Teaching as Learning
Or, the classroom inspires everyone (with sneak peek of some new projects)
I wrote a while ago how in the summer of 2024, I was giving serious thought to hanging up my writing practice.
I was a creative low point I can’t even really describe to you. Some of it was the result of an ambitious book tour schedule to support Splice of Life, including multiple trips, tons of interviews, and a lot of fretting and stressing about whether my sales numbers were high enough. I didn’t even have enough energy for my own resilience. The problem, it seemed to me at the time, was both that I wasn’t a very good writer and, worse, in order to get any sales at all, I had to pour myself into a mold that didn’t fit me. I was exhausted.
A lot happened after that—some good, some bad—but everything had a hand in getting me back to the page and feeling okay about myself as a writer. I lost my two-book contract with my publisher, which meant all the energy I’d poured into editing a long-gestating novel and the drafting of a second memoir went up in smoke. But it also took away a ton of pressure and unpleasantness I’d been experiencing. I set it free.
I also made my way back into the classroom with PocketMFA, an a la carte program designed for writers who want graduate-level study without the long term commitment or cost of a full MFA program. As 2025 smooshed us all like a steamroller, I showed up on the weekends to lead workshops and lectures about poetry. And in the process, I rediscovered something I think I’d lost sight of.
Writing is fun.
It’s the most fun for me when it’s wrapped around the community of a classroom. I love helping people celebrate their strengths, identify where they can learn about craft and process, but most of all to trust themselves—the irony of me needing to have learned these lessons myself, all over again, in 2024 has smacked me over the head like a frying pan as I type this.
I loved getting to know my students, looking for the brilliance in their drafts with them, encouraging them to keep at it. I always tell people writing is a marathon, not a spring, and we’re in this for the long haul (light up that irony sign again, I guess!). As I look back on my fallow summer last year, I try to offer the old me a big scoop of grace. I needed rest, not retirement. And there’s a difference. I managed to give myself the space I needed, to refocus my attention on some healing, and I came out, I think, stronger. (This assessment subject to change.)
But I think the thing teaching does for me is something I haven’t talked much about it. It has forced me to articulate my deepest assumptions about craft. I wish that alone were the easy part, but it’s not. Once I’ve presented these ideas to students, I have to explain why. I have to deepen. I have to defend. I have to discuss. It’s this process that has taught me so much about what I think is true and more so, it has called me to confirm it. My students deserve that. Just like with writing, I have to do more than tell them. I have to show them.
The end result of this reconnection with poetry is that I discovered my next manuscript. It’s one I’ve been wrestling with since 2010, when I wrote what ultimately became the spine of the collection. But I struggled to make the book cohere, to be thematic without being repetitive, to expand without exploding. Obsessive by nature, it can be hard for me to see where I need to go in my work, but I’ve been fortunate that time is an unrelenting teacher. Once enough of it passes, I see more clearly what I can and should do in a manuscript. Does it suck it took 15 years? YES. Do I regret it? At least not today, and that’s something to celebrate.
That manuscript, Career Suicide, is about money, how work affects our identity, how we harm ourselves and others, and the consequences all of these things bring. I’m trying out a joke where I say I hope the title is funny and not prophetic.
I also found a home for the first essay for that drafty second memoir in search of a new contract. “Track 5: Sunday Morning (No Doubt, 1997)” just popped up in the pages of Asterales, the first essay from Hot Mic: What I Sang at Karaoke and the Men Who Drove Me to Do It to get in front of readers. For better or worse, there’s more where that came from, charting the course of my experiences singing karaoke for more than 20 years, and the myriad relationships reflected in my song choices.
I experience teaching as a gift. And in this moment, as I step back from my most recent class to take a breath, I’m filled with gratitude. My students have given me so much, perhaps not the least of which is a renewed desire to create, to show them how I attack the question of craft, and how much growth remains for all of us when we let ourselves be changed.