Once A Writing Teacher

I no longer teach writing for a living. I still write. That's more what my job entails now whereas it was just a benefit of the job I used to have. Teaching writing, I found it useless to ask kids to do as I said. They didn't much listen to me. But they sure watched me carefully. "Yo, what's up with that weird ass pen?" they asked about my fountain pen. "What the fuck do you have to write about in all them pages?" they wondered seeing my writer's notebook. "You like writing? That's straight up bullshit, nigga," to which I shrugged and admitted my guilt. In class, I wrote to show them about writing, but I also just wanted time with my pen. There are few things, yo, I like better than filling pages with my thoughts, and that's no bullshit, nigga. No bullshit whatsoever.

Though I'm out of the classroom, I still have opportunities and some obligation to teach writing. Yesterday, a colleague asked me to review a piece they had written. (I'm using the plural pronoun for anonymity.) They sent me a draft of something they needed to get right. Would I look it over? Sure, I said, but with some trepidation.

Here's the thing: most people don't separate their writing from themselves or their selves from their writing. Kids in school are often better at this than adults. Maybe kids are more used to it or I built relationships I haven't yet had time to build with colleagues. Whatever the case, I know that when asked to look over a colleague's writing, they're asking me to correct typos and then say it's great. If I was still in school, I could get away with that.

(In school I often told students their drafts were better than they really were. This softened things enough that they could listen to the single bit of criticism they most needed to hear. Rather than say an entire piece was out of order, convoluted, and unbelievable, I focused on the sound of the opening and how it related (or didn't relate) to what came next. Your piece is good got us to where I could teach them something.)

I do some of that with adults too. Yesterday, I said (mostly in truth) that they had written a complete, exact, and authoritative piece. Then I said, it's too long. Length matters. (Damn it.) In the case of writing, shorter is better than longer. What's true in the other realms, I don't want to consider here.

Prior to this paragraph, the first draft of this piece was 626 words long. That's not bad. Anything under a thousand is about right for me though I believe anything online that's over seven hundred words won't be read top to bottom. I don't fuss over word count yet. I haven't finished whatever I'm going to say. (Note that I don't know what I'll say until I've said all of it. I begin with an idea, but writing shapes that idea and the shape of writing it. For instance, I had no idea this would have so many damn parentheticals.) I'll keep writing until I've said whatever it is I end up saying.

Then I'll prune the living crap out of it.

In my mother's front lawn is a shrub that was half again as tall and a third again as wide. It had grown to obscure Mom's window and taken over the garden. My brother took it way down and the whole place is better for it.

It will be the same with this piece. (The 626 words became 431.)

It was the same with my colleagues' piece. I told them to remember that people need the fewest words and shortest draft possible. I put that very delicately but still worried sending that email — an email I cut by one quarter in the second draft.

The delicacy of that email grew from knowing how people conflate their identity with their writing. They should because I perceive who people are from how they present. I once worked with a spectacular person who could not spell. His writing would have embarrassed us both he was aware (and secure) enough to have me rewrite his stuff. Maybe my colleague now will be open to learning how to be concise. Maybe not.

I started this by saying I no longer teach writing. I hear you calling bullshit on that, yo. I'd revise the beginning, but instead I'll focus on pruning (significantly) and leave the beginning so as to set up this ending. If that's wrong, someone will let me know. Probably by saying, Brian, this is good piece and you're a good guy. Now about that beginning paragraph...

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I have no idea if Alan Jacobs reads this blog (I'd like to think that he does and you should definitely read his), but this appeared the next day. Coincidence? Yeah, probably. Still, I like to dream.

Brooding, Past and Future

Like another writer I enjoy and you should read, I've been brooding.

I looked back at last year's Morning Pages for October 30 to see where I have come from. I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's first album Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and thinking he couldn't have known Born To Run was in him. He was likely anxious just getting started let alone becoming one of the biggest acts in rock and roll. That led to me thinking about how I can't know where I'll be next year and that sent me to my October 30, 2018 Morning Pages where I found this:

I'm cracking up little by little. This is the phrased I used in a letter to Jerry: cracking up. I remember a special ed. teacher at F-M who was brilliant but every few years cracked up and went out on medical leave for months or a year. I feel as if I'm on the road to a crack up. It worries me....

I have my department meeting Thursday and am reminding myself to shut up. There's no winning at these things and so many ways to lose. I imagine the obligatory "celebrations" icebreaker, each of us having to say something wonderful about school. At my turn, I imagine trying to pass but being pressed by the admin until I say, "I celebrate that we're done with two months of the year and I haven't killed myself yet." I smile thinking of the reaction that would get....

I am listing all the things I need to do next. My hand is clenching the pen again. I take a deep breath and try again to relax. Let it go. Move a sixteenth of an inch away from cracking up. I won't crack up. I just can't.

No way could I have known then that this morning I'll walk to work at a new job that isn't teaching, at which I'm appreciated by all my colleagues including the people in charge. I couldn't have known I would make it through that last school year by deciding in January that I would quit in June.

There also no real way of knowing what next October 30 will look like. I don't even know what the rest of today will be but, I'm closer to Born To Run than Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J..

And get this: since Born To Run in 1975 Springsteen hit the peak of popularity with 1984's Born In The U.S.A., the peak of artistry with Tunnel Of Love in 1987, and the peak of mastery with Western Stars this year. Even he doesn't know what his October 30, 2019 will be. He just keeps writing and recording.

Me, I'll keep writing and posting and we'll see where we get to, Bruce and me.

Not Quite Midnight Run

The computer is killing me. My work laptop has the absolute worst trackpad. Thank you, Hewlett-Packard! I may bring my computer from home to get through tomorrow without feeling crippled. That or start exercising. Maybe both.

Tonight, I sat on the couch under a cat (which is more comfortable than being on top of a cat, for both of us). My neck and arm ached too much to hold the book I was reading (Running With Sherman by Christopher McDougall which is good and getting better with each page). I set the book down, closed my eyes, and tried to meditate, but the sounds of cartilage moving in my neck was too disturbing.

I should go for a run tomorrow morning, I thought.

I've thought that for two, maybe three weeks, but each morning snooze until I've run out of time for a run. After work, I can't fit in a run with picking up our daughter, helping cook dinner, and whatever else comes up. Really, I just don't feel up to running and so make every excuse.

I should really go for a run, I thought again, leaving off the tomorrow morning part.

Running is my go-to cure for depression and stemming the blues. When I go for a run, I end up feeling better most every time. When I run regularly, I stay out of the blues and the blacks of depression.

I wonder, why the hell don't I just keep running?

I'm reminded of the scene from The West Wing in which Leo McGarry explains alcoholism to a woman. "I drank and took drugs because I'm drug addict and an alcoholic," he says. I've yet to complete a psychology degree (mostly because I've yet to begin one), but it seems to me that my not running and depression are part of a circle or maybe a sphere that tipped just the right way allows me to run 50K but tipped a degree off that axis leaves me on the couch, thirty pounds overweight.

I should..., I thought.

The cat got over me moving her. The dog popped up at the sound of her leash at eight o'clock in the evening. I strapped on my sandals, told my wife and daughter I was taking the dog, and went out in khakis, t-shirt, and hoodie. Not exactly running wear.

I leashed the dog and we jogged down the road. The dog prefers to sniff everything but went along down the block and around the corner. My pace was slower than slow. The distance was maybe once around a track. The dog stopped twice because things just had to be peed on (by her more than me). We returned home almost giddy. I chased her on the front yard hill, her favorite game, then we decided go in and tell people all about our adventure.

I don't know if I'll run tomorrow. I think I should, but if I don't, at least I went tonight. And, depending on the angle and axis around which I end up spinning tomorrow, maybe I'll still feel this good.

The Blues

I'm prone to the blues. I've described all that before. Rather than go back into it, I want to suggest, mostly to myself, a couple things that help me get moving out from under the blues.

First is family. When I get involved with the family, when I really dive in, my self-importance shrinks and an overabundance of self-importance is a lot of what leaves me blue.

Ray Charles' first album is pretty damn good medicine. Ray is so deep blue, he makes whatever I'm feeling seem shallow by comparison. Funny, as a kid, I listened to sad music when I was depressed to get myself feeling even sadder. Ray is a whole other deal. I hear hope in his blues.

Being on the couch with a cat in my lap or on my chest works too. The dog takes good care of me too, but she's not allowed on the furniture. I've been reading that cats, dogs, and humans have grown together because a purring cat or a sleeping dog means there's no danger present. The animal's better senses know trouble before we do.

One of our cats knows when something is wrong. If my daughter or I are depressed, she sits on us. If my wife is sick, she comforts her. When our other daughter is lonely, the cat befriends her.

The other cat is just an attention whore, wholly in it for herself if you ask me.

Don't stay too long on the couch. Move and create. Dinner is in the oven and moments away from being done because I chopped vegetables, rolled crust, sauteed things in a cast iron pan, put it all together and into the oven, then cleaned the kitchen. Getting something done eases the blues. Better still, I listened to Ray Charles throughout all that.

There's no cure for the blues, but I'm lighter. A cold night is falling, but the darkness is a warm blanket and the oven is hot, the warm food will soon be on the table. I'll call the family to dinner. We'll feed the animals. We will share a meal together. It's tough to stay blue around all that.