The Yearning to Learn From Our Lives

photo by Sigrid Estrada

Some of you may recall the controversial essay published in February about an MFA instructor who left teaching, then felt free to say what he really thought of his students. It is full of half-truths and a few moments of insight, but those moments of insight don’t really make up for the rest of it. (God help the new or inexperienced writer who tries to differentiate the half-truths from the insight.)

Contrast that piece with this wonderful meditation by Lisa Gornick, “An Analyst Teaches the Personal Essay,” in the latest bulletin from Glimmer Train. Gornick was asked to teach a personal essay course because of her background as a psychoanalyst. She says:

We all yearn to learn from our lives so we do not stumble like Sisyphus up the same hill over and over but, instead, discover the art of living well. For those interested in the therapy situation or the personal essay as a means to this end, there are pages to be borrowed from one another. The personal essay can provide an artful account of earned insight often more useful than tomes of session transcripts or the bastardized synopses of years of therapeutic work. Conversely, for the writer, the therapy situation can provide a road map for the diversions into defensiveness and self-deception, the way we fight self-knowledge as we seek it.

Read the full essay by Lisa Gornick.

For more from Glimmer Train:

The Fire and the Snow by Jennifer Tseng
The Writometer by Clare Thompson-Ostrander