I took my first English class in the winter of my freshman year––it ran from 8:00 AM to 10:05 AM every Tuesday and Thursday. I was up before the sun and got dressed in the dim lights of Campion Hall. I made the long trek across campus––all the way to the building that looks like an old, haunted high school. When I arrived to class on the first day, my professor explained that since 8 AM is the earliest possible class, he would assume that we were free between the hours of 6 and 8 AM for class.
“People who take 8 AMs,” he elaborated, “are either morning people or are passing through on their way home from a long night out anyway.”
He told us we should be there at 7 that next Thursday so we’d have time for a film before a discussion of the texts. Class was well over three hours that day.
Maybe that class should have the stuff of university nightmares. An early morning, winter quarter class that required hours of long reading from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Flannery O’Connor. But by some miracle, it wasn’t.
I dragged myself out of bed every single Tuesday and Thursday, never missing a single class. (This might seem insignificant, or perhaps even required, but I’ve never managed that for another class, especially one that early.) We talked about American authors’ rebellion against our Puritan roots and fought about Death of a Salesman (which is terrible, but I get it) and even watched the A24 film The Witch in class.
My professor reminded me of an old Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society; he loved literature with such fervor it was contagious. We wrote essays in four big, clunky paragraphs and listened to his stories about summering at Cape Cod. For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt like I had the power to understand the complicated works of the dead authors we read in class.
That professor went on to become my advisor and I haven’t had a dull moment since. Sure, we talk about my classes (he once told me to “drink the poison in the morning so the worst part of the day is over with” and I took my science class), but he’s mostly a big fan of storytelling and advice-giving. In little thirty-minute chunks, he’s told me to take risks, visit Kenya and Spain, read the classics, and write a novel.
That summer, with a group of twenty other students, I saw Paris for the first time. My professor was there too, lecturing about impressionism and Modernism under the shade of the trees in the Luxembourg Garden. The little Parisian apartment (the one where you could hear Frenchman singing drinking songs any time after 3 PM) is a little corner of the world I know now.
I wandered my way through the enormous Picasso Museum that is stuffed to the brim in this tiny looking (but actually huge) building that could’ve been a house. It stood like Narnia, a whole world stowed away in the back of a wardrobe. I sat in a bar with friends and discussed the dimensions of women in art––their roles in the paintings of Degas. I downed a beer and wrote about Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at the same bar Ernest Hemingway must’ve drunkenly written at (but edited sober, of course) years before I was born. I strolled past the café that James Baldwin loved and snuck into Gertrude Stein’s old apartment building behind a lady who could afford to live there. I sat by the Seine and ate grapes and thought about Notre Dame and the burning Amazon. I cried for the first time about art, I saw a real Van Gogh––each one of his brushstrokes felt like a painful portrayal of his life.
I came home and thought about getting an Art History minor, but didn’t.
This fall I took my first creative writing class and felt free. This time a different professor, one who didn’t care about tests or grades in a traditional sense. The drive to do well had to come from your desire to get better as a writer. We read the short fiction works of three women of color (something I’ve NEVER done in a class before) and learned through trial and error how to tell interesting stories. We read each other’s work and talked about them like they were real works of fiction––like we were real authors.
We discussed the themes in each other’s work. We picked out metaphors and allusions and pretended for a second that our work meant something to the people outside the little classroom that was always too hot or too cold.
In the middle of the quarter, we heard from real real authors (whose work can read somewhere other than on the depths of the canvas page for an English class) and they painted a stark reality for the future of writers. They told us about what they had to do to get where they are––darting sneakily in and out of Washington Post Headquarters and working for free.
I worked myself up into such a frenzy I thought about quitting, but instead, I went and saw my creative writing professor. We talked about goals and about freelancing and about all the different things you could do with your degree. We talked about how it would be okay to just want a little money to live on, for a while, that my creative intuition (or whatever) wouldn’t be gone just because I was stagnant for a couple of months. There’s a whole world out there that I am supposed to make some sort of impact on, but for one quarter, I felt like my work was worth something even if only a couple of classmates read it.
This quarter, I’m taking a class that focuses on sci-fi and cli-fi novels––books about the end of the world, and what happens afterward. The class meets late in the afternoon and we don’t leave (the same old high school) building until after the sun has set. I walk home––or sometimes toward food––in the dark, shivering from the cold and starving after hours of realizing the depressing state of our planet.
We explore the dimensions of racism and ableism within the larger frame of the novels we read. We are critical and contemplative about the books––we don’t hold these authors as God. We read the perspectives of women, and Indigenous people, and black people in a genre that tries to silence their voices. We explore the idea that for some people, the apocalypse has already happened.
Brought on by the genocide of Indigenous people, white colonists have triggered a post-apocalyptic reality. While white authors theorize about what it might look like when the world ends, Indigenous authors grapple with the ending of the world as they knew it centuries ago.
The class reminds me that pop culture is important. Words that people will actually read have just as much value as the defined canon. Though it takes some mental adjustment, we need to value the work of writers who write for the people of today, of our world now. As a writer, this class helps me see a place for myself, especially as the rest of the world tells us it’s not important.
Writing and literature have shaped my college experience, perhaps who I am as a person from now on. My writing is a reflection of how I see the world and my reading helps me understand how others see it too.
I’ve never met a science class I liked and I have no talent for algebra or geometry. I actively avoid hospitals and buildings owned by Amazon and working for either of these places feels like my personal dystopian reality. As Amazon turns Seattle University into its personal breeding ground for employees and STEM majors declare their status as superior, I consider my place here.
My professors have stretched my thinking and opened my eyes to other perspectives, all while working for considerably less than what they’re worth. I’ve learned how to love reading again and that there’s more to literature than the thinly defined “classics”. I’ve worked to undo white-centric perspectives on literature and how to close read a text.
If you haven’t heard by now, the English department is in danger at Seattle University. With budget cuts looming over the heads of humanities students, we are reminded by the institution that we are less important than the business people, the nurses, the athletes. Though English and Creative Writing have been fundamental to my education (and honestly without the English Department, I would’ve quit by now), the university doesn’t see it this way. If nothing else, this is a reminder that the arts are doing some good––even if it’s not as profitable as the STEM fields.