Notes from a Backwards Chair: The Life Lessons We Learned and How We Got Real

The following is the text of a lecture I gave on May 13th at North Central College’s Sigma Tau Delta (English Honor Society) induction ceremony.

Thank you for inviting me to speak this afternoon. I hope you don’t regret asking me. I’ve never spoken at an occult ceremony, so this is very special for me.

As many of you know, I’m leaving North Central College and it’s a real honor to be able to speak with you on this day of excellence—I say that sincerely, even though there’s a lot of sarcasm to wade through in the talk I’m about to give. There’s some sincerity here, too. I thank you, my audience, for listening to me. I appreciate and value every minute of my time at North Central, so I thank you for giving me this opportunity.

When I talk to former students after they’ve graduated and moved on with their lives, the first thing they usually tell me is how much, even though they didn’t know it then, they’ve come to value the times in the classroom where we gathered in a circle, flipped our chairs around, and got real. I call these sessions ‘rap sessions’ and during these rap sessions, we put our books away and take a good, hard look at ourselves. All of my current students know what I’m talking about.

“Hey teach,” they tell me, “I didn’t believe you at the time about the life lessons we would learn, but now that I’m living my life, I think about the impact you and your wisdom have on me every day. I hear your voice everywhere. Like you’re following me.” I’m usually not following my former students, but it’s at those moments when I know I’ve done my job.

As a creative writing teacher, a suspect vocation if ever there was one, akin to snake-oil salesman or social media manager, I often wonder about the value of what I do. I’ve taught a lot of creative writing students during my time at North Central College and as a grad student at the University of Utah—hundreds, already, in a relatively short time. I hope my life and career will be long and to teach hundreds, if not thousands, more students, and I hope they’re a lot like you—dedicated, considerate, intelligent, questioning.

But here’s the sad truth about teaching creative writing: most of my students will never write another short story, much less publish one, if that even matters, and the chances of any of my students making a career or money from creative writing are so close to 0 that the number might as well be 0. So I ask myself, again and again—why do it, why teach creative writing? I tell my students to define success on their own terms, that making money from creative writing is a fool’s errand, but then, what’s the value? I imagine piano teachers think the same thing about their students, or art professors, or that Professor B. confronts similar demons when she teaches Fanny Burney or Henry Fielding.

For creative writing, the challenge is particularly difficult—our classes are enormously popular. One might argue it’s the one area of expansion in the humanities, though when I say ‘area of expansion’ I say that sarcastically because no area of the humanities is expanding. At all. On a bad day, we might say that the humanities are dying a slow death—a funny thing to say at a Liberal Arts college, but even here, at an institution dedicated to the study of the liberal arts, in an area—the study of literature—that is a keystone of the liberal arts, we see our numbers dwindling. But my creative writing classes are packed—perhaps because of the promise of life lessons, or an easy A, but I think something else is going on. On a particularly cynical day I think it’s because many, many people naively believe they can write a best selling book, but my experience here hasn’t been that—I think it’s something else—but still, I wonder about the value.

Maybe it’s something all teachers in the humanities confront when, in our weaker moments, we start to agree with critics of the humanities, with the students who shun what we call the liberal arts in favor of seemingly more lucrative, more useful pursuits, like ‘Business’, ‘Exercise Science’, or ‘Optometry’—majors I picked at random from North Central’s website—when I’m at my weakest, when I’m dreading the classroom, dreading reading another dragon story, a sad grandma story, a down-on-his-luck-drunk-kills-a-homeless-guy story, I think, well, the world needs business people, exercise scientists, and optometrists, maybe more so than people with English degrees, more than another creative writer.

What is the importance of knowing how plot works? How to develop round characters? Does it matter that my students know not to use so many freaking adverbs and not to start sentences with “this is” and that nobody speaks in all caps? In a world where people regularly need eye exams, glaucoma tests, and glasses, how can I convince a student to study English and not Optometry (a battle we constantly fight with the Optometry department)? What’s the value?

I’ll come back to this question. But first, let me tell you a story.

One comment my students consistently make in my student evaluations is that I love to digress, love to go off topic. They don’t all say this, so my hope is that at least some of them like the journeys I take. I tell them I’m teaching valuable life lessons. I digress as an appeal to your damaged attention spans. It’s an appeal to the ways you consume media—I go off topic because that’s how the Internet works—we jump from thing to thing, and sometimes we come back to the thing we’re supposed to be talking about, and sometimes we don’t—sometimes we end up somewhere else all together, and, as I tell my students—that’s okay. It’s a journey—it doesn’t matter where we end up, only that we more-or-less go there together. I say it’s an appeal to your millennial minds, minds that tweet while binge-watching Game of Thrones while ‘working on’ a paper—I’m like your Twitter feeds; at least that’s what I tell myself. It probably has more to do with my own erratic mind and disorganization, but still, I feel obligated to justify my methods.

So, let me tell you a story.

When I graduated from Penn State many years ago, like you will have, I had a shiny new liberal arts degree, an English degree, and a sense of wonder about the world. I got a job in an office in New York, the city where dreams go to die. Of course, like every young person who moves to the big city to make their way in the world, I was dazzled by the tall buildings, the excellent public transportation, amazing entertainments around every corner, but my job—a promising, if low paying one, at a big book publisher in mid-town—was terrible. I was terrible. My degree had not prepared me for the unkindness of the world, had not taught me what I now know, that one must sometimes eat some shit, that work is work—as one of my bosses (somebody who taught me a lot, a person I admire a great deal) would later tell me—if it was fun, they wouldn’t have to pay you. I took this to heart for many years. He also told me the reason he never decorated his office (advice I followed) was because we could, at any moment, be fired, and it was best to be able to make a quick exit.

I hated that first office job, so I got another job, also in an office, and that job was a little better. I remember then that my office computer for the first time had access to the Internet, and so began many years of avoiding work by looking at the Internet, a pursuit I still engage in, and I suspect, you do too. At that time there was no Facebook, no Twitter—there were maybe twenty websites total, but believe me, I visited them all, and over time, people made more. I remember honestly wondering what people did at their office jobs before the invention of the Internet. Perhaps they worked, but I wonder.

And that job led to another job in another office, and another job in another office, and so on. Many of you, too, will work in offices. In between one particularly bad office job while applying to work in other offices, I was offered a job answering the telephone at the Knitting Factory, a rock club. I didn’t take the job and it’s the one regret I have in life. I waited for another job in an office to come up—one with some promise of stability and health insurance—and that’s what I did. At 23, I felt old—I craved the stability, the sureness, that a real job would give me.

Years later, sitting at my desk, I was bored. An hour has never taken so long as it did then, and I wondered, would I sit at this desk forever? Would I look back on my life and look back on all those hours fondly? Was I making a difference in the world? Was I wasting something I’d been given but had not yet discovered?

Let me tell you another story. At some point in the middle of that story I’d relocated to Washington DC—this was during the tech boom, and I was seeking my fortune working for dubious Internet start-ups, and at that time, DC was rife with such opportunities. DC was also more my speed—a little greener, a little easier, than NYC. I remember during my first or second week in NYC, on the subway going to work in my new khaki pants, a stranger, recognizing me as a transplant to the city, looked at me and said “This city will eat you alive”—a clichéd thing to say to anyone if there ever was one, but after a few years, the city did sort of eat at me. That stranger wasn’t the last to tell me I would be eaten alive by New York. So I moved to DC.

During those years after graduation, I still fancied that I would be a writer, even though I wasn’t getting much writing done. I started to take classes at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda MD (a wonderful place) and I wrote the first story I’d written since my undergraduate writing. It was a story about a guy who auditions for a secret society based loosely on my own experience attending meetings of the Masons in New York. In the story, the protagonist wrestles a tiger in an abandoned zoo. I turned this story in to my workshop, and the teacher, a kind man who looked a lot like the painter Bob Ross told me that I should put a stamp on that story and send it straight to the New Yorker—that’s how good it was, he said. He was a good teacher, but it was the worst advice I’ve ever gotten. I remember driving home from Bethesda to Alexandria—a half hour drive at night with no traffic—blasting music thinking that man, I had made it, or was about to, that I still had it, that I was some sort of genius. It may be the best I have ever felt. Having been assured of my genius, I proofread the story and sent it off to the New Yorker and waited. And waited some more, and of course I never heard back from the New Yorker; no journal or magazine ever took that story, and believe me, I sent it everywhere. I would probably still be sending it out if the computer on which the only copy was stored had not been stolen some years later.

This brings me to my first life lesson: The New Yorker will not publish your story.

That’s not really the lesson. The lesson is also not about office boredom—I encourage you all to read David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water” in which he does a pretty good job explaining that the value of your education will be in your ability to survive boredom and the awful people you’ll encounter in your life. That’s not my point at all—I was bored and decided I didn’t want to be bored anymore, so I did something else. That’s not the lesson either, though it’s good advice—you should do what you love. Don’t waste your lives. Follow your dreams, don’t take any wooden nickels, and so on. You’ve been told all of these things before.

That is incredibly privileged advice—only relatively recently have we had the idea that we can do what we love and make money from it. We’re all special, of course, but the reality is that most of us will not make money doing what we love. As a creative writing teacher, I don’t make money doing what I love—though I love to teach, my true love is writing, and gardening, and maybe Facebook. But my main love is writing. Being a teacher affords me the opportunity to do what I love, but also to think and talk almost exclusively about books. Yes, there is the grading, and the meetings, and you people–the students–but mostly it’s great. When I lived in NYC and worked in book publishing, I was talking to my friend’s boss at happy hour—I told him I wanted to be an editor. He said: “you want to read books for a living, a noble pursuit.” What I learned is that the publishing industry, the book business, is more about business and less about books. Though it never worked out that I got to edit anything, I’ve been incredibly lucky. That’s why I love my job: I read books for a living.

Many of you are off to work in offices and an office isn’t the worst place in the world, certainly—they’re usually air conditioned, and with luck, you’ll sit in a comfortable chair and the tasks you perform will not hurt you. Hopefully you’ll have good places to go to lunch. Hopefully you’ll work with friendly, intelligent, and stimulating people, though this has rarely been my experience (I’m kidding), and what you do will challenge you in new ways and you’ll get smarter. If you’re feeling challenged on a daily basis and feel like you’re getting smarter and they’re paying you, you’ve won.

Though it may not seem like it yet, you’ll all probably make livable, even good wages. With luck, your job will afford you nice things and some spare time to do the things you love. With even more luck, you may even love your job. I’m not that cynical, really, and I am also not somebody who can predict the future. I have no idea what the future holds for any of you, and ultimately, neither do any of you, but that’s what makes life so great, so exciting. Many of you are probably scared right now, but that’s okay—things will get better.

The life lesson isn’t yet about creativity, empathy, or being a good reader, either—for now it’s enough to say that this lesson is about digression and focus, how those two things are not the binaries they appear to be—hopefully if you’ve learned one thing as English majors, it’s not to trust binaries—but that for me, at least, it took several digressions before I was able to focus, that the first jobs you have will not be the last jobs you have, that again, life is not about where you end up, but how you get there, just like one of my classes.

This is a life lesson about change, I suppose, but also about trusting yourself, not being afraid to take risks, and to know when to change course. You’ve probably heard some version of all of this before, too. Here are some other life lessons you’ve probably heard but are nonetheless true and wise: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” and “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Your English degrees solidify your belief in education: something those in higher education forget again and again in a climate increasingly focused on satisfying paying customers (all of you people) with claims about employability. Education is not about vocation, not about the jobs you won’t get with your English degrees, but about the person you’ve become and the people you will one day be, people who know what to do with a comma-splice, who know that the zombies are the protagonists of the Walking Dead, who are richer nodding smugly when you recognize Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency in an episode of Mad Men. Or at least you’ll be able to nod and pretend you know what somebody is talking about when they talk about Frank O’Hara. You haven’t gotten this far not knowing how to talk about the books you haven’t read. But beyond being able to talk intelligently about television shows and to proofread, you’ve made an investment in books, in reading, in creativity, and that, I think, is enough, because what would life be without books? But you know all this. Hopefully you’ll all read a book tonight in celebration of all you’ve accomplished, of the vocation you’ve embraced as readers.

Something we all have to face as educators is that as much as a university education should be just that—an education, not job training—you’re all going to need to eat and clothe yourselves and pay for your education, and for most of us, these things require a job, and the truth is that for many of you, that job will be in an office. That’s not to say that your experience will be like mine, that you will be bored—but I urge you to remember that what you are doing today will not what you will always be doing, to always keep your eyes and minds on what’s next, and to keep moving, even though some days it will feel not so much like moving forward, but also sideways and backwards. Digression isn’t about where you end up.

For the parents in the audience, and for the students about to graduate who might be starting to think this is not a very good speech, let me assure you that in fact your English degrees are and will be extremely useful: recent surveys of potential employers indicate that the number one skill employers seek in potential candidates is the ability to write and speak clearly, and that there is a lack of candidates with these skills. While you might not make as much money out of the gate as your peers who studied actuarial science or engineering, in the long run, you will. These studies are not hard to find. It is not as bad as it seems. You will be okay, great even. Your English degree certifies that you are able to speak and write clearly—skills that in the not-so-distant past were thought to be skills every college student possessed. We all know that’s not the case. That’s just the beginning, though—the knowledge, experience, and skills you’ve developed here are priceless, not commodities. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Let me tell you another story. As an undergraduate, I had a creative writing professor, Professor Schneeman. He’s not the only professor I remember fondly, but for purposes of life lessons, he’s a good one. He’d published a book to some acclaim as a young writer, but years passed, and he didn’t write or publish anything ever again, at least not that I know of. That’s okay—the value of a life is not in what we do and don’t produce, our lives are not the sum of our resumes or CVs—but I remember sitting in his classroom churning out ridiculous, absurd, stuff, and his advice to me was the same advice I give to my students now—certainly he told me about the nuts and bolts of fiction, but what he gave me was permission. When I asked him what to do with the thing I was working on, a long, terrible mess, the best advice he gave me was to keep working on it. He gave me permission and a mission. Though his other advice was sometimes dubious—he thought my friends and I should head down to Mexico and live on the beach after graduation. Maybe this would have been good advice, I’m not sure. I was at one point angry at Professor Schneeman for not returning my emails and letters to him after graduation—it turns out that not too long after I graduated he died, so I can’t really blame him. Though I never was able to get a letter of recommendation from him, I’m eternally grateful to him for that advice—to just keep working on it.There’s another life lesson: get your letters of recommendation now, because your professors might die.

And here, I return to my first question—why do I do what I do? I realize you’re not all creative writers, but bear with me, because there’s a life lesson in here for everybody. Like most writers, I’m a writer who will likely never support myself with my writing; I’ve published a couple of books, but publishing just doesn’t work that way anymore—there are simply too many books published and too few readers. For me the pleasure of having a few good readers is enough, and I have those—a few good readers. Professor Schneeman was a good reader of my work, as terrible as it likely was, but he gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten—to just keep working, to keep going. And that’s what I’ll tell you now: just keep working, just keep going. While I teach my students about plot, about character, about comma splices, etc, that’s the best advice I can give them, to keep going, and it’s that permission that I hope they follow. You don’t need permission, but it certainly helps.

In some ways, by choosing to study Literature (or writing, or journalism) you’ve all given yourself that permission—you’ve probably doubted your choice at some point, or perhaps will doubt it, but I’ll tell you as somebody who has done a lot of things, including cage diving with great white sharks, I can tell you that the value of your degree, the value of your education is not that you’re good communicators, though you no-doubt are, but in your ability to read. In my notes, read is in italics because I’m not talking about reading because all of us in this room I’m guessing can read. What I’m talking about is close reading. Many of you are probably tired of hearing this, and perhaps you can’t easily see the value in being able to analyze and write about a text in a sophisticated way as a life skill, but I assure you it is because close reading is about being more than just a consumer, more than an office worker, more than somebody with a framed degree, because close reading is active reading, and active reading is about noticing in a way that goes beyond the printed page or film, or television, beyond, even, your place in your community, your family, your job. Close reading is about being thoughtful, careful, and engaged. It’s about empathy. It’s about being kind to yourselves and others. It’s about understanding. It’s a skill that I hope none of you forget, that you don’t leave behind as you begin whatever you’re going to do next because I believe this is the real value of your education as an English major. This goes beyond critical thinking—close reading is about engaging and unpacking texts, and as I hope you’ve learned a text can be anything and while I don’t expect you’ll be called upon to deconstruct an office memo any time soon, it’s your ability to interact in a sophisticated way with information given, to communicate that complex interaction in a clear way, and to recognize the nuance in a situation, that will set you apart.

So, my life lesson is this—I give you permission, if you need it, but by choosing to embrace the humanities, to embrace literature, to embrace writing, to embrace close reading, you’ve chosen wisely, because you’ve chosen not just to embrace books, literary history, and all the wonders of recorded thought, you’ve chosen empathy, compassion, thoughtfulness. You’ve chosen close-reading in the broadest sense. If you need permission, I give it to you—permission to live on a beach in Mexico or permission to write, but above all, I give you permission to give yourselves permission—permission to explore, permission to digress.