There is an undercurrent to learning, a movement below the surface activity that pulls in the opposite direction. Sometimes a rip develops, a powerful surge that can carry you or drown you or maybe it generates just off to the side and misses you entirely, shark unseen, jellyfish untouched.
Week one of my online creative writing course, I skimmed the eight-week syllabus and said to my son, “I’ll never be able to finish all these readings.” He stared at me, letting me hear it before he said it: “You’re an English professor.”
When I signed up for the summer course, I assumed a couple things: I would enjoy it; I would be able to do it. The class was on developing a personal essay. I teach U.S. American literature courses at a research university and inside a maximum-security prison. For 25 years, I’ve been writing academic articles, and I wanted to turn, finally, to creative writing. In retrospect, I see that I expected the class to be a portal to a clearing where luminous green touches blue sky, settles every nervous system, induces the full-body peace of a child who, having played in water, on stone, all day, now falls asleep in another’s arms, unafraid. A lesson on how to remain kind while resisting authoritarianism, stay intact, remember dreams.
Week two, the instructor asked a question about an assigned reading. When no one responded, he rephrased with a more open-ended version. I recognized this. He resorted to, “Any thoughts at all on this one?” I experienced the discomfort of being a student with nothing to say (having read, but not closely) and knowing how it feels to launch queries into thickening quicksand silence. “Of course, if you didn’t have time to read, it will be hard to answer,” he closed, both apology and reprimand. I scurried into a cave in my soul.
There is a vulnerability to being a student, being in the position of not-knowing. Someone who can be called upon. At an arbitrary time of day, you are expected to enter the thoughts of the instructor, bracket all that is happening in your complicated life and the lives of others and consider what might as well be quantum physics (or is quantum physics). I did not have the pressures that bear down on most students: grades, extreme debt, hauling every item you possess in and out of questionable living spaces, usually in the rain. My Internet did keep crashing. Which was strange. Now I was the one flickering on and off, vanishing, popping up frazzled with a new background.
I’ve long known that, hard as it is to be a teacher, being a student is harder. But something must have shifted in me unaware over the years, or almost unaware, and I began to entertain the possibility that maybe it would be easier to be a student. To not be responsible for content, class structure, discussion, learning outcomes, evaluation, open-shooter protocols.
By week three, I was headed out to sea.
That week I also learned my 90-year-old father was having crying spells, seized by sobbing. My dad retired early to dedicate his time to ending executions in Illinois. He helped to launch a campaign that, fourteen years later, led to the abolition of the state’s death penalty. He extends love to people in prison not as a teacher or counselor or lawyer but as a fellow being on the goddamn planet. He also took care of my mom in that harrowing decline when she would ask me how my mom was, when all meaning cleaved from words. For two years, my dad, who did not change any of his four kids’ diapers, helped his spouse go to the bathroom, fed her yogurt and applesauce with a spoon, and once, when she thought her doctor was trying to poison her, popped four laxative pills into his own mouth and said, “Mary Julia, these ain’t gonna hurt nobody.” And for a second, her face lit with that old mix of annoyance and amusement and love.
I asked my dad, “What do you think is going on, with the crying?”
“If I had to say, I’d say I’m sinking.”
The following week, I drafted an email to my instructor letting him know I was withdrawing. My email had three sentences and offered no explanation. I almost hit send but remembered my policy about emotional times: I must wait 24 hours before taking an action. I saved the email as a draft.
The morning after I drafted the email, I told students in the prison about my intent to quit the writing workshop. “I don’t have time. It’s more work than I expected. Also, I don’t know what I’m doing. I thought I could write a personal essay. Turns out I have no idea what a personal essay is.” They burst into laughter.
“Yeah, you aren’t quitting,” Donte said.
“You remember what you put us through?” This was Joe. He’d told me this story, so, yes, I remembered. “You told us day one of your drama class that everyone would be in two performance groups. Most of us had never been in a college classroom, never seen a play. You gave us that whole talk about courage and growth. You were right, you know what that class created. But it was terrifying.”
“I hear you,” I said. “I get it. But, listen. I really really want to quit.”
Soon after I had a breakthrough. Something about being a student makes reading the syllabus unbearable. As a professor, I relished the “it’s-on-the-syllabus” trend. I had a favorite meme I would dispatch to students on campus when they emailed a question that could be answered by a glance at the syllabus. Shameful. Now, at 11:00 pm, I would think, Did I read everything for tomorrow? And instead of opening my phone and taking thirty seconds to check, I mulled the question over like one of life’s great imponderables. And hoped for the best. It was wild. The syllabus was replete with resources and information, a labor of love, experience, and planning. I could not look at it.
Perhaps the syllabus exacerbates insecurity with its bloodless march of time and stark accounting of all the ways you are not keeping up. Also, it’s very long.
I resolved to send an apology to every student I’ve ever had.
My personal essay was due Wednesday in week five. On Tuesday I had no personal essay. I kept thinking one would materialize—some collection of thoughts or anecdotes I could hammer into shape. “It can be short,” my kind instructor encouraged. “It can be two separate short pieces. Just a draft. Don’t stress.”
I despaired.
I considered ChatGPT.
I complained to the cats, “It’s summer. I should get a break.” They lolled and rolled and otherwise disparaged me.
I asked my instructor for an extension in an email that was not as kind, funny, or honest as ones I’ve fielded over the years.
I missed the new deadline.
I finished the creative writing course not with a personal essay but with a heavy set of questions: Was my panic attributable to my lack of self-confidence and resistance to being a student? Or does being a student undermine self-confidence and generate resistance? Is the ground for all learning and community the capacity to be wounded? Or is that just me, a few of us? Is it time for me to stop believing liberating spaces can be forged, even for a moment, in a culture forever doubling down on violence and exclusion? If, through writing a personal essay, I were to come close to something true, could it possibly be worth saying amid the chaos, brutality, and grief? And would it cause harm?
My dad worked for thirty years as a social worker and often said his only goal was to do no harm. Not make things worse. As a young person, I thought, “Surely, we need a higher bar.”
Now I fully, terribly, understand.
Moving between the crises of higher education and the catastrophe of prisons, I’ve learned it is not possible to participate in these institutions without contributing to harm—and being harmed. The systems are not commensurably harmful; conditions and outcomes are not the same. Higher education is designed for learning and intellectual growth. Prisons are designed for punishment, isolation, and deprivation. That difference matters. But one did help to build the other, and there is a shared historical design. Students sense the punitive edge to education. Experience it.
In the final weeks of class, I was struck by how much all of us taking the course had become invested in one another. We gave extensive feedback on drafts and offered genuine encouragement. The instructor modeled professionalism and put in place a practice that allowed us to connect and to care. A simple difficult thing to do—and we did it.
Collective learning, the reason I’ve held on through the heartbreak and bizarreness of academic life, and the massive state divestment. The humanities classroom remains a vital space to take up ancient, urgent questions: What constitutes a good life? What defines or could define humanity? What do we owe to one another? We walk the real world right in the door: history pulses through materials, contemporary life surges through discussions. At some point, the syllabus cuts us off, and we scatter with, I hope, a useful tool for living.
My dad recovered from the crying spells. At least, that’s what he told me. We lie to one another out of kindness and exhaustion. He does not know I cry most days.
I drive to a prison, over hills to the switchback that leads to a one-lane road that travels back up a mountainside, with no guardrail to protect anyone from the plummet to the river. I only know a river is there because a river must be at the bottom of this. More twists and bends and there it is, metallic fortress, barbed wire catching sun, terrible luminescence. Deer, woodchucks, turkeys graze near the perimeter. I think “perimeter” and not “fence” because a different prison cancels programs when there is dense fog. Perimeters must be visible at all times.
In this place, you compose poems, sculpt roses from toilet paper. Wake to another’s nightmare. Write your first essay and puzzle over paragraph breaks. Learn the labor of transitions. Locke and Mo Tzu trouble your afternoons.
You know about vulnerability. What it takes to learn.
I watch you, all of you, lift prison up off your shoulders. The daily ritual. The weight of it, the grief. You know time will take you by the throat if you do not learn to love your hands. You praise stars you cannot see. You take accountability for your life. Teach me another way. This song of sorrow. We begin. Try again.
