Writing Is My Drink (9 page)

nemesis: the Success Skil s course.

“Hold on, let me get this down,” I said, digging through my

purse for paper.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, her mouth half full of salad,

waving away my search for paper with her free hand. “It’s all on

the notecards.”

“Notecards?” I asked, hope rising in me for the first time in

days.

“Notecards,” she said with a wink. “It’s all in the cards, my

friend. No worries.”

The day after B. left for Stanford, I tracked down the file with

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the note cards. For each of the Success Skil s lectures there was

a stack of about ten note cards paper-clipped together. I started

with the one for Class Three: How We Learn. “In Piaget’s schema

theory,” the card read, “he asserted that our brains are like filing cabinets.” Okay, I thought, fair enough. The next card read, “For

each topic, we own a folder, which may be very thin or quite

full.”

The cards lacked the promise of revealing the mystery of

Success Skil s I’d hope they’d deliver. But I was also tired of

being afraid, of thinking about the dreaded class, of preparing

for something I didn’t truly know how to prepare for. I’d read the

corresponding chapters in Pauk and Owens’s book
How to Study

in Col ege
; bring the cards and it would work out, right? B. had done it, hadn’t she?

I overlooked the fact that B. had created these notes based

on her own knowledge, which was immense. Each of the mi-

nuscule notations on each individual card pointed to a large file

in her brain that she would download when prompted by each

tiny note. I had no such files in my brain. I had only the tiny note pointing to my vast ignorance of how we learn and many other

subjects.

Enrollment in the Success Skil s class was mandatory for

students participating in a certain scholarship-generating grant

program. No typical college student would take such a course

otherwise. My first quarter of Success Skil s was taught in an au-

ditorium of seventy-seven freshmen in which I couldn’t make out

the faces in the darkness of the top rows. I’d never taught a class in my life, let alone a group of seventy-seven freshman. When

the fated day arrived, I stumbled into the first class, blinded by

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the bright stage lights. I focused on the people in the first three rows. I began my rambling Welcome to the Class! speech, never

letting my eyes stray above the third row. I’d never taught a class in my life, but to let that on would guarantee a bloodbath. All

power would instantly be transferred to the sharks; I’d be de-

stroyed.

The class met twice a week for ten weeks, and I got through

each class, but just barely. I clung to the note cards and made up

all sorts of stuff, to the point where I thought I might be arrested and run out of town. I made a lot of jokes and, frankly, the class

was easy, so most of the students liked me well enough. But I

knew the class wasn’t
good
. Then it came: course evaluation day.

Let me pause for a moment and say this: Yes, in most jobs,

one is evaluated, but there is only one job in which one is evalu-

ated
anonymously
by a group in which the median age is 18.75

years.

The evaluations came back to me a few weeks later, and it

was quickly clear that this wasn’t the most discerning group. Ex-

cept for the occasional gripe, they were happy enough. A few

people had things to say about my hair and shoes. But there was

one evaluation that jumped from the pile. “Let go of the cards,”

the young evaluator wrote in loopy cursive. “You know this stuff.

You just have to
trust
yourself. Just put down the cards and tell us what
you
know. You’ll do great. I promise!!!”

Let go of the cards.
I felt so naked, so revealed. It began to occur to me that every job has an unspoken emotional requirement that, while never listed among the qualifications in any

job description, is just as vital to one’s success as those that are.

Doctors have to be able to cope with facing the grief of others;

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lawyers have to be willing to assert themselves even when they

don’t feel like it; and teachers have to feel the exposure of all eyes on them, of being the starting spot for everything in the room.

Writers have to make themselves vulnerable by sharing their

opinions. You can be a genius and still not be up for teaching if

the emotional requirements of the job—including the ability to

handle this exposure—are beyond your reach.

The next quarter I began to loosen my grip on the cards a

little. One thing I noticed about the cards was they made me feel

like crap. Life with the cards involved me following a very loose

script instructing me on how to impersonate B., a person who

cared about a different set of things than I cared about, which

is easy for me to say now. But mostly, back then, the cards re-

minded me of all I felt I should know if I were ever going to be

half the teacher I imagined B. had been.

Occasional y, I found myself putting the cards aside, and

then I’d tell a little story about when I was in college, about how I felt afraid and unprepared most of the time. I’d blush as I told

these stories, but I noticed that when I did, the students would

actual y begin to wake up, and sometimes they’d laugh and

sometimes they’d even tell stories about themselves, about their

experiences in the classroom. The note cards gradual y fell into

disuse as I brought in research about learning that I had done

myself, but a large part of the class became stories: stories of

barely getting by, stories of succeeding unexpectedly, stories of

finding your passion and the topics you can learn without strain.

Even though I still wanted to prove to my students, my fel-

low faculty, and myself that I was as a real academic, that I was

as hard-core as B., the truth—revealing itself in the classroom as

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gravity reveals itself in every object that fal s—was that I am not truly of the academy. My strength does not lie in the rigors of

research or in the dogged pursuit of knowledge or information.

The truth, which I still wanted to deny, is that I am far too erratic and sil y to be a true academic. But it was also dawning on me

that this might actual y make me
more
suited for the job at hand, and that a true academic might not be interested in working for

long in this particular trench of higher education. Case in point:

B. was gone.

I also began to realize that I shared a special bond with the

majority of my students in rural Utah: We doubted our own

smarts. Most of my students’ parents hadn’t gone to college.

This, the department head told me, made them “high risk” for

not completing their own college degrees. I nodded. This made

sense and made me want to help them. Why didn’t it occur to

me then that neither my mother nor my biological father had

finished high school? I could understand what “high risk” meant

in terms of my students, but I had never been able to see myself

as falling short for any reason other than my own failings.

As my first year of teaching came to a close, the class no lon-

ger looked much like the course B. had taught. It wasn’t any bet-

ter or worse, but now it was mine. I was my own kind of teacher

and no longer simply an impersonator of a person I believed

could do the job better than I could.

As it turns out, many of the lessons of teaching are also the

lessons of writing, with both tasks entirely dependent on your

confidence in your own material, point of view, and voice. In

the classroom, the teacher’s voice is the thread that stitches the

pieces together, that takes the jumble of readings, activities, and 6 5

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discussion and renders them into knowledge. The class relies on

the teacher’s ability to make the parts cohere, just as the reader

depends on the writer to make the disparate parts of a story

unify. But unlike writing, which allows the writer to do the work

of unification on the writer’s own timetable, teaching demands

that you get your act together
now
, in front of everyone
.
There isn’t much room in the classroom for the teacher’s crisis of faith,

“intellectual anorexia,” or doubt in any other shape or form. In

the classroom, all eyes are on
you
.

Teaching two to three classes a day five days a week, I found

myself in a boot camp for confidence, a “scared straight” pro-

gram for doubters. Some days I faltered, others I didn’t, but

every day it was my job to teach and so I did. It got easier. I

still felt nauseated the first day of a new quarter, but my confi-

dence in my voice grew, and having gained that confidence at

metaphorical gunpoint in the classroom prepared me to face my

doubts in myself as a writer. The lesson of learning to put down

the cards and trust myself was essential to finding my voice on

the page, and soon I would have an opportunity to use that new

knowledge.

Living in Utah was a complicated experience for me. Even

though I’d felt like an outsider most of my life, all that garden-

variety alienation was child’s play compared to living in a cul-

ture with secret rituals and underwear, a place where old folks

with little suitcases walked into the giant white temple to do who

knows what. A place where coffee is
not
on the menu. Part of 6 6

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me was always at odds with the culture, but living in Utah also

freed me. No longer surrounded by strivers and creative types

and haunted by a feeling of falling behind, I now resided among

people who were either tremendously talented at hiding their

lust for more or who were, in fact, fairly satisfied with their lives.

Life in southern Utah is M-E-L-L-O-W, especial y if one is

not Mormon and therefore not expected to go to Relief Soci-

ety meetings or have Family Home Evenings or attend church

services for three hours at a stretch. Plus, all this mellowness is happening against a backdrop of red canyons, long mesas, and

the bluest sky imaginable. Hours after my arrival in the state, I

stood in the middle of the red and white rock of Snow Canyon

State Park and thought I’d never heard such quiet. I felt an odd

sensation wash over me that I thought might be what the less

anxious must call “peace.”

After spending the last two and half years primarily indoors

reading, I now lived in a place that insisted that I go outside, a

place where it seemed like enough to just exist. Once I estab-

lished a teaching routine, I began to relax in this land of very

few demands. I biked up and down the empty streets of my new

small town on Sunday mornings. I hiked. I rode in a two-seater

plane over canyons inaccessible by car. I caught exactly one fish.

I made apricot jam and planted tomatoes. Sometimes, I’d think:

I should try to write. And then I’d take a nap.

I felt like the upward push of my twenties had landed me

in a big warm desert resting spot. I now watched TV and slept

in when a year earlier I would’ve been reading something way

over my head, but I had a
job
, a
career
, which implied that all the reading and studying and sweating over seminar papers

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on Shelley’s
Frankenstein
had led me out of the wilderness of eternal poverty and identity-crushing restaurant work. In San

Francisco, I’d always been strapped for cash, sleep, and time,

schlepping in the fog from my tutoring job, via two trains and

a cable car, to my waitressing gig in North Beach. Now I slept

eight hours a night and commuted ten minutes through hushed

desert to get to work.

Within a year of my arrival in Utah, I began to acknowledge

that my stay there wasn’t a temporary one. Yes, my spiritual and

political beliefs might’ve separated me from the pack, but in-

creasingly my life resembled that of the locals. Within another

year, I married a transplant from California. Six months later

we bought a house and then, of course, next came the inevitable

dog. A job, a husband, a house, a dog, and somewhere in there I

turned thirty: My footloose, angst-y twenties were official y over.

Inevitably, the novelty of the peaceable kingdom waned,

though, and restlessness and ambition soon flickered again.