“The only wrong way to write,” somebody said, “is not to do it.”
Those were my words, spoken during an informal mentoring session with one of my students who had been struggling with her creative writing and the whole raft of competing expectations for it: what would be popular, what would be good, what would “fit” her identity, what she actually wanted to write. She was, at that time, thinking about stopping writing altogether. (There is much melodrama involved in being a teenage artist. I certainly went through my share.)
My words then were for her, and I meant them, but like so many things we do when teaching, they did not stick with me. They were reassurance and encouragement, and there was of course a next thing that had to be done. The conversation was, I think, in October of last year, and I hadn’t thought about it at all until the student gave those words back to me when she graduated in May.
When I was getting counseling in the extraordinarily difficult time post-covid, I was asked to do an exercise: think about a time I was happy, actually happy. Remember how it felt. Remember where you were. Remember the physical sensations. Think deeply about that moment to re-center when stress and depression and everything else get to be too much. For me, that was a moment I’d been sitting quietly on the couch with my wife (who remains awesome!).
My student giving those words back to me is something I wish I could hold in my hands, though it wasn’t a moment in the same way. She had been trying to find me during the chaos of graduation day (which was early for my campus this past year), and only caught up with me the following week, when I was on campus for some additional meetings. We talked for a little about what she’d left in my campus mailbox: a yellow plastic three-ring binder with her manuscript in it, and a handwritten note below the printed dedication.
The conversation tilted awkward because even writers aren’t always great with turning feelings into direct statements (hence poetry), and we were both very much between the end of the school year and all that was set to come after. We did a little bit better trading emails.
Then the hungry summer swallowed up reflection. There were events (and painting minis for the events) and travel, and more events, and more travel, and an intense burst of effort applying for a role that went to somebody else, and then it was unpacking my classroom for all the prep work for 2026-2027.
The only wrong way to write is not to do it. Have I been doing it? I am far less concerned about whether I can call myself a writer than I once was, and I put tens of thousands of words per year in some sort of order, but have I been writing?
I have written for games, and for classes, but it’s become rarer and rarer for me to write “purely” for myself. Life took me away from NaNoWriMo as it was collapsing, and while I’ve had an idea for a novel resurfacing intermittently, it hasn’t gone beyond the loosest of sketches. Sentences have surfaced here and there that I am proud of, and on occasion a whole paragraph or scene has emerged like a breaching whale: magnificent, splashy, and soon subsumed back into the pattern of the waves.
Two years ago, as a challenging school year started, I had a plan to get back to Walking Ledges. That was the last post here. I can’t promise that this time will be different, but I’m swallowing any worry that I’m doing this wrong. I am doing it, after all, which means it’s a right way.
I’ve made it to October of my twelfth year full time in secondary education. There’s been grim resolve early (for the second straight year, I am interim team lead for a colleague who is out on maternity leave, for example, and I’m teaching a new course as the first and only teacher on campus to offer it). There will no doubt be more resolve, grim and otherwise, as I navigate shrinking program budgets and the staffing churn that comes with the profession having such difficulty keeping new teachers in the classroom for more than a few years. (In my department, I’m now the only one of the large cohort hired in 2022 still on the faculty.) When I walk out of a budget meeting, it’s sometimes hard to avoid feeling like a member of the string quartet on the Titanic.
And yet!
And yet there are quiet moments on the couch with someone I love, and moments when the work I’ve done returns to me, transformed in ways I could never have predicted because always, always I am teaching students who are their own people, and because the thing with feathers defies predictions even when it is small and bedraggled by storm and stress.
To teach is to plant seeds in a field we tend for only a season or two. We till, and sow, and do what we can to ensure the seeds have water and sun and nutrients. Sometimes we see them grow, but it’s usually just the first shoots that have emerged from the earth before the season changes and our classrooms rotate to fresh crops. Sometimes, sometimes, we are lucky, and the fruits of our labor come back to us directly.
Writing has some of the same quality. We organize words and lay them out on our blankets on the street. Perhaps they’re our innards, messy with all our humanity. Perhaps they’re collected bits we’ve polished until they gleam and only hints of our reflection remain. We don’t know who is reading them. We don’t know what will take root. We don’t know what will come back to us.
There’s an expectation with these posts—and it’s as much my expectation as anything inherent to the genre—that each ends with an envoy a lá a Shakespearean sonnet: something clever and tidy to show off just how cunningly the little essay’s been assembled. I could have stopped at the bit about the fruits of labor coming back to me, but that’s not the point…or at least not the whole point. It’s a tangle of writing, teaching, mindfulness, gratitude, purpose, and half a dozen other things I can’t name on a Sunday afternoon. It is a reminder of why I do all the things I do, and why I should perhaps get back to some of the things I have neglected.
Sometimes, what is important to us shines brightly and snaps easily into focus. Sometimes, the light is coming from many directions and the shadows are unpredictable. It’s okay for illumination to stop short of enlightenment.
