When I retired after nearly forty years of teaching college English, I experienced both the startling freedom as well as the gnawing uncertainty that comes when anyone enters retirement.  It was like leaving a country I’d spent most of my adult life in and traveling to another one whose language, customs, and values were completely alien to me.  I had loved teaching literature and fiction writing, and I was grateful for the many wonderful years of being in the classroom, getting paid for doing what I loved.  For me there was nothing quite as rewarding as when a beautiful passage from a novel or a line from a poem would awaken a spark in my students and lead to a vigorous and nuanced discussion.  Or when talking about a student’s work, another student would say, “Wow!  That’s a really great story.”   Literature has been and continues to be my passion, my reason for getting up in the morning, my very identity.  I have a coffee mug at home that I’d bought in the Kafka museum in Prague.  A quote of his on the side seemed to capture my own feelings: I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.

But there came a time when I could no longer teach what I wanted and how I wanted to teach it.  There were all of these new proscriptions and prescriptions that hampered my ability to get across the important elements of literature I thought my students deserved to know.  Especially in the last decade or so, I found myself becoming tentative in the classroom; instead of my lectures and class discussions aimed at being edgy and provocative—what good is literature after all if it doesn’t uncomfortably stir the soul and set passions aflame?–I shot for being inoffensive, for not saying the wrong thing or saying the right thing the wrong way.  Perhaps it was my fault.  Perhaps I’d become too much of a curmudgeon and the literary world had passed me by.  In any case, I got tired of teaching and decided to call it quits.  I didn’t even take a staggered retirement, where I could get used to the notion leaving what I had loved.  No, I quit cold turkey.

I found that I appreciated the extra time retirement gave me to focus on my own writing and to read whatever I wanted.  I savored going for long morning walks with my two labs.  I enjoyed wandering out to my writing cabin in the woods in the early morning, to write for a long as I wanted without interruption.  To read novels without taking notes in the margins.  As anyone newly retired I relished this new heady sense of freedom.  But I soon came to realize that something was absent from my life.  I certainly didn’t miss the long and often pointless faculty meetings, the piles of freshman papers, or all the flaming hoops that the administration made one jump through as in a circus act.  And then it hit me: I missed teaching.  I missed sharing what I had gleaned during a lifetime of reading and studying, writing and lecturing.  I missed helping student writers to hone their craft, to understand the potential of literature as something powerful, even revolutionary that each student had in them.  I knew, however, I couldn’t go back to the classroom, teaching a course here and there, especially not in this current 1984-ish environment.  For me that had become too stultifying, too antithetical to what I believed was fundamental to the true study of literature and fiction writing.

The answer for me was to become, ironically, what I had always been at heart–a writing coach.

After I’d taken several years off from teaching, a writer friend of mine finally convinced me to try my hand at being a professional writing coach.  But was I somehow selling out, I wondered, becoming one of those senators who retire only to become a highly paid consultant?  I didn’t really need the money.  What I did need was affirmation—affirmation that what I knew and the body of skills I’d acquired over a lifetime, could still be of use to another writer trying to develop his or her craft. What I learned was that my new job was actually liberating, invigorating, challenging, breathing new life into my former stodgy role as a professor standing before an often bored classroom.  It was teaching but teaching distilled to its very essence: one-on-one, without any external interference, a craftsman passing on his skill or knowledge to an eager apprentice, in the same manner that medieval craftsmen passed on their skills.  Much as I had working in low-residency MFA programs, I and my writer-apprentice worked by Zoom, telephone, mail, and email, but unlike an MFA (which I’d always enthusiastically endorsed) without administrators looking over my shoulder, without artificial deadlines or the need to assign grades to creative work.  Besides, most of the real and difficult work of any low-res MFA program takes place, not during the glitzy residency, but during those many months of solitary working at a distance, one-on-one, just a budding writer and their coach working together on a novel or memoir.

I also love the fact that these students want to work with me, that they aren’t forced to take a certain course, and that most already have a head-start on whatever project they want to work on.  The students that I take on now are mostly good and committed writers, and if they aren’t good to begin with, they are passionate about becoming better, which often is more important than being good.  Most of my students are in their thirties, forties, and fifties, a few even in their eighties, people who’ve lived long lives and have experienced suffering, who’ve lost loved ones, who’ve had their hearts broken and want to turn such life experiences into art.  They come to me, as writers do to any writing coach, looking for help starting, completing, or polishing a particular book, in my case a memoir or novel.  For example, one exceptional writer I’m currently working with was a nun for 29 years and wants to write about her troubled life both in the monastery and after.  While she started slow and needed to get the hang of scene and dialogue and pacing, she’s now got a very strong manuscript that’s nearly completed.  Another, a man in his eighties, an architect and builder, spent the better part of the last thirty years of his life working on a single passion: restoring an 18^th century farmhouse on a hill in Tuscany (which I’ve been to and it’s stunning!).  He wanted to turn that passion for his architectural project into a literary one, a memoir that would capture what he’d felt while building his masterpiece.

I tell all of my writers upfront the rules of the road: that I’ll be hard and demanding, that I’ll push them and accept only their best work, that either of us can quit working together at any time if we aren’t satisfied with the other (imagine that in a college classroom: Johnny, you’re not taking this class very seriously, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave).  Some of my current students do fall by the wayside, it’s true.  But most want me to be hard and demanding so that their vision of their novel or memoir will be as good as they can make it.  They have a story to tell and they want me to help them tell it.

I’ve also found that in working with writers outside of academia, I can be more myself as a teacher, play to my strengths, be more direct and honest in my criticism.  I don’t have to worry that I might say something too harsh or politically incorrect, because my students know that I have only their best interests as writers at heart.  One of the most basic requirements all writers must master is that they have to learn to accept hard criticism, to have the skin of a rhinoceros.  Agents, editors and readers will be tough on their work, so they need to be equally tough on it.  They’re not looking to please me for a grade or to get into grad school; they’re only trying to write their book, the best way they can.  Also, I don’t teach or coach as I used to, looking over my shoulder, waiting to get hauled into a dean’s office for saying something that someone thought inappropriate.  Because of this freedom from outside forces, I’m more able to evaluate not only my student-writers’ particular project, but their overall needs as writers as well.  Over the course of four or five months working closely one-on-one on a single project, I’ll often read hundreds of new and revised pages.  Not even with most MFA projects was I able to read this amount of work in a single semester.  I can see the whole of their project in a shorter period of time and get a better feel for it.   And there’s no rush or time limit to finish their book, so we work at a pace that suits them and their lives.

Lastly, a genuine bond often forms between myself and those student-writers I coach, much as it had with my MFA writers.  Not always, of course.  There are some writers that for one reason or another—sometimes it’s me—decide not to finish their book or at least not to finish it with me.  But for those that do, I find a strong connection with the work as well as with the writer.  I want to see their book reach its successful conclusion.  And as with my former MFA students’ projects, I’m elated when their hard work, and mine, results in a finished book, sometimes even in a published one.  For me, coaching writers provides all of the joy I once experienced teaching in a classroom but with far fewer downsides.