I haven't read that, but that in turn reminds me of something that Justin told me about a student at the writing center who'd written a first draft essay for an Ethics class - an immigrant student who'd had to live in a Kenyan refugee camp for years while waiting to find out what country would take her and her family - and because of an argument with a girl at school, the girl's brothers had come with the girl later that day and they ended up beating her aunt to death while the girl and her sister hid and saw this. The teacher had only written something like "Grammar issues" on it. He hadn't engaged at all with the emotional content; maybe he was overwhelmed by it and afraid to not respond adequately. Both this situation and the one you describe probably involve scared teachers who fear saying the wrong thing... That's really interesting to think about for both of these kinds of situations.
ReplyDeleteWow, I didn't know Becky didn't want to go back. It all stems from the high stakes grading or assessing, right? Gloria has talked about how when she got C's in K-12, she felt that SHE was a "C." Yeah, you're in a helping role without the grading part of it. I've tried to structure the class to the extent that I can to make that my role - with them able to get enough points by just doing low stakes work so that it's not all depending on the final versions of the essays. But I don't know how it will all really go.