This Sunday, July 7, I'll be facilitating a short online session for The WriteTime Workshop, an English-language virtual workshop group run from Paris, France. It's the second workshop (both on new confessionalism) that I'm giving in a month. The first was Queering the Confessional, in Cobourg, to a brilliant group of poets, most of whom were part of the Cobourg Poetry Workshop community.
If you'd asked me as a student if I ever thought I would want to teach, I would have laughed at the idea. And, though I now have a lot more respect for and understanding of facilitating and teaching, the hubris of believing I should be on the teaching end of the learning spectrum is still far beyond me. I have much too much to learn yet about almost everything to think of myself as an expert in anything most of the time.
But I will say that teaching about things you care about is a great excuse not only to dive into some extra research. Moreover, seeing other people become excited about your topic is downright thrilling. Sparking curiosity, flipping that switch for someone and watching them light up? It does start to make me see why folks teach. For me, though, I still find that joy mostly from creating, from reading to people at events, and hearing from people who have connected with my work.
On that note, I'm going to finish here with this link to three connected poems of mine that Ottawa literary powerhouse rob mclennan recently posted on Periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. These are confessional poems, and, holding to that tradition more than I usually do, are this time more about my dad than me. I'll warn you that it's hard subject matter, about war and survival and the changes in perspective that come with aging and being human. If you read them, I hope they are good to you. And I hope you keep creating, too.
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