On Distance & Closeness
“All true artists suspect that if the world really knew what they were doing they would be punished.”
-Ben Okri, “The Joys of Storytelling II”
There is much wisdom in the advice to wait. Specifically, there is much wisdom for artists in the advice to wait to write about topics that feel too hot for you to handle in a particular moment or season in your life. Especially when trauma is involved. As a teacher, I have given this advice myself to countless students, and out of care for them.
Many of those same students have listened to my counsel and decided to write anyway.
Sometimes the topic is approached slantwise in a fictional tale, a third person, an invented persona. And sometimes it is approached as directly as possible—naming the harm that been done to them in the hope that the words they put on the page can do some work to set them free.
I am overwhelmed by this kind of (student) writing, though I know that sometimes it is inevitable. I read and weep, and loop in with our counselors.
The majority of students I teach do not want to pursue careers as writers. (Though it is important to note that some do.) They are teenagers and do not (usually) publish the work they create in and out of the class. (Though some do.)
I think, though, there is a relationship between the writing I sometimes unintentionally spark in class for students and the writing I myself have written, and decided to publish.
With respect to the topic at hand: sometimes it is good advice to wait until you have artistic distance from the heat of a moment to write, and publish after you and that moment have cooled down. And sometimes it is good advice to write precisely from the heat, from the very midst of the flame, and publish there and then. The risk you take as a writer to disclose in this immediate way, when you have not had time and distance to consider all of publication’s ramifications—this risk, which readers themselves can feel in the reading—is part of the work’s power.
Let me give you an example, from my own life.
In the fall of 2013, I read for the first time the news of the cover-up and protection of predator priests by leaders in the Twin Cities Catholic Church. As these reports continued to be released that fall—a brave canon lawyer turned whistleblower, Jennifer Haselberger the source—I learned that one of my own mentors from high school had been credibly accused of sexual abuse.
Almost immediately on hearing this news, I began to write. It was mostly poetry, and it was mostly angry. I was grateful to be enrolled in an MFA Creative Writing program at the time (Hamline University) with fellow writers who could help me sort out what was therapy-like processing of emotion from what was (or at least could be approaching) literary art.
As I re-read these poems, which make up the collection Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota), now 10 years after their publication, I respond to them as I would to poems written by another person. I am clearly not the same person I was when I wrote them. But the person I was then held his hands open when the poem presented itself to him. He received it. And it was given to him in the heat. In the flame.
I don’t regret publishing the book in the heat, either. And that’s in spite of the fact that some of the poems are sappy (I can write a better love poem now, Cristina, really!), vengeful (I put two local church leaders in hell, one gnawing on another’s skull, Dante-style), repetitive (so much snow falling on heads—it’s Minnesota, we get it!) or just plain unclear (a number of readers understandably thought from the text of some of the poems that I myself was a survivor of abuse. I was not.)
But it was a first book of poems, and all things considered, a pretty good one. Why I mention it in this context ten years later is not to toot my own horn but because it is a good example and fine-grained illustration of this issue of timing and writing.
I chose to publish that book in the fall, at the start of a school year while I was teaching at a Catholic high school in the very diocese (aka local church) where all of the revelations of abuse and cover-up of abuse were occurring. I wanted community members and church leaders to read these poems touching on this crisis as we were going through that crisis together, in real time.
In theory (and in accordance with some church laws), the leaders of the local church could have made it unpleasant or impossible for me to stay teaching at that Catholic school, which I very much enjoyed teaching at. As it turned out, I had the support of the president and principal to publish, and the archbishop (the one I’d put in hell in one of the poems) would resign later that year. So, no job loss for me, at least not on account of poetry.
And so, though the poems might have benefited from more revision and editing, and been more artfully expressed had they been published a few years later, they wouldn’t have “hit” in the same way in the communities I cared about in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Nor would the book have had the same impact on me, as a writer and as a person.
I realized through publishing this book that part of writing’s function in my life—maybe its biggest function—was integration. That is, writing a poem or an essay or an op-ed did not only present a literary or artistic challenge but a “life challenge” as well. If the words I’d written were true, publishing them meant in some way standing by them. When the words were provocative, asking for change, they obliged me to take steps off the page as well. In the case of Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota), this meant:
-Getting into it with the pastor at my old high school about the predator priest who had mentored me, making sure he informed others about that priest’s presence on the archdiocese’s list of “credibly accused priests.” (The pastor was reluctant about informing his parish about this fact, but after a lot of badgering took some basic steps.)
-Connecting in person with whistleblower Jennifer Haselberger both to thank her for her courageous witness as well as to understand more fully the context of the abuse crisis, both locally and church-wide. Shortly after Archbishop Hebda took over leadership from the disgraced Archbishop Nienstedt, Archbishop Hebda and I met, and I suggested the Twin Cities church do something to honor Jennifer’s witness. He disagreed, citing unnecessary damage to many priest’s reputations. Needless to say, I don’t think any of the “damage” done was unnecessary. And those in the larger Catholic church have taken notice of her prophetic witness: she was named National Catholic Reporter’s “Person of the Year” in 2013 for her courageous actions.
-Listening to survivors, both in church and non-church settings. Because of the book I got the chance to connect with and listen to a number of survivors of abuse. Because of the book, I was much more aware of my own bandwidth and limitations as a teacher reading trauma-inspired writing as well. I am a regular and constant communicator with the social workers and counselors at my high school, and working through issues in the book helped produce that shift.
None of the aspects I’ve listed above are particularly “literary” in nature. But they have been of vital importance to me in my life. And the words I wrote and published ten years ago (the good and true ones anyway) continue to challenge me to live up to their promise and prophetic calling.
I think of this now ten years later as a classroom teacher who is always trying (struggling, really) to integrate his experience of the imaginative life with his experience of teaching in a contemporary American high school. The artistic challenge and the “life challenge” I just mentioned in publishing remain for me in this work, too. That is, if, in these Substack pages, I’m going to write and imagine and challenge and provoke, then, in order to stay vital and credible as an educator, I also must write and imagine and challenge and provoke within the four walls of my own school building, as well as within the four walls of my English language arts classroom. That challenge of integration has never been easy for me. But in a world where more and more of the humanity and agency of teachers and students is being undermined or outright taken away, it’s not really an option anymore for me to simply “keep my head down” and grind away.
I have to speak up, and accept that others might not be pleased with my speaking up. I have to connect with others seeking this integration between the creative life and their teaching vocation. I have to lean in and grow—or find myself a new line of work. As with ten years ago with that first book, it is the words I’m writing on this page now that are presenting the challenge. They present the choices. They make clear the work I need to do.
NOTES:
I offered a very small example of a risk I took in publishing at a local level here in the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. I am inspired by and want to support writers taking much bigger risks and accepting the costs of those risks. Two recommendations in these troubling times:
-Consider the prophetic and challenging work of journalist and novelist
. This is from the opening of his interview with Lit Hub’s Dan Sheehan: “On October 25, 2023—when Israel’s war on Gaza had already claimed the lives of 6,500 Palestinians, including 2,500 children—the Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad posted on Twitter: ‘One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.’” I just finished reading the book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It is an essential read, brilliant and devastating, and his is a vital voice.-Philosophy Professor
resigned from West Point earlier this spring, maintaining that the military academy is mandating “professors cut lessons and books from their syllabuses having to do with Black history, women's issues and gender ideology.” I don’t know all of the ins and outs of that decision but from his writing, I can imagine its contours. And I admire Graham’s willingness to take a stand for what he believes in, and wholeheartedly embrace a vision of education that is not afraid to confront the history of this country, flaws and all. Read his powerful op-ed in the New York Times here.