In the early 1990s, I and Gen-Xer English majors like me were literary trash-huffers. We devoured books like Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred outside the classroom. But inside, we hid our passions from our professors, who had invested years eschewing contemporary commercial literature. So, we deferred to these established academics, and took up the study of texts that we hoped would edify us: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and, if the professor was a newly minted Ph.D., maybe Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
We wrote dissertations that we were only mildly interested in while secretly continuing to read Neil Gaiman, Alison Bechdel, and Marjane Satrapi. We waited for our turn to remake the literary canon and devised terms like guilty pleasure, genre literature, graphic novel, and prestige TV to assuage the shame we were supposed to feel for loving something that we shouldn’t love. We handed the notion of “fun, hands-on activities” over to the STEM crowd. What an error.
This dearth of fun and joy in our classrooms made students susceptible to the absurd you’ll-never-get-a-job-unless-you-major-in-STEM rhetoric.
I’ll spell it out: Students want to read Beasts of Prey, Cinder & Glass, The Hunger Games, Five Survive, and anything by the storytelling machine known as Brandon Sanderson. They want to consume manga and anime and video games. Not only are English majors absorbing this stuff, they’re producing it, too, in the form of fan fiction, fan art, and cosplay.
In the classroom, they’re looking for an experience. Why not provide students the practical, “hands-on” learning that STEM usually claims for itself by showing them how to write a book in real-time?
This is why I set out to write a YA dystopian-adventure novel with my students, bringing a new 1,500-word chapter every week to every class, whether it was a writing workshop or World Lit or American Lit class. At the end of a 15-week semester, I had 22,000 words — or a third of my first novel.
My students, meanwhile, got a lesson in the how. How to write a sizable chunk of book in just a few months. How to write a novel they said they want to read. How to provide critical feedback (and earn an acknowledgment in a book along the way). And how to publish it with a respectable publisher.
But the real fun happens when students submit their own work to class. I publish the best of it in the anthologies I edit for the Nevada Humanities Foundation, and refer others to local and regional journals and magazines, where their fiction and nonfiction appears.
Eric Duran Valle, who published an essay in Las Vegas Writes Vol. 11, now writes for Vegas PBS and Desert Companion magazine and TheList.Vegas. Emily Bordelove published a piece in Vol. 12 and went on to complete her MFA in popular fiction writing and publishing from Emory University, then interned at a lit agency this past summer. Giving UNLV students an opportunity to write and publish what they want to write and publish is paying dividends.
My classes have long waiting lists. It’s not because I push my students to distinguish between American literary realism and naturalism, or to examine “Bartleby, the Scrivener” through the lens of disability studies. It’s because I encourage them to write characters and stories based on their own experiences and identity. A little joy attracts students and encourages them to challenge themselves as writers and communicators. They challenge me and, though I didn’t write the next Lord of the Rings, my novel is 100% fun. And I’m grateful for the experience of spending time with people who love reading at a time when tech and metrics risk muting our humanity, causing us to give up on the humanities.
