Variations on Variations on Grief

Maybe that’s what grief is: a fragment, a dangling modifier looking for a subject.

Jun 14, 2025

Mom’s birthday came and went last week. Grief doesn’t follow a calendar, but still.

I don’t know how many sentences I’ve read over the years that begin this way: “The thing about grief is….” But it’s a lot.

There are two kinds of humans: people who make generalizations about people, and people who don’t.

There are two kinds of writers: successful ones who make third-person-plural “we” statements, and the unsuccessful ones.

The sentences above are all attempts to begin this. None of them seem to work.

Call me an unsuccessful writer.

In my classes, I gave students models for their writing. “Make Your Own” assignments.

The one I like the best is “Make Your Own ‘White Album,’” which is modeled after Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” the title essay from her book with the same name. If you haven’t read it you should. It’s one of my all—time favorite.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is how it opens.

See? First-person plural,1 confident. I love that. If I couldn’t be confident, the least I could do as a teacher was for my students to feel that.

It was sometimes a battle to get students to write in the first person plural. It sounds oddly formal, for one thing. Do it one way, and you might sound like a priest giving a boring homily. Quite often, the early drafts would sound like Meredith’s voiceover narration in Grey’s Anatomy. “Sometimes, what we want is exactly what we need” or something like that.

I’m not yet used to seeing images of mom on Facebook or wherever and not reflexively sharing it or liking or making some funny comment about it.

One of the many shitty and cruel parts of being old and terminally online is that memories pop up of people who have gone: memories, throwbacks, “on this day” posts. Instead, my hand hovers over the phone screen or mouse, and I take a moment looking at the screen.

This will happen waiting in line for coffee or at work. And then I have to get on with whatever it is that I was trying to do.

Another Make Your Own assignment was modeled on “Variations on Grief,” an essay by Megan Daum. It’s been described as a “savage self-indictment,” but that only explains it in part.2

Reading “Variations on Grief” over the years has given me the courage to not be the hero in my own writing and to urge my students to do the same. Sometimes I really am the villain, or at least the antagonist as well as the protagonist, in my own stories. That’s just a fact.

It’s not just important to offer up all sides of oneself in personal narrative, I told my students. It’s absolutely necessary. You may find that, in making yourself unsympathetic, you will make more connections with readers than if you portrayed yourself as the perfect everyperson main character, so common in mainstream film.

Here’s the thing: I don’t feel like being unsympathetic when I write about mom. That’s just shitty.

What I will say is that me and mom had our battles over the years, but she and I stuck it out. That’s what matters.

When I was in my twenties, trying to figure out what to do after graduating college—a first in my family—I poked around at jobs. I was torn about defining myself as a writer, despite encouragement from teachers and other writers. I wasn’t even approaching being a capable writer back then, but I wanted to be a writer so badly, on a level I don’t think I’ve ever felt again. And I think that’s because I was trying to define myself as well as learn a whole craft.3

And so here I am, years later, a writer and writer alone, no struggle or hope, no ambition to speak of, writing about my dead mom.

My aunts and sister might be reading this and think it’s cruel of me to write “dead mom.” I don’t want them to feel that way.

It’s just that writing “dead mom” is the shortest, most effective and yes, maybe the most cruel way to get my point across. If you have a dead mom, you might get what I am saying here. If I wanted to let someone know I don’t feel so great or to leave me alone, I reserve the right to say “I’m just thinking about my dead mom right now—can you please buzz off?”

Mom would approve. Mom didn’t mince words.

Some specifics, from mom’s obituary, which I wrote:

Patti was known for many things: Jean Nate After Bath Splash, hot rollers, and prodding her sister Chrissy to wrap up long grace prayers before Thanksgiving dinner. She loved the taste of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, the hunkiness of Tom Selleck’s mustache, and the soulful sounds of Michael McDonald’s voice. She had a random dislike of actor Jeff Bridges and garlic. She ironed every outfit she ever wore and put on make-up every day. She called everyone “honey.”

This is not just about my dead mom, but how I am trying to get something out here, in these words, so I don’t have to carry it around all the fucking time.

A couple weeks ago, things were sucking in my day-to-day. I was piling on the worry about the future, worried about my kids in ways only catastrophizing parents can do, thinking about how so many items of my writing career wish list were gone. And then, my mind, aided by a little “Caroline No” on the car stereo, brought out the big one: mom isn’t here. There’s no one to call and have a meandering conversation that adds perspective to the day. The exhaustion. The eyes on the verge. The quivering mouth.

And then, next song, next red light. Gone.

This is about my grief. Or at least defining it for myself. When our dad died more than ten years ago, writing about that felt like working up myself into some sort of feeling, an approximation of what we could call grief. Grief as an absence, a man who I loved as a child and hated as a man. Trauma-dumping, as the kids say these days.

That writing-as-performance style is all over the bookstores these days, lyric essayists who think they’re chopping up experience like some J. Dilla. It often comes from a place of privilege, sidestepping real stories because it might expose the comfort underneath. I know I am being cruel, catty even. But when it comes to grief, my grief, it’s about telling stories. It’s a working class thing I grew up with, and I miss it. I hate that I broke from it so hard, dismissed it as some bullshit superstition.

That cardinal outside is mom giving us a sign.

I just talked to her in a dream.

She’s right here, at the bar, doing a shot with me.

Some more specifics:

Friends and family remember her as hilarious. She would mug for the camera next to statues and signs. She would often, at formal gatherings, contract a case of the giggles. From honors inductions ceremonies, funerals, and poetry readings to student concert recitals and one yoga class in the 1970s, Patti would often send others into suppressed, simpering laughter.

In the top drawer of my desk is the yellow procession flag from mom’s funeral. I clipped it to our car with FUNERAL facing the front as we auto-processioned from church to gravesite. I keep it in my desk folded in half to say FUN. Put the fun in funerals, she’d say. I’d like to think she’d get the joke.

Mom’s birthday landed on a workday, and because of that I tried not to think about it. It was impossible. After a particularly stressful day, where I navigated unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar office doing unfamiliar things, I would have called mom and wished her a happy birthday, and we would have talked about pretty much everything. I can’t say, hypothetically, that mom would have given great advice, but her response would have put whatever was riling me up into some sort of perspective.

She would give me an account of some of her celebrations. Her sisters would have taken her out, a diner or some place fancier. The group would include props, sight gags, pointing to some sign or menu item with a funny name. My sister might have dragged her out to Philly with Bill to get margaritas or happy hour karaoke thing in Philly, some situation in which Patti a bar full of people might sing “Happy Birthday.”

Photos would be posted of mom both in and out of her element. A statue of an animal or rodeo ride. These celebrations would begat stories of her interactions with the outside, non-mom world. Mom had this ineffable quality, one completely without any guile but also arch. Think Bea Arthur meets Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.

Everything she said seemed like a joke set-up. It was never clear, for example, when she asked a waiter how big the sausage was, whether she meant to be funny or it just sounded that way. When one waiter responded I’ve never had any complaints, her generous laughter won over another human, who now had a story to tell, to dine out on.

I miss her, is what I am saying. The world is way less fun and less loving without her.

This is about defining grief and it is also about lying about it. I know, I know: whole books are written about grief. I get recommendations all the time. I am sure I will connect with one some day.

But right now at least, I feel selfish talking about myself, so much so that mom is obscured by my story.

When I wrote about growing up, I thought it would be all about my dad, this extraordinarily complicated man who left my life just as I was becoming a man myself. I thought of my hometown as the secondary character.

I thought I had my situation and my story, as Vivian Gornick calls it. I had the place and I had the ideas.

But I forgot about one thing: a hero.

And that hero was mom. It took my sister to shake that out of me. Allow me to quote from my own writing again:

“I guess I am still wondering how we turned out the way we did,” I said.

“You’re forgetting we had Mom. She filled in all the cracks and voids as best she could.”

As I type about my dead mom, I’m distracted by a New Yorker podcast playing in the background. David Remnick interviews a writer about his memoir on his family’s frozen vegetable empire they created in “Southern New Jersey.”

Nobody ever says Southern New Jersey except for people like David Remnick, bless his heart.

“There must be a sense of some profound satisfaction telling this story,” the editor asks, a softball if there ever was one. The writer, who seems like a nice person, demurs, then talks about the privileges his daughter has because of exploiting people of color while building a frozen vegetable empire.

I think about writing my own family’s story, how I would have this voice in my head, one echoed by agents and publishers, that would say no one really wants to hear about a blue collar family from South Jersey. They want to read about people they want to be.

For example, people from a rich family that ran a frozen vegetable empire in Southern New Jersey.

Would people really want to read about the woman who danced with one of the Righteous Brothers at the Latin Casino? Or as a 19-year-old typed 95 words a minute and dodged getting goosed in the hallways at a Center City Bank? Or the divorced mom who rubbed shoulders with Eric Lindros typing memos for the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers in a pre-gentrified Fishtown?

Hearing this interview reminds me of another book, one my old press put out. The memoirist, a scion of a beer brewing family, experiences “great privilege” and “shopping trips to London and New York” with their family, only to have it collapse after the people buying the beer lose their jobs. Drug habits and divorce follow.

These books feel familiar—they hook us with a romance of capitalism, a reminder to readers that they, too, might have been rich once. We see versions of ourselves in writers warped by self-assurance and the need to impress no one but themselves.

That these books by robber baron descendants get published at all makes me shrug. It’s the way mom would after hearing about people who never worked a day in their lives.

I write this on a weekend, yet another day that drives home that she is not around any more. Another idle Sunday afternoon where I’d call and check in. She was the last person I would have an epic phone conversation with. There were times when, as I said goodbye to her after talking about everything under the sun, I’d say goodbye and look at the total call time.

She’s still in my phone contacts, so I can give you selected dates and times: February 29, 2024, 20 minutes, 9 seconds; August 17, 2023 33 minutes and 34 seconds; July 21, 2023: 36 minutes, 48 seconds;

Mom was a storyteller. She’d give a debrief on the family goings-on in ways that connected back generations. She’d invoke my dad, who I didn’t speak to in the last 20 years of his life, in the oddest of moments, and was the only time I would hear about him and, instead of wincing from rejection, add to a memory, laugh.

Putting the “fun” in funeral. It’s the only way.

For her birthday, I shared a photo on Instagram of mom with our girls from ten years ago. The photo, taken in a rental in Sea Isle City, is filled with white furniture and prints of seagulls. Both girls climb on top of Grandma Patti like a jungle jim, no doubt asking about going to the custard stand or a trip to the boardwalk. Patti sits in full makeup and hair done up, a queen in all her glory. When I think of mom I think of her in this state, surrounded by grandchildren, ready to hit the boardwalk and stand in the smoking zone with a Marlboro Light 100.

I don’t have a metaphor for mother-son relationships. Our relationship petered out with Husband Number Two and blossomed with Bill, Husband Number Three. What all three husbands had in common is they had their own nerdy interests. They had and have past pain in their lives, and coped with routine and keeping themselves busy with hobbies, collections. Sound familiar? It does as I look around at a roomful of books and records and several thrift shop amateur paintings by a retired lawyer from Connecticut I love to show off to visitors.

Mom took in men and took care of them, myself included.

What I mean to say: I miss her so much I don’t know how to end this sentence.

Maybe that’s what grief is: a fragment, a dangling modifier looking for a subject.

Or maybe grief is a gerund. Grieving: too slippery to be a noun, too never-ending to work as real action. And I fucking hate gerunds.

Thanks for subscribing, and for reading.

I do apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.

Ugh. Corrected to first-person plural.

These days, Daum runs workshops for writers to say the unspeakable, which means she’s been red-pilled, dipping toes into the New Yorker equivalent of bro podcasting. I still love her writing but these days I can’t carve out time to figure out what goes on in the heads of people, let alone writers, who have decided to explore being a “free thinker.”

A similar thing happened when I became a professor who taught writing. My success and confidence, or lack thereof, as a writer entwined itself with my actual job. Just when I figured out how to decouple writer and teacher, the teaching job ended.

Process Notes: Moments of Being (Sort Of)

From the notebook: the writing grift, ghost signs, DNA, and a quiz.

Daniel Nester

May 31, 2025

One of the writing prompts I liked to use with my students is called “Place Us in the Room Where You Are Writing.” Wherever you’re writing—a dorm room, Starbucks, food court—look around and describe it. Take notes. Let people know where you are, and how it relates to what you’re trying to write about. The most famous example I can think of, although there are many, comes from Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity”:

For about 15 minutes I have been sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. Trying to be honest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to me so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary.

Do you want to read more? I ask my students. I know I do!

This writing prompt did so many things at once. It draws readers in. It tells students their everyday lives are worth writing about. It offers a frame for their stories. It helps them make connections between their surroundings and how they’re reacting to their subject matter—be it nostalgia, longing, trauma, or joy. And, my favorite: it lets them talk about notebooks and pens and keyboards if they want to.

I’m sitting here at my desk at home, looking at my random notes for what I want to write about next. Examples:

People still call me professor. I don’t know what to think about that.
My hair is going. It’s time to just buzz the poof off the top of my head.
Why, oh why, is our local ice cream truck called “Mr. Ding-A-Ling”?

There are a lot of items like these—unactionable, at least as far as expanding them into essays. I mean, I can summon up 2,000 words on Mr. Ding-A-Ling, but I am not sure it’d be worth disseminating.

The Technics 1200 plays a “Dear God”-less edition of XTC’s Skylarking.1

It’s raining. Again. Every weekend for the past seven months, we’ve had a weekend without sunshine. Here in Albany—where, as my old student Abby once wrote, “even the sky seems angry”—this does not go unnoticed. People are pissed. It feeds into the narrative that Albany can’t catch a break. And they’re not wrong.

You might even be able to tell what’s going on by the publication dates of these posts. I’m trying to bang this out before the month turns. I promise you, dear readers, that I do have a work ethic—it just kicks in at the end of each month.

“You have to post something before the month ends,” the work ethic whispers. “Some people actually pay for this.”

One note reads “Content Hustle.”

I’ll try to unpack that here, since I think it relates to what I am trying to say sometimes.

During the week, I sit at the desk of my job and sometimes think back to my past life. I stole the “English Department” sign from my office and have it in my cubicle as a joke. I jot down notes for topics to cover, vignettes from two decades teaching at what I used to call the Historically Catholic College in Upstate New York.

I shirk—if that’s the right word—from the idea of talking about my “writing practice,” at least in the way I see it presented on Substack and elsewhere. I know, I know: I should get over myself. But this idea of Making a Living as a Writer, at least in the way it’s sometimes pitched, seems both unreasonable and dishonest.

Can you SEO your addiction tales into low-level riches and a modest book advance? Complain about gentrification in Upstate New York while also gentrifying Upstate New York? Run writing workshops for other gentrifiers who miss the buzz of Brooklyn? Live with your parents well into your thirties and not mention it until your third book? Charge aspiring writers just to tell them to run from MFA programs that you yourself attended?

There are actual business models for all of the above. And it’s exhausting. Maybe what I’m saying is that, at times, I’m leery about cannibalizing my own tales of professional failure for clicks. Nevertheless, I persist.

“Moments of Being.” [in quotes, as in the original notebook entry]

It’s all a bit of an acting job, really. Most days, my life is what Virginia Woolf calls “non-being,” a “fog of routine and surface impressions,” as I move through my shelves of vinyl to play, coffee to make, family to enjoy and savor. Life is life—and to be honest with you, I wish it were always a sequence of non-being.

That’s because those “moments of being,” as Woolf calls them, spring from instances where life leaves an impression. For me, they represent a double-edged sword: moments of being are often painful, but they are also ones I want to remember and write about. Moments of being most worth writing about have some conflict involved. Do they leave the pain/conflict unresolved or let it continue? Sometimes. But those moments—I can’t write about. Only the ones that have cycled through to some kind of end.

Emotion recollected in tranquility and all that jazz, as William Wordsworth liked to say.

I loved Wordsworth’s definition of poetry for years, probably because I took it as an excuse not to write until tranquility set in. When would that happen, exactly? When I retire to the Berkshires? Win the lottery with a scratch-off? Attend some writing-themed canoe weekend?

MTHFKR

As a sidebar, I will say to you, dear reader, and by way of some reassurance that I am attending to self-care, that I am looking for a new therapist. Back in my teaching days, I had a good thing going. I could walk up the street to see Dr. P, who would listen to me go on about my failures and sadness and daddy issues, and I’d walk back to campus. I remember when I worked as a freelance proofreader in midtown for this crazy lady, and she would be put out that I had to take a break from copy editing cell phone ads to see my therapist. She was in love with her first cousin, so I didn’t really take her seriously.2

Working regular business hours nowadays means going the telehealth route. I will try that eventually, but hold out for seeing someone in-person.

I did start seeing a therapist for face-to-face appointments, and we’ve had a couple at night. They’re an MD and all we talk about is vitamins and blood work. I’m not feeling it so far. Maybe after a couple appointments—after we determine if I have a variant in the MTHFR gene and whether I should go with folic acid or methylfolate—we’ll finally fucking talk about my dead mom or my loss of professional and personal identity after two decades. Stay tuned!

Lipstick Day

I remember when I had an op-ed published in The New York Times—ten, maybe twelve years ago. Sunday opinion section. A humorous piece, but still maybe my highest-profile byline. I thought it would erase the sting of the terrible review they gave my last book—the one that sent me to therapy.

I shared the link with the college’s offices, hoping they’d celebrate it. A professor published in the Old Gray Lady! But instead, the publicity team posted about National Lipstick Day across all platforms, complete with a red lips image and a caption: “What’s your favorite lipstick? Leave it in the comments!”

Ghost Signers in The Sky

I’m looking at the notes at home, and this one was a head scratcher. What the hell did this doodle mean? Then it hit me.

It references a Times Union story on how highway signs still point to the campus of my now-shuttered Historically Catholic College. The angle was obviously click-baity: local governments can't even get it together to take down a few signs, right?

My reaction was personal, since one of these signs—each and every time—triggers me. I almost muscle-memory my steering wheel to whichever off-ramp it points to.

Honestly, it wasn’t always with joy that I drove to my old job. Lately, in classic former professor fashion, I’ve been giving myself pop quizzes in my head. Here’s one.

Which one of the statements below best describes my current mood:

A. I really liked my job.
B. I was riding it out.
C. I trapped there, afraid of what would come next, unsure if I could work outside academia?
D. The “golden handcuffs” of tenure turned me into someone both underappreciated and complicit in the exploitation of adjuncts and students?
E. I just I loved teaching and was willing to suffer through everything to be able to do it.

Answer key: Trick question! The answer is F. All of the above.

I flip Skylarking over, “Dear God” still missing from side 2.

Thanks for subscribing, and for reading.

I have another post in the back, so look out for that one sooner rather than later.

I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.

“Dear God,” arguably the band’s most famous song, was added to the album only after radio stations started playing it. It was initially a B-side to “Grass,” the first single. That “Grass” was a single, in retrospect is insane, in this Substacker’s opinion, considering they had “Earn Enough for Us” in their back pocket.

Seriously, this person was in fact in love with their first cousin. It took several months to put all the pieces together, and when I did, it wasn’t long after I left the job. The vibes were off.

Once More to the Campus Center

I stood back. She dove in. That’s the whole story.

Daniel Nester

Apr 30, 2025

This is my college’s campus green, taken on April 30, 2016.

The last book I checked out from my college’s library was When Colleges Close: Leading Through a Time of Crisis. Despite the title, the book focuses less on closures and more on mergers—specifically, the one between Wheelock College and Boston University.

Like my own college, Wheelock built its legacy training teachers and social workers. And like my college, it didn’t attract massive donor dollars, described by the authors as a “small, non-elite liberal arts college.” In the 2000s, the former Miss Wheelock’s Kindergarten Training School faced shrinking pools of college-aged students in New England, falling enrollments, a modest endowment, and nearly $40 million in debt.

Sound familiar? Swap in upstate New York for New England, and it’s the same obituary. Except Wheelock still exists—folded into Boston University after a years-long effort. At my college, eleventh-hour talks of a merger were too little, too late. There were no takers.

I wish I could do a side-by-side comparison: what Wheelock did right versus what my college did wrong. The short version? They did everything right. We did everything wrong. I can’t imagine our faculty calmly entertaining merger discussions without spiraling into fears of redundancy—as some Wheelock faculty eventually were. But Wheelock’s leadership planned for the long game. Ours, in retrospect, could barely plan for lunch.

It’s all, quite literally, academic now. I can’t picture our administration having the vision—or humility—to acknowledge the end was coming years out and make real moves to preserve the college’s mission. That stings. Because Wheelock, like us, stood for public service and preparing students for underpaid, underappreciated fields in a society obsessed with ROI.

When Colleges Close is a business book. The authors, who I’m sure are decent folks, write for aspiring administrators hungry for wisdom on this elusive thing called “leadership.” But after decades hearing my own field of writing instruction dismissed as cult-adjacent or unserious, you’ll forgive me for being allergic to leadership-speak—especially from people tossing around terms like “relational transparency” while patting themselves on the back for merging into a college in Boston.

My inbox now overflows with messages from colleges my daughter will never attend. Some she applied to. Others just got her info via the Common App, which admissions departments love because it lets them inflate their applicant numbers and, in turn, their selectivity stats.

Now those colleges are sending out emails (cc’ing parents), pamphlets, even T-shirts—as if she’s already enrolled.

These messages from Last Choice Colleges stir up a complicated stew of feelings. Not too long ago, my own college sent out similar messages, funneling prospective students through engagement software that mimicked CRM platforms like Salesforce. I know there’s evidence that Customer Relationship Management boosts enrollment numbers. But let’s be real: at this stage in the admissions game, it all comes down to three letters—ABC: Always Be Closing.

Some recent email subject lines:

Join Us to Celebrate Your Student’s Acceptance
Understanding Your Financial Letter
Top 30 Career Services in Your First Year
Top 8% in Nation for Return on Investment

I read them and feel sad. I think about how, in its final years, my college pitched itself to students like my daughter—promising a campus of self-discovery, hands-on learning, dreams fulfilled. In reality, students learned and dreamed in spite of the institution. Faculty were laid off. Programs vanished. In our English department, funding for anything beyond basic instruction evaporated.

Administrators strutted around like turnaround artists, holding performative meetings while veteran staff whispered to each other that this president, too, would be gone in two years. Nobody took real risks. Ideas that could’ve helped us survive—real mergers, shared governance, transparency—were shot down in favor of consulting contracts and empty branding.

These days, I see ghosts of my old college in strange places.

Last weekend I drove out to a suburban Lowe’s to pick up a kerosene heater. Ours had busted, and we keep one around just in case the power goes out. As I turned a corner into the appliance showroom, I spotted one of my former administrators—the kind who once managed to spin skyrocketing enrollments and faculty “bloat” into the same talking point. I was reminded of Succession—specifically, the “Living+” episode where Kendall pitches a wildly unrealistic real estate venture with juiced numbers and magical thinking. Our own enrollment strategies often felt just as delusional.

I looked for a metaphor—because of course I did—and found one. The heater I needed was technically “in stock,” but it was off-season, so it sat shrink-wrapped on the highest shelf with ten others, inaccessible without staff assistance. Meanwhile, the summer fire pits and grills sat proudly on the showroom floor.

Not only did I get to see the former administrator beaming over wine fridges with their partner—I left empty-handed.

Given all this, it’s probably no surprise I’ve begged out of doing college tours with my daughter. But I tried. Early on, my wife and daughter visited a perfectly fine college and came home full of excitement.

I met them with the joylessness of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. I grilled them about administrative bloat and which departments had been cut five years ago.

It was for the best that I sat the rest out.

She’s made her decision, and she’s happy. We’re happy. At the “accepted students day,” we visited the cafeteria, dorms, and faculty offices. We listened to student panels. It felt like a reboot of a show I used to star in—new actors, same set. Student bands. Bulletin board flyers. Professors bonding with their protégés.

This was the mise-en-scène I knew for more than two decades. A place where you could say mise-en-scène without sounding like a pretentious twat. And I fucking loved it.

That’s Lake Otsego, in case you’re curious.

Anyone who has taken—let alone taught—English 101 might catch the allusion we’re making here. In his essay “Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White watches his son skip stones in the cold lake where he spent his childhood summers.

Yadda yadda yadda—he feels his balls retract and he realizes the “chill of death.”

It was taught year after year in comp classes, because E.B. White—despite my clumsy and testicle-centric summary—is considered one of the preeminent American prose stylists. That, and the essay is short and out of copyright, so it can get taught without paying a licensing fee.

The essay’s always stuck with me. And I couldn’t help but think of it as I scanned the bulletin boards, the bad haircuts on boys, the admissions reps in their sportcoats. I watched my daughter walk—awkward at first, then a little more sure-footed, through a campus that echoed the one I used to work at and believe in. She asked questions. She lit up, even, in little moments.

And all I could think of was, fuuuuuuck, we had this once, and we fuckin’ fucked it.

That’s my version of the chill. That’s the flicker of death.

As the accepted students day went on, I watched my daughter dive in—chatting with professors, asking about classes, looking at a small, oh so small, dorm room. She’ll find herself there, in her own way. Maybe a little like I did. Maybe not at all.

As I kept remembering and remembering, I realized: it’s time to let go. I started the day obsessing over what might have been, or what was lost.

I still get the flashes. This is a real grief, a grief that used to take up whole afternoons, whole weekends, now reduced to flashes, seconds. A chill. A flicker.

It lights up my eyes. And then it’s gone.

Thanks for subscribing, and for reading.

I love having this conversation with you, and I hope you’re getting something out of it.

I do apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.

Never Going Back to My Old School

The panel went fine, except for the part where I dropped an F-bomb. On my love for teaching, the Peter Elbow of it all, and saying the quiet parts out loud.

Daniel Nester

Mar 30, 2025

I searched for “classrooms” in my Google photos, and this came up. I honestly forget where this classroom was. We always had desks. And that TV is too high.

About 10 years ago I spoke on a panel at my old grad school, NYU’s creative writing program. This was the first time I was ever “invited back,” as people say, to my program, so it seemed like a big deal at the time.

The panel’s title was “Life After the MFA.” All three panelists were professors. The first panelist, who taught at a large private college with a large endowment, opened things by talking about how their job took time away from their “daily writing practice” and the challenge of balancing students’ needs with their own.

The second panelist piggybacked on some of the first person’s points, adding that sometimes students would approach her on campus and knock on her office door during office hours.

Their advice, such as it was, boiled down to the idea that teaching—and students—were a necessary evil to overcome so they could do what really mattered, which was writing their work.

It’s during these moments I question whether I am doing things right. At some point, it was revealed that their teaching loads were much lower than mine: a “2-1,” which means they taught one course in the fall and two in spring semester, or vice versa. By contrast, I taught a 3-3, with some of my colleagues teaching 4-4 and 5-5 at community colleges.

The more the fellow panelists talked, the more I felt the back of my neck warm up. I knew what I was about to do: Give some real talk. The person leading the panel asked me to offer my two cents.

“I have to be honest,” I said. “Teaching is the easiest fuckin’ job I’ve ever had.”

I rattled off my working life before that: temp proofreader at ad agencies, administrative assistant right here at NYU, a freelance medical writer, a whitewall-brusher at a car wash. Teaching at a college, by comparison, is a cakewalk. My only regret is that these jobs are going away, and are fast being replaced by low-paying adjunct jobs and yearly contracts.

I could feel myself lift out of my body after I spoke. A few giggles in front broke the silence, and then we opened up to questions.

Afterwards, as I walked around the swanky house on West 12th Street, I sensed that I had done something wrong, had broken some social norm. I mean, I dropped an F-bomb at a panel, for one. I regret doing that, but I was worked up. People fuckin’ drop F-bombs all the time, right?

I think the real offense, if I committed any, was to puncture this idea of an academic job as somehow harder than any other day gig for writers.

Maybe I said too much—or maybe I said it at the wrong volume, or without the niceties academics frame these things? In faculty meetings, we’d frame comments in Socratic, genteel ways, with a sprinkling of concern-trolling.

Example: “I wonder if this proposal will lead to the administration taking away other resources?”

In this case, I could have said: “I wonder if we thought about the jobs other writers have outside the academy, it might occur to us that we have fairly privileged positions as tenured professors?”

I’ve never been invited back to my graduate program.

I love this book. The title comes from linguist Roman Jakobson, talking about Nabakov joining the writing faculty at Harvard: : "Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?"

There is a long history of writers who are ambivalent about academia. Writers from Mary Karr to Vladimir Nabokov famously loved to complain about lazy, lunkhead jabronis who took up chairs and don’t do the reading.

I get the temptation. I’ve had days where I left class second-guessing if anything I said actually helped. But mostly, I found the middle ground where I figured out what students needed to hear to get them invested in what they had yet to learn and discover.

It’s not this binary choice, to be fair. Teachers with prizes and best-sellers who hate their jobs can also care about students, and their classes can be incredible. I know because I’ve been a student in those classes.

And someone who is an effective teacher can also teach writing lessons that aren’t really useful. Writing teachers who’ve never published a word in their lives inspire students every day. There’s no hard-and-fast rule here.

For my part, I was an un-famous writer professor with a couple small books who happened to fall into teaching in early middle age. Because I had the gift of the gab, I found I could talk to a room without too much panic and share my thoughts. I worked hard on figuring out how to involve and teach students “where they are,” as we used to say.

Over the years, I finally got the confidence in teaching that I did not have about my writing, and still don’t. One thing that upsets me about my college closing and my teaching career ending is that it happened just when I thought I had mastered, on some level, this elusive craft of teaching.

Last month, Peter Elbow died. For those of you who are not writing teachers, Peter Elbow is a hero to many a writing teacher. His breakthrough book, Writing Without Teachers, came out in 1973, and I discovered it 30 years later. Its advice, as the title suggests, is pretty simple.

Elbow basically gives you permission to shut up your inner critic and just write. His whole thing is stop trying to get it “right” on the first try, and instead, freewrite your way into figuring out what you actually think. No teacher, no grades, no bullshit—just writing as thinking. The point is to get messy first, clean it up later. You don’t need to be a genius out of the gate. You just need to start.

That idea — that writing is in itself a form of thinking — completely reshaped how I taught my workshops.

When I first got on the Peter Elbow train, I tried to do what he did, famously, which was write the same assignments alongside the students. For any writing teachers out there who are just starting, I recommend doing that, at least for a year. It’s a pretty humbling experience.

I was the last of a certain breed when it comes to professor-ing. Because the teaching market is so tight, or nonexistent, most who enter my sub-field now have PhD degrees and several published books on their resumes.

While the MFA, my degree, is still the standard terminal degree in the mini-field of creative writing, the competition is so fierce, and the jobs so few, that some colleges now specify “PhD preferred” in their postings, or just simply require it, along with a book or books from a nationally recognized press.

The first semester I taught at my college, new faculty were invited to the president’s house for a champagne reception. We stood out in the back yard of this nice house in Albany, NY, mingling with senior faculty. An education professor colleague asked where I got my doctorate. I said I got my MFA from NYU.

“You just have a master’s?” she asked. “If they can’t call you ‘Dr. Nester,’ what do your students call you?”

I paused for a second.

“Oh, they just call me Three National Press Books Nester,” I said, and walked away. She didn’t laugh. I did.

I have had many breakthroughs over my 20-plus years of teaching. One happened in spring 2012.

I don’t like to play favorites, but the English 311: Creative Nonfiction class that semester was special. Maybe it was because it was late in the afternoon or on the third floor of our building, away from the crows. Or maybe it was because a lot of the students knew each other by their senior year.

Whatever it was, students in that class handed in life stories and took themselves seriously as writers. They listened to each other. It didn’t feel like work.

Toward the end of semester, I had students take turns leading the workshop. By this point they are tired of hearing me talk, and it’s time they take over. Each student gets a turn leading the class, calling on students and facilitating discussion. Students also take a turn as “lead critic,” which is a fancy way of making sure at least one other student has come prepared with notes and things to say.

I had gotten to the point in my teaching life where I felt comfortable letting the silence sit in the air. I had learned to trust my students, to calm down a bit, put the brakes on corny jokes, and let things happen.

One afternoon, as the spring sun poured through the windows and hit the tops of our desks, students exchanged comments about a particular draft. It was a story filled with trauma and death and making sense of it. There was a missing parent who the author was trying to re-connect with.

It’s the kind of story that’s worth telling but hard to get right.

Students got to work. They suggested cuts and rearranging dialogue. The author took notes and asked questions. I could see the gears turning. Another student suggested withholding a particularly traumatic scene.

“Don’t talk about it in your introduction, don’t lead off with it,” she said. Instead, have readers experience it as you experienced it, which was out of the blue.

At some point, I had to raise my hand and talk. I had to put a name on what they were doing.

“Can you see what’s happening here?” I asked. “Do you see yourselves helping each other tell your stories? Can you see how you are doing the hard work yourselves—giving feedback, building a consensus, trusting your gut, speaking up, but doing it all with empathy for each other?”

“Remember this moment,” I said. This is special. You’re doing all of this without my help, all with maturity and grace and intelligence. Most of you are seniors, so I’m just going to say it: What we’re doing here is as intense as any discussion you’ll have in the real world.

Now, sure. There were a couple of stoner students in the class who saw me saying all this and thought they were suddenly in the presence of a professor having some sort of shamanic breakdown. I might have freaked them out a bit.

That’s fine. I just needed to get it off my chest. I’m glad I did.

Even if I never teach again, I think about those moments where teaching became a shared, collective activity. A room full of writers helping each other find the story. Not a hierarchy. Not students taking time away from a teacher’s writing. Just patience, attention, and empathy.

That day, and so many others, remind me what teaching can be.

Writing without teachers.

Thank you for reading, as always. And to those of you who are new here or were somehow auto-subscribed to my Substack, welcome. When I first started doing this just over a year ago, I had planned to just write about anything that comes to mind, figuring it out as I went along. I didn’t have a regular outlet to connect with readers, and I was getting tired of pitching editors. Anway, couple months later, my college closed and I lost my teaching job. Then my mom died. So basically I’m writing my way through a middle age crisis, and hope what I come up with somehow makes connections with you. If it’s not your thing, it’s totally fine!

Also: I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Or maybe just buy me a coffee.

The Joke That Will Outlive Our Entire Family

Our mom’s gravestone is a punchline, and she’d love it.

Daniel Nester

Mar 01, 2025

I have been meaning to tell you about my mother’s grave.

Don’t worry. The story’s mostly funny. Mostly.

We begin at mom’s favorite sushi place. The fact that Patti had a favorite sushi place at all blew my mind. Growing up, we ate Steak-Umm and Shake ’n Bake. We’d get takeout from China Star on Route 38, but for the most part we were a Acme groceries-with-double coupons family.

The name of mom’s favorite sushi spot, located near her old house in Laurel Springs, NJ, was Ta Keone.

That was the name of it (pronounced TA Kay OH Nay). Or so she thought.

I wasn’t in the room the day mom said “Ta Keone” out loud. It was said to my stepdad, Bill, used in a sentence to the effect of “Let’s go to Ta Keone and get some tempura rolls.”

To which Bill replied: “Ta Keone? What the hell is Ta Keone?”

The two retirees did go to Ta Keone that night, and when they arrived, my mother, whom I am a blood relation to, pointed at the sign that read “Ta Keone.”

“There,” she said. The sign for my favorite sushi place.

No, Bill quietly explained. That’s the sign for the takeout menu holder, as in “Take One.”

I’m lying about the whispering part. Bill probably used the words “you simple ass” and laughed and mom immediately laughed and also knew what would be coming down the pike: this would be a story told to our family, and we would re-tell it, again and again.

You have to admit, that is crap penmanship right there.

Mom took Ta Keone to be some kind of transliterated Japanese name, and partly out of reverence for other cultures and partly out of insecurity for mispronouncing words, mom tried too hard to get it right, and in so doing, mom said Tah Kay Oh Nay.

Never mind the bright blue sign above the restaurant that read Samuel’s and Chef Chan’s Chinese Cuisine Sushi Bar (see Google Maps photo, above).

“In my defense,” she said, taking a drag on a Vantage Ultra Light 100, “the penmanship was so damn bad.”

The Legend of Ta Keone spread, and for years, we asked Samuel as he walked around the tables if we could have or buy the Ta Keone sign-slash-dispenser, much to his confusion. He must have been wondering why the hell his regular customer was asking.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting on the floor of Moynihan Train Hall, waiting for Amtrak announcements, when I spotted a former colleague. We said hello, and then just sort of sighed together—the kind of sigh that says yeah, this still fucking sucks.

We used to teach at the same college, the one that shut down last year. She landed at another school across the Hudson, one that scooped up a bunch of our old programs and, in the process, got a nice little enrollment boost. The machine keeps running. Students still enroll. But for those of us who put decades into the place, it’s not that simple.

We talked about how the trustees—the ones legally responsible for keeping the college afloat—just walked away clean. No accountability, no consequences. They get to move on with their lives like nothing happened. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left picking up the pieces. That’s academia for you. The house always wins.

The thing is, a year later, a lot of us still don’t really talk about it. Not because we’re in denial—we saw it coming from a mile away—but because what do you even say when something that shaped your entire life is just... gone? You can’t just slap a label on it and move forward. It’s not closure, it’s not acceptance. It’s a void.

And maybe that’s the hardest part. Figuring out what the fuck to do with that void.

I was texting my sister the other day. We exchange messages more often these days. I think my sister, if she is reading this, would agree we are both on similar but also different paths to the grief of mom’s absence. We’re different people, for starters. Growing up, people always thought she was the older one, since she had, like, poise and boyfriends and toughness, and I was the mouth-breather with sweat spots and no girlfriends. (More than once, my own freaking daughters have asked if Aunt Meri is the older sibling, and when I clarify that I am the older one, they revel in my Succession scene-level rage.)

These days, I do feel more like an older brother, and I don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s because she’s living her best life in Philadelphia and I am trying to keep my shit together, what with losing a job and interviews and resumes and LinkedIn Premium. Or I just want to protect her and she’d never needed my protection.

Anyway, I was texting my sister, and she told me how something I wrote affected her. It always surprises me when something I write affects someone else, especially if it’s my badass sister. What we have in common is a lot, starting with the Ta Keone and dealing with the same grief.

It is strange how it pops up these days. We’re getting on a year later, and who knows how I am going to feel when that happens. In Curb Your Enthusiasm scene terms, we’re halfway to the two-year “sorry window” closing.

Usually me and Meri keep it light on our texts, peppered with things like “I miss mom.”

Over the past year, my sister’s texts have covered a wide range of subjects:

A text with funny headline (“Astronomers Found Something Cold and Wet Near Uranus”).
A text covering a dream about mom in which she returns to our childhood home on West Woodlawn Avenue, where we haven’t lived since the late 1980s, and mom wasn’t there.
A text that includes the word “twat waffle.”
Another text that uses “slut burger” in a short sentence.
Another text about a dream, very detailed this time, about pecans.
A screenshot from a web search for what pecan dreams represent (“wealth and financial security”), accompanied by a photo inside the Nuts to You Shop, with a sign for a mix called “Meredith’s Mess.”
An Amazon listing for the “Brasstache,” the “original clip-on mustache” for trombone mouthpieces.

The other week I was in physical therapy for my shoulder, just lying on a table behind a shower curtain, electrodes stuck covering my upper body. Over the stereo the “continuous soft rock station” played Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car.” And I instantly welled up.

The Tracy Chapman original is better, much better. The cover did the job, though. I lay on the table, face directed at posters of muscles and joints, and fucking lost it for 30 seconds.

Just then, I got a notification for texts from my sister. She had been to a funeral. The “Catholic Church songs”—“Gift of Finest Wheat,” “Make Me a Channel of Your Piece,” “Ave Maria”—was too much.

“No one prepared me for the first funeral after the worst one,” she writes.

Mom was our champion, defender, book publicist, first-to-like-a-social poster, emotional backstop, family get-together debriefer, interaction bufferer.

I am not someone who believes in synchronicity or sibling telepathy. We’re one year and one week apart, Catholic twins, the same gene pool. Call it confirmation bias, but the fact that I ugly-wept to “Fast Car” before my therapist twisted my arm also happened at the same time as my sister losing it in a church 220 miles away, that’s something.

Last Thanksgiving, eight months after mom died, we went to visit mom’s just-installed gravestone up Route 130.

I’m not a big grave visitor. I visited Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, and saw a couple hippies swigging from a bottle in Père-Lachaise. I read a couple of my bad poems outside Walt Whitman’s tomb in Camden, NJ. In both instances, I tried to summon up some sort of feeling of it being an important moment where I could catch some spark from the air. I felt nothing, except for the notion that I had checked off a box of places I should visit, only to be able to write this paragraph I am writing right now.

But mom’s gravestone was different. First, it was mom’s. But also we had a hand in composing the inscription.

There it was, two nonsense words in stone, “TA KEONE.” Just tacked on at the end. I had to smile.

We had to go through several drafts and mock-ups with the gravestone engraving people to get it right. The CLUMSY ALL CAPS FORMAT of gravestones doesn’t lend itself to the kind of typographic “Ta Ke One” confusion mom had. We wanted those characters in there, maybe “TaKEONE” or “TAKe ONE”—we had to settle for “TA KEONE.”

I took a picture. I thought about texting it to my sister, but I didn’t. I don’t know if she is ready to go there yet. I am still figuring out what the fuck to do with that void, the jokes. Everything.

Thank you for reading, as always. I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Or maybe just buy me a coffee.

Loading more posts…