"Word-work is sublime"

Toni Morrison, in her Nobel Lecture, tells us that:

"[w]ord-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - the way in which we are like no other life."

By this she means that the beauty, joy (and sometimes terror) of language is that it has the capacity to facilitate emotional, intellectual and physical change in ways unique to humans.

I am keen for my students to engage in the process of change and creation; I want them to write worlds that have been, worlds that exist and the world that will come.  I want them to use writing to better know themselves.

If I am asking them to take that risk, to put in that work, it seems only fair that I too participate in the process.  After all, how can I be a writing teacher, let alone the write type of teacher, if I am not also writing!