After the Fall (term) ...

Traditionally (well, for a year at least), I try to assess how things went during the fall semester. It was a hectic term, where I taught three classes for a time, as well as “running” the writing workshop for the Windycon local sf convention, as well as a writers group made up mostly of my former short story writing students. Add to that writing a couple of book columns for a science fiction magazine. I did a lot of reading and wasn’t able to get my own fiction-writing projects, the frustration over which I am still trying to cope with. 

Not only that, but the courses I taught at the college level were not exactly my “home turf.” Fantasy writing is in the neighborhood of science fiction, but not quite the same thing – otherwise, why call one “fantasy” and the other “science fiction”? I didn’t feel at home, and for good reason: I wasn’t. Not in the way I feel at home with science fiction. 

It wasn’t that I felt unfamiliar with the forms and conventions of fantasy, it’s just there are so many, and so many forms differ from one another. The gamut runs from Franz Kafka to Brandon Sanderson, from Lord Dunsany to J. K. Rowling. My predecessor set up her class to teach fantasy writing as a publishing category in popular fiction. Up until then, that’s what I believed her students wanted. I believed they wanted to be the next Patrick Rothfuss, or Tomi Adeyemi, or Django Wexler, or Kelly Link. Or something. 

Instead, I found that many of my students don’t even know who these writers are. And whatever it is they want to write isn’t necessarily geared to what is currently selling in the publishing world. Frankly, half the class seemed to have trouble identifying what fantasy literature is, exactly (or even approximately). A number of them told me their reading of fantasy was drawn from the worlds of manga, graphic stories, and gaming. And a couple of students seemed to have little familiarity with any kind of fantasy beyond the oldest and dustiest examples; they were of a “literary” bent, and were taking this class to explore what they might possibly do in the form. 

I don’t wish to disparage manga, or graphic stories, or gaming, or literary writers. Except for the latter, I don’t feel comfortably familiar enough with any of the forms to express any opinions one way or another. Luckily, I don’t have to, but for a while I wasn’t sure of that. The role of a teacher somehow gets inexorably muddled with the role of an “authority.” After all these years teaching science fiction, and short fiction too for that matter, I should have known better, but it didn’t occur to me soon enough. 

In fact, it occurred to me to me only after I lay in bed one early morning before class, worrying about what I was going to do, what I should do, and what I thought I was expected to do. I worried and worried and couldn’t get to sleep until a clear, sharp, direct little voice sounded in my head: “Hey, this isn’t your class. It’s your students’ class. You’ve got sixteen other minds at work on these same problems. Now, some of them are just trying to figure out how to get through this class with a passing grade and the least amount of effort, but the best of your group not only are here to learn something, but to contribute something to the conversation you started in the very first session: What is this kind of literature we call fantasy?” 

What I can’t teach them, they can teach me.
I felt incredibly relieved. 

Of course, it’s never as easy as that sounds. On the contrary, it’s total chaos and madness, but I get to share in the process. But that process, of necessity, includes trial and error, and getting things wrong. 

This was also true for the Fiction Writing Workshop: Beginning I taught. Trial and error. Getting things wrong. True, I managed to do a number of things right, and I believe that with a few notable exceptions my students did their best. They were a great group, too. I had at least three students who were already capable of work that could be seriously considered for publication; two more who were very close to putting out publishable work. The one thing I never have to worry about at Columbia is having enough good students for a class. Yes, there are plenty of students who aren’t uniformly great at every facet of the creative process, but still, so many of these students are extraordinarily gifted. Even an academic bumbler like me can look like a good teacher. 

But I wouldn’t want to be judged so on my performance this term. If anything, right now, I feel less than competent.  

But I know, I think, what I can do better next time. 

The learning process extends to me. If I’m to learn anything at this gig, I have to allow for my own mistakes. I have to allow that I can learn from them. And allow that I can do better next time. 

For the Fiction Writing Workshop, I give myself a B-. For the Fantasy Writing Workshop, a C+. Short Story Writing is a non-credit continuing ed class, Pass/Fail … I think I pass, but after 28 years, I should be able to get it right.  

Mostly, at least. 

If I teach these classes next year, I’ll be going for As. 

This spring, I’m scheduled to teach Foundations in Creative Writing, which I’ve never taught before. I expect to make more miscalculations, but I already have a batch of ideas that will at least be fun to try. 

My science fiction writing class was canceled because not enough students signed up for it. So it goes. I guess most students don’t think science fiction has anything to teach them anymore. A science fiction writer like me should feel a little bummed out – and I did. It took me a while to remember that one of the most important aspects of my view of what science fiction is – is really – rests on sf’s ability to subvert the norms of any system or culture it finds itself in. Here at CCC, that means cultural, literary, and academic. 

If you’re a science fiction writer, or even just a science fiction thinker, you don’t shed that viewpoint when you leave the science fiction cave, so to speak, and venture out into all the little elsewheres available. 

Wherever I go, I take my science fiction with me. 

If the students won’t come to science fiction, I’ll simply have to take science fiction to them.  

It may not be much, but it’s what I do.

The Semester Ends

(more notes toward more stuff, and the term that never ends)

It’s all over but the grades.

Wait a second – okay, that too.

I had a good semester. Maybe not my best, but my students did well. They always surprise me. And I always come away from my classes feeling like I’ve learned more from the experience.

I’d love to expand upon that, but what I’m left with at the end of this term is not so much about my students as about the folks who are now my bosses.

You see, when I started teaching at Columbia, I worked for a Fiction Writing department, a rare species in an academic world. For all its rarity, it proved a popular program. In fact, one of the largest in the country.

A few years later, the Fiction Writing department was forced to merge with the MFA programs in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction, which belonged to the English Department. We were now the Creative Writing department, or to be more formal, the Department of Creative Writing.

This year, another merger has me now working for the English/Creative Writing department. So we’re one big, happy family.

Happy families are all the same.

I wonder where I heard that one before.

Years ago, back when I was in grad school, I wanted to work for an English department. I really did. Creative writing was all fine and well, but students needed a solid grounding in language (at least one) and literature. You can’t go anywhere until you know where you’ve been.

To some extent, I still believe all of that, but I no longer think that the “solid grounding” is sole territory of the English department. It may be a gross generalization, but a generalization with a foundation of fact: English departments in most American institutions of higher learning, are bureaucracies. And the main objective of any bureaucracy is self-preservation. Everything else is at best secondary – like students, like education.

I’m aware that most of my colleagues teaching creative writing work for English departments, and some of them may grimace sourly as I enter their domain. To get my attention, they’ll rattle the bars of their cells with an empty soup can they use as a water cup. And they’ll mutter, “Welcome to the club.”

It’s true. All true. I was fortunate enough to work in a department that was an aberration and, apparently, an abomination, before the eyes of the MLA, the NCTE and the AWP. In my old department, we worked for the students. We shared experience. Adjuncts and tenured profs were allowed to commingle in plain sight. Academically, we were Babylon. We were Gomorrah.

Well, now that nonsense has been fixed. We are safe under the heavenly dome of the English department – the way it was, the way it has been, and the way it should always be.

Adjuncts! Renounce your ways and repent! Accept your anonymity and lowly place in the hierarchy. Wear your shame like a mendicant’s robe. And to those who teach creative writing, admit even further to your degradation! You are merely the shills and entertainers hired to lure the unwary into this holy grove. We the anointed will take over from there.

And to those lower still – those who teach writing in “popular” forms, sometimes thought of as “writing that people actually want to read” – the dishes are stacked in the sink. Make sure they’re all clean and dried before you leave tonight.

Resistance is futile.

So, here I am. A Babylonian in the City of God (or so-named; God cleared out of here eons ago). Unrepentant. Proud of my degradation, even proud of my shame.

I’m a science fiction writer – you can’t cast me into a dungeon lower than that! I accept my lot with pride, even as you lower another stack of dishes into the sink. Even from the dungeon, I can see your hierarchy for the shallow, sick skeleton it is.

I’m a science fiction writer – the kind who believes that what we do is subvert the status quo. We examine the quotidian, and insist that there are other ways. Tomorrow can be different.

We may be absorbed into the host (i.e. the English department), but we’re viral. Those who hope to change us will find themselves changed in the process.

Let us hope the change will be for the better.