who needs therapy when you're teaching authorship?

So, remember when I said I couldn't figure out what to write my autobiographical essay about? Well, after all that happened last week with Julia and Hudson, I posted about my inability to grasp what it must be like to lose a child, which led to my confirming that, indeed, I do not want to have children. Well, I extended that post into a short essay, and we workshopped it--along with three others--in class last night. For about ten or fifteen minutes there, when we were discussing the essay, I felt very much out of control in the sense that I was being asked very hard questions that I hadn't realized my essay had provoked. Questions about my mother and unconditional love and Annabelle and being ordinary and what it was like to be sick as a kid around my mother and the kinds of things you can tell certain people and the kinds of things you just can't.

Part of my reasoning, I told them, for assigning the autobiographical essay was to juxtapose their "public" authorship in the first half of the semester (a conference proposal) with what is so often considered "private" authorship. Well, damn if I didn't do a dang good job of juxtaposing the public Amy with what I sometimes like to consider the "private" Amy.

If nothing else, this process helped us all see just how collaborative any kind of authorship--public or private, academic or autobiographical--really is.

Happy when it all comes together like that.