"The desire to write grows with writing." --Erasmus

One day while I was in graduate school, I came back to my office after a meeting and found those words from Erasmus on my door, embossed on a sticky note.

They hit me powerfully at the time, since I was in the midst of writing my dissertation--the largest, most forbidding writing task I'd ever faced, and one that (some days) I couldn't envision finishing.

"Just keep going," the words suggested. "Keep going and going and going, like the Energizer Bunny." So I did. And I found that the more I holed up in my apartment with a pile of books and my laptop and my thoughts, the more I had to say.

Today Erasmus's words are scrawled on the chalkboard above my desk at UT. They're part of the signature attached to my emails, and they sometimes make their way into discussions in the classes I teach--because for me they're true, and I suspect they're true for a lot of other folks, too. Granted, I'm one of those people who has always written...well, stuff. Stories, poems, journal entries, news articles, analyses, arguments, etc. I love writing. But that doesn't mean there aren't days when I'd rather eat garden snakes than struggle to get words on the page. So if you absolutely LOATHE writing, and you've enrolled in one of my classes and are thinking "Oh, great--she loves to write, so she has no way of understanding how much I hate this," relax. I know that writing can be incredibly frustrating. I know the bald-faced terror of the blank page. But I also know that there's only one cure for writing aversion: "Just keep going and going and going."

So whichever of my classes you're enrolled in, you can count on one thing: You'll be asked to work hard. You'll read a lot and draft a lot. I'll respond to your work, you'll respond to other people's work, and they'll respond to yours. Our responses will be guided by two simple questions: "What works well?" and "What needs work?" And if you really commit yourself to the process--drafting, listening attentively to feedback, and revising--it will pay off. I can't guarantee that, like Erasmus, you'll find yourself WANTING to write, but I feel safe in predicting that you'll get back what you put in. And I'll do everything I can to help.