The Kinder Egg of the self

Every week, I teach three writing classes on Zoom: one on Monday night, another on Tuesday night, and a third on Thursday mornings. All of the classes are ongoing, with no pre-determined end date, which makes them sort of like a writing group, but I send out readings and prompts, keep us organized, and lead our meetings. I started the first group on a whim in November of 2020, inviting a handful of students from workshops earlier that year who’d asked for a way to stay connected. They became the Monday group. The Tuesday group has been together since January of 2021, and Thursday’s group started this past June. There’s a lot to love about teaching writing to adults, the most obvious being the fact that they’ve signed up of their own volition, which means that they show up on time, do their work, can reliably mute and unmute themselves, and are invested in not only their own growth, but also in each other’s.

The best part, though, is that I get to learn about all kinds of stuff that I might never know otherwise. Because of these writers, I have spent time thinking about cold-water swimming, sweater girls, ambiguous loss, boiled frosting, death doulas, anemone corms, Montreal smoked meat sandwiches, what to pack in your tote bag when you’re accompanying an aging parent to the hospital, the specific sag of an imperial yellow sofa where an old man in Taipei has watched the news every night for decades, or what it might feel like, should I find myself in New Hampshire, to swim the radius of Lake Wentworth, from Turtle Island out to the pair of rocky islets they call the Jockey Caps.