Working and writing

Dear Nancy:

Over the years, before I came to my life in teaching, I worked with my hands. I was a landscaper, a greenhouse employee. A maid, a cook. A secretary, a teletype operator. I washed dishes, fumbled my way through the waiting of tables and the serving of drinks. And I come from generations of hard work. Coal miners. Dirt farmers. Railroad workers.

I’ve talked about work in my writing life at times. I’ve talked about it in my classes when I urge my students to work hard, take responsibility for tasks assigned, be aware that education is earned. I want to think that the two worlds, the world of my background as “blue collar” and my life as an academic meet, both on the page and in the experiences from the world that I bring to my classes. I try to tell myself to “never apologize for working hard or being who I am.”

I want to believe I don’t apologize for where I came from, yet I do. Apologize, or hedge, or feel shame. When I went to graduate school, the first time, I felt like an alien dropped down from the red planet, each time I went to class. I worked, every morning, as a landscaper, tilled, raked, planted, dug, hauled rocks. I’d gotten in to an Ivy league school by the skin of my teeth and could barely afford my rent. I’d hurry to class, a Faulkner seminar, every afternoon, with no time to change first. We’d talk about “the Tellurian impulse,” the characters with their “unlaced brogans” and country ways while I sat trying to hide my muddy boots and my beat up hands. I was afraid to open my mouth, afraid of theory, afraid of the adeptness and ease with language that I heard around me. This fear, this tangled up shame, has followed me for years.

Where I’m from, my “working class” self, comes with me in my teaching life. Even when I workshop the stories and essays and memoirs of my students. “Why don’t we rip these stories apart more?” students have asked. I admit it. I’m a nurturer. I want to plant their work like little seeds and water and weed carefully and bask in delight as the stories grow. But more than that, what I sometimes see in a workshop are my grandfather’s hands.

He whittled a lot. Pieces of cedar. Making nothing in particular. Carving off curl after curl of good-scented wood. His hands were gnarly and thick-nailed where he’d mined and hoed and fixed engines. But how gently he whittled, looking for the heart, the center.

Karen