Teaching as part of the writing life

Writing life: 36

I know I touched on teaching in my side-hustles post a couple months ago, but I thought digging a little deeper into why writers teach might be warranted, and if I’m lucky, interesting—though you’ll be the judge of that.

Almost every writer I know is involved in some form of teaching. ‘Twas ever thus. For the lion’s share of writers, regardless of era, penning novels, short story collections, poetry, memoirs, or non-fiction books has never been a particularly remunerative way to earn a living. Rewarding, yes. Remunerative, not so much, save for those in the top few percentiles. Again, I say, ‘twas ever thus. But, a caveat. To link every writer’s teaching to financial compensation also short-changes writers. The decision to teach is often more complicated than a simple financial calculation. Besides, like writing, teaching writing is far from lucrative. If money is the sole objective, there are easier ways to earn the kind of dough teaching provides—like cutting lawns or working the counter at McDonald’s for instance. You probably don’t want to calculate your hourly income from teaching. So there’s more at play, here.

Why writers teach

Okay, despite my caveat above, teaching on the side does help many writers to make ends meet. That’s the hard financial reality of the working writer in this country, even those with bestsellers under their belt. (The inexorable limitations on a Canadian novelist’s earning potential is probably worth exploring in a future post, but it’s not this one.) And of course, the time and mental bandwidth required to be a good and committed teacher invariably affect writers’ ability to focus on—let alone finish—their own writing projects.

Even famous writers have taught at some point in their writing lives—frankly, most have.

All of these famous writers taught at one time in their careers. Some still do.

But I’d argue that many of those writers who may teach out of necessity often take away something from the experience that they weren’t expecting. Sometimes it’s inspiration. Sometimes it’s a weekly respite from the isolation many writers experience when working on a book. Sometimes it’s the benefit of the different viewpoints and perspectives a class of aspiring writers can yield. A lucky complement of writing teachers are not exhausted by the experience, but are energized . These are all positive—and sometimes unexpected—outcomes.

My experience

I started writing this post on a Thursday in late May, the morning after teaching my Writing Humour evening course at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. It’s an eight-week course, with each session lasting two-and-a-half hours. I present a pseudo-lecture for the first 45ish minutes on that week’s topic. Then after a 15 minute break, the students will take half-an-hour or so to write a piece using the humour type or technique that I’d just prattled on about. Then we reconvene and workshop as many of them as we can in the final 50 minutes or so.

Many—but not all—of the students are middle-aged and are taking my course as part of the Creative Writing Certificate program. Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been teaching via Zoom, which has its benefits and detriments. On the positive side of the ledger, students can be anywhere. This is the second time I’ve taught the course this year and I’ve had students in Australia, Washington, D.C., Edmonton, Northern B.C., and other far-flung locales. So it opens up the course and makes it available for many more writers.

But Zoom has its drawbacks, too. When I’m presenting in the first hour using PowerPoint, I can’t see everybody in the class. Zoom only gives me a strip of four faces along the top. If I want to see the others, I have to hit an arrow key to scroll through the full row of faces. Not ideal. And it’s tough to read the room and get feedback on what you’re saying when you can’t see everyone and they’re all on “Mute.” It’s also tough sometimes to draw energy from your audience when you’re not all in the same room. But we manage.

To be clear, this is not one of my classes, but a sample screen shot of a generic Zoom class I found in an article about online teaching.

Random cover slide for my Week 7 lecture.

As usual, we had lots of laughs that night. Having developed and now taught this course for more than a decade, I’m always amazed at how funny and talented and different the students are. No two classes have been alike. And they’ve always gelled as a group and grown as writers and collaborators over the eight weeks. I’ve grown, too.

So why do I do it?

Well, I truly enjoy the students and their varied and diverse senses of humour. I draw energy from it. Many of them write humour that is quite different from mine, and that’s always eye-opening for me, and keeps my creative juices flowing.

Not only do I enjoy the students in the course, but I learn from them, too. I try to keep my eyes and mind open when teaching so that I’m alive to new ideas and perspectives. More than once, something a student has said has stuck with me and opened a door somewhere or helped me manage an issue I might be having with whatever novel I’m writing at the time. I think if we shut ourselves down when we’re writing and isolate ourselves in our own mental space, we sometimes miss opportunities that can whiz by us on the periphery. At least I think that can happen to me. So connecting with others is helpful in my writing process.

I also teach for a reason I cited in an earlier post from last year, What being a writer means to me. I teach—and do many other things—because it makes me feel more like a writer. It allows me to enmesh myself more deeply in the writing life.

Different ads in different years. I’m not sure these two ads drove much traffic to the registration site. That brown jacket has officially been retired.

My teaching has not been limited to the University of Toronto. For a year, I was writer in residence at Hillfield Strathallan College, an independent school in Hamilton. The term “writer in residence” is perhaps not what it suggests. I was only really on campus a couple of times in the year, speaking to classes and leading workshops—one of them with writer pal Gary Barwin who won the 2017 Leacock Medal winner for his great novel, Yiddish for Pirates. For a few years I gave an annual session for the grade 12 English students at Greenwood College School, here in Toronto. And of course, like many other writers, I give a handful of workshops every year for writers groups, writers festivals, and conferences like the Surrey International Writers Conference (SIWC) where I’ll be leading a virtual workshop on humour writing this coming October.

(L) Guest teaching a class at a Toronto private school. (R) Leading a workshop at the Ontario Writers Conference at Lakehead University’s Orillia campus.

Wrapping up…

Whatever the reason, teaching has its rewards and its challenges. As long as the former outstrips the latter, I’ll keep on teaching. But it does beg the question, can you actually teach someone to write well or to be funny on the page. Ahhhhhh, now that is a very polarizing question that I cannot answer in the section entitled “Wrapping up…” But I do have views on this intriguing question. Perhaps for a future post…

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