I Tell My Students Writing Is Hard. I Still Ask Them to Do It Any

My life has changed so much since my time as a Voices of Change fellow during the 2023 school year. As I wrote in my final essay of the fellowship, the beautiful, imperfect school I loved and helped build had closed. With the support of my fellowship editor, Cobretti Williams, I applied and was admitted to the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, where I am taking graduate classes and teaching a freshman English composition course. In deciding what to write as a reflection on my time since the fellowship, I started three different essays and hated all of them. I did a lot of cursing, went on a couple of brooding walks and wondered why I agreed to write this in the first place. During the similarly maddening process of designing the syllabus for the first college course I taught, I took a break to write my students a letter. Here is an excerpt: Before we start this course together, it’s important for me to name something foundational to how I approach teaching it: Writing is hard for everyone. I love writing and I believe that, if I keep practicing, I can become great at it... and I still hate doing it a lot of the time. This is why writing is so important. Almost everything we want is on the other side of making ourselves do things we don’t want to do. When we sit down to write, whether we want to or not, and we keep writing when we hit that initial point where we want to stop, and continue when those moments arise again and again like waves, we are getting vital practice. This skill, ignoring the complacent you, the you that would rather do the thing tomorrow, or tomorrow’s tomorrow, and doing the thing now instead is an act of becoming the you that has the things you want. Like anything else, this becomes easier the more you do it.This excerpt reminds me that writing is much more difficult than most of the things we do in a world that commodifies ease and comfort, upholds them as desirable and makes us feel we are entitled to them while simultaneously less and less able to tolerate their lack.