Types of Courses Taught: In my first two years here I’ve taught Intro to Creative Writing and Composition, as well as my own version of Intro to Creative Writing in the Groups summer session. This year I’ll be teaching a 200-level Poetry Workshop, along with a Literary Publishing course that introduces students to the industry from the perspective of both writers and editors.

Creative Assignments: Though we mostly read & talk, there are a few activities I love doing with my students. One of my favorites is making Weathergrams. These are short poems inspired by the haiku that often invoke the natural world. We begin by taking a walk outside and noticing our surroundings. Then we each write a poem in calligraphy on a piece of kraft paper and tie it to a branch or a bush. The idea is that you’re giving the poem back to the world that inspired it, allowing it to weather and fade with the passing of time. I love this activity because it shows students that poems are living things that come from and belong to the world, not us. It gets them out of their heads (and phones) and looking around. We talk about attention and participation without possession or attachment to understanding. About the senses and how we translate feeling through images. It’s also just fun! I want my students to experience writing as both introspection and play.

Relationship between your own creative work and your teaching: I see my own creative work and teaching as spokes on the same wheel. So I take seriously the possibility that my students have something to teach me too, and that we’re finding our way through and with writing together. Sometimes it’s disappointing when they don’t love a poem as much as I do! But sometimes they offer a reflection or interpretation I had never even considered before. And it doesn’t matter if it’s “correct” or not. It matters that they took the risk to feel into what the poem was trying to say to them in particular, and that they felt comfortable enough sharing their perspective with the class. So much of my own writing practice is spent trying to create the conditions in which I can feel free enough to say something that surprises me. I'm very honest about this with my students—how difficult writing is! How much doubt and fear you have to sit with. Inviting this difficulty into the room allows us to navigate it together.

Teaching Philosophy: I suspect my teaching philosophy & ethos will continue to change as I do, but for now, my priority is authenticity and relationality. I tell my students that writing is always a relational activity, that contrary to the popular image of the solitary writer, no writing ever happens alone. So I try to model the importance of tending to intellectual and personal connection as a way of tending to the work of writing. All this means is that we spend a lot of time talking to each other—about what we read and what we’re writing, but also about our dreams, worries, and disappointments. I don’t ask my students to do anything that feels like busy work. I try to cut the fluff and focus our energy on learning how to agree and disagree with respect and curiosity, how to connect texts to our experiences and other happenings in the world, and how to ask questions—of what we read, of each other, and perhaps most importantly, of what we think we know and hold to be true. I find this to be infinitely more productive than lecturing about “craft concepts” or giving generative prompts. If we can practice thinking and wondering together, the writing will come more naturally when it’s time to sit and face the page “alone.”

Main takeaways: My biggest hope is that my students leave my class with more curiosity and investment in their personhood. An understanding that their thoughts & feelings are important and worth sitting with. And that learning how to write is really just learning how to listen.