If there is anything I miss about teaching during the pandemic school shutdown, it’s sitting virtually with a group of human beings I care about, in absolute silence, and in the comfort of my home, while every student in the Zoom Room writes. A silent classroom, no doubt, is better, because not only could you somewhat listen to a room full of thinking, but you could SEE the results of that thinking as pens and pencils moved across a line in a notebook, 30 notebooks at once. In a Zoom Room, you can only see the thinking if you can see the faces and those pens moving, but most often students would disable their cameras. And they were encouraged, as all of us are, typically, to mute their microphones unless they were talking. So the silence was even starker, stiller. In my study with the doors closed and the computer glowing in the early morning hours, I could see their school pictures and hear absolutely nothing else but my own breathing, the humming of an external hard drive, and the occasional sipping from my coffee cup while students wrote their responses to the poem of the day. Through the miracle of PearDeck, sometimes I could even watch them write in real time–but mostly I would just look at the screen in a kind of meditative stupor, paying some attention to how much time had passed, doing my own scribbling if I was moved to do so, and waiting to gently and quietly call them back from their writing.
Even while the pandemic has ended (somewhat), or, at least, our response to it has shifted and most everything in the social and professional world has returned to “normal,” Zoom is still very much with us. And recently it has made possible another tiny miracle. I have joined a writing group with friends of mine from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, two on the east coast, and two others with me on the west coast, and we are coming together every Wednesday afternoon (evening for the east coasters) to write together. For two hours we will chat briefly about our current projects, goals, questions, dilemmas, and then we “sprint” for 30 minutes before we check in with each other again. Usually we get three sprints of writing squeezed into that two hours. This has been a glorious experience. It’s even better, way better, than the experience I had teaching in a Zoom Room. For one, I don’t have any responsibilities other than showing up. For another, these are beloved peers of mine, and adults. Lastly, we are all similarly committed to our creative lives and our creative work. We are all in the same proverbial boat. It’s similar to that previous teaching experience in vibe, in the kind of charged silence that happens when four or five (or thirty) minds are tuned to the same task, a task that has a kind of sacred quality to it, the task of making things with words. And it is a brilliant reminder and practice of the paradox that Parker J. Palmer teaches from that wise old Quaker tradition: finding solitude in community. We need people around to enable us to hear our own voices–not to influence or lead or advise, but to support and help us into our own listening. And what is writing, after all, but the deepest kind of listening?
As I prepare for NaNoWriMo 2023, I suspect that my new found Zoom Room Writer’s Group will add even more inspiration and motivation to the proceedings. I’m so grateful for my writing buddies: Marcia, Larissa, Judy, Lauren, and with an honorary mention to my NaPoWriMo buddy of April 2023, Don.
michael jarmer 