Word After Word

My students say this when they love something they read. At first, it bugged me a lot, this phrase—it seemed so lazy and self-centered. “I see my life and my concerns echoed in this work and therefore it is good work.” Then I remembered my job as teacher is to embrace their enthusiasms and fill my classroom with many relatable things.

And, my job as teacher is to show them, without judging them, that many other pieces of writing want to relate to them, want to say about them, as readers, you are so relatable, I love you.  And my job is to make afternoons where these introductions can take place.

It’s like going to the dog park. It can be kind of stressful and over-stimulating for everyone involved, all that territory to mark, everything really obviously completely up for grabs. All our little biases. Our lovely tastes. Our limited experiences.

The last time I read something that was not immediately relatable was when I lived in upstate New York and I decided I had to read Moby Dick and I started it again with very good, very relatable intentions. What are the Great Themes if not relatable? I trusted utterly that the old Mobe-ster wasn’t worried about relating to me. He knew he would.

I slipped away from him. Four nights later, I was back to lazy self centered reading. Astonishing delicious easier books. I have diminished myself. And gotten annoyed at my students, very convenient, instead of myself.

A great teaching moment is when the student says some version of “I couldn’t relate at all and this book changed me” or “I couldn’t relate, but I loved it.” The authors who did that for me in college were Nabokov, Tanazaki, O’Conner, Mailer, Updike, Bellow and Levertov.