Telling Stories About My Story

It's kind of meta. 

Today, I finished reading an excellent book: The Queen of Palmyra (2010), by Minrose Gwin. Besides being a professor of English literature (check!) in my home state (check!), Gwin documents the research behind her novel in a solid bibliography that testifies to her dedication to truth-seeking stories.

The cover blurb says, "Here it is, the most powerful and lyrical novel about race, racism, and denial in the American South since To Kill a Mockingbird." The cover of the 2009 novel The Help makes a similar claim: "This could be one of the most important pieces of fiction since To Kill a Mockingbird." I read The Help earlier this year and was disappointed by it (read a review here), but placing the two books in conversation made me appreciate Gwin's novel all the more.

Summer school course I will teach someday---a literature elective course that reads only three novels: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Help, and The Queen of Palmyra, using them to open a dialogue about narrative authority, the Bildungsroman, and the role of memory, writing, and accumulating /retelling /revising stories in making sense of race relations in the twentieth-century South. I would love to take that course, if it existed, just for the discussions---especially if I could drag some of my M.A. classmates in with me.

Unfortunately, as I thought about these ideas and began impulsively to underline passages that link the three novels together, I started to feel sad all over again about my decision not to begin graduate school this fall. This is the excitement and enthusiasm that was missing when I made my decision. This is the part of literary studies that I love and already miss. This is the sense of purpose that I wish I could maintain and channel into my daily routine.

I would be oversimplifying the matter if I ignored the weariness and anxiety that often accompany my teaching or tutoring. At the same time, being a literary scholar is still very much a part of my identity. For now, at least in a formal context, I've set that part of me aside. 

Sometimes, like tonight, I feel its absence pretty keenly.