Those who tend to write and those who tend to teaching sometimes coincide. The writing practitioner-cum-teacher is not a rarity. But in professional contexts in which entrenched institutional writing pedagogies carry the day, the writer-teacher often experiences a conflict of interest, an inner civil war, or some blend of the two.
As a younger teacher, I often found myself at odds with favored methodologies about some static "writing process" (I think the definite article always headed that heading); some preemptive insistence on the requirement of "freewriting" before other segments of such a process; and other questionable barnacles of the rhetoric and composition trade. Certainly, the elements of such sacraments were not far from me, but to me they were probably more like a painter's rituals of cleaning his or her brush or creating stretchers for the canvas. Increasingly, I came to understand that the bureaucratic standards of writing pedagogies - particularly in public secondary settings, but also even in higher ed - weren't going to go away -- but also that I wasn't going to capitulate to such offices at the expense of craft. Not without a fight.
I knew this because the craft is a kind of devotion - one that need not be named or isolated in either secular or religious vocabularies. I learned about the common ground of the human capacity for delightful devotion in part over a series of phone talks with a secular humanist-inclined friend, who is both a political activist and classical guitarist. She does not relate to my spiritual questioning, but we both found a common language in a concept of a devotion that transcends mortal boundaries.
So being drawn to language as a teacher comprises for me a devotion and an attentiveness. It means that the teaching of writing naturally grows out of an appreciation shared with students of written and spoken texts. Experiencing our lives as page and text is not a figure of speech when it happens (which is not all the time) --though it's admittedly not possible to do this experience full justice through textuality teacher-talk like this blog.
Nonetheless, those mutually interperformative encounters mark an amazing intersection of populism and discernment. Writing is not the province of an elect few or élite class, but within the nuances of witnessing to craft, skilled elders naturally emerge to guide others. Much as Martin Sheen views his role as that of journeyman actor, any of us who has worked through some of the rigors of apprenticeship under living writers at some point must not deny the call to presume to apprentice others. It demands a really specific cocktail of confidence and humility, because somehow the masters we have served -- however much we sometimes fought with or resented them in the past -- are always in our midst, demanding a chilling level of vigilance.
Language is a mirror for the demands of life. It is not life as such, but also not not life. A mirror can be used to redirect sunlight, to open ourselves to ourselves, to imitate meaningfully or shamefully. A mirror may be the beginning of a ceaseless hall of mirrors (what the East Indian theologians term maya, illusion), or it may be the untouched face of reality. It's my hope that in this forum, I and other interested participants may work with this lens on language. There is the usual blend of smoke and mirrors everywhere around us, but if we look to the guidance of this basic mirror, we may be able to help ourselves and others see through a bit of the smoke. That is something I ask us to trust.