The first class I taught adjunct in Michigan was a last minute proposition: the chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies department called me a couple weeks before the start of the fall semester, wondering if I might be interested in teaching a women’s lit class that had unexpectedly become available. She had pulled my CV from a file drawer; when I planned the move to Michigan more than a year earlier, I sent CVs to a number of colleges and universities, hoping to cultivate exactly this sort of adjunct work. I said yes, met for a quick interview, went home with the stack of books that had already been selected and shipped to the bookstore.
Some were familiar from my own undergrad women’s lit classes, though I hadn’t read or thought about them since: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Emma, The Handmaid’s Tale. Others, like Persepolis, I would read for the first time with my students. The class was small, 12 or maybe 15 women, and met one night a week. I was working part time in an elementary after-school program, so when the kids sat down for their last snack, I would go in the bathroom, change from sticky jeans into something “classier,” as the fifth grade girls always said, and then head across town to campus, trying to make the mental shift from pinecone birdfeeders to textual analysis as I drove.
I wanted to start the semester on familiar ground, and since the books had been ordered, poetry seemed like my best option. I photocopied a few poems and handed them out on the first day; Diving Into the Wreck was among those poems. I taught it because I loved the imagery, the mermaid, the knife, the book of myths, loved the way the very tools you need in the depths, the flippers, are crippling on the descent down the ladder, loved the tension between permanence and decay, damage and treasure. I let the poem stand wide open for my students, who found their own ladders into its depths: what if the wreck is history? What if it’s a university? What if it’s the love of your life? Continue reading
