By Jo-Anne Kerr
I had recently retired after a thirty-nine-year career teaching English in high school and a public university. As a professor of English, I was expected not only to teach but also to engage in scholarship and service. My scholarship included conference presentations, articles for professional journals, and editing two books, for which I wrote lengthy introductions. This writing could be arduous, but I enjoyed engaging in a kind of conversation with peers about topics that were important—teaching for transfer in first-year composition, helping student teachers develop reflective practice, explaining the value of collaborative writing in a writing workshop, for example.
My academic writer-self, forged by the expectations of the academy and by my field of study, was familiar with the exacting conventions of academic writing, and so I was adept at molding pieces so that they conformed to these conventions. This writer-self knew what was considered “good” writing for, say, the field of composition studies or linguistics or teacher education.
When I was writing a piece for Educational Considerations or English Journal I was writing within a corral, confined by those conventions. While constraining, these conventions ensured a safe space in which to write, as I knew what was expected and what the boundaries were. The writing was not easy, but it was familiar and safe.
The transition from educator to retiree was not easy. I had been used to being busy, and now I had far fewer responsibilities and obligations to attend to—and, as a result, swaths of free time that I found unsettling. Vestiges of my teacher-self remained. Shouldn’t I be doing something productive in this free time? I wondered if returning to writing, reconnecting to my writer-self, would be a means for taking up some of this free time while also helping me feel useful.
But what to write? I was never at a loss for ideas when I was writing for professional journals. There were always plenty of topics to research and explore, and most journals included calls for manuscripts that inspired additional subjects for articles. The ideas for the two books that I edited had resulted from conference presentations—one about first-year teaching pedagogies to foster student agency and writing identity and one about preparing preservice teachers to think like teachers; that is, to know how to handle the vagaries of day-to-day teaching.
I had been reading creative nonfiction pieces in anthologies and journals. Authors often used life experiences as fodder for personal narratives, lyric essays, flash pieces. Could I do the same? Ideas for my professional writing had often come from my own experiences as a teacher. Could I mine my personal life, rather than my professional life, for ideas? Would trying my hand at this genre be a welcome break from the academic writing that I was so used to doing? Could it be fun to write a creative nonfiction piece?
No, it was not fun. If academic writing is done in a corral, writing creative nonfiction is free-range writing. There are conventions, of course, but these are malleable. The clearly delineated boundaries of the corral are absent; expectations harder to pin down. There is freedom to roam, to experiment, to bend conventions, to take risks. For my academic writer-self, this freedom was daunting.
I had an explanation for the self-doubt that had arisen as I was writing my personal narrative and a belated realization that as I worked on my piece I had to set aside my academic writerly identity. This was hard to do—as this piece illustrates. The voice of that identity pops up here and there in this piece, insisting on making itself heard and bumping up against the voice of a burgeoning writerly identity, one beginning to explore its potential.
I’m a writer in transition. I’m not yet out of the corral, but the gate is open, and I’m working my way toward it. While the corral is a familiar and comfortable space, I’m intrigued by the writing possibilities beyond it. I’ll continue to write (and to read) in order to develop and foster a new writer-self, one that will, I hope, learn to explore the freedom that free-range writing invites. ___
Jo-Anne Kerr , a retired high school English teacher and professor of English, is trying her hand at writing personal narrative and creative nonfiction after decades of academic writing. Her articles have appeared in Middle School Journal, English Journal, and Educational Considerations , and she co-edited two books: Thinking Like a Teacher: Preparing New Teachers for Today’s Classrooms (Roman & Littlefield, 2017) and Stories from First-Year Composition: Pedagogies that Foster Student Agency and Writing Identity (WAC Clearinghouse, 2020). She is finding the transition from academic writing to creative nonfiction challenging and, like writing itself, a process of discovery.
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