"Infected by waiting"
What it feels like to teach nonfiction writing right now
On Thursday night, I taught my first class on creative nonfiction to a virtual group of 15 students. This is a class I’ve taught before at the Porch, and a lot of the materials are pulled from essays I used to teach way back when I taught freshman writing at Columbia in the early 2010s. On the one hand, I felt confident about my lesson plans that have evolved with little tweaks to address things that worked and flopped over the years. I don’t consider myself an expert on nonfiction or even writing, but the act of teaching this particular topic is like muscle memory for the most part. Give them writing prompts, set the timer. Introduce, introduce, close-read and discuss. The more I teach, the more I understand that the hours are less about filling them with my voice, and more about giving space to others. The more I teach, the more comfortable I am with the silence that follows me asking them, “What do you notice?”
About 30 minutes before going into this first class, I looked at my lesson plan again and deleted a third of what I had in mind, to give students even more time to talk about themselves, more space to sit with the sentences we’d look at together.
Just like our culture has done away with the casual “How are you?” and replaced it with “How are you holding up?”, the introductions were less about breaking ice and more about sharing our current mental states, with everyone checking in from their houses (or their parents’ houses), unmuting their mics one at a time to let in their respective background noises: crickets from the yard, for example. Some of my students were still dealing with repercussions from the March tornado that swept through Nashville. Others were quarantined, like me, or have recently moved to be with other family in order to expand their bubble.
In our introductions I heard variations of the same sentiment. Tired but grateful. An emotional ride. Wanting to write. Wanting to interact with people. Wanting a space to be someone else from who they’re forced to be during the day.
Unbeknownst to them, these introductions were already serving an important lesson in nonfiction writing. How to talk about all the particular, random things in our lives that make us unique, for an audience with their own particular experiences to relate to them. In other words: how to write personally and universally at the same time. How to capture an audience (in this case, 15 people of varying ages, genders, races) with their words, and what details to select or withhold.
Also unbeknownst to my students, I’m actually terrible with this when it comes to talking with my friends. Even with the awareness that “How are you?” doesn’t serve its purpose anymore, I ask it anyway. When asked, I smile and say I’m okay. “We’re healthy and safe.” We have friends in California who are preparing to evacuate because of the wildfires, and compared to that, we’ve just had one tornado warning that resulted in nothing, so we’re okay. We have shelter, food, power, WiFi, and subscriptions to streaming services that keep the toddler entertained during the day, and keep the adults up at night. We’re okay.
It sounds like I’m withholding, but it doesn’t feel like it in the moment. It’s not like I’m deliberately keeping things secret, or that I’m suffering in silence.
My current theory is that it has something to do with this very thing, this silence. When I talk to friends, we’re so eager to be in each other’s virtual company that we fill every millisecond with our words, our reactions (Hmms, Awws, Ohhs), all the follow-up questions that come after our updates. We have lives, and some of us have kids, so the conversations end more or less abruptly, promising to pick up where we left off the next time. I’m out of breath, but at the same time, it never feels like I’ve really told them how I am.
In my class, though, we’ve all carved out the same two hours to be with each other, and maybe more importantly, we’re still just strangers that happened to agree to be here once a week. The silence might be awkward, but there’s no personal guilt involved, no worry about what a particular person might think of them if they remain silent. I can tell that some students are more than comfortable with the silence, especially while they’re muted. These are the same students who would have chosen the chairs at the far end of the table, who like to observe and test the waters little by little before really speaking up. I know because I used to be that student, until I wasn’t.
For years, I’ve used James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” to start my nonfiction classes. It’s an essay that Baldwin published in 1955 when he was 31 years old (which is how old I am today), and he’s writing about the death of his father and the race riots which happened simultaneously back in 1943. I do the math: for Baldwin, it’s been 12 years since the events he’s writing about, with the most vivid retelling that makes readers feel like it’s happening right in front of them. And indeed, it feels like he’s talking to us about the BLM protests of 2020.
Again, a reminder: Baldwin wrote this in 1955, about something that happened in 1943.
I’ve read this essay countless times, but for the first time, I’m caught on his phrase: “infected by waiting.” Maybe I’m triggered by the word “infect,” a word that makes me want to sanitize my hands even though I haven’t touched anything. There’s also a visceral reaction to this whole idea of stillness, because nothing about 2020 has felt still.
Except for the stillness that follows after I call on a volunteer to read this paragraph out loud.
I look at the faces on the screen, some of them re-reading the words, their eyes darting left and right. Others, taking breaths.
And after this silence that feels infinite even though it’s lasted less than 30 seconds, we talk, and talk, and talk.