I am a fiction writer who earns his living as a university professor.
I teach classes about the politics of food, otherness, movement and language, material I’ve spent a long time thinking up, then tweaking and shaping.
My entire pedagogy revolves around urging my students to read and listen and observe widely. I want them to try things on the page. Mistakes are permitted, even encouraged.
In mid-March, classes at university, like most institutions around the world grappling with the pandemic, shifted from in-person to remote instruction, and when it became clear in the summer that classes would continue in that vein in the fall, I became anxious, because I harboured a secret I wasn’t prepared to share.
Earlier this year, I had been asked to co-teach a seminar course for seniors in the fall. I was also roped to teach a creative writing class, my first one. I reached out…