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When I failed physics my senior
year of high school, the worst outcome was that I didn’t rank in the top 10 of
my class. I excelled at English and
Social Studies classes, so didn’t worry about failure. In college, I focused on literature,
philosophy, and English teacher preparation. To my surprise, two of my
literature professors decided that I needed tutoring to improve my writing. Otherwise, I never received below an A on
papers I wrote. I moved on through two
masters and one PhD degree, and then taught as an assistant professor of
theatre for two years at Wells College in NYS and six years at the College of
William and Mary in Virginia when the “tenure denied” verdict came down. Three presses had turned down my book on
Ellen Stewart and LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, a rewrite of my
dissertation, Place of Performance and Performance of Place. The College of William and
Mary was a publish or perish institution, so the review committee looked at my
manuscript in detail. The committee echoed
the judgment of the presses: Namely, I was not critical enough as a theatre historian,
that I instead advocated for Ellen Stewart and LaMaMa. Once again, readers were critical of my
writing itself, and no reader could imagine what course would require anyone to
read the book. I sent it to Ellen
Stewart, who loved it, and I believe it is in the La Mama archives to this
day. It is also in the library at UC
Berkeley. But it couldn’t get me tenure.
During my dissertation research, I
had worked through four revisions of the material. Preparing it for publication was my fifth
revision. Now that I had failed to publish and failed to win tenure, I was done
with the book. I taught my seventh year
at William and Mary, worked one year as a visiting assistant professor of
theatre at Bucknell University, and then applied to teach High School English
in Philadelphia Public Schools. Teaching
in public school turned out to be the benefit of not receiving tenure. I had thought teaching theatre was a ministry
for me, and it was. But what I had yet
to learn was that the ministry was teaching, not teaching theatre. There is a big difference.
I was hired by the first high
school that interviewed me, Franklin Learning Center in Philadelphia, and the
first year was rocky. Disciplining a
classroom full of students was new to me, and I nearly failed at it. That summer, I took a course in teaching
writing at the U of Penn Graduate School of Education. Designed by the National Writing Project, the
course helped teachers release the students’ voices, and helped teachers reach the diversity of students who made up any class. Truly, teaching writing could be a subversive
activity, as potentially subversive as any of the best theatre might be. I
loved it. I went back to teach for
another year at the Franklin Learning Center, and then a third, a fourth, and
so on. I taught literature and vocabulary, of course, but it was, ironically,
in teaching creative and expository writing that I excelled. I fell in love with it.
I myself, ended up writing poetry,
a genre more able to handle the passion I wanted to speak. A few students and I formed a poetry club where
we encouraged each other and held public readings. The club and the classroom became the meetings
for learning that I had only achieved before in rehearsals for dramatic
performances and in improvisational theatre.
Helping students find their voice became my new calling. My ministry wasn’t specifically to teach
theatre, but to teach students skills they needed to learn.
Two side notes:
- The chair of the W&M theatre department told me he sent out his manuscript 23 times before it found a publisher.
- I only started writing narrative non-fiction again for the Simpson House Writers Circle.
Please respect my copyright.
