Teaching

Living Across Genres: The Work of the Artist Teacher
by Alison McGhee

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A Course in Creative Writing, by William Stafford

They want a wilderness with a map
but how about errors that give a new start?
or leaves that are edging into the light?
or the many places a road can't find?

Maybe there's a land where you have to sing
to explain anything: you blow a little whistle
just right and the next tree you meet is itself.
(And many a tree is not there yet.)

Things come toward you when you walk.
You go along singing a song that says
where you are going becomes its own
because you start. You blow a little whistle

And a world begins under the map.

***

I read this poem and think of the junior high school me, who was an A student who wrote, now that I look back on them, boring, boundaried stories and poems. I read it and I think also of high school. I grew up in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, and my friends and I would sometimes drive at night up to Star Hill, where it was said that a ghost sometimes emerged from the pine woods. The trick was that you couldn’t look at the ghost straight on; you could only glimpse it, if you were lucky, from the corner of your eye. I used to sit in the truck, patient and silent. It shimmered and floated in the air, a ball of shadowy light. If I got impatient and tried to look at it straight on, figure out what it really was, it disappeared.

I used to see the ghost.
I think I did, anyway.
It’s clear in my mind, at least, what it looked like, or what it might have looked like to me back then, that shimmering floating ball of light, were I patient enough, trusting enough, to let it emerge.

This experience pretty much describes my life as a writer, in which I spend a lot of time in an alternate world composed of imagined people. Men and women and children conjure themselves in my mind. They seem familiar, as if they once were known to me but got lost somewhere along the way. As a writer, I am interested in that which cannot be seen defined easily, with a straight on gaze. I’m interested in the landscape of the human heart, its shadows and valleys, as reflected in the landscape of my roots.

A student once asked me to help them with their characters: "I’m just not very good at describing the way they look can you help me?" and I realized that no, I cannot help you, because I myself never describe my characters. I really don’t know what they look like, other than a vague sense of hair color and length, and the fact that the girls and women are usually scrawny like me, but beyond that? No clue.

But I have a core, absolute sense of who they are as human beings, their hearts and souls. I can see their hands, how they touch the people they love, and the tilt of their heads when they strain to hear a whisper. I sense that my student wanted help not in describing her characters physically, but in divining who, in essence, they are. And I think again of Stafford’s poem: how about errors that give a new start? or leaves that are edging into the light? or the many places a road can't find?

My work as a teacher reflects that poem, those lines. The classroom process has always seemed alchemical to me, a synthesis of preparation and intuition and awareness and the desire of the students. On any particular night it becomes its own unique experience.

It’s both an honor and a challenge to be here, with people who are like me, both artists and teachers. Perhaps some of you will be able to relate to this question, which was asked in my Advanced Creative Writing class at Metro State last month. My student James brought up Flannery O’Connor’s famous remarks on the teaching of creative writing, a brief excerpt of which goes like this:

"I don’t know which is worse to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher’s work should be largely negative."

My student said, "Alison, that doesn’t seem to be your philosophy."
"No," I said. "It’s not."

But beyond that “No, it’s not,” how to explain what my philosophy of teaching is? How to sum it up? Not easy. I don’t know about you, but I get questions similar to this a fair amount. A common variant on it is this one, occasionally asked at parties: "Is it really possible to teach someone how to be a writer?"

My standard answer is that it might not be possible to teach talent, but it’s possible to nurture it. Sometimes I pose a question of my own in turn, "So, is what you’re really saying that I shouldn’t take my kids to piano lessons, because it’s not really possible to teach someone how to be a musician?"

What are the is it really possible people really asking? Is it really possible to teach someone how to live in this world as an artist? Is it really possible to value the making and appreciation of art above most other things? The feeling underlying this question seems to be something like this: What, really, is the point of what you’re doing? Aren’t there enough bad writers in the world already? At heart, Alison, aren’t you part of the problem?

Our community colleges and state universities are not prestigious institutions, nor are they famous. They are not peopled by 18 22 year olds with prep school backgrounds, or by those who graduated valedictorian in their public schools. They are in many ways a reflection of the sort of people I write about ordinary people.

I have lived my life casting my glance to the periphery, absorbing the wisdom and beauty in the sidelong, the peripheral, the unknown and unnoticed. Many of my students at Metro come to a writing workshop having been silenced in elementary school, or held back by a life with more than its share of burdens. Whatever circuitous paths they have taken to arrive in my classroom, they are finally able to act on the lifelong desire to make art.

An exercise that I use with my students goes like this: the first sentence begins with Last night I . . . And the second sentence begins with What was really happening was that I . . . and they go from there, for ten minutes.

My student Joe reads his work aloud: Last night I visited my mother. What was really happening was that I was helping her pass the time. She lay back on her pillows, and I sat in the chair pulled up to the side of the bed with its little railing, and we talked. I told her about my day. She asked me questions. The lamplight seemed to grow brighter as the sky turned into night. What was really happening was that I was helping my mother in the only way I can anymore, which is to be the voice of someone who loves her, in this, the ending of her days.

The room stills as Joe reads. What is really happening is that Joe has passed Go and gone directly to the heart, and everyone in the room knows it. This is the best way I know to impart to students the sense of depth, of mystery, of honesty, that they contain within themselves and can bring to life on the page.

* * *

Teachers have power. No matter how you cut it, a classroom is not a democracy. The words that I speak and write have immediate consequences for my students; they look to me for guidance, for appraisal of their work. I can't ignore that power. The knowledge of it is always present. Before every workshop I teach, I make a silent vow to my future students, one that they are unaware of: Honor your students. Be still and listen. Honor your students.

What my students don't know is the power that they hold over me. They don't know how I need them, how I depend on them, how they keep me tied to a world outside the commotion of my own head. They don't know how much they have taught me about themselves, and in turn about my own writing.

Driven and impatient and deeply flawed human being that I am, I sometimes want to control my students, make the class go the way I want it to. I make up backgrounds that seem to fit the looks on their faces. I want to go around the room and tick them off on my fingers: there's the ex-hippie, there's the guy who watches Jerry Springer, there's the cop wannabe, there's the Wayzata Junior Leaguer, there's the guy who didn't want to take the class but whose adviser said he had to, there's the smartass who already thinks he knows it all, there’s a girl who will come breathlessly late to class every week with another melodramatic story about how her printer broke down and that’s why she doesn’t have her draft and she’s so so sorry, there’s a guy who will refuse to revise on the grounds that every poem is perfect the way it comes out the very first time because that’s just the way poetry is, there's the woman who will be sweet and, out of fear, silent.

I'm always wrong.

I know nothing about them. I know nothing about his mother; her sister; the marriage that succeeded; the marriage that failed; what it was like when at twenty she told her father she was lesbian; what he likes to eat on top of his pizza; what sort of movie she'll be renting this Friday night; his twenty-three-year-old diabetic cat; her little toe, lost to frostbite five years ago; his best friend, the one they named their first child after; the camp in Thailand where she grew up and watched her sisters die.

As a writer, what I like best is to sit by myself in a room, spinning out words and sentences and paragraphs and stories. No music. No telephone. Nothing but the silent light coming through the window and the people taking shape in my noisy mind. Writing is my only church.

But the relationship with my students means that I can't withdraw. Teaching means I must remain grounded in this messy world. This position of teacher is a trust which I have been offered and accepted. The students will give me their best work, something from the privacy of their time and their lives, and I will give back to them my thoughts, as a writer, on how best to bring that work to its fullest self. They are attuned to every nuance of phrase and word in my responses to their work and because of this, so am I. I concentrate as hard on my responses to their writing as any other writing I do. I feel myself alone in a room with my whole self bent to the task.

My students have taught me that there are no easy classifications. Because I'm aware that the faces they present to the class are only surface manifestations of their lives, and because I want to know who they truly are, the world opens up to me.

My student Lindsay writes: Last night I had dinner with my family and talked. What was really happening was that we were not talking about my father. Over a year ago we sat at this same dinner table celebrating his birthday. After the cake and presents he walked around the table and gave each of us a hug and told each of us he loved us. This was not typical for my father. Then, for no reason that I know of, he told us that when he died he wanted to be cremated, and he told us where he wanted his ashes scattered. Four months after that talk, he died totally unexpectedly. My mother and sisters picked out a coffin. No one talked about what he had said. I felt I had to be the voice for my dad and I reminded them of what he had said, that he wanted to be burned. They said no, they couldn’t stand that, they wanted him whole and in the ground. He is in the ground now. And so much of what we talk about now is what we don’t talk about.

Here’s another poem for you:

* * *

Station, by Sharon Olds

Coming in off the dock after writing,
I approached the house,
and saw your long grandee face
in the light of a lamp with a parchment shade
the color of flame.

An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered
eyes found me on the lawn. You looked
as the lord looks down from a narrow window
and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no
hint of shyness you examined me,
the wife who runs out on the dock to write
as soon as one child is in bed,
leaving the other to you.

Your long
mouth, flexible as an archer's bow,
did not curve. We spent a long moment
in the truth of our situation, the poems
heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

***