By
Kathy Flann
Baltimore,
MD, USA
A student closes a
laptop, gathers the cord, and zips belongings into a backpack. It’s the end of a
conference in my office at the college. We’ve been poring over the student’s
short story for an hour, shoulder-to-shoulder, talking, laughing. The student’s
body language is light and happy, as if there’s a real prospect of breaking
into song or whistling. This student is someone who thinks day and night about
how to improve the story; someone who gets frustrated with peers in our classes
who don’t share the passion, coasting along like tourists; someone who appears
at my door frequently.
“What do you want to do
when you graduate? Do you know?” Graduation with a creative writing degree is,
for this particular student, on the near horizon.
The question pierces the
student’s attention. Eyes cut away from the backpack and lock onto mine, shocked,
as if I’ve committed an assault. The smile is gone.
“Whoops. You don’t want
to talk about the F-word,” I say. “The Future.”
I make finger quotes, hoping this is funny.
The student relaxes,
laughs a bit. Shoulders come back down. “No. I really don’t.” There’s a long
sigh. “I sometimes think about teaching.”
It’s a typical exchange. How
can one establish a life that provides not only the time to write, but also
facilitates artistic growth? Even if one is lucky enough to enroll in a degree
program that comes with mentors and peers to provide feedback, these programs last
only a few years. Life goes on, and a writer still needs the time to write. The
writer still needs a community of readers to say things like: That dragon in Chapter 3 is the character’s mother?
Are you sure you want to do that? Our culture tends to depict writers as
loners, but acknowledgement pages of published novels show how faulty that
perception is. And in addition to tracking down a writing community, exchanging
work with that community, and engaging in the actual writing, one must somehow
keep the lights on.
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| Kathy Flann |
If one must have a job to support a writing
passion (and I assure them that one must), then teaching provides a life
connected to that passion – or so the logic goes. The students picture flexible
schedules and long breaks during which they’ll churn out their novels. There’s
even the word writing attached to the
job: Q. What do you do? A. I teach
writing. That’s why the most dedicated creative writing students often
gravitate to teaching careers. It’s certainly why I did.
My own college advisor,
who was barely visible within the smoke cloud in her office, waved a cigarette
at me and said, “What you want to do is write romance novels. That’s where the
money is.” Her scratchy voice (not unlike Marge’s sisters on The Simpsons) and her ethereal
appearance in the cloud gave the remark a magical significance, like I’d
pilgrimaged to the cave of a sage elf.
But romance wasn’t the
type of novel I wanted to write. I did glean from her advice that I could not
support myself with literary fiction. This was crucial information. I needed an
income stream. The only writers I actually knew were my own professors. Thus, in
the subsequent months, I started to picture a future life as a writer and professor,
strolling around leafy campuses in my corduroy blazers, smoking pipes. I would
have deep, meaningful conversations all the time, most notably during my deep,
meaningful classes. Yes, that seemed pretty good. In these fantasies, I am more
or less Donald Sutherland from Animal
House minus the getting high with students and having sex with them. But
the bohemian salon spirit of it appealed to me.
The teaching profession held
an allure for me, just the same way as it still does for my students and for so
many other writers throughout the country. As a result, unbeknownst to many, it’s
brutally competitive to get a job teaching creative writing. I once saw a
statistic that only twenty percent of the writers who want university teaching
jobs actually have them. When I have given presentations at writing conferences
about how to land university jobs, there have been standing-room-only crowds
with people sitting on the floor in the aisles. Clearly, there is a strong
collective belief that teaching is a good gig for a writer. Some might even
argue it’s the best gig.
But is it true? Is
teaching, especially college teaching, the best gig for a writer?
Most writers who teach probably
agree about the attributes that make the job awesome. Regardless of whom you
might ask, these appealing qualities nearly always revolve around the
interactions with students. My own favorites are the quiet breakthroughs.
Sometimes these happen when students are alone in their rooms, thinking about
something we’ve discussed in class. They tell me about their epiphanies later, breathless
with excitement. Every now and then, these breakthroughs occur when I work
one-to-one with someone in my office. It’s amazing when comprehension of a new
idea travels from the brain to the face, the way that light and joy warms a
countenance. There’s a bit of pride in the expression, too, at the brain’s
accomplishment. To be involved in something as intimate as another person’s internal
processes is humbling. There’s a great deal of trust involved when students
take the risks necessary for growth.
From the prospective of
nurturing one’s own writing prowess, there’s some advantage there, too. If
noted psychiatrist William Glasser’s famous dictum is true, we learn 95% of
what we teach, as compared to 10% of what we read and 20% of what we hear. For
me, the act of explaining story structure to students, whether verbally or in
writing, has always felt as if I’m teaching it to myself. Hemingway once said,
“Writers are all apprentices to a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” I
concoct elaborate drawings. I come up with analogies about carpentry or
construction or anatomy or other fields that feature structure. In class, I
search the students’ faces. Those moments when their confused, knit brows relax
teach me more about craft than anything I learned in school.
In “Worstword Ho,” a 1983
parody of Charles Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!”, Samuel Beckett writes the oft-quoted
line, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
If I can successfully convey craft concepts to the students, I can gain a
deeper comprehension of them, too, internalizing ideas that might help me the
next time I sit down to write my own fiction. I “fail better” as a result of explaining
the same concepts repeatedly, as well as noting repeatedly what does and does
not work in students’ stories.
But herein lies the rub.
“The next time I sit down to write my own fiction” can be months away (for some
people, it might be years), depending on the particular job I’ve had. Teaching
writing requires hours and hours of commenting on student stories. There’s a
lot more of that written preparation for workshop than there is time spent in
class with students – arguably the fun part. For much of the semester, one must
work seven days a week to keep up with the load.
Another consideration is
that the act of grading always has the potential to breed conflict, even in
creative writing classes where grades tend to be high and students tend to be
happy. These conflicts can be exhausting, even when relatively minor. They
happen virtually everyday. Students struggle with time management, punctuality,
distractions, etc., and one has to decide a thousand times a week how to handle
that stuff.
Even the class sessions,
even when they go perfectly (whatever that means), are totally exhausting. When
I started my first full-time job, I would go home at the end of the day soaked
in sweat and lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling for two hours. Lying on
the couch staring into middle distance does cut into one’s writing time.
Moreover, higher
education is changing all the time, requiring more work from faculty in the
form of heavier teaching loads, more recruitment work, more advising, more
documentation, more meetings, more committee work, and longer contracts (i.e.
shorter breaks). These days, one would be more suitably attired in running
shoes than a corduroy blazer. And let’s not get started about pipe-smoking,
which might be allowed if one lurked
25 feet outside the front gates, out by the highway.
So I say to the student,
“Why do you want to teach?”
The student frowns a
little and shrugs, like the answer is obvious. “It will give me time to write.”
I fold my hands on my
lap. I say, “But what if it didn’t? Would you still like it?”
The student blinks,
thinking about this. “I’m not sure.”
I nod. “Well, it’s
something to ponder.” What I don’t say to the student is that I think you probably
have to like teaching and like it quite a bit. If you don’t, you’ll hate it
because indifference isn’t really possible. I don’t say that there’s also a
danger of liking it too much, that it
can consume you. It would be easy slip toward a situation where one never
writes again and foregoes even a personal life. These kinds of opinions are
only opinions. I’ve seen my worldview challenged often enough to be cautious
about doling out platitudes. “What else do you enjoy?” I say.
The student sits up
brightly and says with renewed enthusiasm, “I’m becoming a certified yoga
instructor right now.” (Or I like computer
science, or I’m training to be a
midwife, or I’m a dog walker,
etc.)
“Could you do that and
write your novel?”
“Huh. Maybe.” The student
has not considered this as a real pursuit.
To the student, real pursuits must
involve writing in some way. I’ve been talking to the student since sophomore
year about adding a minor in a subject that has a booming job industry or doing
an internship in field like that. This has not been appealing.
I try to re-frame the
issue. “If writing is your passion, your day job needs to allow time and energy
for it. Do you prefer to do work that uses the same part of your brain as
writing does? Or a different part?”
The student looks worried,
like this is a pop quiz, but my question is genuine.
“There’s no right or wrong
way to do this,” I tell the student. “Well, actually,” I say, catching myself.
“There is.” I take a moment to gather my thoughts, deciding to allow myself to
give this advice. “The right way is whatever gets your writing done, whatever
that looks like for you. It’s possible that something unrelated to writing
works better for some people.”
The student nods, taking
this in.
“Your paid work powers
your laptop. You should probably like it enough to be content. Beyond that,
really, anything goes.”
What I want the student
to understand is that there is no perfect
writing life. Writers tend to think that they struggle because they are in
the wrong job and/or because they aren’t smart enough to write the book.
What I would tell every
last writer, including myself, is this:
You
struggle because it is hard. It is universally hard.
At
the same time, you struggle to manage these challenges because you are not a
replica of anyone else. The strategies that ease my burdens may not ease yours.
This is where platitudes do
have a place, and here’s one I play on repeat:
We must keep moving,
friend. Ever forward. Westward Ho!
Link:
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Kathy Flann is Associate Professor, English (Creative Writing) at Goucher College
and an award-winning author. She will soon debut a new Imprint with Stay Thirsty Publishing entitled Unblended with a mission to “serve up
stories, fiction and narrative nonfiction, pure of spirit, brimming with
humanity.”
