I often find myself in the quandary of whether something I do will hurt other people, even if if helps me. Now, I’m not talking about these situations where I could swindle someone naive for a million dollars or where I could drop a bomb on another country simply because it gets us oil (I have no bias, right?). But instead, I’m talking about situations like the one that happened in my creative writing class yesterday:

A student had written a story about politics, one that was loosely based on an experience he had with a family member. This family member – let’s call him Javier – has a slightly antagonistic persona, and thus, the student had put Javier in the position of being a rather angry person in the story. Now the representation was not exact, and perhaps Javier would not have made the connection – but this student was very concerned that Javier would be hurt by what he had written. Here is a common problem when we write (and as we live.)

Sometimes saying our truth requires hurting other people. I deeply believe that, and while I don’t like it, I don’t think it’s wise to go through life believing that you can walk around without hurting anyone or anything (even the Jains inadvertently hurt other life and must abide the karmic consequences). Sometimes what we do and say hurts others – this is a consequence of living in a fallen world.

For writers, especially for people who write out of real experience, this dilemma is pressing because we are balancing our need to say our own experiences as we see them with the desire – selfish or truly compassionate – to protect those around us. Sometimes our truth will hurt others; sometimes we have to not put what we’ve written out there because of this; sometimes we have to put our writing out there despite this. These are individual choices that we need to make with care.

But in the end, here’s what I believe – if we are being honest and doing what we have sought to see as right, then we should put our work into the world because, hopefully, it’s presence will do more good than harm. And I believe that if we do not tell our stories, if we hold our truth in ourselves always fearing that someone else will be hurt, we can end up hurting ourselves deeply – and surely those that love us would not want us to do that.

Writing is always this balancing act where our stories sit on the center of a see-saw – our friends and families at one end and us at the other. Sometimes we launch the stories onto their side and fling them all into the ether; sometimes we pull our stories to us, tucking them back into our jacket pockets for a later day when we may send them across the see-saw again. But as a woman who believes that is always better to speak the truth in love rather than to fester a wound inside where we grow bitter, I tend to err on the far side of the see-saw, trusting my words and myself to be true as much as possible.

Now if only I could manage this in the rest of my life.

How do you guys handle this question of what to say and what to keep silent?

Happy Halloween.

Filed by Andi at 5:47 am under Uncategorized
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Folks, today I have a cold. Perhaps this little set of microbes should not bowl me over quite so completely, but I feel pretty yucky. So I’m back to bed – stacks of student papers in hand. Catch you tomorrow.

Filed by Andi at 5:55 am under Uncategorized
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Last night, four of my friends and I gave a public reading at my college. We had 36 people show up, which for our school is a huge number. We read in the lobby of our theater, a great space for a reading because it’s intimate but more formal than a classroom. And the reading was amazing.

As we read, we started to see a theme that ran through all of our work – the importance of place. Cate Hennessey read about her desire to feel at home in a place that isn’t really hers. Piotr Florczyk read poems about his experiences as a Polish immigrant, weaving in history and voice in each piece. Poet Josiah Bancroft shared his persona poems that speak from the voices of people in places – the rural South, the American grocery store. Susan Bernadzikowski shared her hilarious tale of a guest coming to New Orleans, a story replete with good food references and rootedness in a locale that lays itself on the backs of all who live and travel there. I read an essay that explores my feeling of dislocation from place.

Here, without planning all of us were exploring the ways that place has affected our identities. All of us in some way were pushing at the questions of what it means to be a person not in our original places. This strikes me as a particularly contemporary thing. 50 years ago, less in more rural places, I think, people did not move like we do. They did not leave behind everyone they know to strike out on a new world. These ideas of pioneering a new life belong to the select few that we idealize in our high school textbooks.

But now, we are living our lives always as pioneers, pushing out to find new land and homesteading in pre-built houses and apartments. Each time moving on our own or with our small families, passing by the others moving around us. No wagon trains here; just passenger cars loaded with boxes and U-hauls full of furniture that gets broken on each move. We are, in some ways, always on our own.

Yet, in moments, like in the reading last night, we find each other, friends passing through, greeting each other in this vast airport of life. We wave; we nod; we recognize one another. We hang on to each other for this leg of the flight, for this stretch of the road. We find each other at just the right moments and are reminded that we are together even in our separate ventures.

We may never sit together on that couch from Friends and drink coffee together every day, but we can read a few words and grab a beer afterwards, secure in our movement, jostling each other tenderly as we travel along.

Filed by Andi at 5:54 am under Uncategorized
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So my friend Lee tells me that my blog is really bringing him down lately, so in an effort to make Lee smile and to show that I’m really not as morose and depressing a person as I might seem lately, I give you my list of “favorite things.” (I must admit that as a child when I got scared, I sang this song in my head belting out the chorus to calm myself down. It always worked).

1. Unobstructed views of the mountain or oceans.
2. Cheese – the stronger the better.
3. Acoustic guitar.
4. The color of the sky at dawn (like now) and dusk.
5. Vladimir Nabokov.
6. Laughing so hard I cry.
7. Talking with friends over a bottle of wine.
8. Writing what I’m thinking or feeling or seeing.
9. Logic problems. My 5th grade teacher Mrs. Mackey did these with us most days, and I still love them.
10. The way cats and dogs feel when they sleep against you.
11. Anne Lamott.
12. Caravaggio.
13. Hearing about my friends’ successes.
14. Star gazing in the winter.
15. Bassett hounds, Bernese Mountain Dogs, St. Bernards, Newfoundlands, and other big dogs.
16. The smell of snow.
17. Patty Griffin, Jonatha Brooke, Tracy Chapman, Ellis Paul, Indigo Girls, Josh Ritter, Rhett Miller, Dar Williams, and most singer/songwriters.
18. Photography – I can’t take beautiful pictures, but I can admire them with passion.
19. Remembering that God loves me.
20. Talking with my parents in the early morning before breakfast.
21. Putting my cold feet on my brother’s warm ones.
22. Walking slowly.
23. Thomas Merton
24. Wind in my face.
25. Singing loudly and with gusto.

Oh and one more, good friends who remind me that life is a good thing, most times. Thanks, Lee.

Filed by Andi at 5:13 am under Uncategorized
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So, I’ve been in denial for a couple of months now. I have decided, as you know, to leave my job as an assistant professor of English. I’m leaving because I want more time to write and because of some really misplaced priorities I see at my institution. I feel good about this choice.

But today it just hit me, despite the fact that my colleagues have been saying this for months, that to a greater or less extent, these problems – too much to do, too much time given to committees, too much attention given to fiscal profits – exist at every academic institution. That truth makes me so sad; teaching at a college has been my dream since I was a kid, and I’m heartbroken to realize that working at a college, even a community college, is so much less about teaching or working with students and so much more about perpetuating the institution itself. I want to cry.

The words that brought this idea home for me came from Thomas Mallon’s introduction to his book On Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing. He says, “If I regret my long detour into teaching – and I do; it’s the vocation of first, wrong choice for most writers. . . .” He then goes on to point out that when he started working for GQ, he “took to [it] immediately – no committees for one thing.” I read that and thought – well, yes, that’s right. Writing doesn’t involve committee work. Teaching does – by necessity and by habit. Here, the proverbial lightbulb went off and blinded me. Not exactly as Damascus road moment, but a big one nonetheless.

The reality is that I cannot be part of a college faculty in the way I’d like to and feel I should – with full commitment and vigor – and still be good at writing – or, sadly – at teaching for that matter. Perhaps there are these miracle institutions that give writers the space they need – if you know of them, do share – but I suspect, especially given the corporatization of most academic institutions, that I will never find that ideal where I teach a couple of classes, get coffee with students, write for a few hours a day, and still feel like I might want to do more than collapse into bed without a thought before I drop into a coma-like sleep. I’m just not sure that ideal exists.

So today, I mourn a lifelong dream and come to reality. I will have to find other work – perhaps adjuncting is the future of my teaching career – in order to keep myself healthy. That makes me so sad.

Filed by Andi at 6:19 am under Uncategorized
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