My students and you and I, like everyone on earth right now, live in a time of compounding urgencies and crises. I can’t name them all, but they include decades of war, a global pandemic, the financialization of housing, the precaritization of the job market, the devaluation of human, animal, plant, and land life, pollution of water, air, land and bodies on macro- and micro-scales, the effects and facts of exponential climate change. Living through these crises in a time when public language to speak about them is impoverished, diminished, intensifies them. Living through these crises in a time when the arts, including writing, are alternately siloed (seen as separate from everyday life, or seen as reserved for a certain class of people) and made diffuse to the point of becoming mere objects of consumption (whether the mass-produced decorative objects sold in chain stores, the remaindered mass-market paperbacks I photographed in the Dumpster behind a Wal*Mart, or the thousandth Jeff Koons sold at Art Basel) strips away the power of art in the lives of ordinary people—of all of us—to help us make our lives, understand our lives, see how others have lived, and learn how to change things. Given all of this, what good is an education in writing? What is it for?
Whether or not we are thinking about any of this at a given time, the crises we live inside make their way through life alongside us. My students here in Dublin don’t need to have the word “financialization” to understand in a deep and living way what happens to people, living and thinking beings, when housing is treated as a commodity, or when the resultant scarcity means that making money looms on the horizon as the difference between housing and no housing, or between finding housing with some privacy and living in one’s parents’ house well into one’s late twenties or even thirties. No one whose school has closed because of heat, or whose school has burned or flooded, needs to know the exact weather models for the coming years to know in a deep way that climate change will not happen “over there” but right here, down to the right here of a first-grader’s finger tracing the letters on a line of the reading textbook.
When my students and I walk into the writing classroom, the facts of our lives come with us. Later, when my students and I sit down to write, the facts of precarity are like furniture in the room, and the felt-but-sometimes-unspeakable effects of climate change and the devaluation of life are in the room like wallpaper, or air. Surrounding us, we breathe them in. Our bodies are shaped to their effects. Their effects are invisible but real, and they show up as pressure. I think the pressure is in part at least the life drive: I want to survive, it says. But we live inside of capitalism, to quote Ursula Le Guin. We move in its logics like air we don’t even think about breathing in. In the rooms where we make art or we make human relationships and relationships to the living world, capitalism is there too. It forms our metaphors, the ones we live by, so thoroughly that we almost cannot see around them.
That pressure shows up, in conversations I’ve had with other writers and witnessed among writers, in part as a preoccupation with success. How to be successful. How others got their success. The tricks of success. Tips for getting one’s work in front of an agent. Finding out the secret formulas. Dos and don’ts. More or less guaranteed paths to success. The pressure of success often takes the form of questions. Sometimes these are stated, sometimes—often—they are tacit and come out in behavior or points of focus over time. The questions are questions like how will I make a living from writing? How can I be successful at this—get an agent, get published, win prizes, make money? How can I get noticed by doing this? What kind of book will be popular next year? How do you figure out trends? How do you get someone to give you a prestigious residency, fellowship, or position? I have felt and sometimes asked these questions, too. They have at times felt urgent in my life.
That’s a lot of pressure.
That’s a lot of pressure on one’s writing and on the parts of one that has ideas, makes connections, feels human feelings, thinks, makes art. It’s a lot of pressure to be an individual genius, to have ideas that are not only human-with-others but that are saleable.
What could we turn that pressure toward? How else might we experience both the compounding crises and the beautiful fact of a creative education, an education in literature? Is there another way to approach this work—the work of learning to write, to think, to live not alone but among others and with them? Is there something else all this is for besides to make rent and make our names?
Learning to write can help us find ancestors and companions. It will help us find the names “Audre Lorde” and “Adrienne Rich” and “Yuri Kochiyama” and “June Jordan” and “Dorothy Day” and “James Baldwin” and we will read them and we will know we are not alone, because these people and more have thought about what writing can be, what a human life can be.
Learning writing can help us think about likeness and unlikeness (that’s the why of studying simile) and a fine attention to what is like and unlike about two things can help us understand when we are being conned or played as well as helping us make language do its magic to and through us. Learning writing attaches us to language and at the same time can help us see that language is both real and unreal, is arbitrary and has actual effects; by extension this may help us understand other systems of meaning that are arbitrary or invented and yet have real effects. But more than any use, an education in writing is for us because we are in and of language and it is in and of us. It is a human thing, a birthright, to use language just as it is to use our senses and to make representations (sound, image) from what they transmit to us. It doesn’t have to have an outcome for it to be right or necessary.
That said, my students and I do live in a world where rent is due. And they go to university in a time where study has been coopted by neoliberal imagining, repackaged and sold as a credential only or primarily necessary insofar as it is a passkey to the next level of security. I don’t fault them for asking me how to succeed at writing on the world’s terms: I think this is a completely normal response to the educational, economic, and social systems that have brought them into my classroom. But it is my classroom, and if I am thinking in ways other than utilitarian ones about what learning and teaching writing are for, then while we’re in the classroom together, I am responsible for teaching in a way that communicates those values and possibilities. If I think that writing is for everyone—and I do—then I am responsible for thinking about what I mean when I say that, and for communicating that through my teaching, too.
In light of the facts of my students’ lives (and my own life as a teacher of writing), and in light of what I believe about writing, I think two things have to happen in the writing classroom. First of all, we must destigmatize failure, and we must do this in practical ways. The most practical way we can destigmatize failure is to refuse to assign grades to student work and to advocate to our departments/institutions in favor of ungraded or pass/fail classes.
Students know that creative risk may mean, in some cases, reduced grades, whether because their experiment ‘fails’ (is not given enough time to be worked out fully; the student does not yet have the skills to accomplish what they set out to do; the teacher does not tolerate play outside anticipated bounds). The grade or fear of the grade keeps students conservative in their practice, even when we encourage them by saying that we want them to take risks. I know from anecdotal evidence—students’ own words—that this is how some students feel about the admonition to take risks in a course where grades will be applied. How much risk? What counts as risk? What if I do as you say (take a risk) but go “too far” (beyond your tolerance)? Student perception of teachers’ desires and demands is extremely fine-tuned. They may not always have the language for it yet, but they are hyperaware of what has been asked of them in the past and what the results of their responses to those demands have been. To ask students to take risks and to reserve the right to evaluate the outcomes of those risks on an axis as unsubtle as Good/Bad, Successful/Unsuccessful is to put all the danger on one side of the equation. If we’re going to ask them to take risks, then we also have to risk something—and I think what we have to put at stake is our trust in our students.
Programmatically refusing to grade student work and substituting a rigorously caring system of involved developmental feedback, coupled with continuous self-evaluation and -reflection on the students’ part, is one way to begin to destigmatize failure. In my experience of ungrading, student work is more imaginative and more open, not less. It is sometimes less polished, but there is unpolished work in a classroom where grades are at play, too. The quality of the work does not suffer by comparison to a classroom where grades are applied by the teacher. There is less anxiety (there is still some, and some new anxiety about “how we will know how well we are doing” on the students’ part—which diminishes as they realize they can evaluate their own work and that I support them in doing that). There is more play and more invention. There is more joy.
I’m not under an illusion that a semester—or a few years—of ungrading will completely undo a fear of failure or a focus on ‘success’ by exterior metrics in my students. But I don’t have control over that. I do have some control over what success and failure look like in my classroom, ninety minutes or a few hours a week. And isn’t that what an arts education of any kind is for? Refusing to accept the given definitions of things just because they are given, going instead to find out what the things mean? Reporting back? Ungrading is, to me, one of the ways we can show our students in a living and lively way that we make whole worlds. You don’t have to please me, it says. You can invent what you need to invent. You don’t have to fill in the form.
We don’t have to accept things that are not good for (children or other) living things. We do not have to decorate the dinner table of power. We can invent what we need, and we make it together. Again and again. As a teacher of writing I am never trying to shape isolate geniuses to perch on the plinth of renown. I am trying to support human beings in being among other beings and on earth, to know, think, make together, beings who understand artwork as coextensive with entire lives. It’s hard to do that in a room where underneath everything else there is a thrum of competition.
This brings me to the second thing a writing education is for. An arts education (in general) is for everyone. A creative life is a human life. A creative life is for everyone, not just for a few of us lucky enough to work in universities or to make a living from our writing. We are a species of makers; the arts and crafts movement rightly saw that our work on earth is to make our lives beautiful and useful and, I would add, meaningful. We live among other makers, human and nonhuman. And in this time of compounding crises when the difficulty of keeping body and soul together faces my students so sharply, when they come to me to ask about how to be successful and mean how to make money, here is what I want to say.
Nonacademic and nonartistic work is a normal part of a writing life and we your teachers should normalize that for you, our students. You don’t have to hook your writing to your rent wagon to find out whether you can ‘succeed’ or what ‘success’ looks like. I have worked in kitchens, cafés, bookshops, a grocery store, and a preschool; I’ve worked as a proofreader, an office assistant, a lab technician, an after-school crafts teacher; I’ve done freelance book design and website design and editing and writing consulting. And I’ve taught in literary organizations and universities, too. I have worked jobs that are not “creative” because rent was due and also because I didn’t feel there was shame in them and because I enjoyed them. I was lucky to be given that sense by my teachers—that there was no need to do one kind of paid work or another in order to be a writers; that writing was something that could be done by any worker. Learning to write should teach us to be free and to free one another. I get this from my teachers, too, who taught me that writing poetry was not for my landlord but for me and for us, the wide us of the living and the dead. No shame in work: and also, all workers together. I remember my poetry professors refusing to hold class while graduate students and staff struck for a living wage. In those weeks of no class I learned that poetry was a thing you did with your life, with other people, as much as anything in a book.
The best possible world is one in which artmaking isn't the reserved province of the few who make a living at or adjunct to it but part of life for all—and a world in which our wages, sufficient to that life and demanding only some of our waking hours, would be made growing food/driving buses/teaching/removing snow/working in a shop or factory/whatever else. The best thing in the world would be for every bus driver, every house painter, every shop worker, every daycare provider, every construction worker, every postal delivery person, and all the rest of us encompassed by this metonymy to have a wage sufficient unto the costs of living, such that an education would not appear to be for funneling us toward work that pays the world and costs our souls (and the world, in the end), but would be for helping us to engrain habits of thought that can face complex things, including our own lives. The best world is one in which one does a B.A. in classics or in creative writing and pays the rent by teaching or driving a bus or stocking a shop—and does not go home at the end of the day (or to a second job) so tired that artmaking is not possible.
An education in writing should help us see the ways those before us have made sense of and survived impossible times. It should help us make sense of or face the complexities of our own times, too. It should help us pay attention to all that lives around us, immediately around us, in our most familiar surroundings. It should help us learn to see power and to face our entwinements in power with integrity. It should help us learn to ask questions of ourselves and of the world, to use materials and equipment (by which I mean paint, language, our bodies, land, tools…), to begin to see our own perception, and to try to make and prove connections across the huge fields of human life and human interests.
The aim of such an education would not be preparation for this or that end; it would be an education that had consequents but not direction, vocation but not professional outcomes or measurable impacts, education as an active process, like life, in which the experience itself is the what and the why. A “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” education? A “present mirth hath present laughter” education? Certainly a “we always live at the time we live, and not at some other time” education. One we would make together, responsive to the facts of our lives. How can this happen? Labor power. As teachers and culture workers we owe it to one another and to our students also to join unions, to support strikes across all fields and sectors, to see ourselves as absolutely involved in the lives of every other worker. We especially do because the more privilege we have, the more risk we can absorb. I am inspired this month by the courageous and righteous students and staff and faculty at West Virginia University, and by the United Auto Workers, and by the UCU workers all over the UK, and by the solidarity shown by farmworkers in the UFW for other strikers. Art is for everyone. Solidarity can make it so. I’m sticking to the union, but that is probably no surprise. And it was my poetry teachers who taught me that.
Thanks for reading—see you next week!
I feel like I am in the classroom getting an education in writing that I want but cannot name. Thank you very much