Public Presentation

My boss made a mistake when she asked me to speak at "graduation" from the writing center. Some fragments of the speech I gave...

There’s very little I hate more than long goodbyes. We fall prey in them to one of two beastly temptations: to glorify and beautify the past and our fellows in our reminiscences, or to spurn and reject their memory, to yield to introversion. Hero worship or demonization? To Godbuild or to demystify a cult? In either case we trivialize our own memories by depicting them into one Great Story, encoding them into one Great Past. In either case, we distance ourselves from the truth…

Another worry I had when I was thinking about this was that we all know each other through work. Just how sentimental can I get about work – and how much are my coworkers going to allow me to be sentimental before them up on stage? Both questions are based on a false premise. Yes, what we have is a paying job. But it’s not work…

Nor can we be merely coworkers. How many of us have, either leaving a conference or waiting for a walk-in, sitting at the table, admitted exactly what was on our mind? How many deep and – sometimes inappropriate – conversations have each of us partaken of? I’ve “worked” hours under different core staff, a lot of different mentors – some of whom are in the room right now – and I can’t think of any semester where I’ve felt unwilling to share a thought, a joke, a moment with the staff on at the same time as me. If I haven’t had the chance to share hours with you, I’m sorry – because I’m sure we would have been friends, and likely facebook friends (the mark of true companionship. Oh, and by the way – if we aren’t facebook friends yet, rectify that.)

With you, my "coworkers," I’ve participated in protests, traveled across the world, sunned out on the grass, ridden the bus, enjoyed countless gas tanks full of coffee, gone to lunch, gone to dinner, gone to bars…our friendships are the product of the campus match.com. (And I’ll move on from this topic now, before Jennifer has to reiterate her staff meeting about appropriate versus inappropriate relations with students in the center…)

…Jennifer said to me, "I can always hear that it’s you inside the conference, that the same crazy Andrew I see out here is in there."

I’m going to pretend that it was a compliment. I’m not…positive…but here’s my Great Story for my own Writing Center past. We are all writers, and we are all helping writers. There is no way for us not to be true to ourselves; inside the conference, we have to be just as true to ourselves as the students. Let them have poured their soul out into a short story, or have just finished writing a term paper for class – I name their work LEGITIMATE, HONEST WRITING. The process of writing has brought some of the student to the conference, and we cannot distance ourselves from that honesty in our "work"...