Please Persist
One of the astonishing things about teaching English composition is the poverty of ability one encounters. We have truly abandoned our young: we have not taught them to read or write. Forget about exposure to great literature or poetry. Little did I know, when I began teaching, that some students in a 300-level college course would not know how to match subject and verbs, or how to put a period at the end of a sentence. My fellow professors commiserate; admit to a rueful voyeurism, the gallows humor of tortured English; and compare the funniest appalling mistakes, like "the Appellation Mountains." Worse than the technical mistakes, however, is a certain lack of depth and a "failure to persist".
Writers about the Teacup Generation say that many young people are so reliant on protective parents that they can't navigate learning by themselves, and I do see evidence of that. Older students often seem better prepared, not least because they are more likely to have the fortitude required to look up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary. No doubt all of us humans, in our infinite varieties, differ in what we do well. Not everyone is going to love language. Not everyone loves engineering, either, or ice-cream. Maybe it was ever thus.But I wonder: why are we pretending that substandard skills are worthy of a college degree?
Next to this question, however, stands another astonishing thing. All of my students, I dare say want to write. They have things to say, funny stories, sobering perspectives. They try to see things differently and know themselves better. This morning, we read Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, "Kindness," and one student said, "I think she is saying that you have to lose everything before you appreciate the ordinary things." Yes, absolutely. And I want that student to be able to unfold her thoughts before a rapt audience, to possess the tools she needs to make the world pay attention to what life has taught her.
After class, I come to the ForeWord offices, where bins of books await me. We live in an age in which nearly anyone who wants to write a book can publish it. At ForeWord, we get great books; we get good books; we also get a fair amount of not-good books. Some are written poorly. Some need a good editor. Some are well written but don't go beyond the author's individual experience. Anyone who doubts that writing is a healing process should read Gregory Orr's wonderful Poetry as Survival, in which he suggests that writing helps us make meaning of disorder. It was important for all these writers to write their books. But what makes a book important to read?
We want books that blow our minds open, that as Rob Baker wrote a couple of issues ago, blast us into "emotional atmospheres," but these books are hard to find. Too many, these days, are cataloguing of events: first this happened, then that happened. He said this to me; I said that to him. And so on. At the end of a day of reading this claptrap I want to throw my hands up in the air. For what are we cutting all the trees down?
Please, please, persist. If you are going to write a book, give it your all. Write! Write like the wind! Write until your fingers drop off. And then work on it some more. Hawthorne said, "Easy reading is damn hard writing," and he knew what he was writing about. Practice and practice. Get a decent editor. And don't just tell us your story, tell us our story. It's critical to our survival, and we need every single voice to be trained in song.
