The Last Assignment Page
In college Fall-Term life, this early December feels like the End Times. “Writing and Politics” at UPenn, cross-listed between Africana Studies and the English Department’s Creative Writing, asks students to write and publish pieces about youth vote. We host an event about youth vote. The young writers have interviewed youth voting activists, and read and researched. They’ve written and re-written, thrown away drafts, agonized over American structures of democracy with its limited and limiting electoral college and history. What a history. What a present. What a way to learn your classmates’ writing and storytelling strengths and one’s own.
Now it’s December, and they are preparing portfolios, preparing for our final reading, which we’ll stream on Instagram Live. As I update the assignment page, I think about what can happen to work in the last revisions. It can blow the hell up. A writer can find the key to connect to her deepest heart or rage or hilarity. And you realize that’s why you chose this subject, or metaphor or scene.
It can happen. And it should. Especially as they study and watch our governance and citizenry; the money sloshing around politics and the old poisoned narratives talking through new forms as Artificial Intelligence amplifies genuine, natural, long-standing human ignorance. I’ve urged them to find honesty, to know and become the boss of their own minds, to write stuff we can feel. Each term, even as I yearn for my own writing time without a mind full-up with their error and potential, I hate to see them go. Each term, I’ve learned from them — in time, I hope, to do them some good. Each term I worry that it hasn’t been enough. So, I update the last assignment page each December, like some grey-haired stand-in for Disney’s Little Mermaid, croaking out a bluesy “I want more!”
Because it’s not good enough to help them mimic the world as is.
Here’s it is, the last assignment page:
Please think about how you will take your pieces from good to great or memorable or nourishing. Find a way to shoehorn in a phrase or a verb or a quote you love or a scene that keeps coming back to you. As we talked in Monday’s class, I thought of Toni Cade Bambara’s unforgettable phrase that our role as artists “is to make revolution irresistible.” We’ve toggled among forms this term: straight-up journalism, memoir, essay, lyrical think pieces, comedy: all of them elegant forms of homework-turned-culture-work.
Why do I take time badgering you with these assignment updates? Because I’m saying to you that writing doesn’t have to be perfunctory because it’s the end of term and we’re all busy-busy-busy. It can’t be perfunctory. We cannot squander the gift. And just as we suspend time for three hours on Monday nights, we can hold back the incoming inbox and enjoy the craft of crafting a few decent sentences. And make even just one of them sing.
Maybe AI will learn how to do that, like those little robots in Japan have learned to make lonely octogenarians smile. But for now, it is up to you to make this revolution irresistible. And it is revolutionary to challenge your cohort to vote. Because if you help change hurt and snark, nihilism and privilege, the disheartening inhumanity of I’m-OK-screw-you; the waste and infiltration of lies and blood-sport campaigning; if you can change for five minutes the energy in one person’s head when the words youth vote are read — then you have made change irresistible. You have answered Wendell Berry’s call to keep language true.
Cotter: please spritz some lime on the intro for brightness and bite. Grauke, ending, same. This IG reading is for people who do not know you, so a few words about the goals of this class — to post, to talk to your cohort, insert peer recommendations for civic engagement next to skincare and Bumper ads — that could be useful.
For the reading, practice four or five times, so that you know the piece well enough to pause for emphasis or between paragraphs to look up. Practice reading until you overcome nervousness. Speak slooowy and the let your face learn how it feels when the muscles that tense let go. Until you hear where you can sprinkle fairy dust. Until it sings.
…This is us…
