permission to be creative.
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Dear ones,
This week brought us officially into spring, which I wax poetic about here, but it also brought the final session of the Personal Essay Writing class I taught for Literary Cleveland, which I’d like to wax reflective on here. As most of you know, I’ve been teaching in some capacity since 2008, the vast majority of that being at colleges and universities, in Communication/Media departments and/or Gender & Sexuality Studies departments. The teaching I did as a professor in critical humanities fields came really easy to me — deconstructing hegemonic norms and doing root cause analysis of social problems is exactly what I’d been doing as an activist even before I got to college. I loved learning theories and frameworks that gave language to injustice in even smarter and more compelling ways, and I loved making that language accessible to my students. Although a big focus in my research and teaching was on resistance to oppression, when it came down to it, a lot of what the classroom involved was a discussion of what was wrong. I did my best to practice feminist pedagogy by treating the students as co-teachers and trying to acknowledge their full, embodied personhood, but I know many of them probably felt like cogs in the machine, sitting in the back row and doing only what would get them a passing grade.
The second kind of teaching I did, starting in late 2012, was in the yoga studio. This was a dramatically different space, and instead of struggling to create room to honor the body, I found the challenge to be creating a space for critical dialogue about appropriation, racism, capitalism, and so on. But I loved teaching yoga, and if I’m honest, it was a gift to get a break from the constant picking apart of oppressive systems (which is not to say that marginalized bodies in the studio were ever getting a break from the oppressive systems, just that we weren’t swimming in a discussion of them). I mostly taught an inarguably privileged clientele, but I also taught in prisons, jails, and rehab centers, and in all those settings, I could tell I was helping facilitate something healing (and if not healing, then something on the way to it). It wasn’t enough to support somatic work without coupling it with critical antiracism/anticolonialism (etc), but somehow it still felt…sometimes better than what I was offering my college students.
Since my book came out in 2020, I’ve been offered opportunities to do a different kind of instruction – teaching writing, and more specifically, teaching creative nonfiction. I’ve now guest lectured in MFA programs, spoke in classes focused on autotheory, and have taught several memoir and personal essay courses for the local writing center. This past month, I got to share space with a dozen mostly-women who felt compelled to sign up for something that would involve turning a part of their life into art. I assigned readings by some of my favorite writers — all of whom are thinking critically about systems of oppression, but who anchor their work in personal experience — and asked my students to take on the task of narrative-making. By the final class, the students shared feelings of breakthroughs, transformations, gratitude. Many of them were writing about trauma, or at least hard things, but I got to witness the joy that is unleashed when you give someone permission to be creative.
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