20131017.0926

Having taught writing for a number of years, I am familiar with the call made by many composition textbooks to find a useful place and set of circumstances in which to write (and I have a piece forthcoming in CCC that speaks to places of writing).  I am also familiar with counter-claims asserting that relying on any one place or set of circumstances to write ultimately serves as an excuse not to do so; the place cannot be reached, nor the circumstances attained, and so the writing is allowed not to happen.  I understand the counter-claim, and I have seen it prove true for many people, but I nonetheless have my own places of writing, my own circumstances--and the different writing tasks I do call for different sets.

For example, the blogging that I try to do every morning (and to which I attend later today than I would prefer) happens in my home, in the part of Sherwood Cottage that my wonderful wife and I have set up as our shared office space (with thanks to our wonderful folklorist friend who suggested the arrangement).  It faces away from the door and from windows, minimizing distractions from outside (there are already too damned many available on a computer), focusing my attention on the generation of this kind of text.  And, as now, I write my blogged essays in the quiet, whether of the early morning when others are asleep or later after others have gone to work and I have not yet had to.

Blogging is not the only writing that I do, however.  Evaluating student work involves much writing for me--I leave many comments for the improvement of my students' work and, hopefully, of the thinking that underlies it, although I know that many will not read what I write in such a way that they can benefit from it.  That writing, I hate to do at home (although I have been having to do so more frequently of late).  Instead, I prefer to find myself in the library or in my office, hunched over a school-supplied desk with papers spread out or staring at a screen and navigating document after document after document to try to piece together what students have written and to respond to it in a way that maybe, maybe, one or two of them will look at and realize how to make things better.

It is true that I am not always diligent in my writing.  There have been days I have not blogged.  I certainly have not been as good about getting my grading done as I ought to be.  And I suppose that it is in some part the case that I have failed to be as diligent as I should be because I have not been in the conducive circumstances.  But there have been many times I have been at home and have not blogged, and there have been others I have been at my office and have not graded, so it is not only place and circumstance that permit the writing to take place.  The will to do so, to look about and within and tie the two together in knotted strands that are thence woven onto the page, is sometimes lacking even in the best of situations.  More than any other concern, it is that will that is needed--and the cultivation of it is ongoing.