This Heaven We Have, Here

There’s an author on Vocal named Raymond G. Taylor, who, at least from what I can tell based on his profile, is one of those prolific, enviable writers who seems to always earn dozens of likes and comments on the stories and contemplations that he posts on a near-daily basis. On Raymond’s own response to this challenge, which he titles, “Sorry, Vocal, but it’s not all about you,” he shares an altruistic commitment to the rest of us:

“I like to think,” he writes, “that as a 64-year-old writer, with a 40+ year career behind me, I too have something to offer. This will also be a component of my aspirations for 2024. To provide as much support and help as I can to fellow creators.”

I commented that I was still trying to understand how I could gain a following on here.

“Granted,” I confessed, “I don't post every day or even once a week, but that's because I'll spend at least four hours writing, rewriting, and editing. Am I too worried that someone will critique my every blunder, and therefore sabotaging myself out of actually posting consistently and becoming a prominent voice on here?”

His advice was frank: keep writing, keep posting, use other social media to promote yourself, and don’t worry about the criticism. “If you or someone else spots an error,” he wrote, “you can always do a quick edit.”

Raymond wasn’t telling me anything that I didn’t already know. I probably only asked his advice because in my subconscious, I knew I needed someone to hold me accountable.

I want to be a writer, and I lose nothing by posting something every day. So, why don’t I?

***

I became a teacher because I did not have the courage to pursue writing over a stable, albeit modest paycheck and health insurance. Plus, I genuinely thought that teaching would leave plenty of time for writing. In high school, all of my teachers set clear boundaries, were rarely frazzled by anything, and always seemed to know what they were doing. In my head, they lived beautiful lives: Ms. Coppens designed a course about Romanticism, where she taught us about the confluence of visual art and the written word and made me fall in love with Mary Shelley; Mrs. Zuba, who had been published in several literary arts journals, took us on a weekend trip to Columbia University, where, between lunches at groovy organic restaurants and meandering the arteries of Manhattan, we attended workshops about how to build a better literary magazine for our high school; My sociology teacher, Mr. Barry, ran a discussion-based classroom, which almost always got tense but helped us realize that we, too, were citizens of the world, that our ideas mattered, that as individuals, our perspectives felt like little, but that the collective synthesis of our ideas could offer satisfying resolutions. School was where I learned to love thinking.

I landed my first job right out of college, in a rural district in north central Montana, where I was sure that I would inspire my students. I would create a sanctuary for curiosity and contemplation. I would teach so that my students could think for themselves and spend my evenings thinking for myself while I wrote stories.

Then, I got eaten alive.

My senior class refused to reply to my open-ended questions. “What were your first impressions of Holden Caulfield?” only amounted to blank stares and even a few defiant eyerolls. When I wanted to connect the philosophy of Transcendentalism to contemporary romanticizing of the American West by showing Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, a mother accused me of promoting pornography in the classroom (there’s about three seconds of full-frontal nudity in the film, wherein Emile Hirsch is bathing in the river after having killed a moose; in a letter home to parents, I had said that I would skip over this part). I had to wear teacher clothes even on Sundays, just to go to the little market to pick up yogurt, lest someone tell the Superintendent that I did not conduct myself professionally. In September of my first year teaching, the principal asked me to coach the Speech and Drama Team, and when I told him that I was staying at school until 7 or 8 o’clock, sleeping a maximum of five hours a night, and killing myself to build curriculum from scratch, he told me that being busy was a mindset—that if I were resourceful enough, I could figure out a way to get things done efficiently.

With time, I was able to appear that I had a handle on things. After a few years, I knew the books and standards that I was teaching. Though I still worked at least seventy hours per week, I rarely felt at a loss for what to do—there was, of course, always something I could do.

After getting home from work two hours after the end of the day, I’d trudge up to my office upstairs, maybe do a yoga class, then check my email again. Usually after dinner, I was pulled back into re-planning a lesson that I realized wasn’t going to go well or catching up on grades before I knew that I was, inevitably, going to collect more essays, homework assignments, quizzes, or whatever the Hell the next day. At two o’clock in the morning, I’d remember that I hadn’t yet posted that reading that I wanted my students to start in class, that I hadn’t planned the NHS induction which was due to happen in three weeks, that I hadn't emailed or called the parents of students who hadn't turned in an assignment in four weeks, parents who had instant digital access to the gradebook but who would still insist that I should have called them sooner. I'd remember that I hadn’t done any state standardized testing practice with my eighth graders in the last month and that all the school board ever noticed was that our students’ reading and writing scores tanked as soon as they entered middle school—as soon as they entered the English Department that I co-ran with one other recent college graduate.

Overstimulated, I turned to exercise and a vegan diet that was so low in fat, protein, and calories that I lost thirty pounds, half my hair, a notable portion of the bone density in my lumbar spine, and my ability to sleep more than five hours a night.

I was still writing, earning my master’s at the Harvard Extension School. But I was driven manic by the demands of teaching.

***

Save for a brief hiatus to recover my health in spring 2021, I have continued to teach and earned some laudations for my performance, gold stars which are encouraging but hardly unique for anyone competent person in this profession. When I taught in Vermont, a parent contacted the principal to comment on the impact I’d had on her son’s writing; the principal then cried when I told him that I was leaving his school. When I taught at a private all-girls school in Massachusetts, several girls expressed that they’d “found their voice” because of me, and even the school nurse told me that she believed that one day, I could earn Teacher of the Year.

I keep track of all of these accolades in a journal, where they juxtapose my scattered lists of story ideas, first lines of personal essays, prompts, and promises to myself to publish more.

***

One of my other teacher friends, a poet who has spent over thirty years in the classroom, can always anticipate my disdain before I verbalize it.

“You’re unhappy, I can tell,” she said to me one Monday last school year, after I’d spent fifteen hours the prior Saturday and Sunday writing personalized feedback on my students’ essays, all the while ignoring my own.

“Is there any possible way to do this job well and to not lose yourself in the entire process?”

“I know,” she said. “It can be soul-sucking.”

I wasn’t just tired from the weekend. I was dejected. For years, I had spent an average of at least ten extra hours per week giving my students commentary on their writing, figuring out innovative ways to teach, typing essay-length responses to complaints from parents that I was too rigorous, that I demanded too much of my students—that I was too determined to make them better thinkers, readers, and writers. And at what cost?

I was still unpublished. I was too poor to live on my own in central Massachusetts and had to instead live with my mom and dad. I’d received accolades for my teaching, but I had yet to finish any of the short stories I’d started during my master’s program. My novel had remained untouched since I submitted its first ninety-nine pages to my thesis adviser three months ago. I hadn’t even amassed dozens of rejections from literary magazines and online publications, the obligatory dues that a writer pays before getting noticed. I was pushing thirty, past the age at which I dreamt I would be living the writing life, and I was still trying to prove that I could succeed in a profession that subjected me to endless scrutiny, in a system that set me up for failure.

What was I doing with my one precious mind?

***

In spring 2023, I finally finished my master’s in creative writing, which took me forever because I paid for it out of pocket. For some reason, I got a job offer from one of the top-ranked schools in the state of MA. For the first time ever, I would only have to teach one curriculum, would have double the preparation time built into the day, and would not have to waste weekends chaperoning dances for free or take on coaching or advising positions to prove that I was a worthy investment for the district. I was granted freedom for the day-to-day lessons but would not need to build curriculum from scratch.

I closed out the school year with a regained sense of hope: next year, finally, I would work in a school that respected that I am a whole person. Finally, maybe, I could be a teacher and a writer, too.

I rediscovered Vocal in the summer of 2023. I’d posted a few things on here back in 2022, then neglected the platform for the same reason I’d always neglected my writing. When I won my first Challenge in July 2023, my father, who rarely praises anyone for anything, congratulated me.

“He wants you to be a novelist, you know,” my mother said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he tells me, Catherine. He says, ‘She needs to finish her novel. Then, she needs to write another one.’ He believes that you can do it.”

My thesis adviser, a bestselling thriller writer, also thinks I can do it. So does one of my favorite teachers from Harvard, a woman named Elisabeth who bases much of her work on the tropes in fairy tales. So do the other women in my writing group, and so does a friend of mine, who published one of my personal essays in her magazine about marriage, and so does another friend, who meets me for coffee in Cambridge, has herself finally scored a literary agent, and believes that I could one day, too.

If I was capable of winning a Vocal challenge, then, maybe, just maybe, none of these people were lying to me.

***

I recently finished a unit on Paradise Lost, an epic poem by John Milton, with my ninth graders. We only read Books I and II, in which Satan, between expressions of disdain at having been kicked out of Heaven and motivational speeches to the fellow cherubs who are stuck in Hell with him, admits that he is aware of his own error. All Satan and his demons have to do is apologize to God, to humble themselves in front of the deity that created them in His image. Instead, Satan declares God a tyrant and deceives his devils by promising them free will while committing them to an eternity of agony. Amidst the meandering syntax, archaic language, and copious allusions to the Bible and Greek mythology, the theme of the text is simple: being what you are not destined to be will only build resentment, drive you mad, and keep you in a metaphorical Hell.

In their final essays on the text, some of my students recognized Satan’s comedic self-sabotage: by refusing to submit to God, he keeps himself excluded from the Heaven that would offer him eternal peace. It's childish, actually. By refusing to admit that he is not God, that he can’t be God, and that no one can be God except God, Satan makes himself the paragon of misery.

When I reflect on my career, I can’t help but laugh, too. I’ve worried so much about my reputation as a teacher that I have deprived myself of the Heaven that’s been available to me the entire time.

***

I can think of no better example of Heaven than Vocal, a place where stories can breathe, mistakes can be edited, and writers, like God’s angels, can coexist with our shared understanding that so long as we treat our fellow writers with dignity, so long as we uphold Vocal’s principles—we can enjoy this platform of light and salvation.

Raymond told me not to worry about the criticism. I can’t promise that I won’t; teaching has conditioned me to worry constantly. But teaching has also taught me humility. I will not engage every student, every day; nor will everything I write be worthy of acknowledgement. I will not impress every parent, just like I won’t write a Top Story every month. But I’ll teach anyway, because right now, it’s a steady job that I have come to do well enough and which does, most days, bring me joy. I’ll write anyway because it’s the only compulsion I have that is never anything but instructive.

My Vocal aspiration for 2024 is irremovable from my aspiration for myself: Don’t let the fear of criticism drive you from the Heaven that so lovingly awaits your stories.

***

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