Welcome! The Instant Librarian contains two years of book reviews and writing-related posts.
It began as an experiment in using technology I felt a little wary of, as a way to chronicle my reading, and as an avenue for connecting with friends and family. The title comes from my love of libraries and my one-time interest in becoming a librarian.
I learned a lot in the first year, and moved from the free WordPress platform to my own site, encouraged by the connections I made with readers and writers– people who found my posts from across the world and right down the street. I also began a low-residency MFA program and found myself posting less regularly, and more reflectively, opening the posts to include thoughts on faith and writing.
I now find myself faced with a lot of questions about the role of publication, blogging, the internet, and social media in my life. My ideas about career and identity have also undergone a big shift this past year. I married my partner of seven years and took a part-time cafe job, in order to focus more on studying and writing poetry. I’ve discovered that my definition of success as a writer is founded on my sense of growth, the quality of work I produce, and the quality of living I do.
Like many people in these shifting times, I feel called toward less busy-ness, and more cultivation of the life growing under my feet. I’m ready to devote my energy to becoming a better poet and preparing to be a teacher, and that seems to mean moving off-screen for the time being.
In gratitude for this experience and for the comments and support of regular readers, I offer the archives here as a resource, for whatever it may be worth to you. I hope you’ll enjoy what you read! Please feel free to contact me.
A few weekends ago, I went up to Seattle for the Search for Meaning book festival, and brought along a copy of Lauren F. Winner’s new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. It was the perfect read for a long train ride and a weekend of lectures from writers on spirituality, faith, and social justice.
I discovered Winner’s first book, Girl Meets God, through writing this blog, upon a reader’s suggestion. That was Winner’s book about her conversion to Christianity; Still is about what happens after conversion, the much longer and usually much less dramatic story of living into faith.
When we think about a crisis, if it’s the mid-life variety, the story usually involves an abrupt change in career, lifestyle, or at the very least, a new car. A mid-faith crisis is different. The crisis to which Winner refers is less an event in and of itself, than the very uneventfulness of the middle part of a faith story. The crisis is that there’s no crisis. None of the powerful drama of a conversion experience, with which to shape one’s prayer life, through which to feel one’s connection to God. Meditating on the concept of being “mid” faith, one gets quickly tangled in the ineffable: how to describe the complex interrelationship of God, self, community in chronological terms?
While there are certainly crisis events in the book, such as the loss of her mother and her divorce, the story is about Winner’s apprenticeship as a person of faith. It’s sort of a non-story about a non-event, gracefully shaped into a narrative through short chapters. These “notes” draw forth questions rather than conclusions about God’s existence and hiddenness, the hills and valleys of prayer, trust and anxiety.
“The middle” plays a key role in this book, as metaphor for all that is murky and unknown in life. The middle’s not often looked upon with appreciation. We speak of getting stuck in the middle, or lost in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a very attractive place. It’s the place you want to run from, and the place that has the most to teach you. It’s a wonderful metaphor for contemplating the interaction of our purpose-driven egos with the much more soul-concerned body of mystery.
In the preface, Winner describes this place not as a milepost along a journey, but as a room in a house. “Something will show up in this room, and what shows up will be faith. I am less certain now than I was ten years ago, but I sense that this place is certain.” What I love about this reflection, and about the book, is how it shifts the location of certainty or uncertainty from within the self to outside of and containing the self. If a crisis of faith comes from the fear of unknowing what was once known, then the deepening of faith grows out of surrendering to that unknowing, and trusting that it is known by God.
When I went up to Seattle for the weekend, I was finishing a paper on how modern poems end. I laughed when I read this bit from Don Fowler, one of the many great epigraphs included in Still: “There is an abundance of work on opening and closure, but very little discussion of what comes in between.” Here I had been reading Poetic Closure, a 1968 scholarly study of how poems end, focusing on traditional poetry, and feeling very much the opposite. I had a hard time finding contemporary literature on closure in poetry, and the sense, in reading an anthology of experimental poetry, that poetic closure might be in crisis. Or to put it more accurately, in transition.
Fowler’s words, and the rest of Winner’s book, opened my eyes to the peculiarity of focusing on beginnings and endings, to the exclusion of the bulk of a story, a life, a poem. The middle is a kind of cultural blind spot, and modern poetry’s resistance to traditional methods of closure seems to me a sign of the creative consciousness endeavoring to reflect our changing understanding of experience.
Closure is a fiction, I wrote in the margin, a snapshot of a continuing. Poems and books, being limited by ink and paper, have to end somewhere. Still ends with a series of questions and answers with Winner about the process of writing the book. She writes about reading Falling Upward, by Richard Rohr, who suggests that in the second half of a spiritual life (after the dust and glitter of conversion have settled), “you may find yourself reading a lot of poetry…you like the space that poetry offers. I read Rohr and thought it was no coincidence that most of what I’d been reading [while finishing Still] was poetry.”
In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith suggests that “the poet reveals the ideal truth, the truth of the heart.” I would go a step further and say that good literature in general does that. The truth of the heart doesn’t always adhere to real-time chronology. Its story might not fit into the container of beginning, middle, and end. Still does a wonderful job of telling the truth of one heart, without forcing it into an artificial shape. This, in turn, allows us to find our own truths within it, and maybe feel a little more able to speak them.
Daniel’s one of the wise elder poets in the MFA program at SPU. His poems impressed and delighted me during my first residency on Whidbey Island; his skepticism of easily-digested poetry gave me pause. As a brand new student, I listened hard to his senior presentation on poetry that risks, challenges, arrests.
A recent graduate, Bowman saw his first book of poetry published this January by Virtual Artists Collective, a small independent poetry press in Chicago.It’s stunning.
I tucked A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country into my backpack and took it to work with me today at the cafe. It certainly lives up to his own criteria, above. And it also holds its own in the barista’s behind-the-espresso-bar reading material test. Possible to read in 1-3 minute intervals? Check. Narrative or thematic cohesion, allowing for regular pauses to grind beans, refill mugs, wipe counters? Check. Stirring and unusual, thereby engaging said barista on a rainy, slow night? Check.
Okay, I don’t actually have a checklist, or the luxury to curate my at-work reading. On deadline, I patch together bits of my assigned reading on the bus and behind the counter. Reading Bowman’s book this evening, I was struck by its strength as a collection of poems one could call both “accessible” and wonderfully elusive.
Chez Bowman, you have a Williamsesque spareness of line, and a voice whose clarity seems to travel from feet firmly grounded in particular haunts, known patches of earth. These poems sing of Buffalo, Cincinatti, and most of all, the Mohawk river valley. Here you’ll find a frank pastoral: river, tree, lake, cardinal flying at night. You’ll also find the very real fragility of daily life: the smell of hot rolls and coffee, an awkward wander into a dive bar after a Yankee game, the sound of bleak-sky November blues, or chip packages scuttling down city streets. You’ll have the strange dream-like sensation of having entered your own life, or something almost like it:
Now I dream that I’m the stranger
in someone else’s dream,
that I’m walking
through the dream of a stranger
and the stranger’s dream turns out like
dreams I had when I was young
(“Walking Through the Dream of a Stranger”)
Many of the poems in A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country directly address and express the odd feeling of deja-vu that characterizes certain moments of self-recognition or self-questing/questioning. Who am I? Is that me, over there? Or is that a reflection, the warped image in the mirror I made for myself?
Poems like “When the mailman dies,” “The Poet Goes Before the Board of Directors,” and “Your Room” launch us directly into alternate realities, extrapolated from the surrealist universe of ordinary human thought. The results are comic and frightening at once.
This is more interesting territory for self-exploration than the confessional mode that characterizes so much of our modern intake, literary or otherwise. The thinking “I” is shoved outward, observed. Or the inverse: a third-person meditation is stilled and investigated, in poems like “Diner, Midtown Manhattan,” within the more familiar atmosphere of the personal lyric:
The thought that she can’t stay beautiful much longer
on cigarettes and coffee
nags at her a little more
now that it’s fall.
But not today.
The book’s sections are punctuated by haiku from Basho, Bakusi, Onitsura, and Issa. There is certainly a haiku-like precision within these poems, the work of a careful ear/eye honing both image and texture down to the essentials, as in “Directions”:
It may seem like you’re going
in a circle.
That’s perfectly natural;
you’re almost there.
Just bang a hard left
through your father’s Jersey City
and turn wide
around your mother’s ear,
through the cigarettes and pigeons.
At this point,
you’ll be under the compass.
Which is not being lost
and also is not somewhere but not nowhere.
Reading A Plum Tree, I recognized my own sense of being “not somewhere but not nowhere,” the part of me that interrogates memory, experience, environment for affirmation of my own not-lostness. I also felt plunged into a new ecosystem, with its Delaware sky and its snowy fields.
That juxtaposition of distance and immediacy resonates in these poems, drawing the reader in and making for compelling future reads and rereads.
There are gifts, and there are gifts. One of the best ones I received this year was a collection of poems by Keetje Kuipers, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. On Christmas day, I tucked the book in my backpack and took it to the coast.
Lyle and I camped out in a yurt near Tillamook, where the campground hosts ate paper-plate turkey dinners, their motorhome windows strung with lights and tinsel. The ocean sounded like it wanted to come into our yurt for a bite of lasagne, but I curled up on the bottom bunk and read this collection cover to cover, something I rarely do with a volume of poems. I usually tend to sift through a collection at random, sampling a poem here or there, letting the book ride around with me for a while until I realize I’ve grown familiar with all of it.
Beautiful in the Mouth is as compulsively readable as a good novel. It compels you to listen, propelling you forward through intensely personal experiences you nonetheless feel as your own. Kuipers’s poems are prosey, direct. They do not confess or converse so much as reveal. It’s as though the self speaking in the poems has been saving up truths, polishing them in order to pour them out all at once, breaking them into lines only so you can better absorb them.
These poems are infused with awe at the body’s impermanence and power, its beauty and its strangeness. They explore how inseparable our experiences are from our interior worlds, how inextricable our bodies from the larger body of the universe. The lovely, terrible entrapment of the self within flesh, world, time.
And yet there’s no trace of the grandiose– far from it.
In “Memorial Day,” everything carries a whiff of the abject. Pieces of wind-born sawdust are compared to “star-shards blown out a comet’s ass.” How’s that for poetic language? Here we encounter the President (presumably Bush) in a radio broadcast, laughing so loudly at his own bad joke, he can’t hear the reporter’s question. The sun is “just-dead,” and in the speaker’s thoughts we see the image of her uterus, seen at a recent doctor’s visit, “black holes stretched on my flesh.”
This is her memorial day: a pause near a drainage ditch to reflect on her health, and feelings of regret, guilt, indifference, denial. If these aren’t emotions to mark the dawn of the 21st American century, I don’t know what are. “I’m always ready to deny exactly what I’m guilty of,” the poem admits to us, and the inclusion of our former president takes on more weight.
The courage to compare oneself to a much maligned President, the courage to compose a poem of ugly things, and to construct a world of breathtakingly unfeeling, yet human-like natural forces– all of this risk-taking is part of Kuipers’s enormous gift. “Intention doesn’t really matter once you’ve been charged with a crime,” this poem concludes. Such a pat statement would feel shallow in a less skillful poem. Here, it drops to the bottom of the stomach, a heavy and cold truth we can recognize as personal. For who among us hasn’t committed some kind of crime, whether against self or another, whether contained and defined by law or hidden inside?
The unprettiness of life lived within a body articulates itself within these poems. Cartilage grinds to fine dust in hip sockets during an act of love (“Finally”); a mother’s mouth becomes a “soldered pout” (“Why I Live West of the Rockies”); and the hips of adolescent boys are “narrow barbs” (“The Undeniable Desire for Physical Conduct Among Boys of a Certain Age”). These are poems of embodiment, filled with a precise understanding of what it means to live inside a human body.
The last lines of “Santeria for the City: Blackout, Summer 2003″ (what is for me the most luminous poem in this collection), nearly encapsulate the tension wire upon which the entire collection is strung:
As the body is a home
as the city is a body
as circuitry runs the lengths
of my arms, these streets– we are a flash
in the fuse box, a blown kiss
into blackness, the perfect
thrill of your last departure
orbiting its small plane inside you.
“You” is code for the self, Kuipers tells us in another poem, and in fact she seems to hold the hand of each former self as she witnesses again her passage through time and trial, relationships, mistakes, solitude, grief. How close are creation and dissolution, death and sex, chaos and absolute silence. How close, unto itself, is the body to an entire world.
This collection is truly a gift, each poem as beautiful in the mouth as it is on the page. Thank you, Keetje, for giving us what we need to hear.
You can’t be successful at everything. You simply can’t. Every success has its corresponding loss. That’s Alain de Botton, in a breakneck-speed examination of success and failure, over at TED talks.
He’s looking at the nuances of success in the context of career anxiety and the modern age. I’m thinking about them in the light of the coming new year, as Lyle and I get ready to burn old brush and new wishes in the backyard.
It’s kind of a tradition. One night when 2008 was new, we went down to the beach in St. Malo, with scraps of paper in our pockets. We had written down our old fears, painful things from the old year, our wishes and goals for the new year, prayers for loved ones, visions for the future. We knelt in the wet sand and lit them with a lighter, the flame flickering in the wind.
A recurring dream for me, a wish I have for myself, is to live by my writing. Why is it such a struggle? How can I bring more ease into it this year? What if that dream is real, and possible, but it just looks a little different than what I’ve imagined?
De Botton suggests that there’s always an element of the haphazard to success, and that the idea of work-life balance is an illusion. Perfection of art or perfection of life, but never the two together. This idea of loss being success’s shadow, its twin sister, its soft belly, is familiar to me. It’s inherent in the process of making art. Every poem I make leaves a trail of its trimmings, the words and images I had to cut in order for the true poem to live. Artistic choices include sacrifice, entail loss. Perhaps the same is true of making a life.
We sacrifice something in order to succeed. To gain one thing, we must lose another. Maybe not forever, or even for long, but for a time. A risk. A jump. A leap of faith.
My friend Yared Nigussu, a painter living in Vancouver, B.C., brought the Alain de Botton video to my attention. Yared’s a bright, talented artist with a delightful laugh, a friend Lyle and I made while living in St. Malo. He’s been working hard, as long as we’ve known him and surely long before, to make a living as an artist.
Lyle and I both want that for ourselves, and this year we’re hoping to braid our talents and efforts together to make it happen. I’m going to use my writing and editing skills to help him with his business. If, in turn, that makes his business more successful, it might mean that I can cut back my day-job hours and put more time into my writing.
I made a lot of resolutions last year. This year I want to make poems, cartoons, graphic novels, screenplays, little books. This year, I want to go slowly, to bring a sense of ease and openness with me. To stay positive and keep doing what I love.
Lyle made me a little book about our wish-burning; I made a poem. I share them both with you here, because they help me remember that the wishes are alive with me right now. Today is made of them, I am made of them. Old wishes brought me here, and tonight’s wishes will inevitably carry me somewhere, too.
Lyle writes: “Melissa, what was written in the prayers before we found ourselves here? What was burned? To this circle, we bring ashes.”
You Can’t Name the Things
In this circle, we carve the sand
with our fingers. It is not
very deep, this circle, this groove
we make in the wet crumbling at the edge
of the world. In the dark,
we can hear the ocean grumbling,
hungry for the prayers we are about
to burn. In the distance—miles
it seems—the sea wall and its stones sealed
against the wind. In the houses
with their mouths clapped shut:
the private breathing of sleepers. Out here
after midnight, the second day
of the year, we burn our old decorations:
the crimped paper stars we hung
for a Christmas tree on fishing wire,
ripped into angles, written with wishes:
words for what you can’t name, the things
you write and burn, flame the one tongue
you can give them. Only home-
made star parts, cheap sheets of paper
from the corner store, but here they fly
upward. The wind catches them in strips,
leggy ashes that skitter downshore.
They flicker out into the dark
of the waiting year, too new, too hungry.
Too cold, we run home and eat the rest
of the oysters and warm our cheeks
over the radiator, the yogurt forming
in jars on top. Above, the window
under the roof—full of streetlight and
our blank reflections, our blank reflections
murky as sea stars in a night aquarium
I just returned from a reading of Cloudbankcontributors, part of Portland’s Mountain Writers series at the Press Club. It was standing room only. I drank a glass of grenache and listened to ten poets read in the hush, clink of glasses and spoons. A tiny gray spider landed on my coatsleeve and crossed my wrist.
L and I both going on five hours of sleep, leaning on each other near the bar. I couldn’t always see the poets’ faces, but I liked watching the faces of the other listeners. Wednesday night, solstice night, longest night, and there we all were, crammed into this narrow cafe and steaming up the windows with poems and murmurs of appreciation. Even when we are tired, and broke, and often discouraged, there is a kind of wealth that is free for the taking, in a city where poetry is read aloud in packed rooms. We can stand in it together.
Vern Rutsala was there. I just discovered him in an anthology of mine, via “Words”. I loved it so much I left my desk and dragged L in from the shop to listen. We read it together in the kitchen.
If you click on the link above, you’ll see Rutsala’s poem was selected by Rita Dove for the Washington Post’s “Poet’s Choice” column. Dove has been a source of strength today, too, through an interview with her in The Writer’s Chronicle:
The alarm has sounded before and will sound again– it’s usually a signal that the world as the alarmist knows it is changing, and whoever is set in her or his ways feels uncomfortable with any shifts that threaten their easeful status quo… The more interesting question is… Why should an MFA degree… suddenly become an emblem of poetry’s decline?
Poetry is alive and well, and has been so through the latter part of the 20th century. There are more poets writing and publishing in America than ever before… At best, it’s premature– at worst, hysterically adversarial– to call our still rather youngish workshop culture an assembly line for the mass production of duplicates. There can never be too much poetry.
And if much of it cannot overcome mediocrity, so what? Aren’t there hordes of amateur painters and pianists populating our civilization, bringing pleasure to themselves and those around them with no detrimental effect? Shall poetry be the only art form ordained to play itself out in the Elysian Fields? Although I wouldn’t be terribly surprised should the number of truly great poems remain fairly constant, rather than increase exponentially with the number of poets, I believe that among the growing stacks of well-intentioned, lesser specimen will be poems that can also entertain, nurture, and sustain the lives of their readers.
Dove is getting a lot of press these days both because of her recently-published Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, and her powerful response to Helen Vendler’s appalling review of the anthology for the New York Review of Books. Even without the professional background of either Vendler or Dove, it’s easy to spot the weaknesses and pettiness in Vendler’s review.
The Chronicle also prints listings of deadlines for submissions to journals, contests, and residencies. Submitting to and publishing in literary journals helps a poet gain publicity and collect credentials in the publishing world. A list of publications shows that you’re active, read, and that a collection of your poems might sell. The publishing world is changing all the time, of course, and there are lots of young poets taking a different path: self-publishing chapbooks, e-publishing, organizing their own readings, editing lit blogs.
There are some truly incredible opportunities out there, including the Montreal Poetry Prize, a new award which grants $50,000 to a single poem. Asa Boxer, who organized the first round of the prize by soliciting donations, points out “that people must take initiative building institutions for their communities,” and that “if we use prizes to inform people of the high value of writing, then writing will earn that high value in the minds of those who disagree. At various points in history, it was culturally decided that music, painting, sculpture, and even professional sports (all forms of highly specialized aesthetic and physical expression) were highly valuable to culture.”
I’d like to be part of the community that values poetry and doesn’t shove it in a corner, calling it dead. I want to create and publish and know what my peers are creating and publishing. And I’d like to support myself doing it. Maybe you’ve noticed my new buttons in the left hand column over there. My goal is to submit to at least three journals a month. Most general submissions are free, and some journals pay their contributors. Entries for contests with prize money usually have a fee of between $15-$20.
As a nice counterpoint to all of this, I’m finishing up Roger Lundin’s Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, a biography with wonderful close readings of her poems and a thoughtful exploration of this prolific writer’s reticence to publish. Dickinson published no more than 20 of her poems when she was alive, and these after considerable pushing from editors and friends. She was more interested in producing the best work she could, and looked toward posthumous fame rather than the buzz of being the next voice in the newly-minted American publishing world. Lundin cites William Charvat, who distinguished among the mass poet, the public poet, and the private poet. The private poet, he writes, “creates a vocabulary which the world must learn as it learns a new language.”
This is certainly the case for Dickinson, with her strange and beautiful dashes and capitals.
But there’s no reason the world can’t learn the new language of poets actively reading, publishing, engaging with an audience. (See Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette and Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees.) Okay, and then there’s the Poetry Brothel. (A nice counter counterpoint?) This is a Brooklyn-based project, in which poets adopt personae and recite poems in private readings for individual, paying guests. I cringe at their use of the word whore, but find myself drawn to the project of subverting usual ways of experiencing a poetry reading. I love reading my poems to one person, or a few friends gathered around a table after dinner. And being read to.
Last bit of encouragement: Running After My Hat! The lovely John Simpson included one of my poems in his weekly “whiskey river Fridays” blog post. Check him out.
For several months now, I’ve been reflecting on being teacher. My essay on my first teaching job was recently published in the web anthology In Her Place.
St Malo, 2007
“Islands” is about my experience working as a high school language assistant in St Malo, France. As with the telling of any story, there are three or four other versions of this one hiding in the wings. “Islands” is one frame of several through which I can look back on that year.
It’s the perspective of a first-year teacher who judges herself harshly. My poor performance in the classroom, I decide, means I lack something essential for teaching. This single job defines and portends whatever future I might have as a teacher. In other words, through this lens I am really hard on myself.
Through another lens, I remember the two kids I tutored in English that same year: Paul, 7, born in the US and struggling to hang onto his English after five years in France; and Yangchen, a sparkly ten-year-old who learned rapidly, drawing pictures to accompany new vocabulary, and writing stories about horses. My memories of teaching them are colorful and tinted with joy. I found tutoring to be creative and rewarding work.
Yangchen
With time, my perception has softened, and so has the conviction that I am just not cut out for teaching. I am more forgiving now; I know that there were several factors combining to make that position particularly challenging, not the least of which is simply living in a foreign country. (It was also my first teaching job. Ever. For which I had about three months and one day of training.) Further, many of my friends who have gone on to become teachers remind me that there are good days and bad days in the teaching profession– just like any other job. Sometimes you’ve got it, and sometimes you don’t.
In the years since my assistantship, I’ve traveled and sampled odd jobs aplenty. I’ve done high-end landscaping and tutored high school French. One year, I interned and then co-managed an educational farm; the next year, I worked as a church administrator. I’ve always looked at teaching as just another job, something to do outside of writing. Something to fall back on if I can’t make it as a writer.
This subtle link between failure and teaching is a corrosive one. I think it stems from the response I often heard as a child when I said I planned to be a writer. So, you’ll teach? the adults would say. I felt as if they hadn’t heard me, or didn’t believe in me. I began to equate the decision to teach with the resignation of my dream. I don’t think this is so terribly uncommon for aspiring young writers.
The thing is, writing and teaching are each compelling vocations in their own right. They do not necessarily go hand in hand. Dana Gioia argued famously that so many teaching writers robs literature of the variety of material different life experiences, ostensibly, provide. There are many poets and writers who teach; there are many who don’t. Bob Hicok worked as a machinist. Wendell Berry raises sheep. Portland poet John Brehm writes, in his “Dear Internal Revenue Service,” that he doesn’t teach “mainly because I don’t know anything.” For poets especially, as his poem underscores, the appeal of a steady income is pretty strong. Still, it’s tough to find work as a teacher, especially in this economy. The dipping unemployment rate signaling resignation rather than the creation of jobs, at the end of the day this seeming ‘choice’ to teach may simply be moot.
I can relate to Brehm’s feeling of inadequacy. How am I to teach when I am a student myself, and always will be? Whitman writes: “A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;/ How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.” I used to feel like this on the farm, explaining the parts of plants or the miracle of compost. All these young, bright faces looking at me as though I understood something.
The woman who owns the cafe where I now work is studying to become a nurse. Her anatomy professor, she tells me, suggests that she teach her children and husband what she’s learning. Her professor has seen his least successful students improve by leaps and bounds simply by taking on the role of teacher. “To teach is to learn,” then, and I love learning more than anything. Maybe I can do this, after all.
I am inspired by the teachers who come in for coffee at the cafe, upbeat even when they tell me they had an off-day in the classroom. I’m inspired by teaching friends in California: my friend Kyla, who teaches for a literacy non-profit, tells me that the day she realized how much she loved her students was the day she let go of her fear; my friend Tom, who is nearing retirement as a community college instructor, asks me to reflect on “what I have to teach” as well as “what I have to teach.”
Alison Backous, a graduate from my own SPU program, writes in a lovely essay on teaching: “I am a teacher. And that fact fills me, daily, with excitement and dread, energy and fear.” I realize that’s exactly how I feel about writing. Maybe it’s okay to be afraid of teaching, to look back on that first year with both embarrassment and forgiveness. Maybe it means I’m on the right track. Backous writes: “vocation, as it affirms gift and longing, also strips us, sloughs the pride and naivete that we carry right off us.” I don’t know if teaching is my vocation, but as I get closer to completing my MFA (and closer to thirty) I find I’m more open to it than ever, hungry for experience, ready to try again.
A few weekends ago, I went up to Seattle for the
