February 19, 2025
You are doing great.
Reading my student’s beautiful narrative of heartbreak, marveling at the complexity of his imagery and the cleverness of his structure, I had a sudden and shocking flashback to cigarettes and my father.
It was a nonsensical flash. The story had no connection to me or my mistakes or my shame. Why would I personalize it?
I looked up and said, “You are such a good writer that you’ve created a problem that only you can solve.”
The student smiled, maybe at the compliment or maybe because he already knew the problem.
“What do you feel you owe the reader at this point?” I asked. “Do you owe them an explanation? Or do you want it to be their responsibility to understand? How much work do you want your reader to do?”
The smile disappeared, replaced by the student’s hands rubbing his cheeks, then his temples.
For a moment, I thought he was crying and I was going to have to change approach, shift into one of my other student-facing modes.
He was thinking so hard his eyes looked like they were tearing up.
“I guess I’m not sure,” he finally said, disrupting a silence that was just about to be uncomfortable.
When, as a depressed teenager, I had to visit my father at the pharmacy to shop for smoking-cessation products, I watched him shifting between child-facing modes.
“Do you think you want gum or patches?” asked the Pharmacist.
“Don’t you remember how much pain Grandma was in?” asked the Father and Son.
He was rubbing his temples so hard I was worried a tear might emerge.
“I guess I’m not sure.”
“You have to stop smoking. You’re the only one who can decide to do it,” said Pharmacist-Father-Son.
As my student gathered his backpack, I let slip, “I can tell you are a musician by how you write.”
He paused and I wasn’t sure if I had offended him.
“Musicians create problems we have to solve,” I added, hoping I hadn’t squashed something by speaking aloud what he already knew.
“See you this afternoon,” he said as he exited my office.
I grabbed the framed post-it note from the shelf behind me, just to give myself a reminder. Years ago, while in the middle of class, a student had written it, stood up from her seat, and stuck it to my desk: “It’s okay. Take your time. Stuff happens. You are doing great.”
