On Urine and Faculty Development

Tuesday was the annual convocation at my college. It's always good to see the faculty return in full force to campus on Convocation day. We spend the morning hearing about the state of the college, the demographics of the incoming class, and we listen to a bunch of inspirational speeches to pump us up for the school year. In the afternoon, we always have a faculty development session where members of college faculty learning communities report on their accomplishments. This is where my new thing for August figures in.

I've mentioned that I'm in a creative writing group at school. On Tuesday, we read from our works-in-progress in front of a good sized group of faculty. I was terrified. Just "wet-my-pants" scared. I've done many, many presentations, but none of them have involved reading my own creative writing. I'm working on a piece of creative non-fiction about my time in China in 2011, so I conjured up some courage and read the beginning of that piece
--all about my fears of the eastern-style "squat" toilet. The piece is intended to be funny, and that was part of my fear: what if no one laughed? The other part of my fear had to do with the audience. My dean was there, and I was reading all about neuroses and urine. MY urine and neuroses. More nerve wracking was the fact that my new visiting Chinese faculty member was there. Fangjun arrived from Xi'an last week, and I knew him during my time in China. I was terrified that I'd offend him and cause some mini-international incident (hey, I've established the fact that I'm neurotic!).

I'm happy to report that my nerves faded after I received my first laugh; I'm happier to report that there were many rounds of laughter after the first one. The dean came up to me afterwards to say how funny she thought the piece was, and one of my colleagues who knew my fears about offending Fangjun told me that he laughed during the reading, too. The truth is that, despite my nerves, I love telling stories and making people laugh. I love being the center of attention, too. Clearly, this was an event made for me. Also true is the fact that my poet-colleagues who read are ridiculously talented. There is something about being in a group of people who are just plain great at what they do: it made me feel proud to be in their company and excited to keep writing and reading. All in all, this was a great new thing!


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