I love teaching. I love standing in front of a roomful of students—whether it’s their very first Introduction to Creative Writing class or a Graduate Workshop—and doing whatever I can to convince my students that their stories matter. That their stories are interesting. That they are interesting and their lives are the stuff of art. What absolutely slays me is that we so often don’t know the ways we’re interesting. We take our experiences for granted, or we think what we know is what everyone already knows. And while it’s true that there are universal experiences—everyone has the story of how he or she first learned about sex, for example—the details that of experience, the specifics are what make it fascinating. One of my student’s sex talk consisted of a pop-up book her mom left on her bed. A pop-up book! Another student’s sex talk was his dad saying, “You know not to get anyone pregnant, right?” The sex talk my father gave me—“Don’t be a pig,” he said—was so weird and great that it became the story that opens the book.

These are the three stories I encourage my students to tell:

1. The story you don’t want to tell your friends.

2. The story you don’t want to tell your mother.

3. The story you don't want to tell yourself.

But my biggest teacherly concern is convincing my students that being a writer goes hand-in-hand with being a reader. I spend a lot of time yapping about the absolute pleasure of reading, reminding my students that it’s good when a book is challenging or fills you with anxiety or rage. When a book gets you all riled up. When you wish you could call the writer up and say look here, pal, you got me thinking. Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” and I say yep. Good writing blows my mind, too. It’s all about communicating with a reader. The writer starts the conversation with what he or she has written and the reader says something in response. For me, a good piece of writing will lead me to two reactions: recognition—I know exactly what you mean, or revelation—I never thought of it like that. But the best writing gives me both.