Until I lost my job two years ago, I was a teacher of basic writing, a discipline I love because of its sense of possibility. For scholars, basic writing holds the hope of creating scholarship to advance the public good of higher education. At the same time, scholars work with writers at the very beginning of their journeys in college. My work combined three passions that have woven multicolored threads throughout my life—writing, teaching, and working for social justice. In the last two years, I have found other means to weave the threads of these passions through civic engagement and a renewed commitment to writing for educational advocacy.

Still. The search for meaningful full-time paid work has become complicated by substantial unemployment and underemployment across many occupational sectors. The literacy work that many of us hold near and dear to our hearts has been restructured as part-time positions without benefits and volunteer positions without pay. Literacy work for the public good is no longer practicable, it seems. The idea that drives so many of us—that students and teachers can and do learn from each other—becomes lost in a mad competition to find and keep a job that will pay for health care, housing, and other basic amenities. The love of teaching and of learning can easily become lost in such frantic pursuits.

Sign found at Zuccotti Park in October 2011.

When we isolate ourselves as individuals, we forget the meaning of the public good and the “single garment of destiny.” Indeed, in the most difficult times, any of us can lose sight of those connecting threads. We, the unemployed, are quick to be blamed for our own destiny, even as we see all around us the suffering of so many others: people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their sense of well-being. We may indeed know we are not alone, yet at the same time we realize that for others we might well be invisible, our words and actions easy enough to dismiss because they do not conform to a model of linear progress or to the social norms of the American Dream. Perhaps what we long for most, even if unconsciously, is a greater sense of public connection.

“Crossing to Freedom” quilt by Jane Burch Cochran at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH

Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library photographed on a recent weekday afternoon.

The New York Public Library, where I often write, was instrumental in helping people sustain that public connection during the Great Depression of the 1930s. When people without jobs had no where to spend their days, the library opened an Open Air Reading Room in Bryant Park, the large public park adjacent to the library. That reading room has been resurrected today, and people gather there and in the library building itself, in the Rose Room, to sustain the sense of hope that seems to exist in short supply for many of us.

Bryant Park Reading Room at twilight, book carts covered against the coming rain.

From “Reading Room, The New York Public Library” by Richard Eberhart, photographed on Library Way on East 41st St. in New York City.

As I sit down to write this post, I am in the process of learning outside of my comfort zone. I find I do not quite know where to start, and so I begin with the story of a wise teacher that understands the perils of such learning. The story takes place at the end of the term, as the teacher offers stern yet compassionate guidance to students. The present remains filled with turmoil and the future appears uncertain. Based on past events and current realities, we must prepare for questions that do not point to easy responses. Yet the teacher’s words suggest a deep trust in students’ abilities to think critically, with a profound compassion for the students’ commitments to engage in new enterprises.  “You’ll face challenges we cannot anticipate…you must be able to make well-informed decisions,” the teacher states, and the students absorb the teacher’s every word with rapt attention.

The protagonist of this story is Star Trek’s Captain Hikaru Sulu, aka George Takei, who delivered the Ray Browne lecture at the Popular Culture Association (PCA) conference, which I recently attended in Boston. While many people in my life are avid Star Trek fans, I never followed the original series, or any of its sequels or films. I knew George Takei only from the Facebook posts that friends posted on their timelines, and these I found quite fascinating and even poetic. Yet I was not immersed enough in Star Trek lore to make the connection between Takei and Sulu; indeed, all I remembered about the cast was that Leonard Nimoy wrote poetry.

So the afternoon I attended the lecture at PCA, I felt entirely unprepared to enter this new community of practice. At the same time, I understood Shannon Carter’s concept of rhetorical dexterity for basic writing, in which students “effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one.” I hoped that learning the cultural and linguistic codes for Star Trek might be similar to my fondness for French existentialism, and particularly for Albert Camus and the Myth of Sisyphus, toward which I had gravitated as a young adult, much as my peers had dreamed of navigating the Starship Enterprise.

Rhetorical dexterity served me well on that afternoon in Boston. Camus and Takei’s creative commitments evoke the hope and the material reality of social and cultural transformation. Both of them honed their craft through life experiences gained in the challenging circumstances of World War II; Camus took part in the French Resistance and Takei was incarcerated in an internment camp for U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, spending several years of his childhood living behind barbed wire under armed military guard. In Boston, while discussing his work for the LGBT community, Takei spoke of the necessity of actively engaging in democracy and discussed why such engagement must be rooted in compassion. Comedy, he offered, may be especially useful in this regard.

After returning home, I searched the Internet for clips from Star Trek that would connect with democracy and compassion, and was soon drawn into a second story featuring Hikaru Sulu as the demanding if benevolent teacher. This time Sulu the teacher plays a commander proposing an unconventional course of action. The teacher must model attitudes and beliefs to face challenges that he did not anticipate and to make decisions that are well informed, even as a colleague objects to his proposal. Respectfully yet forcefully, the colleague argues against breaking longstanding rules and upsetting established standards. Commander Sulu, weighing each word carefully, replies that the conundrum they face ought to mean more than  “just carrying out orders and observing regulations.” In contemplating any course of action, we must remember our humanity and act with humanity in coming to the assistance of others. We must engage the present moment in order to claim the future—and indeed “to boldly go” where no one has gone before.

Adrienne Rich was a teacher and scholar of Basic Writing who taught under the direction of Mina Shaughnessy at the inception of open admissions at the City University of New York in the late 1960s through the early 1970s. Her obituaries in three U.S. national newspapers of record obscure her participation in the Open Admissions movement to varying degrees.

The Los Angeles Times is perhaps the most direct on this point. A paragraph late in the article states that Rich taught “remedial English to disadvantaged students at City College of New York.” The Washington Post notes that “Rich taught remedial English to poor students entering college before teaching writing at Swarthmore College, Columbia University School of the Art and City University of New York.” Yet both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post make a distinction between instruction in remedial English and the teaching of  writing. The Post obscures the fact that Adrienne Rich taught remedial English at City College, separating Rich’s service to the “poor” from her later vocation of teaching writing at more elite schools (including City College).  The New York Times, which has been a consistent critic of offering remediation at the college level, says nothing at all.

Perhaps these obfuscations and eliminations may be interpreted as what Rich calls, in her 2009 poem “Ballad of the Poverties,”  “…the poverty of theory…/…poverty of the diploma mill.” In her own work on teaching Basic Writing, Adrienne Rich did not draw a distinction between “remedial English” to “poor” or “disadvantaged” students—and teaching “writing” to everyone else. In her essay “Teaching Language in Open Admissions,” she suggests a more holistic pedagogy that neither infantilizes Basic Writing nor sentimentalizes it. Rich writes, “So these were classes, not simply in writing, not simply in literature, certainly not just in the correction of sentence fragments or the redemptive power of the semicolon; though we did, and do, work on all these.”

This intersection of curricular components will be very familiar to teacher/scholars who take a Writing Studies approach to Basic Writing theory and practice, especially if the word literature is interpreted broadly to mean a variety of readings that allow students to understand the situated contexts of college literacy. Indeed, reflecting on the college classrooms of the late 1960s–early 1970s, Rich cannot help but refer to texts from a wide variety of disciplines that she and her colleagues and students read and wrote about in the Basic Writing courses of those times—including, but not limited to, Martin Buber’s The Knowledge of Man (philosophy), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (children’s literature), W. E. B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folks (from the still-new discipline of Black Studies), and the poems of Audre Lorde, who also taught at City University with Rich and Shaughnessy.

In the autumn of 1993, I had recently moved away from the verdant mountain of a graduate school in northern Appalachia to teach writing at an open admissions community college in a struggling rust-belt city some 200 miles away. A new colleague handed me several sheets of paper with cramped, faded print from the creaking division office copy machine. My colleague offered this article as a welcoming gift to my new position because, he said, Adrienne Rich’s perspective had deeply inspired his own teaching at the college. My colleague hoped that I would feel similarly inspired.

Excited and overwhelmed at once with new teaching responsibilities at a new institution so unlike the research university where I had earned my doctorate, in a new city hit hard by the recessions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, I eagerly followed my colleague’s advice. And I immediately felt transformed. Adrienne Rich was describing herself as a writer, someone who took the actions, the processes, and products of writing seriously—and who took her students seriously as writers as well. For Rich, open admissions education was “a very demanding matter of realistically conceiving the student where he or she is, and at the same time never losing sight of where he or she can be.

Her words articulated my position more precisely than much of the theory I had just finished reading in graduate school—and most of the professional development training I have encountered since. Rich’s obituaries would seem to diminish or even to erase her advocacy for the open admissions education movement. Adrienne Rich may have left us a record of another time, yet that time seems no less vexed than the turmoil of our current historical moment.

Indeed, as I enter the nineteenth month of my own long-term unemployment, I find that “Teaching Language in Open Admissions” speaks directly to any of us who struggle daily against the long-term results of what were once posed as short-term solutions: losses of students, courses, programs, jobs, and—most debilitating of all—the loss of hope. Yet Adrienne Rich’s words also invoke the significance of education for social and personal transformation. She writes, “Finally as to trust: I think that, simple as it may seem, it is worth saying: a fundamental belief in the students is more important than anything else.” That belief, in our students and in the work that becomes possible in the presence of our students, must never be lost, for it opens for all of us a resolve to imagine and to enact a more equitable future.

* Adrienne Rich  “Diving into the Wreck”

Once upon a time you adored grading students’ essays. You had only a handful of students each term and grading did not seem like grading at all. You read essays like you were reading a mystery novel or a love letter. You found thoughts for future development and sentences structures and word choices in need of the gift of revision. You discovered the miracle that is student progress in learning and writing—evocative descriptions and provocative ideas so infused with a life of their own that you thought they would jump off the page and begin to sing.

But that land of few students and cherished insights seems long ago and faraway, back in graduate school, when grading still felt like a novelty. Now you have more than 100 students a term, instead of fifteen or thirty. Often you have to grade straight through weekends and oftener still, you grade papers on school nights. You have seen dawn creep up out of a darkened sky—either from inadvertently staying up all night long or, worse still, from having fallen asleep hours before, next to the stack of ungraded papers. The cat sleeps beside you on top of the stack. The light seeping through the blinds is not the gentle fall of another morning – but a wakeup call of increasing intensity, worse than any ring tone pre-loaded onto your aging smart phone.

In just two hours, you realize, you will have to confess to your 8 a.m. class that you couldn’t finish grading their essays—your third such confession in as many class periods. You recall that you have four back-to-back meetings tomorrow (Thursday, your day off from teaching), after which you will be too exhausted to grade properly. The next day (Friday), all four sections of your classes will meet again, then the weekend will come as it always does, and once again you will somehow find the energy to grade. But what will you do about today?

What about today indeed? You have read every blog and essay you can find with tips and hints for easing the difficulties of grading. You know why grading is so hard, you know what you can do to alleviate grading stress, and you can recite by heart suggestions for online grading. You have thought of grading as a subject for your own blog, but you can’t quite bring yourself to do spend your few free hours writing about grading.

Now, back in the present moment, as you struggle valiantly toward wakefulness, you glance at the aphorism you have scrawled on the front of your grade book, your favorite quote from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées: “The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.” As you often do these mornings, you reflect carefully on these words, which you first read in your late teens, and have returned to in middle age after a long absence.

The trifles, you think, would be grading itself—the need to categorize and mark, then to write comments or check off rubrics that justify those marks. The greatness is, of course, in learning to write, learning to transfer thought from the head to the page or to the screen, just as in Pascal did centuries ago in the Pensées—before, of course, the screen existed.

Your tired brain works out the contradiction. These days, or so it appears to you, the act of writing, and the deep thinking that writing engenders, often seems overlooked in favor of the endless task of grading. This contradiction between action and task has the potential to come to crisis for every student’s every paper to which you assign a grade in a single term. This term you teach 113 students X 7 writing assignments (five essays + a midterm and a final, not counting any of the drafts or revisions) per each student =? You cannot bear to complete the equation in your head.

You endure the entire process, time after time, year after year. Every year, despite your best efforts, you find yourself falling into vertigo from which there seems no escape. Except for grading. You envision the silent stillness of the night just ended, your cat snoring softly next to you on a stack of ungraded essays. You had gazed at her for some time last night, comforted by her sweet expression. Before you realized it, dawn had arrived outside your front window. You gather together your papers and your thoughts and rise up to meet another day, your brain awakening at last with miraculous light.

Jennifer, you learn, has been in this country for 11 months and cleans houses to supplement the income of her great-grandparents with whom she lives.  Richard, and three generations of his family before him, grew up in this community where this institution is located. Richard still attends high school and enrolls in your course for dual enrollment credits for college. Nothing, he believes, will deter him from attending college across the country in the city in which he dreams of finding fame and fortune. Meanwhile, the institution that Jennifer and Richard attend and in which you teach is in the process of restructuring. Your course and your job are threatened, and your program chair, also in danger of losing his position, has called for the faculty (most of them who, like you, teach part time) to create new benchmarks for the course.

There is pressure from both the institution and the local community, “Why,” you have read in an editorial on the local paper’s website, “should taxpayers have to fund a course that students are supposed to take in high school? It is a waste of money, especially in these difficult economic times.”

“But Richard,” you argue in your head with the anonymous editorial writer, “is still in high school. And Jennifer,” you continue (as you guzzle down your fourth cup of coffee before your 8 a.m. class. You have promised yourself that you will cut back, but not today). “Jennifer did not attend an American high school.” Indeed, it is unclear if she attended high school at all, although she has earned an American GED.

You extend this silent argument to the program chair, staying mindful of the pressure he must be feeling from his own supervisors. “Our program already has clearly articulated outcome statements. We have identified what students should be able to know and do by the end of the course. And now we need benchmarks for the middle of the term? How is it possible to measure the processes through which students learn to write?  What can we expect all students to have achieved by week 4? Week 8? Week 12?”

This task absorbs you as you present the assignment for the in-class midterm. You explain that the students will have fifty minutes, until the end of the class period, to write these exams. Jennifer, awake and alert, has her hands already on the keyboard. At the same time, you watch as she bends her neck and squints at the screen. Either she needs new glasses (which she insists she does not, and which anyway she cannot afford because she has no health insurance) and/or she is struggling with the syntax of written standard American English sentences.

As Jennifer tentatively begins to tap the keys, you look away toward the classroom door, where Richard is at last making an appearance. At least he has arrived only three minutes late for this midterm. He blinks at you and barely nods as he finds his seat, and logs onto the computer.

That leaves you forty-seven minutes to draft the list of midterm m benchmarks that the program chair assigned to your subcommittee. You are relieved that you talked the chair out of asking for Week 4 benchmarks. Week 4? you had said. As if everyone’s week 4 looked the same! At week 4, Jennifer had begun learning how verbs function in American standard written English and now, at week 7, she was in the midst of a long experiment with verb usage, sometimes choosing verb forms that agreed with their subject, and sometimes did not agree. Jennifer could recite the rules from the handbook by heart, and she was still practicing how to trust her judgment enough to apply the rules effectively. Richard’s week 4 had featured a revelation about sentence fragments, and by week 5 he had stopped using them. At that point, he had transitioned into fused sentences that at times seemed almost Proustian – paragraphs or pages long. Now in week 7 he was beginning to understand the difference between independent and dependent clauses and his punctuation had become somewhat more reliable.  Richard was, indeed, becoming a fine writer, keenly attuned to audience and purpose.

Every term of your teaching, you had encountered student writing whose surface features resembled Jennifer’s and Richard’s writing—and every term you had born witness to students who had faced immense challenges at the beginning of the course and even at the middle, but who were writing capable college-level essays by the end, and had moved on to the next composition course in the sequence. Each of these students had progressed through your beginning courses at their own pace, and each had different challenges and different ways of moving forward with their writing. Although you could recite the course outcomes by heart in your sleep (indeed, one night you woke your partner doing exactly that), how would it be possible to create more discrete benchmarks for an action as complicated as writing an essay?

Suddenly, 22 minutes into the midterm, a panicked voice bursts into your reverie.
“Miss, my computer screen is frozen again.” The voice is Richard’s. His computer screen seems freeze every class period, no matter what seat in the lab he chooses.

“Did you press enter/alt/delete?” asks Jennifer, who is the class expert in solving technical difficulties.  Richard nods, then adds, “And I hit escape, too, just like you said last time.” Jennifer makes a motion to rise from her seat, but before she is standing, other students suddenly take up the call. “Mine too,” they say, “my screen is frozen.” With a quick glance you see it is true. The monitors seem to have declared a general strike. Not for the first time this term, and certainly not for the first time during an exam.

“But that was my best writing ever,” Richard says, with no little pain. You shake your head sympathetically as you remember the time in graduate school you lost the entire third chapter of your thesis. But you will save that sad story for a less stressful moment.

“You will give us the next class period to write,” offers Jennifer, her statement more declarative than interrogative.

“No, unfortunately I cannot,” you explain. “These midterms are due for the composition norming committee this afternoon. But I will tell the committee what happened and they will read your exams without penalty.”

You hear sounds of a few grumbled complaints about the expense of tuition and the cost of loans, and the condition of the computers at your institution. But you also hear the zips and clicks of students removing pens and pencils from book bags and handbags. You begin passing out blue books for a midterm that will now be only twenty-five minutes long and written by hand.  So much for the experimental benchmark norming session that was planned for today, yet you are grateful that you remembered to bring the bluebooks to class for just such an emergency. But even more, as you watch the intense and attentive faces of the students, you feel deep gratitude for their perseverance in learning to write.

You find yourself perplexed by three students: Julie, Sean, and Carol (pseudonyms) engaged with writing at their own pace, each unable to complete the course. Julie seems to sleep through each class, her face covered by the hood of her too-heavy parka. However, when you ask her to respond to a question or contribute to a discussion, she gazes out from underneath her hood and speaks as if she has remained alert all along. She exhibits the same clarity and self-possession in her writing—or at least the one in-class practice essay that she has managed to hand in so far. Her insightful, precise speech translates into thoughtful, intelligent writing—perhaps a bit sloppy with a verb ending or two, but not indicating a pattern of errors. Julie’s in-class midterm essay is brilliant, but she does not hand in a portfolio, and she is absent for the final. College mandates require that you list Julie’s final grade as “failure to complete the course.”

Sean comes to class for the first time in the third week of class, the same day as the college’s final withdrawal date for the term. He explains he missed class because of a family emergency. After class, you go over the syllabus with Sean, point by meticulous point, and show him all the assignments he has missed. He nods his head, but you are not quite sure that he is listening. In the next few weeks you observe that he participates actively and insightfully in small-group revision workshops, although Sean himself has no writing to share. However, for the in-class midterm, he writes an above-average essay. You look forward to speaking with Sean about his writing, to work with him on revision, especially on organization. But Sean does not return to class for the rest of the term and you never hear from him again. He also fails to complete the course.

Carol is a model student, if not the strongest writer in the class. Her revisions show substantial improvement, her attendance is perfect, and her assignments are always turned in on the due date. Carol often stays after class to work with you on her writing, and by the end of the term she appears on track to pass the course. But the day that final portfolios are due, Carol is absent for the first time all term. She does not respond to e-mails, her phone service has been disconnected, and then does not show up for the final exam. Carol, too, has therefore failed to complete the course.

When the college compiles its metrics on remediation, Julie, Sean, and Carol cease to become real students with nascent writing ability and the potential to achieve. Instead, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), these distinctly different students fade into statistics used to demonstrate that “less than 50 percent of remedial students complete their recommended remedial courses.” The NCSL is a significant stakeholder for President Obama’s plan “to create incentives for states and their colleges to produce better results for students, while keeping tuition in check.”

Yet lost in this matrix of statistics and arguments and counterarguments are real students like Julie, Sean, and Carol—students who are becoming confident and capable writers, but who disappear before they complete our courses. The statistics leave out the number of students who may be working but live at or below the poverty level or who have no stable place of residence. Indeed, Julie, Sean, and Carol may have been chronically homeless or in foster care throughout their lives; their previous schooling may often have been interrupted, contributing to their placement in “remediation.”

In our classes we have an opportunity to facilitate substantial writing practice for all students, even those students who are unable to complete the course (perhaps because of the instability of their housing or employment or health care, or other issues related to the current economic crisis). We can vary our teaching strategies, engage students in multiple activities to learn new concepts, connect students with tutoring and writing centers. These efforts foster a positive environment in which students can build on their strengths as learners.

All of our students are engaged with learning to write. No matter how complicated the circumstances seem, whether our students finish the term or not, we need to honor the time they are able to spend in our classrooms. For whether or not we can measure the outcomes, Julie, Sean, and Carol have an opportunity to learn skills and capabilities that will serve them long after they leave our classrooms.

[Photo: Seeking consolation in the bathroom by quinn.anya on Flickr]

When I was in my late teens, in the midst of the transition to college and young adulthood, I read and fell in love with Albert Camus’s the Myth of Sisyphus.  Published in 1942, in the midst of the catastrophic events of World War II, Camus presented a lesson on persistence that I have never forgotten. This brief synopsis of Camus’s retelling of this myth sets the scene:

Condemned by the gods, Sisyphus is ordered to push a boulder to the top of a mountain. Each time, as Sisyphus neared the top, the boulder would roll all the way down to the bottom again. Sisyphus would head back down the mountain to retrieve the boulder begin the task again, only to lose the boulder each time as he approached his goal. According to Camus, the gods believed “that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Yet in the midst of his hopeless and absurd situation, Camus suggested that Sisyphus need not fall into despair.

“There is no sun without shadow,” he writes, “and it is essential to know the night.”

The present moment holds the possibility for change. The difficult hours prepare us for joy, just as joy remembered helps sustain us through difficulty. As a first-year college student living away from home, Camus’ essay moved me profoundly—not merely as literature, but as a lifelong lesson. Many years later, I shared this lesson with students in basic writing. My goals for presenting this lesson were twofold: first, I wanted the students to revisit their values and larger purposes for attending college. Second, I wanted to present Sisyphus’ dilemma as an analogy for the writing process.

Our class had just written their midterm essays. Grades were low and spirits were flagging, but the weather that spring was achingly beautiful. The semester was a study in contrasts and contradictions. Yet I held high expectations for the students. I believed that they would learn from their determined persistence and that their writing would benefit as a result. If we were to make any progress as writers, we would need to remember persistence, even if we felt like Sisyphus, pushing that boulder uphill time after time without hope. The boulder metaphor worked well for the students. The myth inspired provocative conversation about the meaning of persistence, and students recounted stories of persistence in other aspects of their lives. Collectively these life stories held resonance for students’ persistence in their first year of college—and for their persistence in writing.

Persistence is a much-discussed topic in postsecondary education at this historical moment. The article “Who Comes First,” published by Inside Higher Education, focuses on “rationing student access” in the California two-year colleges based on quantifiable measures of persistence, such as “students who are most likely to earn a degree or certificate.” These students would be allowed priority enrollment; those targeted for reduced access are referred to by the term “less disciplined students.” The article quotes Chancellor Jack Scott of the California Community Colleges, who suggests, “We’re not open to all. Some people don’t want to face up that it’s reality.”

As that former first-year student still enamored with Sisyphus, I hold a strong connection to the term, “less disciplined students.”  Perhaps you knew me, or someone like me, a teenager with undiagnosed ADHD, uncomfortable in my own body. I sat in the middle row of my English literature survey class (first-year composition was not required at my private liberal arts school), loudly cracking my gum (to keep me going until lunch after missing breakfast), my head wrapped in a blue bandana (to cover my unwashed hair). I fidgeted in the small classroom seat and doodled random squiggles on the lined paper where I was supposed to write lecture notes. Every day I attended that class, I fought with vague feelings that I did not belong there, and the grades on my essays seemed to indicate as much.

Yet herein lies the contradiction. Undisciplined as I appeared, I did not drop out and I somehow managed to pass the course and to persist, with stops and starts, long enough to earn a PhD. I learned to overcompensate when I faced adversity, to persist in the face of difficult odds. Persistence did not come to me naturally, nor was persistence “common sense,” or a subject offered at school. Like many of us, I learned theories and practices of persistence from powerful life lessons, and I review these lessons often to retain their significance.

The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (written collaboratively by members of the Council of Writing Programs Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project) lists characteristics of persistence that can be applied to Chancellor Scott’s notion of the disciplined students, such as: “follow through, over time, to complete tasks, processes, or projects.” Persistence thus helps to achieve the institutional goal of retention and to offer the institutional reward of privileged access to enrollment. The Framework also offers a definition of persistence that complements the meaning suggested by Camus: “the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.” First-year students, perhaps like Sisyphus, manage to sustain their interest and attention, but this ability is not necessarily acquired overnight, and surely the journey toward persistence is not always attained, or even welcomed by others, with open arms. Indeed, the lesson of persistence also can involve a great deal of difficult struggle.

Camus draws additional significance from this myth. In the moments between losing the boulder and retrieving it, when he must climb back down the mountain, Sisyphus is free from his burden, and also free to contemplate his fate. This freedom helps Sisyphus not only to persist, but also to experience joy: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”  Such remains the nature of persistence.

As I grapple with writing these days, I remember Jeremy’s suggestion for dealing with writing burnout and blocks: “Go outside. Take a walk. Just be alone with nature.” Well, that’s just fine, I thought. I live in the most populated city in the country. How can I possibly be with nature? Then I considered a subsequent conversation. I had just read the results of a study about children diagnosed with ADHD. This study found that children could greatly improve their attention by spending time in nature. Engaging in green outdoor activities was posited as yet another “treatment” to “manage” ADHD.

But Jeremy and I speculated that green space served as something more than an alternative to medication or behavior modification. We had both experienced being in nature as a metaphysical or transcendent experience. Nature did not tell us to stay in our seats when we felt like dancing or complain that our handwriting looked like chicken scratching. In fact, nature does not pass judgment. Perhaps this lack of judgment helps attention to improve. Nature also provides renewed inspiration for writing. And writing, as Jeremy and I conceptualize it, is not only about fulfilling an assignment or following a rubric. Writing holds the potential for personal growth and social transformation.

So, remembering my conversation with Jeremy, I pulled on a jacket and sneakers and headed out for a walk around the block. My neighborhood has many tall old trees, maples and sycamores and oaks, among others. Often just one tree can represent nature. As I envisioned the urban spaces where I had lived and taught over the last decade, I remembered how the students and I had loved holding class outside on balmy days. I remembered as well that students generally seemed more focused outside—especially when we could sit near a tree. No matter if the tree was scraggly and old, or teaming with pollen-filled blossoms, or ripe fruit. One tree was usually all we needed to create the wonderful concentration that helped to focus our writing and listening. The few times outside space had distracted the class, I realized, was because the place we had chosen had no trees, only grass and asphalt.

I took a deep breath and found that I needed to walk further than usual. This latest writer’s block was persistent, and who knew how long it would be before this mild weather gave way to more wintry conditions. Then suddenly, like a mirage in the distance, I saw an opening in the line of trees that separated our neighborhood from the parkway. Several benches were placed in the clearing, dedicated to the memory of a neighbor that had dedicated her life to the neighborhood. The trees in the clearing still held some of their leaves, while the rest of the leaves were slowly becoming mulch underneath the soles of my sneakers. I walked a short distance toward the tree line and found a tree with bright holly berries. I closed my eyes, breathed in, breathed out, opened my eyes and took in the leafy midday light. This holly tree would look extraordinary in a photograph. This very tree could serve as inspiration for a blog. Slowly and steadily I felt the need to write surge back into my heart.

This morning I considered the relationships we create with libraries, and how often that space remains utilitarian rather than imaginative. I had awakened to local radio news that a forced eviction of Liberty Plaza had taken place in New York City overnight.  The People’s Library at the Plaza was gone. Only the day before I had visited the library and had marveled at the changes since my first visit in late September. Back then the library consisted of a small collection of books and pamphlets placed on one of the sitting areas in the park. By the time of my last visit, the library had moved into its own tent.

Libraries hold free access to new and often disconcerting ideas and experiences that can lead to lives opened and transformed, perhaps most movingly described by Richard Wright. Yet the privacy of following our own thoughts in a library setting remains a matter of privilege. Writers in our courses may not yet have experienced such privilege. Perhaps, for good reason, the thought of such quiet seems unsettling, the idea of endless stacks of books intimidating.

For complicated reasons, libraries often remain mere utilitarian spaces to be used by students only for completing homework assignments, to find printed or digitized resources for researched essays, and to compose and print out their essays in computer labs. If the more exploratory aspect of libraries remains unfamiliar to our students, then we especially need to introduce discovery experiences into our courses. Students who feel comfortable in with the imaginative potential of libraries may feel more engaged in academic settings as the library develops into a comfortable home away from home.

We can facilitate access to libraries and give students opportunities to discover for themselves the kinds of spaces that libraries offer for deeper study. We might begin by providing in-class time and space for students to discover the local college library on their own. Large urban or suburban public libraries, or university libraries beyond our home institution’s facilities, may offer excellent opportunities for class field trips.

Students who take courses online or who attend school in areas without access to additional libraries (or who take courses that do not have time for field trips) can browse special collections or archives on the Internet. Whether the experience is virtual or takes place in real time, two simple questions may prove useful to guide students’ exploration: What section of the library fascinates you most? Why?

The tent that held the People’s Library at Liberty Park became a reminder of those fascinating imaginative possibilities. Inside the tent, plastic bins now overflowed with books and posters, and flyers covered the tent walls. There were systems for borrowing and donating books and a welcoming librarian who offered suggestions for volunteering.  On the outside of the tent, facing Broadway, large red, yellow, and green capital letters spelled out the word LIBRARY.  If only memories remain, perhaps these memories hold out the hope for creating new visions for how we might live our lives. Certainly this hope may propel us toward understanding the possibilities of libraries as imaginative space for our students in Basic Writing.

Postscript: A day and a half after the People’s Library was removed, I returned to Liberty Park in the midst of a drenching rain. Later that night, the books recovered from the New York City Department of Sanitation and the additional books donated to rebuild the collection, were confiscated once again. In a citywide demonstration the following day, the librarians received still more donations of books, which they pulled through the city in two-wheeled shopping carts.   When I visited the park, the librarians urged me to remember that the story of the People’s Library had not yet ended, and that recent updates can be found on the Library’s website.  You also can read and contribute to a poetry anthology at the website.

As I follow the further developments of the People’s Library, I continue to consider the

relevance of this story for our work in Basic Writing. Here are questions that continue to jog my thinking, and that may be usefully shared with students. Please consider adding other questions and/or students’ questions or responses in the comment section below.

• What is the importance of a People’s Library located in outdoor public space? What does the Libraryrepresent to the librarians? To the people who use the library? How can you tell
• What symbols, metaphors, or analogies might best describe the Library? Why do you think so?
• Even though the Library has been seized at least twice, people continue to donate books to the Library? What do you think motivates people to give to the Library? Why do you think the librarians continue to accept these contributions?
• Do you have a have a place similar to the People’s Library in your home community? If so, what function does this place serve? If not, would people in your community benefit from a library like this? What would you need to do to start a library like this in your own community? What can you learn from the experiences of the librarians?


Occupy Wall Street Librarians

The day I learned to occupy revision was a fine autumn Sunday in New York City. I had been working without success on a particularly difficult revision, so I decided to leave the suddenly stultifying quiet of my apartment and venture downtown to Zuccotti Park (also known as Liberty Plaza). After 09/11, the park was rebuilt as a public sanctuary, a much-welcomed tree-lined space of tranquility in an often-restive city. A circle of granite benches surrounding a London Plane tree, located at the intersection of Liberty and Trinity, serves exactly this purpose for the people of Occupy Wall Street.  I found the outside of the circle filled with crowds of demonstrators, musicians, and tourists. All of us had walked away from the spaces of our usual lives, and were attempting to negotiate the ever-changing landscape of the park.

At the base of the tree, people had placed objects that for them hold special significance: plants, apples, flowers, Mardi Gras beads, an American flag, all meticulously arranged and lovingly tended. On the wooden planks that support the sanctuary was written “It’s better to do something imperfectly than nothing,” and against the planks someone had propped a poster of Mahatma Gandhi that read “Action expresses priorities.”

As I took in the scene around me, I realized that both of these principles hold true for revision. To accomplish revision seems more than a matter of memorizing steps or strategies. When we attempt revision, we understand that the results may be far from perfect, but the attempt is more significant than giving up in midstream.

Revision requires that we move inward, that we creatively and critically try to find a blank space that we can fill, a hole in the writing that we can turn inside out, that we perceive our subject with renewed senses in order to infuse language with deeper persuasive and imaginative meaning.  To occupy revision adds another layer to the process. When we occupy revision, it reminds us that we need to show up—that we need to create an embodied presence, that we pay attention to the ways in which our bodies and our minds work together as we write. Revision never works the same way twice. That is both why revision is hard and why revision is such an important part of the process of writing.

As a writer with ADHD, I often need to negotiate the intense competition between the hyper-focus that allows me to concentrate so deeply and the distractions that inspire me to write in the first place.  If these ideas seem contradictory, they also describe the needs of many learners whose challenges with attention require thinking outside that very familiar box.  In immersing ourselves in the unfamiliar, we can begin to perceive the profound work that global revision asks of us.

Beyond “seeing again,” revision suggests a reordering of priorities, a willingness to examine our perspectives, to consider whether the end product justifies the process used to complete that project. A hasty lockstep process of revision could well produce an unsatisfying outcome. My process had hardly been hasty, but I had often wished for more consistency and less unpredictability. Yet in the midst of a park bustling with activity, I found the deep concentration I needed to write. And so that afternoon I learned that revision often takes more than just showing up. Perhaps my lesson can be phrased even more succinctly: don’t just revise, but occupy revision.