Teacher / Poet #37

A Thank You Note, To My Mentor, Deborah Keenan

A Thank You Note To My Mentor, Deborah Keenan

Early on in my teaching career I found myself facing a crisis that has since repeated itself in various forms over the years. The details should be familiar to anybody who has labored in an American classroom for any stretch of time. The lessons I planned for the students more and more felt divorced from anything of substance or value to me or my students. In spite of that harsh truth, I was required (and did) document every jot and tittle of those interactions for the supervisors who observed me. I worked about 60 hours per week and was paid less than $30,000 per year.

That fall, I’d taken advantage of Obama’s $8,000 credit (free cash! I’d thought) to become a first-time home buyer in the same neighborhood of the high school where I’d just gotten the job I described above. The pressure of that financial commitment, the difficulty of learning to teach at an urban high school, and my failure to translate a passion for reading and writing into effective teaching of young people–all these were adding up to a good old fashioned American style burn out. I was 25 years old.

I was writing every day–early morning writer I am–as I have since I was 15 or 16 years old. Fiction, mostly, in those days. But I felt stuck there, too. Having moved around for college and grad school, I didn’t really know any other writers in the Twin Cities. I would spend months crafting and honing a short story. Then would send it out into the ether, submitting it for publication, and receive no responses, or form rejections. Very discouraging.

After suffering through that rough year of both teaching and writing, I learned about The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, a community writing hub that offered writing classes, among many other things. I took a short story writing class that summer that I very much enjoyed.

People talk about how artists tend to find other artists almost by instinct. Like their auras seek and find each other or something. As woo-woo as those sentences sound, I do believe this to be true, if for no other than practical reasons. We artists know that without each others’ company and support, we wouldn’t be able to do that thing we are called (or compelled?) to do, to make the thing we are called (or compelled?) to make.

When I read over the details of my early teaching life and its struggles, it seems on the surface a little strange that I would decide to enroll in a part-time creative writing program, at Hamline University. It seems even more strange that adding this aspect to my already packed work-life was the decisive factor for keeping me in the game as a teacher. That it was the decisive factor in preventing me from total burn out. But that’s the truth.

Still, it’s not quite true to say it was “the program” at Hamline that saved me. Yes, of course, I paid tuition, attended classes, did the readings, etc. But I never approached my work there as a credential to gain. (A credential, the MFA, by the way, which my high school and very few others, could care less about.) Rather, I saw my work at Hamline as an apprenticeship.

For five years I took courses at Hamline, and during those five years, only had four professors who taught me. Each of these writer / teachers had a profound impact–the essayist, Patricia Francisco, the poets Katrina Vandenberg and Jim Moore, and finally the poet Deborah Keenan, for whom this essay is dedicated. These teacher / artists really did change the trajectory of my life.

But Deborah Keenan. I first met her as the teacher of the “core” introductory class for new MFA students at Hamline. Unlike a lot MFA programs, Hamline requires its students to do reading and writing in each of the major genres it offers–creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry–rather than specialize in one right from the jump. As a consequence, all of the professors taught all of these genres in this core class.

From the beginning of my interactions with Deborah, I felt “seen.” (All words are going to be inadequate to express my gratitude to you, DK, so why not this particular therapy-speak flavor of inadequacy today?) Then, as now, prayer, reading the scriptures, and receiving the sacraments in the Catholic Church I was born and raised in–these aspects of my life were woven so deeply inside me, I could not extricate them from me, even if I wanted to. (I didn’t want to. I don’t want to.)

I was worried, though, that I’d have to check this integral part–the heart, really–of who I am at the door of the MFA classroom. But Deborah dispelled that fear right away, encouraging me in conversation, in her notes to me, and in the prompts she gave to the class as a whole, to “scratch” what was itching for me. She encouraged me to write about my own often complicated relationship to God and my own faith tradition.

And not only did Deborah encourage my own writing in this area, she introduced me to to contemporary writers plumbing these kinds of depths themselves. Early on in my coursework, she shared some of the wonderful essays and poems of the Catholic writer Brian Doyle, whose work continues to move and inspire me. And at the beginning of another class session early on in my time at Hamline, Deborah dropped onto my desk a snipped-out magazine essay written by the poet Christian Wiman, who at the time was editor of Poetry Magazine. I think this was the piece “Love Bade Me Welcome,” which charted the poet’s circuitous journey to an adult trust or faith in God through romantic love, having children, and a cancer diagnosis. As with Brian Doyle, Wiman continues to be an important example to me as a writer.

In some ways this was a very simple thing: to read another writer, writing well about some of the same material you want to write about. But it is hard to overstate the hope it gave me. And to receive an introduction to these writers from a teacher I respected but who I knew did not share my same faith background or commitments–well, that really impressed me. It was a gift.

Knowing that I had the space and support to write about these things would become even more important a few years later when a local archdiocesan lawyer-turned-whistleblower, Jennifer Haselberger, went public with what she knew about the church’s cover-up of child sex abuse across the Twin Cities Catholic Church. It was a cover-up that hit very close to home for me, and to so many people I love. Rather than simply stewing in my feelings, I wrote out of the anger and grief, and these writing mentors–Deborah, and Katrina, and Patricia–I knew they understood and could help me craft my writing into something as artful and powerful as possible. (The poems I wrote during this time would eventually become my first book, Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota).)

But that is getting ahead of the story I want to tell here. What I want to remember right now about Deborah Keenan are those first classes with her. And how she encouraged me not only to write about my complicated relationship with Catholicism and God, but also about teaching.

At the time I started classes at Hamline, I had just transitioned from my work doing Title 1 Reading (and Mathematics) to being the full-time 9th grade English teacher at the school I mentioned earlier. Some days in my new role went very well. Some days not so well at all.

I remember that it was very important to me at that time to put down on paper, in both poetry and prose, not just what was literally happening in the classroom, but also the emotional spiritual flavor of those things, too. Like, how it did feel the first time the technology crapped out on you in a lesson that required it? Or what it was like not being able to account for one of the students in your care during a group project with a local university, only to discover through the efforts of a female co-teacher, that that student was hiding in the girls bathroom, avoiding detection by hunching on top of the toilet? Or that beloved knucklehead student questioning everything you were doing during an after school tutoring session, asking big essential questions, about why does learning this matter, and you not sure if he was asking because he cared or simply to move the attention away from the annoying task? (And maybe it was both. Maybe it often is?)

Of course, I could go on. The point wasn’t that these small but significant moments in my early teaching life inspired literary masterpieces, but rather that it was clear from Deborah’s responses to the writing I produced that these things were worth writing about. That they mattered. That a young teacher’s experience of learning how to be a teacher could be of value to other people.

Again, as with the introduction to the writing of Brian Doyle and Christian Wiman, in some ways this was a very simple thing Deborah did. But it too was a great gift.

To know that someone else is paying attention to what you’ve written–I mean, really paying attention–as a writer it is hard to overstate the importance of that. And I knew Deborah Keenan was always paying attention to what I’d written; in fact, in sometimes she could be paying more careful attention to my own work than I myself was.

So of course I took as many courses as I could with her–courses that introduced new forms and schools of poetry to me, courses that gave me new prompts to begin and revise poems, courses that pushed me to engage the visual languages of paintings and portraits, and see in them spurs to writing.

These were all wonderful learning experiences in their own right, but what I most remember was the final “course” I took with Deborah, which I put in quotation marks because it was so stripped down, so simple: an independent study where every week, I would share with her my latest work (mostly poetry, but some essays, too, I think), and she would meet with me and respond to them. We would talk about what was working, and what was not.

By this point, my fifth and final year in the Hamline MFA program, I’d discerned that I’d be stepping away from high school teaching. Cristina and I would be getting married that coming fall and we were moving to Chicago. I knew that these big changes–the move, but most especially the marriage–were decisive ones. I wanted to give myself the space and time to be present to my new state of being as a married man and living in a new city. And I knew high school teaching was not going to offer the space and time for that kind of presence. I got (what I considered to be) a boring job in marketing and leaned into the joys and challenges of new-married life in the Windy City.

That was 2016. We were there for two years together.

It’s interesting to me now, eight years later, having now moved back from Chicago to Minnesota, and in fact, having gone back to the very same Minneapolis school I’d taught at before I left the teaching profession, how in my second run at this school has felt so very different from the first. The biggest difference I can see is that I longer see “teacher” as woven into my identity, as intrinsically part of who I am. I have consciously and intentionally de-prioritized my investment of time and energy that I put into teaching and working on school activities. I love the students and my work with them. And, as much as humanly possible (and it has become more humanly possible, now that I have dropped down to a .8 out of 1.0 FTE role), I leave that work at school. I don’t take home the bulging briefcase of papers to read grade. (I do that in the slivers of time available at school–prep periods and while I’m monitoring lunch or breakfast, etc.)

But the other half of that “Teacher / Poet” title in my Substack–the “poet” part–that is another matter. In spite of the fact that my writing and poetry, have not in any way, shape, or form paid the bills in the ways that teaching has, I consider poetry to be the more decisive shaper of who I am. Even if I never write another poem–and that’s possible–I am a poet.

And I trace some of that shaping–or re-shaping–to those final 1-on-1 meetings with Deborah in the spring of 2016. They helped reveal (or re-reveal) a truth for me: no matter what it was I was doing or experiencing in the world, I would need to be writing. And that the words I chose to write would matter. And if they would only matter to a small group of people, sometimes only myself, that too would be alright. In other words, Deborah, in her last final ‘official’ capacities as a Hamline professor (we’ve had many more meetings since) confirmed for me that writing was a calling, a vocation. That, too, was a great gift.

Writing, as you might have guessed, pays me little. Teaching pays the bills. And while it may be that I have ‘de-prioritized’ my own life investment in teaching, while I don’t see it–out of necessity–as an essential part of my identity, I remain active in the profession. And look to promote and practice particular ways and modes of teaching, specifically of teaching writing and literature.

And so another great gift from Deborah Keenan in my “second round” as an English teacher is her inspiration to regularly incorporate creative writing into the classes I teach. Students are reading sonnets in the poetry unit? I will teach them the basics of the form, and they’ll write one themselves. They’re reading short stories in a fiction unit? They’re going to figure out how to craft their own original, utilizing what I can show them about point of view, characterization, and plot. They’re reading a play? They’ll craft their own original scene, and act it out, and film it for their classmates to see, too.

As I’ve written here before, while it can take time to justify these instructional choices using the byzantine and bureaucratic language of the Common Core / College Board, it can be done. (See my reflection, “Washing Some Dishes,” in response to Chris Drew’s work in this area.) But more importantly, this kind of teaching and learning is joyful, for both teacher and student.

Another core element of Deborah’s practice of teaching–and I believe of the entire Hamline MFA faculty–was to invite into the classroom, at least once per semester course, a writer whose book we were reading and discussing. We were able to ask them about particular choices they’d made as a writer, their process for creating, or any number of weird and wild questions we might generate. (That was always an assignment we were given and took seriously, by the way, creating questions for the author visit.)

These were always valuable class sessions and made our own budding vocations as writers feel more actual and real.

I have tried–and mostly succeeded–in the last 7 years as a teacher to facilitate at least one, and usually multiple conversations per year between the students I teach and living writers. And usually with writers of color. Since 99 % of the students I teach are people of color, I think it’s important for them to be seeing themselves represented in writing as a vocational path. I know it might be a very small percentage of the students I taught who decide to write as a career. But I hope it is a much larger percentage of them who give value to their identities as readers and writers. Who see those identities as essential to who they are as people.

I don’t know if I’ll ever know the impact of these, and other, decisions I make as a teacher. (And I’m skeptical of teachers and administrators who claim that kind of knowledge.) But from time to time I have had privilege of receiving an email from an old student who writes something along the lines of: your class help me value my creativity or thanks to you, I didn’t hate English class or, one of my favorites, now I write poetry for fun.

These notes mean the world to me. I hope this essay constitutes that kind of world for you, Deborah. From the bottom of my quirky, crooked and contradictory teacher / poet’s heart, THANK YOU.

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NOTES

-I’ve emphasized in this essay Deborah Keenan as a teacher, but she is a wonderful poet, too. Check out my reading and musings on one of my favorites of hers, “For Some Reason At My Elementary School” from her latest book, The Saint of Everything, last year. That quote I read in my video intro is from Mary Ann Grossman’s Pioneer Press (Saint Paul newspaper) piece on Deborah after her retirement from Hamline in 2017.

-As I was in the middle of writing this essay, I was reading through the poet Dana Gioia’s wonderful new collection of essays, Poetry As Enchantment. Everything in the book is excellent, but the way he reflected on his being mentored by the poet / critic Donald Davie, resonated very much with me, especially the way that mentorship was “unofficial” in an institutional sense. (Gioia was getting his MBA at Stanford when he met Davie there and took courses with him. So there was no advisor or program pressure in their writerly relationship.) Throughout this book as well as his other memoir, Studying With Miss Bishop, Gioia offers ways that seeing other living writers doing their writerly thing inspired him to continue making his own way as a poet and writer in the world. More than any MFA program, these witnesses, and the relationships they can spark, are what nourish a writer.

-For any teacher interested in teaching creative writing or in facilitating creative writing workshop instruction that doesn’t suck, I highly recommend Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, as well as Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (which Chavez utilizes). Both Lerman and Chavez center the artist and the artist’s intentions in their creation and facilitation of workshop spaces. In my experience, that is a key point, and one that is sometime neglected in schools and classrooms.