What I've Missed Most is The Teaching.

Last Saturday, I conducted my nature writing workshop, Earth Words, at The Well—an eco-spirituality center near Chicago—for 10 interested writers, nature lovers, and those seeking to marry spirit and nature in their everyday lives.

We met for 2.5 hours in a bright, comfortable room adjacent to a lovely outdoor garden, though everyone agreed the time was too short, that they were just settling in—to the writing, to themselves—and then it was over.

A few days prior to our meeting, I’d prepared by reading and re-reading poems by Mary Oliver, essays by Barry Lopez and Leslie Marmon Silko, and excerpts from Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.  I thought about what writing exercises to use, what readings to bring along, how to connect the poems or stories to the writing and the students’ own experiences.

Then on that day, while in the room and actually teaching—guiding students in the writing exercises, inviting discussions of the readings—I realized yet again that it didn’t matter what I’d prepared or pre-thought about those 2.5 hours.   For out of the immediacy of the moment, and words read, written, and spoken, out of all of that came memories stirred and imagination ignited, discoveries made, thoughts and feelings more deeply understood.

This is what it is like for me to teach. 

I stumbled onto teaching by accident, almost 25 years ago, already middle-aged, a returning graduate student in English seeking refuge from a mind-numbing, soul-destroying job, intent upon reading—just reading—the best that had ever been written.   And then an offhand suggestion from a fellow graduate student, “Why don’t you apply for a teaching assistantship?”  Apparently having nothing better to do that day, I did, was accepted, and in 1987 began teaching my own classes in freshman comp at the same university.

I lasted four years.  I loved the teaching, and really loved teaching writing, infatuated with how it always took me places I never expected to go.  But I grew impatient with the indifference of most of the students, unhappy with the need to grade them.

Then in the summer of 1991, I picked up Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute?  and found buried in the appendix this by Frederick Buechner:  “The place God calls us to is the place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  

Though a card-carrying agnostic, those words changed everything for me, especially when I read “work” for “place.”  I knew I wanted my work to exist at the intersection of my gladness and what I thought many people hungered for—time to be creative; room to be imaginative; a place to tell their stories.   

It took awhile, but that’s the work I created over the next 20 years—writing workshops that served up the time, the room, and the place, and for adults of all backgrounds and ages.  How could I not be glad doing that?  How could I not be excited every time I rode the Red Line to the Newberry, or the metra to Barrington, or the big bus up to Madison? 

And then last year the recession, aka the "greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression."  Opportunities to do my work began to disappear.  Both institutions and individuals were—and many still are—in real economic distress, with discretionary spending taking an especially big hit.    

Woe are we.

But, as Robert Graves once said, there may be no money in poetry, but there’s certainly no poetry in money.  So while I could do the numbers and wince like everyone else, it wasn’t until last week, while in that place with those 10 people, the place Buechner so poetically described, that I realized that what I’ve missed most is the teaching.

Yes, I've missed going out to dinner more often, drinking the higher-end wines, visiting family in California and friends in New York.  I've missed buying whatever books and CDs strike my fancy.  I've missed all the little luxuries that make life so enjoyable.  But really what I've missed most is the teaching.

 

 

 

 

What I Did Today Instead of Write

Listened to NPR, love that Joe Wilson’s rival got over $400,000 in campaign contributions without even asking (what’s going on with South Carolina anyway??);

Made Coffee

Checked e-mail

Went on Facebook

Looked at ranking of the Stories Book on Amazon

Organized Day

Reconciled bank account

Checked e-mail

Went on Facebook

Organized Writing Files

Made 2^nd cup of coffee

Checked e-mail

Read internet article on anti-wrinkle creams

Went on Facebook and Amazon

Did neck exercises (don’t want the tinnutis to return)

Tidied up apartment

Did dishes

Went on Facebook

Checked e-mails

Did stretches (don't want back pain to return)

Went for a walk

Stopped at grocery store; fortunately didn't have run-in again with the lady who yelled at me for eating samples from the salad bar

Stopped at comic book store, asked about the graphic memoir Stitches by David Small

Came home, checked e-mail, Facebook and Amazon

Made lunch

Read the Red Eye, keeping up on popular culture (Ellen is replacing Paula on American Idol)

Read parts of Stein on Writing, got an interesting idea to use in my next writing workshop

Checked e-mail

Went on Facebook

Biked to university library, cruised the periodical stacks.  What a treasure trove!  In addition to the usual popular magazines like Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Vogue (Vogue???), there are tons of academic journals including  The North American Journal of Fisheries Management; Middle Eastern Studies; the Huntington Library Quarterly; and The Scottish Journal of Theology.  Can't wait to crack those open.

Read parts of the Summer 09 issue of Paris Review

Left to meet private writing client at the local indie coffeehouse

Biked to Sears to pay Discover bill

Went to networking event at Uncommon Ground

Biked back to the university library

Read more of Paris Review, found much solace in Billy Collins’ poem about not writing:

 

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

 

Everything is fine---

the first bits of sun are on

the yellow flowers behind the low wall,

 

people in cars are on their way to work,

and I will never have to write again.

 

Just looking around

will suffice from here on in.

 

Who said I had to always play

the secretary of the interior?

 

And I am getting good at being blank,

staring at all the zeroes in the air.

 

It must have been all the time spent

in the kayak this summer

that brought this out,

 

the yellow one that went

nicely with the pale blue life jacket---

 

the sudden, tippy

buoyancy of the launch,

then the exertion, striking

into the wind against the short waves,

 

but the best was drifting back,

the paddle resting athwart the craft,

and me mindless in the middle of time.

 

Not even that dark cormorant

perched on the NO WAKE sign,

his narrow head raised

as if he were looking over something,

 

not even that inquisitive little fellow

could bring me to write another word.

                       

                                    ---Billy Collins

 

 

P.S. I love you Billy Collins.

P.P. S. Came home, checked e-mail, went on Facebook and Amazon.

 

About Work

In the Stories book exercise on work, I list several of my previous jobs, including mailroom clerk, secretary, waitress, social worker, and college instructor.  Having thus been around the career block a lap or two, I’ve thought a lot about work, especially as I wasn’t raised to do it.  What the fine nuns at my all-girls Catholic high school hoped for was that we’d all graduate into good Catholic marriages, becoming good Catholic wives and mothers in the process.  If we had to work until that happened, it was expected to be of a short duration and in one of three pink collar ghettos: teaching, typing, or nursing.

Of those, teaching seemed the least objectionable, so off I went to college to be an elementary school teacher.  I lasted only a year before I began my slow descent into Dante’s Nine Circles of Career Hell.  There I drifted far longer than I ever imagined, the good-Catholic-wife-and-mother thing never quite materializing. 

The default of course was always secretarial—which I think is the Eighth Circle—since I typed an insane number of words per minute and liked to organize things.  What I didn’t like was sitting for eight hours a day, the blandness of the work, and not using much of my own creativity, unless it was to figure out how to better arrange the supply cabinet. 

But a default is a default and it came in handy whenever another of my many jobs or careers went poof.  Which happened quite frequently until I returned to graduate school in my forties and finally found myself as a writer and teacher.  There are likely several explanations for this inability to “settle down,” as my father said on more than one occasion, including having grown up with drunks. 

But that’s another story.

This is all to say that I may not have always been the perfect employee, harboring as I did great expectations for what a job is supposed to provide, other than some money and a place to be eight hours a day, five days a week, for an unconscionable number of years of one’s life.  

The huge chasm between what I expected and what I got became clear during my recent stint at the bookstore.  Ideally, work, even part-time, should be meaningful and fun, calling forth the best of one’s gifts and talents.  It should allow for variety and initiative, and promote a sense of well being.   Work, even part-time, should also provide a reasonable wage, an easy commute, and more than a half hour for lunch.

So there I was, out of touch with reality yet again.  For retail is not work, really; retail is a job, and one I turned out to be lousy at.  Not because I couldn’t find the “merchandise,” shelf it, take it off the shelf, ring it up, put it in a bag.  But because working retail means doing what the Corporate Entity says to do, and in the precise order It says to do it.   Individual initiative is not encouraged, at least among the worker bees, though hewing to the party line certainly is.

Which makes me think of those fine nuns all those years ago.  Though they aimed to teach us to be good Catholic wives and mothers—speaking of hewing to the party line—and good typists, teachers and nurses until we got there, they quite overshot their mark.  By a lot.  For those nuns gave us the tools to think , to value independence of thought, to do more than hew. 

Those nuns whooshing quietly down the hall in their black and white habits, hands tucked demurely beneath their starched nun-bibs.  Sister Kathleen, Sister Adrienne, Sister Lawrence, even old and blind Sister Paul with the Coke-bottle glasses.  This, in the ‘50s, when in my mainly blue collar family thoughts of sending girls to college were dim to the point of absent.  Those nuns, wittingly or not, let that wily snake back into the Garden.  And some of us learned to love the taste of the apple.