Letter of Self-Reflection
At the college where I work, as at all higher-ed institutions, permanent faculty members undergo an intensive review process every few years. One element of this is an in-depth letter reflecting on one’s professional life, including teaching, contributions to the community, and scholarship, which for me is creative writing. The panel for my 2019 review responded warmly to my letter and suggested that I post it online—so here it is, edited for web readership.
To the Faculty Review Committee, Hendrix College
September 2019
Early on in my writing life, I developed the belief that writers should be deeply involved in the world. I would have been hard-pressed to say what this meant that writers should actually do—take part in protests and sit-ins? write only about subjects that would warrant attention on the nightly news?—but, having high-mindedness in greater supply than lived experience, I was sure it was a bedrock truth.
Looking back, I can see that my conviction had many sources. I was a child of the sixties, captivated by the social movements that were sweeping the country, as filtered by my parents and older brothers. I was (and am) a United Methodist, inspired by John Wesley’s claim that “the world is my parish” and shaped by my church’s deeply connectional identity. Both of these were in harmony with the idealism of the day and the unique culture of my family. My mother, a preacher’s kid, had grown up in Methodist parsonages all over the state. She and my dad then lived in many different places as my father figured out his professional path in academic medicine. They kept up with friends from each place they’d lived and maintained wide circles of relationships, interests, and activities. Simply being in our household put you into contact with a variety of activities that family members were involved in—sculpture, birding, music, pathology, gardening, veterinary science, cooking, furniture, and historic preservation—as well as a number of often-colorful people that each of those orbits encompassed. Writing might be solitary and introspective, but given how I grew up, it’s no surprise that the kind of writing I liked, which I intended to make my life’s work, would turn me outward toward the world.
College and adulthood put me at some remove from that experience, and my idealism about the writing life began to wane. It was not that I became disillusioned so much as that, as tends to happen, daily life distracted me. I took on various part-time and freelance jobs. I had children, and their needs deserved attention, as did the needs of a marriage that eventually failed. I did a lot of volunteer work. I taught in an adjunct capacity at Hendrix. Although I kept up a regular writing practice and published from time to time, my writing felt pretty contingent—not at all like it was saving the world. This accrual of experience didn’t feel lofty; it felt messy and disjointed, as if my writerly engagement with the world was a banner I had dropped along the way.
By and by things changed. My household stabilized and I remarried. One by one my children cleared the threshold to adulthood. Amid the other shifting elements in the picture, teaching and writing persisted. After earning my MFA, I was offered the position of Hendrix-Murphy Foundation director, first as an interim and then permanently, and my job status became full-time. By then I had gained some clarity on my work, the scope and nature of my interests, and what was realistic to expect of my writing.
With the objectivity that getting older can provide, I now see that my path all along was not so directionless as it seemed. Erratic as it looked, it really had been shaped in large part by my core value of engagement—forging links between the life of the mind and the life of the world. That core value, in a more tempered and mature incarnation, has found a surprisingly fitting home in my job at Hendrix College.
My teaching and programmatic position here at Hendrix is like no other that I know. It’s a wonderful fit with my love of literature and writing and my reverence for language itself. Through this distinctive role, I can be a means of connecting needs, gaps, and questions in the wider community with the assets we have here at Hendrix. This relationship is not a one-way street, with me tipping young people down some passage to the outer world like so many doughnuts down a chute. Often, it is my students—with their life experiences, interests, and activities—who bring new learning back to me. They put me in touch with things that are happening in society and orient me to new understandings of today’s reality. Together we function for each other as what the Vision for Student Learning calls a “link between the classroom and the world.”
. . .
Every year, usually in the fall, I teach a creative writing course called The Writer as Witness. The constancy of the offering has allowed me to refine the course ever closer to my ideal vision. Witness writing is a good fit with Hendrix’s commitment to “engagement that links the classroom with the world,” as our statement of purpose says. My main goal in the course is to equip students to use their creative writing as a constructive, aesthetically satisfying response to significant things going on around them. By teaching students to write compellingly, I’m giving them the tools to craft consequential responses to what they see. Acquiring the means to contribute something to public conversation that is lasting, well-made, and even beautiful can enhance students’ sense of purpose and save them from the frustration and despair of feeling ineffectual. Also, of course, writing well will be an asset in a host of professional settings. Thus in multiple ways the course helps them, as Hendrix’s Vision for Student Learning says, to “flexibly meet the demands of their futures.”
The Writer as Witness covers a lot of ground, both topically and technically. The theme-based approach, which is not the norm for creative writing courses, means that we need to spend class time examining witness and witness literature as concepts. That takes a while. Also, because this is a multi-genre course, students need some familiarity with craft and technique for the three distinct kinds of writing—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—that we cover. Their previous experience with each genre varies widely, from none to a fairly sophisticated grasp, and it takes time to bring everyone up to at least a cursory understanding of certain forms and conventions. I encourage students to wade in without worrying too much about the terminology and inner workings of genres that are new to them. Low-stakes assignments, a supportive class community, and an encouraging atmosphere set their minds at ease. Ideally they increase their comfort level and broaden their perspective and their skill set. Feedback comments such as the following suggest that the course does succeed in exposing the students to new forms and genres that they can pursue later in more depth:
“She spoke to me like I really mattered and it affected my relationship with the class. I really enjoyed this class and I made it a priority.”
“Hope’s enthusiasm for the class was contagious.”
“Hope provided some of the most beneficial comments on my writing that I have ever received.”
“I didn’t realize that I could write poetry.”
“The lyrical essay is a form I’m going to come back to, now that I see what it’s about.”
“M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A was also just stunningly good. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was a difficult read, especially the introduction, but I think it was a really worthwhile lens into the ethics and complex emotional burdens of witness.”
“Thank you so much for introducing such great pieces of writing to us!”
“[John McPhee’s] Encounters with the Archdruid was the most cumbersome to read, but overall it pushed me and was fulfilling to finish.” (Note: not all are equally enraptured with the readings:.“I wasn’t as into the Archibald,” one student wrote.)
Indeed, several students have gone on to write their creative writing theses in genres and on subjects first met in ENGC 307. The course seems to serve, informally at least, as a gateway to creative writing.
In my view, the most successful thing about The Writer as Witness is its immediacy and relevance to student concerns. Although I still consider it a work in progress, it is getting better and better. Even while imperfect it accomplishes what I had hoped for when I conceived the idea: it empowers students to write, meaningfully and well, about the world they deal with in their lives, the world that comes through their phones and into their earbuds every day, its troubles as well as its wonders. Being able to make something compelling and lasting in response is a potent antidote to the devastating feeling that one is powerless to act.
. . .
The needs of the world today are more urgent than ever, and I believe in giving back. However, to my chagrin, this is a time in my life when I’m not doing much community work outside Hendrix. My office schedule and commute, frequent evening events, and the ongoing drumbeat of grading and class preparation have to take priority—not to mention my commitment to my own writing, and the need to protect time for family and for mental and physical health. I pitch in occasionally at church-sponsored drives and citizen science events, and try to give financial support to the nonprofit organizations and causes I believe in. Still, I miss the gratification and social outlets provided by regular volunteer work and feel mildly guilty not to be doing more. My young self would have disapproved this abstention from community service, and even midlife me, knee-deep in nonprofit meeting agendas and school volunteer signup sheets, would have found it pretty strange.
Even though my direct service to the outer community is minimal these days, I believe that I make an indirect positive impact through my unique role at Hendrix. As an advisor and mentor to students, I orient them to the wider world and encourage their outreach and volunteering. Simply by having been around awhile, and having worked or volunteered in a number of places—not to mention that connectional culture that has nurtured me—I know a bunch of people, or as 21st-century jargon would have it, I have networks. I’m able to point students to organizations where they can intern and volunteer. Such efforts make a difference, and they fulfill my own predilection for forging connections. Whether it’s that old Methodist thing or simply that I’m channeling my mother’s personality, I get a ping of pleasure from forging connections among people. It’s similar to the satisfying snap of fitting together pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
. . .
I’m probably not the first to point out that “work-life balance” is a misleading term. It contains two fallacies, first that one’s job is coequal with life overall, and second, that work and life are necessarily counterposed. In fact, work is just a part of one’s lived reality—albeit a large part—and vocation need not be inimical to everything else. True, tensions arise from competing demands, and it can be hard to adjudicate limited time, energy, and attention among the responsibilities one has to a paying job, a household and family, and creative or scholarly commitments. But as my old yoga teacher used to say, the nature of balance is not some perfect pose that one achieves and then holds with rigid stillness, once and for all; true balance, he said, consists of wobbly legs and desperately quivering muscles as the body sways, intensely striving to catch equilibrium. When you’re vibrating with effort, quaking as you make minute adjustments, you are living out true balance.
“Work-life balance” implies a false dichotomy, like my youthful dictum that “writers should be engaged in the world”—as if they could ever live life apart from it. One way or another, writing always deals with worldly experience, just as work and the rest of life are unavoidably interconnected.
A case in point is a birthday present I got last January. My children gave me a subscription to StoryWorth, an online site for collecting one’s memories and stories. They explained that every week I would be emailed a question, a prompt of their choosing. I would email my written response back to StoryWorth week by week and then, at the end of the year, my responses will be collated into a printed book for our family to have.
As I responded to the gift, my lips voiced appreciation: so cool! how thoughtful! how kind of them to be interested in my life stories! Inwardly, I was quailing: oh nooo. I have so little time for writing already, and this will be just one more regular demand that I’ll have to do before I get to my “real” writing. Plus, isn’t it kind of gimmicky—something intended for really old codgers? But there was nothing to do but to grin and bear it. I promised myself that I wouldn’t belabor the weekly prompts, but would toss them off as quickly as I could with as little distraction as possible from my creative projects.
But writing the StoryWorth entries turned out to be quite a positive experience. For one thing, it’s hard not to be sucked in by the weekly email whose subject line begins, “This week, Caroline would like you to answer the following question…” Rationally I understand that my daughter was probably not staying awake at night vibrating with curiosity about her mother’s past. She probably ticked off the question prompts without a second thought when she bought me the StoryWorth gift. Still, the avowal of interest churned out by the StoryWorth computer warmed the cockles of my parent heart. Also, the questions were more varied than I expected—anything from “What bands, albums, or musicians do you like?” to “What pets did you have growing up?” While some of my kids might have known some of this information, it’s equally likely that I’d told one child the same story ten times while never telling it to the others. From here on, though, they’ll all have it for reference, if they’re interested. Since StoryWorth lets you attach photos to your “story,” I was able to select and contextualize pictures that would otherwise sit unviewed in faded albums. And during a period when my creative writing has been entangled in a messy phase of research, writing a weekly assignment was satisfying. Even on a Saturday when my fiction or poetry output is otherwise low, it was curiously grounding to complete my StoryWorth piece. I came to realize that this task that I tried to relegate to some personal realm, alien from my “real” writing, refused to be cordoned off as irrelevant but rather has shown me, once again, that all parts of my life are intrinsically related, possessed of worth and significance for the kind of writing that matters.
“Gee, I had fun writing my required letter of self-reflection,” said no one ever. Still, composing this document was an important part of my introspective processes in 2019. Attempting the detachment required for a comprehensive look at one’s life and taking stock of where you’re going intellectually and professionally can be helpful at any time. As it happened, this review coincided with a period when, coincident to family events, I was sifting through a lot of other material from my personal history: spending many evenings sorting reams of letters, papers, and belongings from multiple generations; drafting a story related to that history—a story about fabrication, no less—and dutifully cranking out the weekly StoryWorth accounts of my personal past. All of this made for a pensive few months. I was reminded of the many streams of influence that have contributed to who I am. I realized I was fortunate that my professional work is so interwoven with my identity. And I was made newly aware that I couldn’t divorce my writing from the world, or my work from lived experience, even if I tried.
Yours sincerely,
Hope Coulter
Director, Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language
Assistant Professor of English