I’m not sure what I feel like writing about tonight, just that I feel like writing. It was a hectic day. I woke up early to get a little bit of work done on my Shahnameh introduction – nothing new, mostly typing up notes I took while I was in DC last Wednesday – and then, after I dropped my son off at school and came back here to make myself breakfast, I rushed out to school to get some paperwork and emailing done before my first class of the day, Asian American Literature. I gave my students the assignment for The Joy Luck Club, which most of them have not yet finished reading. That’s okay, though, since they will have two class periods to work through the short essay questions in groups before they go home to write the assignment up. If they don’t finish the book during that time, it’s their own fault.
Teaching Asian American Literature has been interesting. First, it’s not my field, which has meant that I’ve had to learn not just about the three ethnic Asian communities whose literature we will be reading – Chinese American, Filipino American and Iranian American – but also about the field of ethnic American literature in general. It’s nice, for a change, to be teaching something that teaches me something, but that is not actually what interests me tonight, sitting here in my office while my son goes to sleep and my wife takes a shower. The fact that I am teaching a course that is not in my field has started me thinking about just what, precisely, my field is. Because it’s been some time since I’ve felt like I have one.
In terms of credentials, my field is Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. That’s what it says on my Master’s Degree, and that credential is largely why I was hired by the college where I now teach. Indeed, I spent my first five to seven years there doing almost nothing else but the work of the ESL program that the institution was in the process of building. I loved the work, though I have not taught ESL classes for some time now and don’t plan to anytime in the near future. Indeed, if I were to be completely honest, I think going into TESOL was, in the first place, a way for me to avoid the fact that what I really wanted to do was write.
I finished my TESOL MA in 1987, three years after I graduated from Stony Brook University with a double major in English and Linguistics. In Fall 1984, right after my senior year, I enrolled in the Creative Writing MA at Syracuse University – this was before they had an MFA – where I studied with Tess Gallagher, Philip Booth and Hayden Carruth. I lasted just one year. I was 22 at the time, and I was sure that writing poetry was what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I’d make my living as a teacher, but it was as a writer that I intended to leave my mark. I t was not long before circumstances at Syracuse conspired to make me realize how young I was, and how arrogant.
It was Philip Booth who sat me down towards the end of the Spring 1985 semester and told me that, while I certainly knew how to handle a line of verse, and while I also very clearly knew my way around a sentence, there was not yet a real center to my work, no set of concerns out of which my poetry grew. That absence, he suggested, would make it very hard to write the thesis – a book of poetry – that I would have to write in my second year. What I needed, he said, was to live a little bit and there was just no getting around the fact that living would take time. So why didn’t I take some time away from school, he offered, and see what that did to my writing. Mr. Booth’s words – I never got to the point where I felt comfortable calling him Philip – meant a great deal to me, and if I had to say now what I learned from them it would be that you don’t have to go to school to become a writer.
So I went to my graduate advisor and told him I wanted to take a year off from school to work on my writing. I was not expecting his response. “If you want to go commune with your muse,” he sneered at me (and, yes, it was a sneer), “that’s your business, but you came to school – or at least I assume you came to school – to learn something and that’s not going to happen sitting alone beneath a tree trying to capture the wind in a song!” This was during what I have heard people refer to as The Theory Wars, when literary theorists and creative writing faculty were, quite literally, at war with each other over the legitimacy of their different pursuits. My graduate advisor was clearly in the theorists’ camp, and I guess I have him to thank that not only did I take time off from Syracuse, but also that I never went back. I think I have led a much more interesting life than if I’d stayed at Syracuse and gotten my MA, though it is also true that if I’d known then what I know now about academia, and if I’d known then that I would end up as an academic, I might have made very different choices.