Knuckleheads vs the Self-Censor

Maybe you’re wondering why I’m on such a crusade against my self-censor. Okay, fine, but I’m going to pretend you are anyway.

You see, it takes extraordinary courage to write the experiences that reveal who you really are, what you really think and feel. (Sometimes I think teachers forget just how much personal courage the personal essay requires of our students.) And I, for one, have never been much for courage.

When I was in high school, I learned to write well because I could use words to obscure myself. I found that clever was a great cover, and that the objectivity newspaper writing required meant that the reporter never had to reveal himself. Even in my twenties, when I learned to write for real, my words screamed, “Look how funny I can be!” No need to worry about truth.

In grad school at Fairfield U., I had a teacher named Susan Moore who taught me the concept of voice, and I discovered mine pretty quickly. Voice, I realized, isn’t linguistic ornamentation but is a way of knowing, and once I found my voice I became a lot more interested in finding the truth. At , I learned from my wiser colleagues Ben Gordon and Mary Smith that honesty was one of the best traits a teacher can cultivate in a student writer, which means it must be pretty essential for the self as well.

Nevertheless, I didn’t write the first piece in which I “dumped water balloons over my big fat stupid head,” as Dave Eggers advises in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, until I spent a summer as a fellow in the Connecticut Writing Project. The CWP leaders, Bill McCarthy and Bob Wilson, created an incredibly supportive environment that allowed me to acknowledge myself as the imposter I felt I was at the time, surrounded by colleagues who had forgotten more about teaching and more about literature than I knew.

But my transformation was incomplete. When it came time to read an original poem that summer, I read the glib, profane critique of material values that I’d written in an hour rather than the poem about my father that I’d worked on for a week. On the plus side, it helped me understand how students feel when it’s their turn to read.

Even after I was accustomed to exposing my own scars and warts so I could in my classroom build an environment of trust, I limited my exposure to relatively safe topics – my own failures, my own moments of weakness, but nothing that would upset anyone I knew, and no target more serious than Miley Cyrus lyrics when it came time to show my rage.

No more playing it safe. I recently read Knuckleheads (Dzanc Books), by Jeff Kass, and it’s pretty raw. Jeff and I went to the same high school, and he is now an English teacher, performance poet and director of a youth center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  When I was first given the book, I  thought, Great! A teacher wrote this, so this might be the kind of professionally-written narrative my students would love.

Once I read it, um, not so much. Knuckleheads isn’t really for kids. It’s a set of short stories based on a lot of the exploits common to kids who grew up in the seventies and eighties when a driver’s license could be altered with a pencil and eraser. In the stories, Jeff sugarcoats no detail of the things we weren’t supposed to do when we were thirteen or sixteen, and spares no testosterone in describing the way the victories and shortcomings of a high school athletic career follow a boy into his manhood.

What it tells me is that I have been rotting your kids’ teeth out.

When I read these stories, or the edgy pieces selected by the teens at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia for each year’s edition of The Best American Non-Required Reading, I am reminded that teenagers in their roles as people are more attuned to the truth than when they are playing their roles as students. To help them tear down the wall between one self and the other, I need to vanquish my self-censor, as does any writer who wants to truly discover something about himself.