It Was Time to Go

I started teaching a few months before the September 11 terrorist attacks. I had two nonfiction writing classes as a brand new instructor with the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. Back then, the school advertised its writing workshops in catalogues distributed in plastic yellow boxes on the street. I was working as a correspondent for Janes, covering international maritime shipping, and the publisher paid me sporadically through wire transfers to my bank account. I was due thousands when I reached out to my mentor who was the former Dean of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. He recommended me to the new Dean and he called me in for an interview. We talked about my experience as a journalist and the memoir I was writing about my marriage to an Israeli man and the trauma of the Gulf War. “So why do you want to teach?” He asked. “I need the money,” I said. He laughed and hired me as a nonfiction teacher.

Even though my classes were over, I wrote to all of my students to see if they were okay after hijackers crashed into the twin towers and they collapsed. A student said her boyfriend worked in one of the towers but he had taken the day off to surf along the Jersey Shore. It was a beautiful fall day with a periwinkle sky. I didn’t tell my students that my father’s flight had taken off from La Guardia Airport just before the first plane hit. My father could see the burning tower from his window on the plane. His cell phone was off and we worried about him until he landed in Detroit. He called my mother, rented a car, and drove home to Connecticut.

Gotham Writers’ Workshop hosted a September 11 memorial reading and I read a chapter from my Gulf War memoir. It was still unpublished but my boss asked me to begin teaching memoir writing. I taught beginning and advanced memoir classes. I also began to teach online nonfiction workshops. I was paid very little compared to my journalism work but the direct deposit came every two weeks.

One of my students wrote about working as a dominatrix. Another wrote about surviving breast cancer. She showed the class the heart tattoo where her nipple used to be. Another wrote about his childhood neighbor running over her drunk husband with her car—on purpose. Another wrote about traveling to Cuba as the daughter of exiles. And another wrote about falling in love with Harlem years after immigrating from Germany. I published outstanding student work in Epiphany after I became the nonfiction editor of the magazine.

I had difficult students, too. A Brazilian student protested my ban on emailing submissions. “This a dictatorship!” he said. He became so agitated that I was worried he might assault me. One of my students had worked as a bouncer and he later said he would have thrown the student out of the window if he attacked me. The troublemaker never showed up to class again. But I ran into him on the subway, outside a movie theater, and on my way to church. He followed me into the church and attended the service.

He wasn’t the only agitator. A retired doctor left a message on my cell phone demanding that I recommend her to editors at The New York Times. In class, I told her I had only been a stringer for the paper and didn’t have any contacts that could help her. She persisted and I was fed up. She wrote a letter to my boss saying I was harassing her. He called and told me about it. Then he said he was throwing the letter in the garbage. I quit not long after that.

I left journalism and began working as a freelance editor for books, stories, and essays. My first memoir came out and not long afterwards my first poetry chapbook was published. My mentor had become the director of the writing program at New York University’s continuing education school and he asked me to interview for a job. I was hired as an adjunct instructor to teach introductory writing and later I began to teach memoir writing. After a few semesters, I began to teach the one-day crash course in memoir writing instead of the full 10-week course.

I sublet my coop on the Upper East Side and spent a year in upstate New York writing my second memoir—about my father’s tour in Vietnam and out trip back together. My mentor left New York University and I asked my new boss for a semester off. She agreed but then she never gave me another memoir class. I proposed a new class—Write to Heal—and she approved it. But the class was canceled because too few students enrolled. I never taught another class at New York University. I thought that my teaching experience, books, and nonfiction and poetry honors would help me find a tenure track position, but most universities required an MFA or PhD in creative writing while I had an MS in journalism.

While I was still living upstate, a writer who wrote a blurb for my Gulf War memoir recommended me for the board of New York Writers Resources. I was then asked to teach writing with the affiliated program, New York Writers Workshop. I began with creative nonfiction workshops hosted at the Marlene Meyerson Jewish Community Center. I expanded into memoir writing workshops hosted at the Goddard Riverside Community Center. One student wrote stories about his bodybuilder father. Another wrote about growing up with parents in the Communist Party. And then another student told the class that her father committed suicide but she was unable to write about that. She then berated another student for his very long and detailed critique of a classmate’s paper. He was so wounded he almost skipped class. I should have defended him but I feared another letter to my boss complaining about harassment.

I found a full-time job writing evaluations for specialty occupation visa applications, analyzing candidates’ professional and educational qualifications for employment in the United States. I kept teaching, too. I also published the Vietnam War memoir about my father and another poetry chapbook.

Writing classes were suspended during the beginning of the pandemic, and when the program resumed the workshops were on Zoom. I had full classes with moving student stories about being born in an Austrian displaced persons camp at the end of World War II and losing a daughter who suffered from multiple sclerosis and blindness. One student migrated from my live workshop to my Zoom class after writing about overcoming her panic to become a scuba dive master. She began to publish her essays and poems in literary magazines. She shared the links with me and I was delighted.

But students sometimes didn’t get my emails with student papers attached and sometimes they couldn’t connect to Zoom. One toggled back and forth between her computer and iPad to participate. Another clicked on the link multiple times before it worked. Then, by mistake, the program’s host sent a Zoom link to the students— not me—after registration and a different link to all of us the morning before the first class. I had no idea why half the class was missing that night. I sent an urgent email to the class to join asap. They began to trickle in and told me they had joined the other link. It was chaos.

I had written a poem about teaching, how my mother gave me advice at the beginning. “Love your students,” she said. She and my father taught Sunday School for decades and they took their students to lunch every week. I did love many students who became dear friends. Some earned master’s degrees in writing. Some received literary honors for their essays. Some published books. But it had become too much with my full-time job. It was time to go.

By Karol Nielsen

From: United States

Website: https://karolnielsen.com

Twitter: karol_nielsen