In
her essay Teaching Writing Teachers
Writing, Shelley Reid argues students of writing pedagogy should be
confronted with inherently difficult writing—that by struggling with hard
writing, future teachers will be able to better connect theory with practice
and empathize with their students. This all seems like a no-brainer. But then,
writing for me has always been a difficult process. This particular assignment
alone had three scrapped introductions. The assignment is connected to an
argument with my wife, my four-year-old with the flu, a pile of neglected
dishes, and my twelve-year-old slurping loudly on a grape Popsicle. It was hard
writing and a hard decision on what to write. I went through the entire
process—the prewriting, the rough draft, the revision, more revision, and then
the final product. I work this process every single time I sit down to write
anything. And I am a highly proficient writer, yet Reid says, “Highly
proficient writers in graduate pedagogy courses may see process steps and
composing strategies as crutches needed by less skilled writers.” Reid seems to
suggest the entire writing process is one many students haven't encountered,
have avoided, or at the least resisted. But why?
Yesterday,
I picked up my daughter from her first ballet class of the academic year. One
of the other fathers, Rodney, stood outside waiting. He wore a shirt that read,
“Ask me about my book.” The book he had written was academic in nature, about
implementing community service projects—all of it above my head—but the one
salient comment he made struck me. Rodney said the review process was horrible.
“It [the peer review] really affected me. It was like a personal attack. I
didn't know I was that close to my writing.”
The writing process is fraught with emotion, and I believe Reid hints at
the emotional baggage associated with writing, but doesn't ever really address
the issue. We see this most clearly in the personal reflective accounts of
Reid's students:
- It
really messes me up –Kelley
- I
felt a little silly –Faith
- Not
used to failure –Alicia
- I
struggled so much –Gabrielle
- Is
that writer really me? –Elaine
These writerly confessional
snippets are all loaded with distress and anxiety, and my argument is that any
writing is a personal matter and comes with emotional baggage; that difficult
writing assignments confront head on the emotional side of writing.
Per
example, this past June I published my novel Wasteland, loosely based off T.S. Elliot's poem of the same name.
The book took five years to write. Wasteland
contains a lot of controversial issues and topics one doesn't discuss around my
parents—BDSM, heroin, acid trips, drinking cat blood, depression, eating the
head off a live bird, suicide, war, religion, homosexuality, serial killers. I
was afraid—really afraid—my family would get a hold of Wasteland and decide that the book is worth reading, and then what
kind of repercussions would I face? When I was a teenager, my father worried I
was gay. In my twenties, my mother thought I was strung out on drugs. Everyone in
my family was concerned that I'd marry into an interracial relationship. I've
had, to no avail, lengthy discussions with my mother attempting to explain the difference
between fiction and non-fiction. Open-minded is still not a term used
successfully to describe my family. If Mom or Dad or one of my siblings read Wasteland, they'd think the book was
true, that what I wrote really happened. This fear of what others thought
impeded my writing. The emotionality I attached to Wasteland was more difficult to deal with than what Reid describes
as difficult writing: length requirements, taking a narrow stand, publication,
presentation, or peer review. I had to get over myself before I could be
successful at writing Wasteland. I
had to realize the problems and prejudices others had with what I write are
their problems and not mine.
Even
academic writing carries emotional baggage I must deal with. Every time I begin
an academic paper, I am confronted by my high school English teacher. My most
recent academic work, “Howl” as Keen in
Form, Function, and Reaction, is currently in the review process at Essays in Criticism. Sitting down to
write this behemoth of a topic—comparing an American Beat poem to a defunct
Irish cultural practice—had my high school English teacher sitting on my left
shoulder with a pitchfork yelling at me about dangling modifiers and vague
pronoun references. This internal editor construct of my subconscious sat on my
shoulder before I had even finalized the topic. The topic—let alone the thesis—hadn't
even begun with Ginsberg, but Mark Twain and then maybe Poe, and I waffled between
Hemingway and Faulkner, all the while Mrs. O. telling me I wasn't good enough.
As a junior in high school, I had signed onto the yearbook, and to this day I
remember, very clearly, an article I had written about the volleyball team. Mrs.
O. told me the article was too long for the space available in the yearbook.
Five hundred words too long. So I cut, and I cut and the process was painful,
and after I had finished the edit, the piece was still fifty words too long. I
turned in the assignment in tears. Mrs. O. then informed me I had completely
misunderstood her. She had told me, supposedly, that she'd do the edits, that I
didn't have to bother with the struggle, that cutting that much from an article
would have been too hard for me in the first place. At forty years old, a
father, a husband, a student who took twenty-two years to finish his undergrad,
every time I hand in an academic paper I fear the writing is too long or
somehow I misunderstood the directive for the paper.
Rodney,
the other ballet-dad, said he hadn't realized how close emotionally he was to
his writing, even though he only wrote the book to garner the prestige
associated with having written an academic text in his field. Rodney explained
how one of his blind peer reviewers took it upon themselves to list all of the
books better written and better informed. “That hurt,” Rodney said. Rodney's
experience echoes Reid's student Susan's experience:
"Writing
[the first response] didn't feel hard to me…. What was difficult and
challenging was the peer workshop and
revision process…. I thought I had written a relatively well- organized and clear argument for my position,
and [my peers'] comments suggested I wasn't
quite as organized or systematic as I needed to be. The horror! I'm a writing
tutor!"
Susan's response is one of shock.
She quotes Heart of Darkness and ends
with surprise at how much revision was needed for her assignment, because,
after all, Susan is a writing tutor. She helps others with their writing. She
does not receive, or at least, she does not seek out assistance with her own
writing. The peer review and revision, for Susan, was an affront to her
identity as a writer, and our identity—who we see ourselves as—is tied together
with emotion and past life experiences such as how my family views the world
and how Mrs. O. was a bulldog of a teacher. Reid agrees with Lil Brannon
professor of English and Education at UNC and Gordon Pradl professor of English
education at NYU Steinhardt. Pedagogy classes should “extend beyond the notion
that writing teachers should demonstrate high competency in their filed,” but
also help teachers build an identity of “who they are as writers.”
In
my English Methods I class, a large portion of the class was dedicated to
developing future English teachers' identity as writers—to see themselves as
actual writers. I was appalled at the fact that some of the students could not
identify verbs from nouns and thought revision and peer review were unnecessary
for their writing. One fellow classmate, a senior and an A plus student,
admitted that she had never revised an academic paper and never reflected upon
her own writing. I am blown away by Reid's encounters of resistance to
difficult writing, though I shouldn't be considering my personal experience in
English Methods I. These fellow students in English Methods were confronted
with their emotional baggage connected to their writing. They were made to
realize their own prejudices and get over themselves. They were made to
struggle, and although I actively search out these opportunities to push my own
writing in directions I am not always comfortable with, many people do not seek
these moments of self-teaching, forgoing the idea of revision, keeping the
identity of, as Reid puts it, nonrevisionists. A class devoted to difficult
writing, for future teachers of writing, needs to not only address the basics
such as nouns versus verbs (although I'd hope graduate students would know the
difference); needs to not only complicate the assignments with publication,
word length, or structural constraints; but needs to deal with the personal and
emotional reasons for the resistance against difficult writing in the first
place, even if to only make the students aware of that emotional baggage, and
why the writing process, no matter the topic, is hard to begin with. The actual
process of writing is not difficult—it's butt in the chair, one word after the
another. However, the personal attachments and the closeness which is placed on
one's own writing make the process difficult. If we, as writing instructors,
are tasked with asking our students to write, then we must, as Reid says,
empathize with our students. We must become aware of what our students face as
new writers, and although I am not suggesting a pedagogy course become a
vehicle for psychoanalysis, I do suggest that we as students “know thyself” in
the Socratic tradition of long-established wisdom.
I launched Wasteland two years ago. I spent four years writing the novel; longer if you factor in the idea for Jack began in an Iowa Writer’s Workshop as an undergrad. I poured my heart and soul into that book. I bled. It was the piece of writing that pushed me over the edge, made me realize I needed to not worry about what my mother would think if she read what I wrote about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I shopped the novel around to different agents and publishers, and they all told me what I had written was really good, but that I had no audience for it. Wasteland would never sell. I felt like my authorial hopes were utterly dashed.
