How Lucky I Feel

From an email to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling:

The main thing [most book] authors experience is THE VOID. We never get any feedback or at least never enough. I have a friend called Ruth who is 80 years old and reads voraciously: novels, biographies, poetry. She writes to the authors she likes and gets back extraordinary responses: four pages hand written, invitations to dinner. She says, ‘I would have thought they were too important to read my letters’ and I say ‘Ruth, you are the only one who writes’.

It’s the same with teaching. We get to know so little of what effects we have on our students. But the internet offers a small measure of salvation. Sometimes a former student writes, ‘You don’t know me but I sat in your class in 1991 and…” It makes all the difference to get just one of those every few years, but it doesn’t add up to an objectification of the audience for our work.

I’ve had thousands of students and written one book. (In Chinese you are a “writer” if you’ve written one book and an “author” if you’ve written more than one — so I am a writer.) I don’t hear from my students very often but every day I get feedback from the SLD forums. To say I get “enough” feedback would be to understate the effect of comments like this:

I started a new job this past August . . . It’s so strange to be in a new place with people who’ve never known me as Fat Del. . . . That insidious “I wonder if there’s something wrong with her” has never crossed their minds. I’m just the normal girl in the next office. Men flirt with me and seem to think it’s cute when I’m not sure how to flirt back. . . . No one ever thinks I used to be fat and no one ever judges me in that light. Hell, my boss calls me by my full name and says it’s because Del is too short and casual for a pretty girl.

It’s so odd to be normal. I never thought I’d know what that was like.

Thanks for letting me know, Del.