I’M IN SO DEEP I can’t get out. I have started liking teaching more than I like writing. My students are doing well. One of my undergraduates won the departmental fiction award for a story he wrote in my workshop. My students have won the award for three years in a row. I’m terribly proud of them and proud of myself for inspiring them to rewrite the stories until they were good. This year’s student, Kevin Brown, rewrote his story four times. We put it on the worksheet three times. He believed me when I told him that writing is rewriting and now he has his reward. His face was glowing as he ran into my office to tell me the news. He said it was the best thing that ever happened to him in his life.
Where in sitting all alone at my typewriter is there any emotion to compete with this? There isn’t. And that is why people stop writing after they start teaching.
Teaching is fun! It’s exciting and challenging and full of surprises. I have been teaching for four years now. My students work all over Fayetteville. If I go down on Dickson Street to get a smoothie one of my students makes it for me. If I have a flat tire in front of the Whole Foods Market a student is standing there to help me. If I go to Target to see the new clothes Isaac Mizrahi designed, I run into one of my graduate students and she helps me buy a seersucker skirt and later we go to my house and drink ginger tea and walk around the yard and look at the prayer flags I hung on my trees to bring luck to the students’ writing.
Teaching has filled my life with wonderful, imaginative young people. My own grandchildren are far away from me. I talk to them on the phone and see them in the summer and at Christmas but I don’t have them with me every day. My students are all around me. They enrich my life, they teach me things, they give me books to read and tell me about music I would never have known about. The chairman of our department is an aficionado of African music. He has a radio program on Monday nights of music from all the African countries. I would never have known this wonderful music if I hadn’t met Robert Brinkmeyer. Now I am addicted to it and listen every Monday night.
My poor old writing has suffered. I write books still. I have written two or three of them in the last couple of years but I don’t REWRITE THEM ANYMORE. I tell the students that writing is rewriting but I do not tell them that it is hard, arduous work. They can find that out for themselves and the ambitious, driven ones will find it out. Let them rewrite their stories and win awards. I’m through with all of that. I have a job I absolutely love, a paycheck every month, a retirement account, a rich and full life. Why should I spend my mornings rewriting my stories to make them into something the world will find valuable enough to print and read? I like them as they are. If I go back into boxes of my papers and find first drafts of things I have published, often I like the first drafts better than I like the finished PRODUCT.
I’m tired of turning my wild imagination into PRODUCT.
Here is what I’m doing with my life in the last year before I am seventy years old. Exercise, careful diet, devotion to beauty and order, devotion to my children and grandchildren, being here in good health and good spirits for when they need help or advice, enjoying the wonderful house I bought with money I made writing books, enjoying the spring rains and winter snows and flowers and trees and all the beauties of the earth and sky. I am meditating and doing yoga and reading Shakespeare with my friends on Sunday afternoon.
Last week I went on a news fast, an idea I got from Doctor Andrew Weil, who is my spiritual guru. After fourteen days of my fast, I put on my glasses while running on a treadmill at the gym. The first thing that flashed across the screen was a story about a man in California who had shot all seven of his children in their faces with a gun and killed them all.
I took off my glasses. My news fast may last another month. Or forever. I already know who to vote for. I don’t need commentators who have been corrupted by making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to tell me what to think about the events of the world.
Teaching is a tar baby. I’m stuck and I love it. I don’t even want to get away although I am always glad when a semester is over and I can go back to writing first drafts of novels and stories and putting them away in boxes to read when I am old. I probably won’t get old. That may not be as inescapable as some people seem to think it is.
FEBRUARY 2004
“The Middle Way” © 2002 by Ellen Gilchrhist. Originally published in the anthology entitled The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage, published by William Morrow 2002.
“The Shakespeare Group” © 2001 by Ellen Gilchrist. A slightly different version was originally published as “In Love with Shakespeare” in The Book magazine, October 2001.
“How I Got Stronger and Smarter Instead of Stupider and Sadder” © 2003 by Ellen Gilchrist. Originally published as “Message in a Bottle” in Real Simple magazine, February 2003.