Over the years, I’ve had boosts and buck-ups from many folks. I was making contact with the social and natural world around me. And as we journeyed through the deserts of the Southwest, I started to come back to life-both personally and professionally as an educator. We were searching for material, teachers, and life for a new course we wanted to teach at Vassar College-”It’s Only Natural: Contemplation in the American Landscape.” So we traveled through landscapes, met extraordinary teachers (including Native American teachers and the land itself), confronted various obstacles, and dipped into some contemplative practices. Then, my friend Paul Kane and I went on an adventure-a road trip. I was writing for myself, and myself alone. I was emotionally and spiritually crushed. I first starting writing In Search of a Course as a form of therapy. The “process”-if it can be called that-was a long, rambling, fractured journey that kept pulling me along. What was your process like writing In Search of a Course? The characters-mainly myself-have more than enough flaws revealed to defeat any moral smugness.īut is it preachy? I’ll have to let my readers answer that. In Search of a Course, almost by definition, “professes” and “advocates” insofar as it seeks to help people on their way-their way to greater self-knowledge and joy. (Did I just say sententious? Perhaps I should worry more about sounding pompous and moralizing.) I’m certainly more comfortable with being “preachy” (to advocate for something of fundamental importance) than with being “self-righteous” (to be complacent and smug in my own moral standing). I can’t afford to worry too much about being sententious. What’s that? I need to answer this one? Well, OK. I’ll skip this question and take the next one, please.
How did you work to avoid writing a book or characters that feel “preachy” or self-righteous? My hope is that readers will see themselves in the pages of the book, find some solace in that identification, and discover helpful, practical reflections as they forge their own paths to meaningful lives. And as the two courses are related, so are the public and private problems and the ways forward-ways to greater public and private flourishing. The public side addresses such issues as what education is really all about, and how can education, broadly understood, address anomic lifestyles, destructive consumerism, and the toll of a rapacious economy on the social and natural world. On the one hand, I address what it is to have the ground beneath you give away in an instant, such that you suddenly lose all sense of who you are, what’s important to you, and what can sustain you in an onslaught of chaos. The “problems” or “issues” that my book addresses are both public and private in nature. What social issue or problem does your work address? What difference do you hope your book will make?Īs noted above, In Search of a Course is about two, related courses: a course for your life and a course for the University. Complexities and limitations of the main characters are revealed, but especially my own. In the end, I fashioned a narrative that was honest and intimate but not wounding or gratuitous. And so the book evolved, it changed, it became more personal, and I found the need to keep asking myself, “How do I write a personal, honest narrative while doing no harm to those I’m portraying?” After all, I’m writing (in part) about an ex-spouse and University colleagues. Where I wanted to stick with general, abstract reflection I was told to offer more of myself and of the people in my life. Indeed, more than one editor pushed me to reveal more personal truths. I’d probably sell more copies it were a tell-all book, but sadly it isn’t. Given the subject matter of the book-the failure of a marriage and, to some extent, of higher education-you can imagine how it could be a tell-all book, revealing scandalous secrets about my marriage and about life inside the University. Finding a course for the University entails a narration about how I got into academia, what it’s like to work in a university, and, most importantly, what higher education is all about-and what it should be. In my search for a course for my life, I recount my failed marriage, my loss of faith in things spiritual and academic, and the strength of a friendship that got me through it all. In Search of a Course is about finding a course for your life and a course for “the University.” The two courses interweave on almost every page of the book. The Acheven Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction.
Deskscribble tutorial series#
Sour Mash: RHP’s Southern Literature Series.
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