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.
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.
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.
That first third of this—boy howdy did I enjoy that. So. Spot. On. The way some folks who've never worked outside the academy equate it with the salt mines is just . . . .
I was invited back to my MFA Alma Mater once to guest teach and apparently was so terrible they changed the job description so that no alumni were allowed to ever return and teach again.