Who I Write For

My identity as a teacher is inseparable from my identity as a writer. I've always been both. I've always wanted to be both.

Last semester I taught an Introduction to English Studies class and we spent a lot of time at the beginning of class talking about how we write, asking students to think about what their process was, and examining a past paper and revising it. I tend to spend a lot of time in my classes talking about how and why we write. My Composition I and II classes spend a lot of time talking about rhetorical situation and how my students should learn how to write not for professors and a class but by asking what they're trying to accomplish, who their audience is, and how they will achieve this. 

I tell my students that my role is not to tell them how to do something, forcing them to conform, but rather to learn how to get to the end point, whatever that is, learning what works for them along the way. I want them to be able to transfer the skills they learn to other writing situations, other classes. I introduce them to and model a variety of things and ask them to at least try them, although I don't require them to continue to use them (I have failed for YEARS to get students to use writers notebooks).

This semester I'm teaching an online Advanced Composition class. It has some English majors in it but it's also one of the upper level English classes our interdisciplinary majors can take, so there is a wide range of students in it. Our IDS major is totally online, so most of my students will not be campus and many won't be in the state. I tried to keep this in the front of my head as I designed the class. Like my other classes students will choose their own topics and interests for their writing but I've also been thinking a lot about the idea of who we write for.

I first started writing scholarly pieces ten years ago. I was still teaching high school full time, adjuncting at the local community college, teaching online AP classes, and had zero reason to write scholarly work. It would not advance me at work. It would not earn me no money. It actually added more things to my already full plate. I wrote because I wanted to. I wanted to do the work, I thought it was interesting, I thought it would be fun. My first writing credit was co-authoring a book chapter for an edited collection because the original scholar was unable to finish. It was a blast.

I regularly blog. I used to write fairly consistently for a comics based website. I've written for other people's blogs. I've written book reviews. I've written book chapters and articles. I wrote a dissertation, twice. I wrote a (failed) book based on the second dissertation. Each of these types of writing has different purposes, different audiences, expectations. I have been lucky in that for the most part I've been able to write what I want, the way I want. After the first failed dissertation one of the major issues I had was being told not to write. Not to doodle. Fairly condescendingly I was told "not even that whiteboard of yours." I write to think, to process, so I could not get my head around not writing, especially when things felt so dark, hopeless.

Even when I have had to write to fulfill specific expectations, for a class or requirement, I have always written for myself. I mix disciplines and approaches. I write exactly how I sound. Once someone edited my voice out of a piece and I was heartbroken. 

In part I've been able to write for myself because I don't really have stakes that say I can't. For a long time I was a high school teacher publishing, and no one cared. Then I was a graduate student and my horror and popular culture writing was not the type considered by medieval or early modern scholars. Then I went back to teaching high school and mostly decided to leave academia behind. The rare job interviews I got for colleges mentioned the blogs I'd written for more than my scholarly pieces. I did not get my current job because of my scholarship, it was my teaching demo that put me over the top. Even now, with a tenure-track job, I write for myself. I am privileged to do so by my job and what my university requires. Tenure requirements for my department are three publications. I am in my second year and have two, I'm trying to get the third by my third year review so I can feel a little more stableand focus on my teaching. This is a privilege. I know that. But I also know I took this job because it focused on teaching, because of where it is, the expectations.

I have always been surprised when people tell me the teaching stuff I've written about and shared was helpful to them. Not because I don't think my teaching resources are good, I've done plenty of teacher PD, more that anything I wrote was read. Despite the fact that I write Tweets and blog posts, things posted on the Internet, I don't ever think anyone reads it. I realized that's because I don't write things to be read. I still write only for me. Which is why my latest published chapter opens with a personal story about my Mom going to see The Exorcist, and my latest chapter is a feminist railing against misogyny and the Final Girl. I don't write to be accepted. I don't write to conform. I don't write for anyone who would care. 

If you'd told me ten years ago that I could spend the majority of my time writing about horror films, or hell, if you told eighteen year old me I could have a career out of watching movies, television, and writing and teaching about it, I would laugh. It's a helluva thing. I am privileged to do it. I always have ideas about what to write next, a running list in my planner. I do try to follow a schedule of one thing ready to be published, one thing submitted, another in the works. I am not always able to do this, but I try. But the things I write about are all my choice. Exorcisms. New Mexican folk heroes. Bogeymen. Board games. Horror video games. Twin Peaks. I see something, I doodle some things in my notebook, I circle back. I take a legal pad of notes watching, at some point it turns into an article or chapter. I tend to do better writing for a specific journal or collection call. I still struggle to write for journals that are more standard, more formal. I'm working on it. Kinda.

But one of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is that if I only write for me, I don't owe anything to anyone. If things are exhausting me, draining me, not adding anything but stress, then I can easily just stop. I can refocus on what I want to write, when I write, and how.

I tend to think things ebb and flow, so whether this is a necessary mental break or permanent hermitage, meh. But as I have found with other things, there is a real freedom with saying "I don't care" when what you mean is "I don't care about THIS thing, I care about a lot of other things." 

One thing that has definitely become clear the last couple of years is that no one is going to look out for you, care about you, so it is up to me to protect the spaces I need, to look after myself, to build the environment I need and want to do what I need and want.