So this week I’m waiting for some contributors to send in revisions to their proposals. I’ve really enjoyed working with prospective authors and seeing some already strong abstracts get even better. The next step: putting the prospectus together. I’m hoping to send that document along to the authors for feedback by mid-March.
As I’ve been reading the abstracts again, in addition to doing my own writing and editing and teaching, I’ve been struck by how some of the writers and texts we know, love, and teach elude our best efforts at criticism. To my mind, the best criticism — and probably the best teaching — models new ways of thinking and reading. You show your reader (or your students) how to read differently, and thus how to see differently. To adapt lines from W. H. Auden, it’s the crack in the tea-cup that opens a lane to somewhere else. You crack open the text, and it takes you somewhere new.
But there a few texts and writers that leave me shrugging my shoulders in front a class, saying, “I don’t know. I just think it’s awesome. What do you guys think?” Jean Rhys is one of them. Stevie Smith. Muriel Spark. Complicated, knotty women I return to again and again because they push back against my readings ever so slightly with their slightly prickly ways.
Fortunately, I have over two dozen incredibly talented teachers and critics to provide (hopefully) me — and you — with approaches to teaching these writers who refuse to be completely “teachable.” Which authors and texts do you find a challenge to teach, to write about?