CONFESSIONS OF AN AUTODIDACT


I’d been engaged to teach a one-day workshop in journal writing. The group, an organization that served mostly therapists, had asked me for a course description and an instructor biography. Two days after I mailed it off I received a phone call. “We need to know your degree level,” a cultured voice requested, emphasizing “degree level”. “It’s necessary to provide credibility for our members.”

I resisted a temptation to apologize for my inadequacy, my lack of any degree level at all. It had taken me years of experience as an adult education teacher to overcome a self-esteem problem and break myself of the habit of automatically volunteering apologies, but I faced a dilemma.

Although I thought the biography I’d sent her was adequate, it was clear she needed something more or different. I promised to send a rewritten biography, of course, but I couldn’t tell her I graduated from an unaccredited religious high school and had completed only four quarters in a backwater teacher’s college in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I wouldn’t award myself a mythical degree in whatever. I couldn’t flippantly tell her I was an autodidact -- self-taught – even if it was true. Especially if it was true!

What to do? I picked up the most recent catalog of events and workshops the group sponsored and read over all the biographical paragraphs. They reeked of PhD this and M.A. that. Also the language was more formal than what I’d sent her. So I rewrote my biography using formal language and added three specific references to experts I’d “studied with.” I concluded with, “R. Jean Bryant was educated in the libraries of the West.”

I knew she wouldn’t like it, and probably would fail to appreciate my honesty. I knew she wouldn’t call me again, but that I’d be on probation of a sort and would have to prove my expertise in the lecture that would precede the workshop. I also knew I would do a good job despite my lack of a formal education. And so I did.

I had gotten into teaching through the back door maybe ten years earlier. Although I had taken one “Introduction to Education” class in college before I got married, the teacher had been so boring I thought maybe he had already died and no one had bothered to inform him. Before I took that class I had thought that teaching was potentially the most exciting job in the world.

Four children in quick succession and a career as a fulltime mother absorbed my time and energy. I was an avid and eclectic reader and dreamed of being a writer. I finally began taking an evening class in creative writing. The teacher was wonderful. Somehow she believed, in me and continued believing in me, until I believed in myself.

Writing was excruciatingly difficult for me. The blank page terrorized me; it seemed to shout, “You’re bore-ing! You’re not creative. You’ve never even done anything interesting.” But I desperately wanted to be a writer, so I persevered. Writing was so difficult I thought there was no point in doing it unless I could get published, often quoting Samuel Johnson who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Perseverance paid off. Within two years I had begun to sell humorous essays to “Charmed Land,” The Seattle Times Sunday magazine section, and other local markets. My self-esteem grew. My attitude in class was, “Hey, you guys, if I can do this, anybody can do it.”

I took that attitude with me when I joined a second writing class at the downtown Seattle YWCA. At the end of that session the instructor asked me if I was interested in teaching that class the following year. She had noticed how helpful I was with my fellow students. I jumped at the chance and, despite my lifelong shyness, I went and interviewed for the job.

I had found my true vocation. After several weeks where I tried to inflict a lesson plan on the students, I began to realize that writing can’t be taught. It can only be learned, and each writer must teach his/her self through the application of words onto paper. My job was to encourage that struggle; my job was to facilitate the would-be writers in class; my job was to help them get from where they were to where they wanted to go with their writing. I learned to listen to my students and trust my intuition. My reputation for doing just that spread by word of mouth and my class filled up ironically enough with multi-degreed professionals -- teachers and therapists.

I was terrified they would find out that I was uneducated and therefore unqualified. Maybe I was selling smoke. One day I was whining again about my fears to a close friend. She stopped me and asked, “Do you respect your students?”

“Yes, of course I do. I’m in awe of them. It’s a privilege to be part of their creative process.”

“If that’s true,” she said, “then you have to respect their choice of you as their teacher.” What a concept!

I eventually learned to appreciate that what set me apart from every other writing workshop teacher in the Greater Seattle area was my lack of a degree. I didn’t know how writing was supposed to be in a formal sense. I just knew when a writer told the truth, when a writer spoke in an authentic voice. I could listen for and encourage that.

My background for being a good teacher consisted of many learning experiences, including my first peak experience. When I was almost six years old in the early fall something happened at school in Tacoma that unlocked the secret of reading for me. I was so excited that I ran home, banged on the screen door, and the minute my mother unlocked it I demanded that she sit down so I could read to her. I turned out to be a natural speed-reader. I attended nine schools in four states in twelve years. By the end of the first week in any new school I had read all my textbooks. After that I always took a stash of my own books to school; my teachers learned to leave me alone as I was always ready to recite, and they learned it kept me from making trouble in class due to boredom.

Home was wherever I had a library card. I haunted the libraries of the West and did battle with librarians. In the summertime in Santa Fe I was allowed to check out only two books a day, so I did -- two books every day. Some of my choices were not age-appropriate (I was nine), and I often had to do a verbal book report to assure the power-hungry librarian I had actually read the books or convince her I had my parent’s permission. My avid and eclectic reading habit provided the unorthodox foundation for my true education, and continues to do so.

Writing was a different kind of education for me, especially journal writing which was overtly therapeutic. I ultimately came to believe that most writing was therapeutic -- not only poetry and fiction – novels and short stories, but biography and autobiography and creative non-fiction. We write out of who we are. We bring who we are to the page, and to the myriad of decisions that any piece of writing entails.