What stories do

On the purpose of writing and teaching

Photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash

When I was an undergraduate, I knew I wanted to be a writer and a teacher. The two had been joined in my mind for a long time, since I was a kid, in part for practical reasons (writers need an actual job) and in part because I always really liked school and admired my teachers and thought that thinking up how to teach a lesson was, actually, pretty fun. Increasingly, in my twenties, though, I thought of teaching as a profession oriented towards others. And writing as something selfish. Something private and purpose-less. Something that mostly just served my own desires.

Teaching, then, was a way to justify writing. I could do the selfish thing (writing)—but only if I did the altruistic one alongside it.

When I talked about this with others, they’d often mention that writing has a purpose too, that writing can be for others. And I’d see the inherent tension in my reasoning, which was this: I was purporting to teach students about the beauty of story, the value of a poem. All while implicitly denying this in my posture towards my own work.

I’d try to explain why my feelings about own writing were different. And they were, actually, different—to believe in the worth of a particular piece of literature that you have chosen to teach is not the same as believing in the value of an unwritten piece of your own. In fact, you can know with almost certainty that the pieces you teach—most of them great works of literature—will dwarf even the best of what you produce. To think anything other than that is insane.

In the end, though, it didn’t really matter what I thought. I did both of these things, teaching and writing, anyway, regardless of their relative worth in my mind. I spent the first two years after college teaching high school and (kind of) writing. Though the two didn’t go together nearly as well as I would have liked.

I went back to graduate school the following fall, for an MA in English, and then had a completely different kind of crisis regarding the status of literature. I had questioned the value of my own writing repeatedly, but I had never questioned the value of books themselves, of reading and studying a novel or poem. I had taken classes on pedagogy and thought about how to teach—but I’d never questioned the discipline of English as a subject. Suddenly, though, spending my time in these heady seminars, trying to talk with my classmates—I could no longer answer a basic question: What was the point of reading fiction? A poem? A play?

I couldn’t answer it because everything simple had become, now, intensely complicated. In classes where I was submerged in theory, where everything was always understood in light of a reference I didn’t know or an idea I’d never heard of, I felt as though I no longer knew how to read a story or a poem or a play.

I couldn’t answer the question because the answer I’d held since middle school—the first time I’d realized, with a thrill, that a person could read a book as literature, and not just for fun—no longer held. I’d grown accustomed to seeing reading as an act of narrative empathy, but I found I no longer believed this. I now felt this to be trite, childish. Sure, a piece of fiction can take you into the mind of another person, another character; the language of another consciousness. But how many people read these works and leave them with no understanding of other people at all?

A few of my classmates had an answer—a compelling one. Literature should spur action and change. It should be politically efficacious. It should do something.

This came up in a seminar called The Popular. We were reading Victorian ballads and novels; we were thinking about popular forms and talking about the people who read and produced them. The critique came up during our conversation about Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. The novel sheds light on social issues, one of my classmates pointed out. But is it, in the end, quietist? Did it actually produce any change?

I wondered about this for weeks afterward. Was this the measure of a good book—that people read it and felt moved to act afterwards? I felt something lacking in this framing—that a book had to have an obvious social effect to be worthwhile—but I also couldn’t shake the question it had produced. If not that, what? What do stories do?

Community

This question was on my mind again this week. It was on my mind when two of the other resident scholars came over for dinner in my apartment on Friday. We talked, among other things, about the shooting of Renee Good and the ongoing ICE arrests in Minnesota and elsewhere. We talked about the presence of ICE at local schools and the fact that Minneapolis and other districts have decided to offer a remote option for classes into February, for the safety of their students and teachers. We talked about our relative remove from the Cities, up here in Collegeville. We talked about the removal in general during this year of residency. We talked about other points in history where people had witnessed injustice and hadn’t done anything. I said I was realizing how easy it was to be one of those people.

“You write,” one of my neighbors said at one point in the conversation, and I shook my head.

“I write things that are small,” I told her. “Domestic. Nothing that would be good here.”

What would be good here? I don’t know. I had spent part of the day taking in the news cycle and then part of it working and part of it getting dinner ready.

I’d been writing a piece on narrative possibility that now seemed fairly trivial. I was questioning what I was doing here—a question that I’d asked myself a few times this year already.

I’d asked myself that question—but now I asked it in conversation, outside the echo chamber of my own head. Now, standing in my little kitchen, it intersected with other people’s thoughts, other people’s experiences and questions.

We sat down and talked about the weeks we’d spent away from the Institute. We’d each brought food to share. Everything had been thrown together last minute. We talked about the news, and we talked about the months that lay ahead. We passed dishes around and moved from the big to the small and back again.

We shared stories, in other words. Personal ones and ones outside ourselves. Our conversation stemmed from the fact that we’ve been living alongside one another for the past several months, that we’ve already shared bits of what we came here to work on and the questions that have come up for us in our time here too.

This had been part of my answer to that question about the purpose of literature, back in graduate school.

In my second year of the MA program, a friend and I started a writing group. We met in people’s apartments to workshop stories and poems and plays. People cycled in and out, but the group remained, in some fashion, for seven years.

And so this is one thing that stories do—both the written ones and the informal ones we simply tell out loud. They bring us into relation with one another.

I realized this surprisingly late in my twenties—that the thing I’d thought was selfish was responsible for a number of the communities I’d been a part of, that writing had been the reason I talked to relative strangers and invited them into conversation. (I was introverted and awkward, but there I was, inviting people here and there. The spouse of a classmate. A coworker. A future housemate. Someone I’d just met on a pilgrimage to Kentucky.) I realized that this was not unique to me, that writing was responsible, too, for community among my students—the small group of them who gathered to share their writing with one another every Tuesday after school.

It took a bit longer for me to realize the quieter work that writing and reading were doing inside me. This was a version, really, of my older understanding of narrative empathy, a more complex one. I was teaching one day, and during our discussion, I realized I was drawing from some well of understanding that had come from outside my lesson prep—that I’d thought about this particular set of questions before, in my own writing, and I was able to articulate thoughts to my students, and frame the conversation for them, because I’d spent time exploring these ideas over the course of several years, in fiction.

The work that writing and reading are doing, then, the work that I hope they do in my students too, is forming their minds, giving their inner lives a kind of richness and complexity and depth. And then, in conversation, this inner life can come spilling out; it can inform the kinds of debates and discussions they have, the questions they ask, and the answers they try to offer.

There’s no accounting for any of this. You can’t, when you sit down to write a story or a poem, know how it will intersect with a future conversation. You can’t know how it will form you, or if it will be a piece that forges relationship.

What do stories do?

Most of the time, if you want to draw a direct line from creative writing or literature to the outside world, it will be disappointing. Whether that’s a direct social outcome or a direct effect like empathy.

And I think it’s wrong to expect literature to do this to because it would excuse us, then, from moving ourselves.

It would also diminish what literature can be, reducing it to purely practical aims, to immediate effects. And—I’ll use the less lofty term, story, instead—we go to story for so many different purposes. We go to stories sometimes to laugh and distract—sometimes to make ourselves capable of reengaging with the difficulties of the world as it is. We go to stories sometimes to encounter the world exactly as it is—to confront its harsh realities or its beauty.

I often wish I wrote about different things than I do. I wish I was a clearer thinker or a broader one. I wish the first words that came to mind when I thought of my own work were something other than small and domestic. I read others’ writing and think—if only I could do that.

But the other beautiful thing about writing, about any kind of creative form really, is that it takes so many different shapes. Some better suited for one moment than another. I’ve been grateful for many people’s writing last week and last year and in so many years prior.

Action/contemplation

Propped on the desk where I write is the back of a calendar that has followed me for three years now, a gift from a friend. It always hangs or sits somewhere near my desk. It says:

The stillness of prayer is the most essential condition for fruitful action.

-Saint Gianna Molla

I think about this quote often, and I’ve been thinking about it repeatedly this year. I’ve drawn, a few times in my journal, a line graph with contemplation on one end and action on the other and various names of people and practices and professions and places pulling me in both directions. Last semester, I was reading Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Roundtable; I was “reading” Thomas Merton (a Cistercian monk) through a podcast on mysticism that does slow readings of his writings, as a contemplative prayer practice.

I drew that line once, twice, in my journal, with Merton on one end and Day on the other and a long blank space in between.

But I was aware, even as I did this, that I was wrong—because Thomas Merton was an activist and Dorothy Day (I learned, courtesy of one of the Catholic Workers in Duluth) was a Benedictine oblate. And the quote staring back at me right now as I write this is all about movement: one moves from contemplation into action.

The podcast I was (and am) listening to has this tension embedded in it too—it comes from the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico.

To bring this back to writing and reading and teaching: While these might not seem like contemplative practices (far from it, in the midst of wrestling with a draft, or dealing with a chaotic classroom) I think there’s a corollary. Writing, reading, and teaching are often the conditions that action comes out of. But not in the simplistic way I was trying to work out in my graduate school class—not in a clear call to action. Direct calls to action are necessary, but the logic in stories and poems and plays works differently. In a classroom, it does too.

Writing and reading and seminar discussions are not “still” in the way that prayer is, but they are still in that they don’t appear to “do” anything. They are a slow gathering towards something that can never be measured (however many standards you write, however many assessments you give.) And yet, I think they are, if not essential conditions, at least incredibly important ones. For forming human relationships and complex thinking and interiority. For making it possible to be quiet and to contemplate. For providing comfort in some moments and discomfort in others—the discomfort that moves to fruitful action.