Notes on a Blueprint (from March 2016)

“You’ve got to build a closet.” ~Mom

A few months ago I went to dinner with a sister prof of mine. We talked about one of her latest projects drawn from her research on Octavia Butler, the influential but profoundly unsung writer. I was excited to hear more about Butler’s life, not simply because of my respect for the writer but because of her influence on Black women and other science-fiction writers (Steven King once shouted her out and I have mad respect for King’s craft). My colleague confessed that she had cried while reading Butler’s journals that past summer. Butler’s journals contained in-the-moment accounts of crippling poverty and overwhelmingly heavy ambition. Like many African American families, the Butlers had migrated from Mississippi to Los Angeles with the hopes of making a better life only to be welcomed by the reality of having to make due with scraps. For Butler, making due (or is it do?) meant watching the family dog suffer with a pellet in his leg because they didn't have the money to pay for a trip to the vet. It also meant suffering through the physical and emotional pain of dental issues because paying a dentist wasn’t as urgent as paying a light bill.

What a high cost of living…

Coincidentally, making “it” was the even heavier burden in Butler’s life. A few weeks ago, I read a facebook story about Butler’s dedication to her craft. To say she was serious about it is an understatement. The only contemporary parallels I can offer for women as focused, self-sacrificing, and articulate about the career they want come in the forms of Serena Williams and Beyonce. Butler was intentional. Yet, according to my sister prof, Butler was also depressed. She struggled with the disease while waiting for the publication of her first novel. The wait to make “it” was just that heavy.

The irony of having that conversation then – the night after I had experienced one of my biggest professional failures – is not lost on me. Without going into many details, let’s just say that the keynote I delivered days before did not go well. Scratch that, if I could find an explosion gif, I’d include the visual here. Despite the work that I’ve completed recently (and I have completed a fair bit), I didn't trust that my existing work fit in that conversation I had been invited to join because I’ve been waiting for some sign that what I do is legible to the field where I work. Yes, I know that sometimes you have to create the work you want to read. I also know that my professed faith should make me better able to believe in what I do not see. But, I am human and I am fallible and I get frustrated with how long things take. It has been hard to wait when you hear yourself wonder, what happens if no one reads your work, or they (and by they, you mean people you respect in your field) don’t consider it _____ enough or _____ enough (insert your discipline of rigor barometer of choice)? Waiting is heavy. Waiting in fear is heavier.

You may ask why waiting has been hard for me. The answer is because I eventually want to talk about “why” questions. Even though, I do actually care deeply about the practice of teaching writing and there is no other professional identity that I means as much to me as that one, I am not yet at the stage of developing pedagogies or anything like that just yet. Books and talks that explore why conditions happen and what they mean can be a hard sell sometimes. In those instances, folks don’t want things to get too specific, ideological, off-putting, or risky. Addressing why gets you classified as “too political” by those who see themselves in the trenches doing the hard work. Why based discussions can seem too out of touch and not broad enough for the real day-to-day realities of people struggling.

Isn’t it funny how something can be abstract and political at the same time? I swear…

Pursuing why can be quite lonely. At this moment, it means that I am not testing out or creating pedagogy when that seems to be what my field privileges. Rather, I’m attempting to understand practices and conditions that shape the mindset of students before they even get in the classroom. It means that I am not setting up studies about what students write when I know that we need those studies. Instead, I’m theorizing attitudes about community participation and why literacy is so important to these groups. It means that I’m not yet talking about classroom assessment. Nope. I’m trying to name the ways people assess the behaviors of individuals in their communities and how those assessments position certain people (Black women in this instance) to over invest in education, self-help, or sermons, etc. just so they can be read as valuable or well. I deeply respect the scholars who are able to publish in the journals of my field with bold and unflinching critiques (there are some), but they are don't appear there enough. Instead, neutrality is still a large paradigm and while, neutrality is safe, to borrow a phrase from Beverly Moss’s wonderful book, A Community Text Arises, I need it “brought to [me] in a cup [I] can recognize.” In other words, I need to see me.

​The need to see yourself, to recognize your likeness, and to be legible are not mutually exclusive, but it can make for unnecessary work. When the time came for me to prepare for that keynote address, I felt a need to produce something new when what I had was enough. Even as I was working on my talk, I could feel that I was devoting too much time to it (I know there is a blog post to be written about instinct and trusting your gut, but one thing at a time). Even worse was the way this recognition came back to me as I listened to my colleague introduce me and I lamented the time I had wasted slicing up an old article and a new one in a way that, ultimately, did a disservice to both works and to me. Had I given this bad talk on the road I might have been able to toss the regret out the window on the way back, but I didn’t. My colleagues gave me a great opportunity to show the work I’ve done in front of my peers and I … flopped.
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Fortunately, I have a wise mom. She listened to me explain how heavy waiting is and how it can zap your self-confidence. Then she listened to me lament my mistakes. She waited while I talked about hoping for another shot and then she said, “yeah, you psyched yourself out. It happens. No shame there.”

Then she gave me a new philosophy on writing:

“You’ve got to build a closet. Treat your writing just like that. Put together a few outfits that make you look good so that when you get invited some place, you can just pull that outfit out and show off. Even if that outfit is old, there's a good chance those people haven’t seen it. They’ll think it’s great and you’ll feel comfortable”

She is right. I am enough.

​Consider this a draft of my closet blueprint.