Recently I experienced one of those moments. You know, like the dream that you’re on stage during what you thought was a read-through but turns out the audience had paid and was expecting a full-on performance. And you look down and you’re in your underwear, too, and it’s not even the lacy expensive kind. “Embarrassment” doesn’t come close to articulating the emotional response I’ve witnessed in myself and I’m trying to do two things here: 1) figure out what’s really going on inside of me; and 2) get a handle on it. Because getting a handle on it is a means of declaring my self-worth in spite of the indifferent world I do not understand and have never understood. As I’m half dead already (at least) this understanding appears genuinely beyond me. I’m unsure the extent to which it matters.
When I teach writing, I become mentor to each student who lets me. Every one. I understand an intimate relationship between the self and the formative act of composing. It’s an ever-present intimacy, whether we acknowledge it or not, because we are constantly composing. Composing: a natural, human act, born of ego, consciousness, and situatedness. I understand a great power in generating awareness about how, what, and when we compose, and the potential effects of our compositions on the world and on our selves, simultaneously.
So I did something not so unusual, I think, in the universe of graduate students. I submitted an article for publication that wasn’t nearly ready for anyone to read seriously, and to a leading journal in the field to boot. Turns out the ideas brewing in the draft are really just very early thinking related to, but not even cohesively exploring, the ideas that will emerge into focus in my dissertation, which is still two years away. At any rate the submission was roundly rejected, which in and of itself doesn’t sting so much as the suggestions offered in the rejection letter, suggestions that communicate to me how wrongly I perceived my work, the mission of the journal, and the values of the community to which I was speaking. And now I doubt the journal, the community, and myself in trajectory-shifting ways. Perhaps more painfully, I doubt my mentors.
For the writing teacher, mentorship means opening. Opening time, energy, attention, intention, and good will to people making their ways and their selves in the world. It is a philosophy, a way of being in the human world; a caring, generous, generative way of communicating with people opening themselves to dialogue through composition. If there is ever any “expertise” to be had as a writing teacher, it exists in the ability to pay attention, to listen generously and respond in ways guided by the student writer, always toward that writer’s ability to consciously articulate that she has created certain meanings, and that other meanings are possible, so that she can make more informed choices about what and how she communicates. It requires good reading, reading for possibilities, and constructive feedback, feedback writers can use to construct more/different meanings should they choose to.
It must have been a dreadful read for those adjudicating the draft. I can imagine they felt irritated at having been foisted upon by such amateurish work. Time is precious. For them, that time was wasted.
And it was.
In my defense, one of the editors of the journal is a professor in my department and I did send a draft to her asking if she thought I should send it on. She advised me to send it. (She has apologized and definitely felt the sting.) Also, as part of my comprehensive exam I included a link to the article draft and an explication of my understanding of the journal (which, of course, I read thoroughly, through its archived volumes). All of the professors on my committee, one of whom is a reader for the journal, was invited to read the draft and knew of my intention to submit it. Actually, one of the expectations of the exam prompt is that the writer produce a plan for a publishable draft, execute revision based on the plan, and submit the revised draft for publication. I did it, but somehow my drivel got through, and the ideas I’d felt very excited about…now I doubt their worth. I doubt my worth.
I’d forgotten that I love teaching writing. I’m always amazed by the passions, intelligences, and deep experiences of my students, and I believe to my core that their stories, their meanings, are valuable. I know from experience that many teachers operate guided by different notions of excellence; they seek conformity to standards of form and thought. I blame this orientation for the many times my students claim to “be bad writers.” I have made a career dispossessing them of that notion, as much as I can in one semester, but it always requires a conscious effort on my part to bring their attention to the fact that they create meanings and that those meanings matter as much as anyone’s.
What I have felt stronger than anything these past few days is shame. Shame and fear. Fear that all the satisfying work I’ve engaged in as a teacher was a dream, and all the work I’ve done these past three years…a waste. Not mine, but my husband’s and my child’s time and faith. Shame and fear. They are disabling feelings students feel at all levels, especially when the ideas they communicate don’t get through, or when they struggle to find those ideas alone, never landing on the inspiration of conviction, or a clear conception of an audience remotely in reach of their imaginations. They are the most destructive feelings a teacher can spark in a student. And I seem to have sparked them in myself.
Okay. So reading this again I realize how hyperbolic it sounds. I mean… it’s one rejection. There are maybe just a few people in the world who have read the draft (none of them my mentors) and likely they’ll never remember it. But the distance I now feel between where I thought I was and where I really was, as I see it now, seems unbridgeable. I will move forward, of course (prospectus date in September). But I think I will refocus on teaching. There is some rebuilding I need to do there. And to my mind it is what makes all of this reading and thinking, process and rejection, writing and conversation remotely worthwhile.
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