When I left Cal Poly in 2021, I was tired of language, of the written word. I was tired of evaluating writing. I had been teaching writing for more than two decades (about 17 at Cal Poly, a few years at Cuesta, a few for our school district, a few in Argentina). I loved working with students, helping them, especially when they cared about it, to hone their ideas, to produce essays that were not just good but great. Evidence of this: The Cal Poly English department published a volume of student essays every year called "Fresh Voices," which many instructors used in their composition classes. Year after year my students had essays published there; and one year, I think I calculated that 1/4 of the essays came from my students. That was good, meaningful work, and I gave it my all.
But I was glad to stop. And after I left, I thought about working in other media. I enrolled at Cuesta College, our San Luis Obispo community college where I had taught right after getting my master's. I enrolled in a painting class with David Prochaska. It was so challenging and lovely and challenging. Did I mention it was challenging? I had loved painting at different stages in my life. When I was pregnant with Diego, and then after he was born, I would often paint in the mornings. I am ... pretty terrible at drawing. But I really love painting. In Prochaska's class, he assigned us different painting projects to get us thinking about possibilities. We had twenty-plus easels set up around the room, and he played really good music, all different genres, while we worked on our paintings. I joked with him that I basically came for the daily soundtrack.
It was awful and perfect to be put in a situation, at 51 years old, where I was trying to hone an art. Some days I felt so depressed about my abilities. Other days I left with a spring in my step. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I have talked before about that CHASM between what you want to create and what you actually create and how devastating that can be. I hung in there. As part of my mid-life reckoning, I had learned to ride a motorcycle, and had purchased a Suzuki Boulevard from a local guy on O'Connor Way, the kind of backcountry road that leads to Cuesta, and on days that I didn't have to bring a lot of materials and could travel light, I rode that bike to Cuesta, very fast. It was exhiliarting. (I may have mentioned it before, but Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of my favorite books, and reading it in my early 20s made me fantasize about someday riding and maintaining a motorcycle). (It was also so strange to me that upon reading it later, I was also teaching rhetoric at a university, which narrator had also done.)
Prochaska had assigned us an oil painting--my first time working with oil--of an iceberg, which, he explained, was never static, but always melting and shifting (especially in this day and age). We had to include the water and the sky. He suggested we collage it from different photographs we liked. I decided that my iceberg would be, uncharacteristically, near the shore. I LOVED working with oils; it was one of the reasons I had taken the class, because I knew we would be. Previously I had only worked with water colors or acrylics. I had no idea what I was doing, but set out on the task. He would come by every once an a while and critic, sometimes grabbing my brush and showing me, on my canvas, what was possible.
So this is not my painting, but mine and Prochaska's. But I love it.
I liked to fantasize that maybe some day in the future I would be a painter... that I would stop working with words so much.
I took a figure drawing class the following fall and another painting class. I was milking my mid-life crisis as much as I could. But eventutally I sold the motorcyle, bought an electric bicyle, returned to storytelling through language, and got a day job.
But I still harbor that fantasy of shutting up and just
PAINTING.
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