Teaching - continued from previous page

This poem was important to me at the point in my writing life at which I had a husband and a teaching job and three children under the age of six. As if writing were the guilty pleasure, the addiction, that which took time away from everyone who needed me. I used to believe that writing was separate from my life. I used to believe that most parts of my life were separate from the other parts. There was the mother me, the teacher me, the wife me, the friend me, the daughter me, the cook me, the laundry me, the vacuumer me, the gardener me, and on and on and on. Though I always told people I was a writer, and I was known as a writer, the writer me was something that in the stillness of my heart I suffered guilt from. It was buried in there with the me who knew that the times she felt most connected to the source was when she was alone on a mountain or alone in the silence of a room, herself and her keyboard and nothing else.

Sometimes it seems to me, looking back, that much of my personal struggle in this world has been a struggle to acknowledge to myself what I love, and what I don’t love, and what brings me joy, and what brings only a sense of weary obligation.

Let me read you a poem by Galway Kinnell.

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milky dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell

This poem has become for me the most gentle of anthems, of what it is like to be a whole person, a person who can be a writer and a teacher and a cook and a gardener and a friend and a daughter and a sister and a mother and an artist at the same time, who is connected to the source in all ways, no matter if she’s tapping at the keyboard or cleaning up the cat’ s latest vomit.

To my student who comes up to me the first night of class and confides, "I am terrified of this class. My high school English teacher told me my writing was superficial," I think, it is time to re teach you, to put a hand on your brow and retell you in words and in touch you are lovely, until you flower again from within, of self-blessing.

I may dislike a student draft. I may sigh as I read it, impatient to toss it aside and get on to the next. If I were reading a magazine at the doctor's office, that's what I would do. But that would break my vow, my vow to honor my students. Ultimately, it would break me into parts again, the way I don’t want to be. My wish is to bring wholeness into the classroom, and into the world.

My students have approached writing, and me as a teacher, with desire, sometimes with longing, often with fear, and I will never denigrate that desire, those emotions, by tossing a manuscript aside. No draft exists that does not contain within it a spark, a core, a grain of something real, something true. Sometimes it seems as if it is only my belief - that there must be something in this draft, something right, something true - that causes a grain of clarity to come shimmering up from below the surface, placing itself where I can see it and seize hold of it and say, So that is what this is about.

The gentleness that surfaces when I teach softens the words and allows understanding. Teaching has taught me patience and grace. It has taught me how to hold my own restless ache for order in check, how to focus on the tiny, clear flame of being that is at the heart of every embryonic story. Week after week, my students bring me back my humanity.

Flannery O’Connor said: "Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

I answered my student by saying, "What is my true responsibility as a teacher of an art? Is it to search for potentially great writers? Is it to try to stifle bad writers? Or is it something far more complicated, which is to strive for an unsilenced place where someone, or some thing, or some poem, or some story, can be re taught its loveliness?"

If someone had tried to stifle me, back when I wasn’t a good writer, it wouldn’t have worked. I know, because several teachers did try. And even though it didn’t work, it didn’t help me either. How could it have?

* * *

To the is it really possible? people, I sometimes say no, it’s not possible to teach writing, just as it’s not equally not possible to write. Annie Dillard wrote a wonderful short essay titled Write Till You Drop, part of which reads:

“Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too - the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that. He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air and it holds.”

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then - and only then - it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bund in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.

One line of a poem, the poet said - only one line, but thank God for that one line - drops from the ceiling. Thornton Wilder cited this unnamed writer of sonnets: one line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler’s hammer. Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down as if with tongs, restraining your strength, and wait suspended and fierce until the next one finds you: yes, this; and yes, praise be, then this.”

* * *

I have another question to the Is it really possible to teach creative writing people, which is this: if something is worth doing well, isn’t it also worth doing poorly? Take me for example. I am a poor runner. I run slowly and I’ve never run farther than eight miles in my life. But I love to run. Because I can’t do it well, because I have no inborn huge talent for running, does that mean I shouldn’t run?

I said to my class, "How can it be a bad thing for the world to do what you love doing? Isn’t there value, isn’t there honor, in trying?" As Galway Kinnell says, "The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower."

In my own life as an artist, I write one book, I make it as beautiful as I possibly can, I look at it, realize (again) that it is not and never will be as beautiful as the book I imagined writing, and off I go to write another trying, always trying. Sentences glide one into another, searching but not finding, full of yearning. Just like me. Nothing I write is as good as I want it to be. Somewhere are the perfect words I long for, but no matter how I try, what I long for eludes me.

The poet Nick Flynn writes of searching for a "song with a lost room inside it."
The feeling haunts me that in some unknowable place, the books I might write were I a better artist exist already, things of beauty whole unto themselves. Maybe the impulse toward art is the same no matter the form, no matter the level of experience, the ability, the talent. Maybe in the end there is only one art, and that one art is in essence a yearning to create something unbroken, something eternal. I hunch on the couch, seeking in my writerly way black lines and curves on a white page to translate the beauty and sorrow of an ordinary life. At heart, no matter how they try to hide it, no matter how by their lack of knowledge or ability it is hidden, isn’t that what our students are doing too?

Last night I read through twenty four drafts of poems that were not allowed to rhyme. I read of bad tempered cats, dying mothers, lost love, the kitchen junk drawer, an unwanted pregnancy, a child’s first haircut. What was really happening was that in each draft I was listening for the song with the lost room inside it.

And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the secret to this whole messy life, this chaos, this unknowable world. Maybe we’re all trying to find the lost room within the song.

<--Back