Philosophy & Background
Note: I’m currently on a teaching hiatus, but am open to new opportunities!
Each semester, I begin with this quote from Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.” My stance as a teacher is always an inductive, exploratory one. I’ve had the privilege of teaching students at many different points in their lives: from traditional freshmen to migrant workers after a long day at work, from first-generation college students to students with children and families, just getting started on their careers or starting over. It’s a cliché to say that I learn from my students, but of course I do, every single time I teach.
I’ve taught at UC Berkeley, St. Mary’s College of California, a private school, and now I primarily teach at College of San Mateo. I’ve also taught online creative writing and pedagogy workshops for both high school students and adults. My main teaching focus is creative nonfiction, but I regularly teach courses in composition and literature as well. My pedagogy often integrates creative writing into the composition classroom as a way for students to engage their own contexts and as a way to approach analysis and their writing practice in a hands-on way, from the inside out. I’m also interested in multimodality and genre-bending: considering how form interacts with content to create meaning.
In creative nonfiction, I’m most interested in the mundane. What stories can we find in the average, rote, forgotten, seemingly unimportant parts of our lives? Most of us live our lives between and within to-do lists. We grade papers, we attend meetings, we take our children to school, we scroll on our phones while watching Netflix on the couch, we wish we were spending our one precious life a little more loudly. Even big stories are broken down into logistics, like waiting for a plane, finding a new apartment you can afford, or needing to eat something. This is the stuff that makes up a life. Everything comes back to this. And our writing can (and maybe should), too. This is not only a neat strategy for finding a way into work: especially for historically marginalized writers, honoring the quotidian allows us to honor the parts of our lives and, by extension, the parts of our selves, that have been deemed unworthy of contemplation. You can read more about this philosophy here.
As more and more people grow up hating reading and choosing not to read, I stay committed to teaching literacy and creative expression. I agree with Kylene Beers, who has written that literacy knits people together and creates a common culture. Literacy provides the intellectual tools used to question, challenge, understand, disagree, and arrive at consensus. Literacy allows people to participate in an exchange of ideas. A democratic nation is weakened when fewer and fewer citizens can participate in this exchange. Reading and writing give you power. Teaching is one of the greatest loves of my life, and I feel lucky to have found it.
Check here for upcoming classes and workshops, and please say hello if you’d like to chat reading lists, lesson plans, or if you’d like me to visit your class. I love giving guest lectures and workshops! See you in the classroom.