My short story class at Hubbard Hall is in its third week – I am really enjoying this class, I think I might teach it again the Fall – two students were sick this week, the rest of us waded in with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, it is a great class, focused, hard-working, creative and helpful to one another. At some point in every writing class I teach, someone – sometimes everyone – tells me they are embarrassed to share their stories, they would never put up a blog, their stories are stupid, meaningless, unimportant, it would be presumptuous, even selfish, to write them or share them with the world.

I have come to recognize this anxiety,  it silences so many creative voices, kills so many stories, it cripples more writers than any greedy or bovine publisher or agent or challenging marketplace. I tell my students – I told them this today – that we all need to believe our stories are important, and we need to separate our fears of being authentic from our feelings about our work. Don’t ever speak poorly of your work, I said, it might hear you. When I met Maria, she did not believe her art was important, she believes it now, and so do many other people.

I believe this idea is formed in us early in life. My mother was a bitterly unhappy and sometimes frightening person, but she loved my stories, she always told me I was a great story-teller, she always wanted to hear my stories and she always made me feel good about telling them. Her gift to me is that I love telling stories and I feel they are important, I never feel they are stupid or worthless, even when they are.

Your stories are important, I told the students, if you don’t believe in them, why should anyone believe in them? Don’t speak badly of your work in my class, not here, I said. Writing is not a mystical alchemy bestowed on the wondrous few, the sacred spark lives in all of us, we all have stories to tell, the job of the teacher is to light the spark, not to snuff it out.