Beyond the Small Circle by Marjorie Anderson

Author:Marjorie Anderson [Anderson, Marjorie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women's Studies, Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780307371072
Google: PSChTYt-GFoC
Goodreads: 13533558
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2006-04-10T23:00:00+00:00

part three

A LONG ECHO

For me, the pleasure of work and a cruel sense of imperative are mixed together, shaping a force that I wrestle with every day. Having been raised within a tolerantly Calvinist family, I am motivated by guilt, by desire, and by the ineffable satisfaction of completing a difficult task. This may be the main reason that I write. The challenge of building ideas and of communicating those ideas with the sharpest and clearest of words requires an ascent to a summit that most don’t want to undertake. There is immense satisfaction inherent in the journey, and of course, considerable pain. It is not at all easy to live as a writer, especially here in Canada.

And then there is the other work I cherish and toil at: teaching, talking, doing research, and chipping away at the quotidian tasks of a woman in academia. The plateau of writing breathes an air more exhilarating than academia’s grubbier potion. The hallways and offices and classrooms of a university demand an unrelenting attention, compounded by theoretical wars, identity politics, a thick glass ceiling and a burgeoning concern for technology and funding.

Teaching at every level offers definite rewards, tangible as the student who develops a love for literature expressed with so much grace and gift that one can only smile and approve. Or the chronically inarticulate student who, after years, achieves some measure of eloquence. Every year I receive dozens of notes and e-mails from students who thank me for the energy that I give to my classes, and who tell me where they are in their own writing careers. Yes, my former students are themselves making a mark on this country’s literature. But the precise challenge of teaching—and teaching well—is far removed from the urgent trivialities of university life, the frustrations of trying to arrive at a sensible destination in an arena attentive to so much arcane minutiae that every memo and notice becomes a virtual ankle chain.

How did I get here? I often ask myself. The students are worth the energy, and they are the primary reason for my passionate attachment to teaching. But the politics and the picayune jealousies and the jockeying for position and the back-stabbing and the slow poison that leaks through the vents of decrepit buildings perform a version of cumulative discouragement. Where once there was a sunshine aura to post-secondary education’s physical and psychic space, it is now obsessed with results and advancement. Students want jobs when they graduate—and what they are learning is mere conduit to that land of tech-toys and six-figure salaries, enviable cars and downtown condos. The university itself reinforces that commercial mindset: the more research dollars professors bring in, the more respect they are given. And so, imagining itself a version of a corporation, academe has allowed its halls to become the site of cloak-and-dagger competition, obsessed with arguments over space and resources, with sadly petty results.

But wait, how did I get here? In my first year as a student at the University of Alberta, I was completely and unreservedly happy.

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