To Write Is To Sit In Confrontation With Yourself

For her third question, the Iranian poet quoted something I wrote in our correspondence that was not part of my answer to either of her two pervious questions:

What I’ve been thinking is that no one I know who is not an academic fully understands the degree to which grading essays is emotional labor. Even among those who are academics, I don’t know many who fully recognize that this emotional labor [meaning the teaching of writing] is different from the emotional labor involved in teaching a content.

This was the question she asked:

Can you explain more about what you mean by “emotional labor” exactly? And considering that this is your last year of teaching and you will be retiring, can you say what impact teaching has had on your literary career? One of the great Iranian poets, Ismail Khoei, admitted after being banned from teaching that the deprivation of contact with students damaged his creative mind.

To write, I responded, is to sit in confrontation with yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing—a letter to a friend, a poem, a scholarly article—what you’re trying to do is wrestle language into a coherent and accessible expression of what you have to say, which is an intellectual, emotional, and psychological process. Wrestling with yourself like that, if you’re honest about it, is to court what can be a very frightening vulnerability, because it means by definition having the audacity to lay claim to a readership’s attention—to believe, in other words, that your work matters enough that it is worth someone else’s time and, if you’re writing for publication, money. Every element of the writer’s craft that I can think of is a tool for giving your language a form that you hope will earn that attention.

To teach writing, then, is to mentor students through this encounter with themselves; it is to enter with them into their own vulnerability, their own uncertainty about whether what they have to say matters—and the younger the student, the greater and potentially more threatening that uncertainty is likely to be. Part of your goal as a writing teacher, perhaps your most important goal—and if this isn’t your goal, perhaps you shouldn’t be teaching writing—is to help your students see that what they have to say does matter and that it is worth learning how to say it in a way that others will take seriously. To hold that space for students, whether in the classroom or in the process of grading their papers, is emotional work that rarely gets recognized as such. Holding that kind of space is not unique to the teaching of writing—all good teachers hold space for their students’ vulnerabilities in one way or another—but I am trying to describe what I meant when I said that the emotional labor of teaching writing is different from that involved in teaching content.

As to your question about the impact that teaching has had on my literary career, I’m not sure Mr. Khoei’s experience is the best point of comparison. I do not know the specifics of his story, but I assume that he was banned from teaching because the politics he expressed in his writing and/or that he brought into the classroom clashed in some subversive way with the government that was in power at the time. He also lived the last part of his life in exile. Being cut off from students, in other words, was one component of a much larger dynamic of forcible silencing. I have no idea—I have no prior experience, no possible frame of reference, with which to gauge—how it would impact my creative life if my government silenced me in a similar way. That said, though, teaching was not something that fed my creative endeavors in the way Mr. Khoei’s statement implies that it fed his. This is not a criticism of or complaint about my students or my job. I have enjoyed my time in the classroom immensely and I have found tremendous fulfillment in the teaching I have done, but the reality is that most of what I have taught over the years has had little or nothing to do with what I write, and so the two endeavors have been largely separate in my imagination. The space between them has not been impermeable, but substantive crossover has, for me, been very rare.