First Generation Story

My pedagogy is influenced not only by my MFA study and my experience teaching at universities, colleges, and public writing centers, but by my own background and the long road I took to the professorship I hold today. Although a strong student since childhood, as a first-generation college attendee, orphaned at age twelve and from a rural area (my public high school drew from five towns and had a total enrollment of 250), I was ill prepared for both the academic rigor and the social milieu of Davidson, the small liberal arts college that I found myself attending from 2000-2004. I chose English as my major because I had always wanted to be a writer, not realizing that I would mostly be studying the creative works of other people rather than writing my own. I had little understanding of scholarship and what it is for, because the community and family from which I’d come did not emphasize the value of academic pursuits, and few people I knew had attended college. Although I was fortunate enough to secure significant financial aid, I found myself continually perplexed (sometimes vexed) by the rituals and values of my relatively wealthy classmates. This disorientation not only led to social discomfort, but also contributed to difficulty participating in class discussion and in forming collegial bonds with study groups and the like. In my early years, I was hesitant to ask questions, to be vulnerable as one must be in order to learn.  Davidson then was primarily white, and my whiteness gave me significant advantages and privileges, but I still felt alienated, even and sometimes especially when I managed to blend in. That I was queer didn’t help me navigate a campus that stressed inclusion but that I experienced, back then in the early aughts, as socially conservative. I approached conferences with faculty in fear and trembling, intimidated by their erudition and unsure what was expected of me, thinking I had to perform for evaluation and not understanding that I was to use those conversations to direct my own learning. But eventually, the careful questions of several professors revealed how at sea I felt, and their investment in me greatly compensated for the lack of understanding I felt from my peers. I know who, specifically, is responsible for showing me that I could pursue the career I now have as a writer and teacher, and throughout that career I have striven to be the watchful, empathetic presence that those Davidson professors (and later, others at Columbia University) were for me. I have worked and will continue to work, on the interpersonal and the structural level, to address intersectional questions of belonging via my teaching, creative work, and professional service, and to always remember what it was like to be a student who did not fit the normative picture of higher education.