Teaching on November 6th

What I said to my students

The first semester of my current academic job was fall 2016. On election night, I got blackout drunk as the returns looked increasingly grim, even though I had class the next day. Now, 8 years later, I’m not “sober-sober,” but I drink vastly less than I once did (boxing has played a big role in that journey, though that is a story for another time). This year, I did not drink on election night or in the days after. I have learned that, for me, despair + alcohol do not mix well. Once again, I had class—an undergrad fiction seminar—the next day and wanted to take some time to prepare.

My class meets in the morning and I wasn’t sure what attendance would look like, given that—regardless of how they felt about the election—many students would be running on little to no sleep. It would not be a day for heavy lifting. I decided that we would write through a series of prompts together. I brought my own notebook, so that I could write alongside the group. I felt grateful to be sober, clear-headed, wide-awake.

I talked a little bit about how fiction allows us to make a record of the world as we know it; imagine alternate paths; to name, with precision, the forces that are working to shape our current reality. Then we went through the following questions / prompts:

~ What role has storytelling played in your life?

~ What is one detail from Nov 5^th that you will remember? Why do you think this detail or moment will stay with you?

~ What kind of story do you long for right now? What feels urgent? Needed? Beautiful? Meaningful? True?

~ Imagine a character. Now write a few paragraphs of “future imagined” for this character. Nov 6^th is your starting point. You can go a week into the future or a month or 2 years or 100 years.

~ Now write a different version of that alternate future. Stick to the same timeline, but imagine a different series of events & outcomes. What accounts for the change?

In this class, we’ve been talking a lot about time, and how time is one of the most powerful and important shaping forces in fiction. How time dictates meaning. I wanted to end on “future imagined” because our ability to imagine a different world feels like the definition of hope for me. If we can’t imagine it how will we ever be it?