AWK AWK
AWK
I remember when I was taking classes to become a teacher, my professor—a wild haired feminist force of a woman, who drove a red convertible—told us never ever write awk in the margins of our students’ papers. “It’s like a rare bird! And confusing!” she laughed. “No awks!” No red pens, she said. No correcting.
I was crestfallen. I really liked when my professors wrote margin notes, detailed notes on how to write better sentences. And I loved red pens! Writing class was like a ballet class. You performed. You were corrected. If you cared, quite a lot, as I did, about getting it right, you learned. Quite a lot. I was sad I would not get to write awkawk, would not get to crow in the margins of my students’ papers, would not get to use red (I used pink) pen.
Last night when I was walking with my friend L, we were talking about our books-in-progress and how hard it is to write them. This is one of our favorite topics, next to mocking each other’s food choices or discussing very old people we love to visit. We’d both just printed out giant chapters, and we’d spent the last week reading our works to ourselves, to see what we had. Making notes. Reworking passages, whole pages, by hand. “I have so many awks,” she said.
“You write awk? Do you write clar? I had so many clars!” As in, clarify this. I couldn’t believe she did the same thing I did! Essentially, we write, as students do, terrified and clumsy and hoping for the best, and then we take the work into another room and read it with a red pen. As a teacher reads.
To write, there must be two of you.
When I wrote this awkchapter, I truly felt it was sheer genius. Not only great, but astonishing. Then, reading it over, trying to hear how it might sound, I was bereft, it was all awk all over and not clear at all! To get the two of you to work together—that’s the great secret of good writing. And it’s why I think so much can be learned about making art from being in relationships with annoying people. And even more can be got from love.
This is what I want to teach my students how to do: to see how being good at love is being good at learning. I want to teach them how to become good readers of their own work. To not get discouraged when it’s not going well. To simply get more curious, when it’s awk, about what might be under there, in there, way down deep. I want to teach them to be unafraid of the murky, the shining, the confusing, the weird.
I was so happy to learn L works exactly the same way I do. It’s such such solitary work, writing. No one else can read your work the way you do, can know as much as you know about what to improve, or how. (Teaching is solitary in this same way, since you are always the only one doing what you are doing in the room.)
But these hard parts about writing, revision, and teaching, these awkward and solitary parts, the parts that are just not yet clear, these are the parts I love.
If itwas easy, I would not love it. A candy bar is easy and a little goes a long way. What’s the point? I like the work that makes me sigh. It’s hard. But so, so, so good.
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