"Those Who Write, Teach"

That's the title of a story in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It resonated with me because I'm currently taking a class called Theories of College-Level Composition, which is meant to give newbies like me some background before we're dropped into a classroom next semester and have to teach 25 freshman how to become better writers. The author, David Gessner, is talking about being a creative writing professor, which is slightly different than what I'll (hopefully) be doing—teaching freshman comp. How to write a logical, persuasive essay. That sort of thing. Gessner tries to answer this question: If you're a writer, what does all the teaching actually do to your writing? Can you give 100 percent to both?

A few things he said made me laugh. Because they were so true. And frightening.
• "A great writer, after all, must travel daily to a mental subcontinent, must rip into the work, experiencing the exertion of it, the anxiety of it and, once in a blue moon, the glory of it....the creation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise." [Having just completed my first story for workshop, which is to be critiqued the day after tomorrow, the words "exertion," "anxiety," and "irrational" rang particularly true. The trip to my mental subcontinent was full of hiccups, and said subcontinent seems to be populated by a lot of latent depressing thoughts about relationships. Aren't all short stories depressing, though? Seems like all the ones I've read lately are!]
• "Well, we can't all go live by ponds or write books about whales." [He's talking about Walden and Moby-Dick. Even if I had a pond to go to, and a whale to write about, I still can't imagine completing an actual book.]
• "Young writers think all they need is time, but give them that time and watch them implode. After all, there's something basically insane about sitting at a desk and talking to yourself all day...." [I suppose I'm one of those "young writers," if not in actual age, then in experience. Luckily, I have yet to implode. When I feel an impending implosion, I immediately decide it's time for lunch, or decide it's time to go into Manhattan and see a museum, or it's time to blather on and on using this blog as my mouthpiece.]
• "Yet no matter how much support you have....there remains the basic irrationality of the task: you are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you're going next." [Shit, there's that word again: irrational. I get the feeling that what I'm doing for the next two years—writing, and fiction, no less—makes no sense. And there's this whole "sitting" theme. Did I pick the wrong career (or did it pick me)?]
• "Energy is finite while college students seemingly are not, and after teaching for a while you begin to feel like you're in a 'Star Trek' episode, lost on a strange planet made up of a thousand pods of need, all of them beaming out at you, sucking your energy, and all of them, invariably, asking you to read something." [Don't know what to say about this, other than....why do I want to teach again? Oh right. To give back, make a difference, etc etc. But....pods of need? I didn't sign up for pods of need....]

Gessner writes that the demands of being a college writing professor "often crash up against the necessary fanaticism of the writer's life." I might have to get back to you on this, since I have yet to create a fanatic writing life or have such teaching demands placed on me. Someday, I hope to have this dilemma. Do I work on my prize-winning novel, or tend to my highly motivated students at a charming liberal arts school? If only....