The What
During my undergraduate in Writing & Poetics, I had a teacher who changed my life. Most of the people who have changed my life for the better are teachers. Perhaps this is because the thing I love most in the world is learning, and so often those who love learning move into the field of knowledge-sharing and mind-shaping, the domain of teaching. As I stumbled through childhood and adolescence, uncertain that I would make it through alive, kind-hearted teachers were the ones who gently nudged me along my way, inspired me to keep reading, keep writing, and to keep listening and feeling and learning in the ways I knew how.
I feel the longing to launch into a grand list of these angels, but today I’m not here to talk about all the teachers who have changed my life. I’m sure there will be time and space for that here eventually - but today I want to talk about the teacher who asked me if I wrote reviews. This was the strange and unintentionally impactful question that changed my life. This was after I turned in an essay that was, arguably, not an essay at all.
We had been reading Event Factory by Renee Gladman (one of the many hybrid works that changed my life, unlocking something within me and giving me permission to follow my writing-poetic-mystic self into the woods and never look back) and I had been struck by the immersion I experienced in the world of Ravicka. The impression it left on me was vast and impactful, and I was left without the capacity to criticize and pick it apart to analyze, to compare or contrast, as with most of the reading reflections that we were guided to do. I wrote a response piece - something that the art pulled out of me.
I remember sheepishly letting the teacher know “I know this wasn’t what you asked for” and they (as always) said they were sure it was fine. When they returned my paper to me the following week, they looked me dead in the eye, and said “Have you ever considered writing book reviews?”
With their question, they unravelled some personal judgment within me. Not only was the (practically involuntary) response art that I had created not going to get me an incomplete grade, it was valuable enough that the teacher was nudging me in that direction. Telling me there’s something fertile to tend to, if I have the longing within me.
This is what Art (writing especially) does to me. It unravels me, breaks me, puts me back together. It is an act of deep intimacy and generosity, one that I feel as connective tissue, webbing between me and the author and the many other readers who interact with the thoughts, who tread around the terrain of our collective unconscious - reveling in the new secret garden that we have stumbled upon together.
It is an unmarketable review in many ways - it doesn’t give a good description or summary… it leaves people just as disoriented about what they may find within the book as they may have been otherwise. It is a map I draw by feel, and echo of what their words or creations left within me, something I am digesting still - that is still nourishing me as it guides my movement, as it moves through me anew.
I have never been good with directions. So these aren’t maps that are intended to help you bypass the scenic route. This is an reiterative art piece, a collection of quotes, a revelation of new ideas, or perhaps even a rant about what I did or didn’t like. This is the impact these works of art left on me. These are their impressions, the shape they left upon me once our time together had passed.
If it leaves you with anything, I hope it sparks some interest in joining the conversation of art. The asynchronous dance of humanity, the way we share feelings and meaning and stories across time and space… this is a conversation that we all get to join, if we are courageous enough to be seen. We all have something to add - even if it is only a thought, a response, a reflection on what we learned. As I watch our education systems dismantled, I think that this is the kind of Learning we cannot lose. The kind where we are touched deeply by the wonder, where we revel at the intimacy and vulnerability, where we say “I don’t know yet” or “this is what I know now” or “this is what I believed before I knew more”.