Why Teach?

An Interview With Peter Shull About His Brilliant New Novel

Like a lot of writers I now admire, Peter Shull was a writer I was first introduced to here, on Substack. One of the first things I read by him was his brilliant piece, “Teaching Isn’t a Science—Or an Art”, which sidesteps a false binary (that I myself have fallen into many a time) and in doing so offers a fuller, richer sense of teaching as craft that might inform a bigger conversation about what it is that teachers do.

When I learned that Peter was a writer of fiction and had written a novel, I knew that I needed to read his work. I ordered his novel, Why Teach? in mid-June (appropriately right after our school’s graduation), received it a week later, and finished it in three days. It was a delight in every way.

Rather than bore you with a straight-on praise essay or spoil key plot points, I’d like to share with you a “teacher/writer” interview I conducted with Peter via email and Google docs over the past week. Thanks for agreeing to this, Peter, and more importantly, thank you for your thoughtful and honest witness as a teacher and writer.

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ZACH: Your protagonist, William Able, is in pretty familiar teacher territory at the opening of the novel: disillusioned by the school system he’s been a part of for the past three years and ready to move on to something new after finishing up what will be his fourth year in the classroom. You state in your acknowledgments that you “hope you will not be confused with your protagonist…but that” [you] too have stumbled into the profession through a back door and learned lessons the hard way.” Could you share your own “back door” story of teaching, and how it informed the genesis and writing of this novel?

Hi Zach! First of all, thanks for the questions! Second: Thank you for the enthusiastic endorsement of Why Teach? To answer this first Q, I didn’t grow up planning to be a teacher. I always–always–wanted to be a novelist, and growing up I made the majority of my personal and academic decisions with this end in mind. When I went to college, I studied business first–I had imagined, based on my understanding of popular culture, that I would likely need to get some kind of ‘business’ oriented job in a coastal city in order to support myself as a writer–then I switched to biology pre-med (business turned out to feel awfully mercenary, and my father and favorite uncle are doctors, so I thought I might pursue medicine to earn my living), and finally, midway through my junior year, I switched to English. I had come to realize that if one wants to go into medicine, he probably ought to do it for the right reasons, not just to earn a living, and as the son of a doctor I had known from an early age I never wanted to be one. I had also learned the truth of Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Harlem”: that when you really want to do something, you can’t put it on the backburner and do other things first–you have to go after it, or your soul will start to wither.

So I earned my degree in English, which wasn’t quite the same as going in fully on becoming a writer, but it was so closely adjacent I didn’t really know the difference.¹ While I studied English, I also took a trio of creative writing classes and started the important habit of keeping a journal and writing down bits and ribbons of narrative I came up with. I picked up a job at my university’s library and was finding authors I admired: I had begun my apprenticeship.

To try to abbreviate this suddenly very long account of my becoming a teacher: I didn’t get into any of the MFA programs I applied to in the two years after I graduated from college, and I earned my living at this time working first at a coffee shop and then a bank. Then I discovered that I could make more money substitute teaching, and took a job first in my college town, then back in my hometown–a big meatpacking town on the western half of Kansas. I was on my third or fourth day of substitute teaching at the high school I had graduated from when the administrators asked me to stop in after school. I was good with the kids, they said, and they had noticed my ‘emergency’ license listed I had a degree in English. Would I be interested in taking a full time job teaching for the district, provided I took some classes along the way? I didn’t have any other plans for the next couple years besides working on my writing–I told them I would.²

ZACH: Some of my favorite scenes in the novel involved the school’s Head of Literacy, Janine Hirsche, who frequently observes William’s teaching and clearly disapproves of his methods and philosophy of teaching—she hates that he teaches (long) whole novels and plays as opposed to excerpts and test-prep as the district has mandated. These scenes could have easily devolved into soapboxing or mouthpiece moments for you as an author, but they always felt dramatic, interesting, surprising for me as a reader. Could you share a bit about how you go about composing a scene of fiction? And/or how you create characters like Hirsche?

One of the hearts of the novel is the ideological struggle between my protagonist William Able and his ‘nemesis’ Mrs. Hirsche: How should we teach the children? It has to be a complicated and dramatic conflict because it’s a complicated and dramatic problem. It’s easy to look at data from twenty years ago and say ‘what we were doing wasn’t working.’ Similarly, it’s easy to look at data today and say ‘what we’ve tried doing instead hasn’t worked.’ I’m a traditionalist: I think the older ways of teaching were better, and that the newer might produce hallucinations or mirages of ‘success’ in the short term, but for longer term success and positive outcomes, the older ways were better. But not every method of teaching works for every child, and even if the older ways were better, they weren’t better for all students, and the outcomes people wanted–perfection; uniform competency–were never going to be achieved.

In creating scenes–this may sound weird–but I always have this image of a Rubik’s Cube floating in my head. I want to look at the thing from every side, to give as holistic and honest an understanding as possible. I could, in writing scenes, create antagonists who were weak and one-sided: straw men and straw women for my protagonist to work against–but then my scenes wouldn’t be very dramatic, and my fiction wouldn’t be very honest, and honesty in fiction is, I think, the highest end fiction can aim for.

How did I create Hirsche? I’ve had a lot of administrators over the years: she’s an amalgam of all of the worst ones, all of the worst ones I’ve heard about, and many of the idealogues I’ve read who don’t actually work in classrooms (or haven’t in decades) and still have the gall to think they have any right to say anything about how classrooms do or should work.³

ZACH: Without spoiling too much for prospective readers of your book, I think I can safely say that money, and specifically lack of money that teachers make, is a big motif in the novel, especially as it touches on William’s consideration of continuing teaching or following in his dad’s footsteps as a lawyer. You noted that this book was in part inspired by Taylor Mali’s poem, “What Teachers Make,” which obviously hits on these themes as well. Could you share a bit more about your own response to Mali’s poem, and how you see it connected to your book?

I saw Taylor Mali perform when I was in college. At the time, he was trying to get 1,000 young people to sign a pledge to become teachers. I didn’t sign it. At the time, I still thought I would never be a k-12 teacher–that to do such would be beneath me. When I became a teacher, Mali’s words often rang in my ears–not just from his famous poem “What Teachers Make,” but from the collective ethos of all of his work. I recognized early in my career that as a teacher I wasn’t going to get rich–every month, I either came out $40 ahead, or $40 behind, no matter how I budgeted, and my credit card balances seemed to be hanging consistent, even as I very slowly chipped away at my college loan debt–but I had worked at a bank before, a job I hated, and I recognized that working in the school I was absolutely doing some good. Doing the work of teaching, I have to say, is good for the soul. In many ways, the job saved and improved me in ways that making more money never would have.

When I wrote the book, I wanted to use a few of Mali’s words in the epigraph, so I wrote Taylor a letter to ask permission. He responded with a letter of his own, his permission, and a signed poster. I think he’s fantastic–a living saint for educators. I think everyone should read his work.

ZACH: I noted in your acknowledgments that you thanked two creative writing professors at Kansas State University who “provided [you] a kind of creative and intellectual nourishment” you “desperately needed at the time.” As someone who would not still be teaching high school were it not for my own MFA experience here (Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota), I really resonated with this acknowledgment. Can you share a little more about your experience at KSU? And how it nourished you, both as teacher and writer?

Even on a college campus, I don’t know that one always gets the kinds of connection with art or literature that one craves. I certainly had several university-level English classes that made me feel alive, and some that left me feeling cold. College at a big school can be a ‘choose your own adventure’--you can rub shoulders with thinkers, drinkers, and people from all walks of life, with all kinds of plans. For whatever reason, I don’t know that I was as surrounded with the kinds of thinkers I had hoped to be when I enrolled in college, though I did brush shoulders with a few, and it was in my creative writing classes more than any others where I was able to have the kinds of conversations about art and literature that I had hoped to have. The desire to be a novelist–a writer who is an artist–is one that is often looked down upon in our profit-first society. The creative writing classes I took helped legitimize some of my longest and most secretly-held desires in life.

ZACH: As you note in your acknowledgments, this novel is self-published through your LLC, lower midlist publishing. (And I hasten to add, the novel doesn’t lack any quality for being self-published. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read all year.) How did you decide to take the step to self-publish? And what have you learned along the way as this book has been released, and you have begun marketing it and sharing it with more readers?

I wrote the book, rewrote it, rewrote it, revised, clarified, edited, revised, clarified, and edited. I did my research on the query process, assembled my list of agents and agencies, and queried and queried and queried, trying a number of approaches and a range of agents. I rewrote and revised again–going so far as to try swapping the novel to third-person from first-, and trying a variety of opening scenes. I researched the industry more, researched it more, read ‘trade’ publications and the books that were coming out, and researched the industry more. I ultimately decided to self-publish for three reasons. First, I realized that the query process was becoming poisonous to my writing. I was revising my manuscript with imagined audiences in mind–the agents, the editors, and the people I thought they wanted to sell books to–and I was making editorial decisions that should have been artistic with marketing and people-pleasing in mind. Second, I realized I could self-publish–and that I could do it up right. In the modern world it’s not only the big publishing houses who have access to great editors, cover designers, and the means of production. I contracted a developmental editor who had worked with major authors I respected, found an excellent cover designer on Substack, and contacted a former student to get permission to use a sketch they had gifted me at the end of class one day to make my cover. After I’d realized I could self-publish, part of me began to realize I would be selling myself a little short if I yielded control of my work to others and didn’t do it on my own. Finally, there was the matter of time. I could have continued querying, but it was an enormous time sink. Agents expect you to research them to explain why you think they’re a good fit for their lists, and to tailor-write them specific query letters. I’d already lost hundreds of hours to researching the query process, researching agents, researching agencies, writing synopses of my book, and writing query letters–it was costing me time that I wanted to spend working on my second and third novel. And if I had managed to get an agent, it wouldn’t have been a guarantee of my book finding a publisher–or being published in a timely manner. Education is in upheaval now, and I felt my book was relevant now. I wasn’t willing to wait any longer.

You asked me what I’ve learned from my publication, so I’ll close with this: I’ve learned to trust my own taste and bet on myself, and perhaps to be careful of whom I trust as an outside evaluator of my work; I’ve learned that no one can write for everyone, and that to try to do so is certainly a recipe for failure; and finally, I’ve learned that selling books is hard because the market is crowded and as an independent author without the benefit of the industry’s marketing and advertising machinery, I’m essentially invisible. In closing, I’ll thank you, Zach, for bringing my novel to more people’s attention. I hope some of your readers have found this interview interesting and might consider looking into my book–I wrote it for teachers, students, educational stakeholders (which means all of us), and lovers of literary fiction alike.

1. I’m glad I didn’t know the difference, or might have tried to get an undergraduate degree in creative writing, which I’m afraid would have run the risk of a) over-investing me in my own writing before I had a suitable background of reading, b) burning me out on writing before I was ready to really invest myself, and c) leave me completely and utterly unemployable in a way that my English degree didn’t.

2. There’s more to say here, perhaps, and I’ve already gone somewhat long, but just to elaborate: my initial plan to teach for two years and then apply to MFA programs again was extended two more years when it turned out that teaching English, while writing-adjacent, was all-consuming, and I couldn’t get my applications together to my liking in my first two years of teaching. Then the Great Recession happened, and then I became engaged to the woman who would become my wife, and, long story short, I fell into my second-level vocation, the secondary-level career I have felt called to do, and I teach English nine months of the year and work on my fiction in what margins (large and small) I can find to do so otherwise.

3. The worst story I’ve heard about an administrative walkthrough came from a first-year teacher I spoke with at a conference in Denver. In her district, the admins had walk-through forms with ‘high yield strategies’ listed, and when they walked into a classroom, they expected to mark off at least X number in ten minutes, or teachers would receive negative reviews. Which is, of course, absurd. One high-yield strategy used well for ten minutes is almost certainly a much better use of time than a barrage of four or five or eight or ten.]