Write about anything you like.

I'm a day late this week because I've struggled with this prompt.  I've thought about a few things, but nothing in particular, or in any depth.  I've thought about how it is that creative writers have perhaps the least academic training in the department (the MFA is often considered a studio degree) and how we learn to be peers of TCR and literature students, even though in these areas, we are probably far less qualified than students who were denied admission.  I've thought about my fairly rigid view of first year composition and what it is I think students should take from it.  I've thought about beginning with the end in mind (so about what I'd like to happen after the PhD), every semester needing a plan (I highly recommend a presentation I viewed at the beginning of the semester; I think this is it:  http://www.facultydiversity.org/?FallSemesterPlan), and how the growth/fixed mindset model of education currently does and will continue to influence my teaching.  In short, I've thought about a lot.

And then today in my FB newsfeed was a link to a former peer's essay in Tin House (here's the link to "On Pandering:" http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/41314/on-pandering.html).  And holy cow, did this essay strike a nerve.  I've struggled for some time to articulate the difference between masculine and feminine writing, and why masculine work receives a better critical reception.  Meanwhile, even as I wrestle with the differences (are they empirical or perceptional?), I realize that these differences should not matter.  I presented at the Women and Gender's Studies Colloquium here at TTU this semester, and frustratedly conceded that I could not explain the difference, and I'm tackling a similar question in my paper for research methods this fall.  Ironically, this author's astronomical success first raised this question in my mind:  both she and another writer in my program, Donald Ray Pollock, met with serious success after their work was described as masculine.  As if this was the most laudable thing about their work, and both writers are frankly fantastic on their own.  But immediately, I wanted to get to work being masculine in my writing, to add some grittiness in here, and to subtract some lyricism there.  If I were to describe a text as masculine, I daresay you would know exactly what I mean.  If I were to distribute a list of authors to our class and ask students to classify them (say Chuck Pahlaniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, A.S. Byatt), I also think our decisions would be nearly unanimous.

So today I'm copying and pasting the end of Claire Vaye Watkins's essay here, the part where she offers ideas to marginalized writers.  And now, as the semester ends and as a big round number birthday approaches, this list feels like a sort of freedom.  Not that things have changed, but that they're changing.  (Warning: there's some language here).  (Okay, never mind; I edited it.)

Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white [dudes] at Oxford.

Let us use our words and our gazes to make the invisible visible. Let us tell the truth.

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Let us burn this... system to the ground and build something better.