The LSD Trip That Changed My Pedagogy: Part 2

The classroom as metaphysical spaceship

The semester is over, dear subscriber. My grades are submitted, I am somehow embodying the paradox of “serenely caffeinated,” I am moisturized, unbothered, and ready to spend a week in a cabin with no phone or internet. But before I go, I’d like to update you on how my semester went. The triumphant “how it’s going” to part one of this essay’s “how it started.”

If you read “The LSD Trip That Changed My Pedagogy: Part 1,” you know that, due to a confluence of factors (one of them being a particularly informative acid trip), my approaches to teaching and writing have changed drastically since last year. I was visited by ghosts of various Christmases past, present, and future – and maybe even some Christmases at non-Cartesian points in spacetime we can’t yet conceive of – and certain parts of my heart long hardened by the rigors of the academy and various notions of how difficult “good” art is supposed to be to produce warmed and softened and even melted a little. And it was with this sloppy soft-serve heart that I approached my grads and undergrads this semester, inviting them aboard what a friend has termed “Raf’s metaphysical spaceship” (i.e. my weird new classes).

The grad class was a creative nonfiction workshop called Essays on Being. Texts read included Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, Simone Weil’s Waiting for God, Byung-Chul Han’s The scent of time, Kenko and Chomei’s Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, and selections from Aldous Huxley’s The Divine Within. The mission of the class was to harness the dynamic, oddball power of the essay to confront the ineffable, and my students more than rose to the task.

The undergrad class was Beginning Fiction – which I’ve been teaching since I was first hired in 2019 – but reinvented as a sort of fiction-through-philosophy/philosophy-through-fiction experience I’ve named Big Ideas in Fiction. Writers read included Ted Chiang (“The Lifecycle of Software Objects”), Omar El Akkad (“Factory Air”), Han Kang (The Vegetarian), George Saunders (“Puppy”), and Catherynne M. Valente (“Silently, and Very Fast”). Each week we explored a new philosophical question by way of an essay paired with a thematically appropriate story. Questions included “Can AI have consciousness?” and “What is ‘the self’?” and “Is our gender a performance?” and “Are there limits to our Universe?”

Both of these classes emphasized content over form. I asked students to use the story as a means of exploring their deeply-held beliefs about the world and themselves. Instead of teaching them how to structure a scene or how to write naturalistic dialogue or how to polish a metaphor to within an inch of its life, I asked them to identify their themes and think deeply about them, to take in everything I was assigning them to read and watch and then tell me honestly why they’re compelled to write and think about what they’re compelled to write and think about. The result? Hang onto your hats, fellow MFA grads: I saw the most technical improvement in a single semester across the board that I think I’ve ever seen in a group of students.

This feels a little to me like the discovery of my own teacherly penicillin (or LSD, for that matter): an overgrown petri dish, some chemical solution spilled onto the lab floor out of haste – an accidental byproduct of a diligent attempt to synthesize something entirely different. My intent in steering away from the formalist creative writing classroom of my youth was just to have a fun semester and – I’ll admit – coerce my students into exploring my burgeoning interests in metaphysics and mysticism. I figured, “Well, I do have this BA in philosophy kind of just sitting around, so it might be nice to revisit that stuff.” I really wanted a break from the same old craft lectures I’d been giving for years, the death of the author mentality with which I’d been taught to approach every text I’d ever workshopped: the writer is not in this room; they cannot hear or see us; they are less a human being with a set of life experiences than a narrative-generating black box; they are an AI whose aesthetic code must be rewritten. I had begun to feel like the nuts-and-bolts formalism with which I’d started my writing career just wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. And it didn’t seem to be cutting it for my students, either.

So, I decided to assign a bunch of books I wanted to read or reread with a less cynical eye. I wrote up some really wacky writing prompts calling students to dramatize the Trolley Problem or write from the point of view of a three-billion-year-old space-ion or write a letter to themselves from another dimension. I tossed in some episodes of TV shows I really love – Severance, Dr. Who – and set out to have an entertaining semester. What I did not expect was for my students to somehow internalize all the craft lessons I’d been taking pains to teach them for years, without my saying a thing, simply through the process of truly understanding their themes and really caring about what they were writing.  

I still haven’t puzzled out the strange alchemy I’ve stumbled upon – how a thoroughgoing engagement with the “big ideas” and “big emotions” can, after an incubation period of a few months, produce work of a technical sophistication students weren’t capable of before – but I think I understand it on an intuitive level. Teaching (especially teaching art) is more about trust than any of us have been led to believe. The kind of aesthetic instincts that result in what we’ve come to describe as a “good reading experience” seem to come naturally when students are tasked with writing about something they feel passionately about and given a set of guardrails they can rely upon to guide them. By contrast, when students are taught how to write a compelling scene, shown examples from canonical twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, given a set of rules to follow (or, if they’re lucky, follow until they “know how to break them”), the resulting scenes tend to turn out like Fabergé eggs: ornate on the outside and hollow within. And all too often these eggs are revealed to have been decorated not out of inspiration or passion but anxiety: their ornamentation is revealed to be sloppy and panicked, their paint only half-dried – they were created to please an instructor or imitate a famous writer, to get a grade instead of explore creatively. My students’ ability to digest a craft lesson wasn’t the problem: it was their anxiety that was keeping them from accessing their passion.

There is a much longer essay to be written here about the many pitfalls of teaching art in the academy – a major one being that grades, those fear-inducing/hyper-capitalist signifiers of judgment and competence, often have to be involved – as well as the ongoing debate about whether art can even be “taught” at all (it can, though not in the way we’ve been thinking of!) But that essay will have to come later, possibly as part of the longer piece I plan to write on the strange business of being a creative under capitalism. For now, I’d like to offer you the total treat of getting acquainted with the wild antics my students and I got up to this semester: our field trips and their creative work¹.

I. The Field Trips

At times, the metaphysical spaceship could not be contained to the desks-in-rows classroom: we either had to reimagine it, or leave it entirely. 

First, a reimagining: Our Yellow Wallpaper/Gender Trouble Day (or, as I’m calling it, “The Build-a-Gender Workshop”). After reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” along with an essay summarizing some key points from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, my undergraduate students were assigned the following prompt:

For this assignment, I want you to decouple gender from sex, as well as from the social norms we’ve been coerced into living by. Then, you will create a character with an entirely new, as-yet-unknown gender, and tell us about this character’s world.

The students were then tasked with creating group presentations during which they would describe, among other things, the character’s gender performance, pronouns, and the various customs of their world. They were also offered extra credit for dressing up as their characters from a few boxes of very gay odds and ends provided by Fig, myself, and our glam rock librarian friend.

Subscriber, would you believe that they all elected to take the extra credit?

Clockwise from top left: Shittymon, a lesser-known Pokémon that begins as a trash demon, transitions to a personification of AutoZone, and culminates in an egotist named Saffron; Egg — whose pronouns were also egg/egg — and who was like if Abba had been born in 2004; Cthulhu Hivemind, which communicates telepathically but uses a tin can telephone “as a metaphor”; and Women Want Me, Fish Fear Me, an informally lesbian algae structure with a Jimmy Buffet vibe.

But there was more to this than dressing up and creating neopronouns so arcane they can only be deciphered by alien minds: several students wrote about confronting some assumptions they’d been trained to make about gender roles and the binary. Gabe shared this especially trenchant series of observations in his Thought Journal (a kind of philosophical diary I had everyone keep on each of our weekly questions): 

Judith Butler is not a person I had ever heard of before this week’s reading. I was intrigued by their ideas and they have actually changed my perspective on gender. The concept of the man/woman binary is so rigid and has existed for so long, it is hard to question it. But that is why it is so important to do that, we should take nothing for granted if we hope to understand our world. The separation of biological sex and gender is something that I understood well before this week’s reading. However the ideas of performative gender is something that intrigued me specifically. People may feel comfortable performing one gender role and would prefer to be that other another, or may not feel comfortable performing any role. The idea of what a “man” is or what a “woman” is has changed over time as well. Butler’s idea of gender being created by people is a great explanation for this change.

Gabe went on to write about how the characters in “The Yellow Wallpaper” had been “coerced into performing their roles” and “are [unwittingly] helping to reinforce the gender binary.” Nicely done, Gabe!

Next, a departure from the classroom that my grad students sorely needed: a trip to The Healing Moon, a yoga and meditation space owned and operated by lovely local Earth mothers Robin Buck and Lorie Allen. The Moon, which used to be a run-down convenience store, was rehabbed by Robin’s late partner to become the kind of cozy hardwood den capable of accommodating all manner of candles, crystals, and yoga mats. It’s the sort of space one might imagine housing magic elves, or maybe a particularly spiritually-inclined resident of the Hundred Acre Wood.

At the Moon, Lorie led the students in a session of meditation/restorative yoga followed by automatic writing (kind of like free writing but aiming to be as unself-conscious as possible, and to never let one’s pen leave the page). Students reported feeling so relaxed that they became anxious all over again – that “I let my guard down!” panic that I know all too well from my own twenties – and excavating some strange, scary, and even beautiful artifacts from the cobwebbiest corners of their minds. One student was inspired to write a letter to his deceased older brother that would go on to achieve some truly incredible heights in essay form (more on that later).

MFA students (and Fig) at The Healing Moon

Finally, I held end-of-semester “splatter paint parties” at local community art hub Project Human X. Let me take a moment to say that I’ve never encountered a place quite like PHX, nor a person quite like Marquez Scoggin, its prodigy owner-operator. Marquez is a fairly recent SIU graduate and professional artist who understands all too well everything I’ve laid out so far in both parts of this essay: that making art is more about figuring oneself out than adhering to a set of technical strictures; that creativity can be a mystical or even spiritual practice; that collaborative art-making is a beautiful way to bring various members of a community together; that having a “beginner mindset” when it comes to anything requiring technical skill will get you a whole lot farther than torturing yourself with perfectionism and striving for immediate mastery; that we need more spaces pretty much everywhere that people can inhabit in states of paint-covered, unself-conscious creative euphoria. If these things are important to you, PHX has you covered, especially that last thing: the “splatter room” is the only one of its kind in the Midwest, a place where you can go to cover a canvas (and yourself) in glow-in-the-dark neon paint under a psychedelic black light. The students threw paint on the walls, on their canvases, and on each other, sometimes employing the aid of toothbrushes and super soakers in addition to paintbrushes. The overall effect was one of pure joy – a rarity during finals time – and it’s got me thinking that this could become an end-of-semester tradition.

Big Ideas in Fiction at Project Human X

MFA students at Project Human X

II. The Creative Work

The Big Ideas in Fiction final was, as you might suspect, quite open-ended: the goal was simply for students to choose a philosophical question that resonated with them and tell a story endeavoring to answer that question. Here are some answers:

Anna and Máni

Anna drew this somber and quite lovely portrait of themself with their D&D character, Máni. The two stand back-to-back, hands clasped in prayer, Anna quite human-looking and tearful and Máni with mottled blue skin and long white braids, an upward tilt to her chin and pained-but-hopeful look on her face.

In Anna’s words:

For my final I picked the topic we covered on if there is a God or not. For as long as I can remember I struggled with growing up going to Church three days a week. I always thought it was just because I was a kid with attention span issues, and going to church was boring. While that may have been part of the reason, as I got older the feeling never seemed to go away. I thought there was something wrong with me. Why did I dread going to church? Was it because we had to sing the same songs and listen to the same stories over and over again? Or was it something else entirely. I never was devoutly dedicated to the church, and as someone who grew up with people drilling it into my head that I needed to be, it scared the life out of me. 

All of that came to a head when I realized I liked girls. It was an internal battle with myself for so long. I had this new, exciting revelation about myself that I wanted so badly to be proud of but the church told me it was wrong to feel the way I did. Ever since that moment, every ounce of faith I still held seemed to dissipate from my body. I resented Catholicism and everything it stood for. I was angry for the longest time, and only now have I learned to accept what happened to me. 

Máni is my Dungeons and Dragons character, and I put a lot of myself in her. She’s a character held to a golden standard that she can never let down out of fear of the punishment of the people around her, and her god. Once everything that brought her joy was taken away, she resented everything about her faith and how she was brought up. She’s bitter, and she’s angry, and she’s everything I was when I lost my faith. I portrayed her and a younger version of myself begging to whatever god is out there to fix us, but I never needed fixing. Eventually, I’ll have Máni figure that out for herself as well.

Flock Together

Bethany drew a comic exploring the idea of animal consciousness, a topic we discussed quite a lot during the weeks we spent investigating posthumanism.

In Bethany’s words:

As far as philosophical topics go, I was largely exploring animal consciousness, but I was also using this story as a way to talk about how the ruling class stands united with itself in order to oppress everyone else. And just as an excuse to draw a bunch of birds, haha!

final hours

Nancy brought their musical talent to their final project, exploring the sometimes-contentious relationship among self, ego, and art-making. The product is “final hours,” a dreamily meditative, almost Bon Iver-esque song.

In Nancy’s words:

I wrote final hours in response to the philosophical question: What is the Self? My writing process is deeply affected by my Ego and experiencing existential dread from the question of “Who am I?” is very frequent.

Exploring topics such as this, along with writing exercises really helped me let go and dive into my creativity without judgement. The writing process became easier.

Exploring this topic helped to remind me that the things I create, while they come from my brain, they become their own sort of Self and exist in their own right.

Waiting for Atman

AJ – who absolutely has a future in filmmaking – made this short film in which he plays his own ego and body searching for his soul. It’s Waiting for Godot meets an aughts British sitcom, though given the music I think a better title might be A Show About Nothing.

Of his film, AJ said: “It was fun thinking about who I would become if separated into three parts.”

Some prose-based highlights:

This truly brilliant moment of characterization and possibly the best-ever insult from master of madcap Chelz:

Maybelle put her lip balm away and cracked her fingers. The way she was so unphased by every insult thrown her way; it pissed Bowie off to no end. And that was even before he heard her finishing blow: “Hm, well seems to me, sugar, that you just so happen to care a little too much. Why is that? Is this really all about what Denim wants? Or is it about what you want? Cuz last time I checked, he don’t give two moose knuckles and a rubber goose ‘boutcha, pumpkin!”

The painterly trippiness of Brandon’s narrative from the point of view of Mikey, the hypothetical “stoned ape” of Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory:

After ingesting the mushrooms, Mikey's senses heightened. Colors intensified, and the jungle pulsed with a rhythmic energy. He found a towering tree and, with agility unmatched, scaled its heights until he reached the crown.

While perched on a high branch, Mikey analyzed the panorama before him. The entire forest unfolded beneath, a mosaic of greens and earthy hues. The bright blue sky stretched overhead, a vast canvas painted with wisps of clouds. Time seemed to stretch and contract as Mikey lost himself in the beauty of nature.

As the magic mushrooms worked their charm, Mikey's perception of the world underwent another transformation. The vibrant colors merged, creating a dance right before his eyes. The rustling leaves sang a soft melody, and the jungle seemed alive with whispers of ancient secrets.

Mikey, perched on the tree's pinnacle, became an observer of his own existence. He watched the world below with a sense of detachment, as if he had transcended the boundaries of his monkey form. The magic forest offered a spectacle that was outside the ordinary, leaving Mikey in awe of the mysteries hidden within the jungle's embrace.

The horror and suspense (and truly masterful prose) of this scene from Brooke’s novel-in-progress about two brothers trying to survive in a dystopian near-future:

The scene he found before his eyes was horrifying. The office door had been forced open, splintered wood scattered across the floor like bloodstains. The strange boy had his back to the door, his shoulders hunched, a shadow against the sunlight pouring through the huge window at the back of the office. He gripped the wrist of Max’s brother in one mechanical hand and the collar of his shirt in another, yanking him up from the floor where he had apparently been. Worst of all, though—worse than the bruising grip on Theo’s frail arm, worse than the piles of all his favorite books thrown haphazardly to the ground—was the expression that pervaded Theo’s face. His thin lips creased into a small smile and his eyes carried a serene satisfaction that Max had never seen from him before. Strangely unsurprised. Sickeningly calm.

Miami Vice Ego Death

I gave the grads this prompt about writing from your imagined point of view in a dream or piece of art that deeply affected you. Brock riffed beautifully on a very strange scene from Miami Vice. It’s hard to pick just one section of his dreamlike essay to share, to I’ve chosen to start at the beginning:

The night here is never black. It's always tinted in neon, splotched with pastels, speckled with fluorescence. Most of the time I like it but tonight I could use a little blue-black, some real darkness, any place to crawl into and lay low for a while. I mean real rest, man. I’m talking grizzly bear, Rip Van Winkle until this whole Calderone fiasco blows over. 

When I was a kid my favorite color was black. It felt like a pop-up book where you didn’t have to pull the flap back. You could just stare and anything could be in there: our family’s Christmas tree too big for the living room, hunched in the corner with its head ducked, patches filled in with ornaments that sang and lights that jingled; your momma’s favorite dress that turned her into someone new because the blue made her skin shine and she smelled different when she wore it—hell, even unreal things like the world under water or me in there as a cowboy. Not dressed up or nothing, not in the backyard with cap guns and my Papaw’s wide-brim falling in my eyes, but the real deal, jack. But the best part about the color black—it could be not a goddamn thing at all in there.

For those curious, here’s the scene in question:

Spider Pond

Writing on the same dream prompt, Rachel told the charming and wryly observed story of her subconscious experience as a purposeless porpoise, one of multiple vignettes of hers that had the entire class laughing out loud:

Impossibly blue waters vibrate around me as I glide below the surface. Sunbeams shatter down from a glistening sky and I can feel them warming my bones. I have no fins or flippers, but I move effortlessly, like a dolphin in no particular hurry – a porpoise without a purpose, if you will. Well, just one purpose: to take in as much of the booming undersea wonder I can process. I don’t even choke on the water as I smile openly, and I wonder what I’ve done to deserve this paradise. In the shallows, I come upon a tangle of gnarled roots that I mistook for a reef at a distance. “Jesus fucking Christ, not the mangroves again”. I coldly look over my shoulder to face the specter I’ve come to know – my view of the sky is now obscured by millions of writhing, bristling tarantulas that coat the waters’ surface. For size reference, they could probably beat Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson at a thumb war, but they’re still small enough that plenty will be able to share me as a raft when I come up for air. And wouldn’t you know it, I suddenly realize I haven’t come up for air once since I spawned. I try to sink to the sea floor, but the tide is going out, so each wave pulls the pulsing blanket closer to me. I try to sip enough air to fuel my escape by carefully slipping my puckered lips into an opening, but one of the beloathed lot shifts and I give his prickly paw a kiss. Spluttering, I thrash in reaction, stirring up the unholy soup and coating myself thoroughly. I’ll spare you the details of what happens when I scream. Actually, I’ll spare you all the rest of the details, you get the picture.

As is often the case during one’s MFA, much of your semester is spent in anxious anticipation of your workshop: you’re getting your story/essay/poem ready for critique, you’re sitting in class trying not to appear disastrously fragile while this art-baby you’ve been struggling to parent for months is subjected to other people’s off-the-cuff opinions, you go home and cry and smoke some cheap weed or have a flat, flavorless beer and text your college friends about how mean everyone in workshop is and how winning a MacArthur Genius Grant now feels farther away than ever.

OK, maybe I’m projecting a little! But my point is: workshop can be a challenging time for MFA students, who, fearing others’ judgment, will sometimes harden in anticipation of mockery and start to eschew self-disclosure and vulnerability and plain old kindness. Luckily for me, the MFA cohort I preside over at SIU isn’t like that at all – quite the opposite, actually – and this semester students achieved some incredible heights in those very same categories of self-disclosure, vulnerability, and (perhaps most importantly) plain old kindness. Below are some excerpts from grad workshop essays that truly knocked my socks off.

On Meat

Alexis wrote an arresting meditation on contending with cosmic injustice, seeing beauty in the grotesque, and “retroactive kindness” (a term I’ll let you learn more about from Alexis herself, when this essay is eventually published). I could have excerpted this highly variegated piece anywhere, so I chose the very end, at which Alexis dives into a quasi-ekphrastic mode vis-à-vis the work of artist Mark Rothko:

I never feel like I write about Rothko the way I want to. I've tried – out of everything in this piece, this is the section I've been toying with the longest. It existed before this, it will exist after, I will wrestle with it perhaps forever. Mark Rothko was an abstract painter, known for color field paintings, and the detail I've most latched onto is his suicide in 1970. He's hardly the only artist I love who took his own life, it's a theme that pops up in a good deal of the work I love, but his in particular has stayed with me in recent years. In my teenage years I fixated on brazen displays of pain, grotesque, dramatic, obscene. I still somewhat do, but I can also look at squares of color now and want to burst into tears. I have this thought, this desperate sort of hope, that if I look long enough at a piece, if I can love it hard enough, maybe he can feel it. It's stupid. That doesn't stop me.

I want to apologize for his pain. I want to comfort him, somehow, across time. I'm obsessed with the idea of retroactive kindness – of reaching back through time, somehow, through the strength of raw emotion. It's impossible. That doesn't stop me. I have to sit there, and I have to cry, and I have to try to take care of him, despite it being too late. I’m sorry you didn’t get better. I’m still surprised I did. I hope you know, somehow, that I love you. That in some way, either now or then, you could feel it. I hope one day a stranger will look at my work and love me, or at least the delusion they form of me. I hope we both go on forever, though I know it is hard. I’m sorry. I love you.

I hope the thirteen-year-old me I carry, my own ghost, will be free one day, though I think I need her as much as she needs me. I hope Yeehaw Junction and its occupants have recovered just fine. I hope the teratoma removed from Reverend Taylor didn't suffer. I hope the cadaver guy thought about it and painted the old woman’s nails anyways. I hope my grandmother was happy, somehow, despite it all. I hope we do everything we can for the ones we love while they are alive, though we’ll cry over coffins regardless.

I hope we're all going to be okay. I'm sorry, I love you.

The Silverberry Tree

Sarvin wrote an essay about the Iranian diasporic experience and her own triumphs and travails living between two cultures that was a series of micro-essays/vignettes, some regular narrative prose and some hermit crab. The result read a little like if Lydia Davis tried out the Japanese zuihiutsu form. This is one of my favorite vignettes from the essay:

My father and I are driving back from my grandfather’s house. I had recorded a video of every corner: of that wall my cousin and I used to walk on, even though grown-ups had warned us about it (or maybe because they had warned us), of the fig trees whose fruit my grandpa would drive all the way to town to bring to me every summer and it was as if sun beat at their heart and pumped the sweetness into your mouth, the pomegranates which my grandfather had turned into necklaces for my cousin and I, the little hallway in which he would gather firewood all year only for us to burn it all in the last Wednesday of the year in celebration of Charshanbe-Soori.

We pass by a silverberry tree that stands out in a field. I ask my father to stop the car. We walk between the rows of golden oats and look at the tree close up and take photos together and of the tree on its own. Iranians put silverberry in the Haft-Seen, a spread decorated with seven symbols in celebration of Nowrouz and arrival of spring. I had been thinking to myself for a while, What would be truly Iranian to bring with me? So far, I had packed things that had meaning for me: many postcards and too many letters. But this was it. When we get back in the car, I take a photo of the tree getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. When I get the drawer fever, the urge to look for something in the drawer over and over again, I go through my phone’s gallery instead.

And it’s all there.

the ides of october (have come and gone)

This is the essay I mentioned earlier by Harrison, the student who used the meditation and automatic writing session at the Moon to compose a letter to his brother Garrett, who died of a drug overdose. The essay Harrison put up for workshop took the form of a series of lengthy, epistolary responses to Garrett’s Discord DMs, all the while exploring the brothers’ shared love of video games, America’s cynical death economy, and grief as regret. I found this section to be a total knockout:

After a few months had passed, I started saying that I had “done the grief process well.” I leaned on my friends and family, felt a cavernous, blistering hole in my heart, and cried a lot. All the things you’re supposed to do.

But, despite that suffocatingly patronizing funeral director’s best fucking intentions, I am still haunted by the visage of your rotting corpse. And then there’s this recurring vision where I jump through the five-minute window and start running towards that perpetually surging wave of black ichor. The ground is coated in a thick veneer with the viscosity of warm molasses, making my strides effortful and dream-like. And there you are at the base of the wave, slowly being consumed by it. I reach out my hand and shout for you to grab on as you reach out yours, your face expressionless. I get to you just as the tips of your fingers are engulfed. I pound on the wave, trying to break through to you, but my fists are rebuked like I’m slamming against some non-Newtonian fluid. Only after I have fallen to my knees with exhaustion, does the warm viscosity of the tar finally consume me. And sometimes I’m back in the funeral chapel, resting my head on your cold, hard breast above the empty cavity where your heart used to beat.

So there you have it, dear subscriber: a total paradigm-shifting semester for me, and I have eleven acid-soaked hours last summer to thank for it. Really, though, this is about more than a July afternoon’s spiritual voyage – I think these are realizations I would have come to regardless of the combination of chemicals in my brain; that is to say, those chemicals jump-started something that had been incubating in me for quite some time. Quite frankly, I was getting tired of living how I was living, of investing in beliefs about “creative success” that were hurting my heart and stifling my art, of trying to get students to jump on the ego-is-everything train with me when I myself wasn’t even finding the seats particularly comfortable, nor the view out the window that inspiring.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tour of my favorite semester teaching thus far. It only gets better from here.

1. All student work included in this essay is featured with students’ knowledge and permission.