Someone quoted somebody last night at dinner saying that life is like a chess game, and as we get older, we have fewer and fewer moves we can make. I said I thought that was not the case for me, as I get older, I find I have more moves to make than ever, and am learning more all the time. In a way, my chess game began around the time I turned 60, and no one has been more surprised by that than me. Or more grateful.

Almost everything about my life has changed since then, including my ideas about teaching writing and creativity to others.

I have taught on and off for more than 25 years, I have always been drawn to it, perhaps because I had so much trouble learning in my life. In the last year or two, something has changed, opened up inside of me.

I feel I am just beginning to learn how to teach, good teaching is precious, it can alter lives. I am beginning to learn how to draw the good stuff out of people without making them feel small or dumb, as I was so often made to feel. It’s not easy, and many people, of course,  do  not really want to learn, they just think they should.

And I am learning that it can be especially difficult if you are a man, because so many of my students have had difficulties with men.

I am loving teaching more and more, and doing better with, attracting remarkable people, who are as on fire to learn as I am to help them. I have realized in the past year or so, that there are ghosts in the room when I teach, and the ghosts are quite often the ghosts of men. Most of my students are women, not too many men out of college take writing classes, I don’t know why. I have long believed that the only men I can love were either tortured as children or humiliated as adults. Something has to open us up, we don’t seem to do it naturally.

In teaching, that is important. I can drawn on my own life beyond writing my books and blog.

I have come to see the spirits and behaviors and values – and prejudices – of men are often serious roadblocks in the creative evolution of women. The mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote about this when he said of his many years of teaching that he taught hundreds, perhaps thousands of women who were drawn to writing, music or the arts, but who canceled their dreams and adventures because a man – a husband, boyfriend, father, teacher – discouraged them, belittled them, in some cases, even abused them into turning away from their callings.

He often begged his gifted women students not to be swayed by the pressures and opinions of men, they need to come out into the world with their work and stand in their own shoes. He taught this long before this was a popular or widely accepted idea.

Campbell said this pattern made him sad. He always told his students that they would survive, but would be leading substitute lives. T. S. Eliot called it the life of the Hollow Men (and women.) I am a man, so I am often mistrusted or treated with some wariness and skepticism, but I have learned that if I want to help my students open up, take the leap, bring their stories out into the world, I may very often have to talk about the ghosts and spirits of men who hover over their lives and imaginations, and shut them down.

I see that many women have troubling stories about men, are afraid of them, or inhibited by them or discouraged by them in one way or another. Some men are threatened by creative women, I can testify they can be intimidating. Some men are jealous of the creativity they can not access because they tend to be more closed. Some men are dismissive of creative lives because they are often comparatively (in male terms) powerless lives without money or security. Some men are too demanding of time and care to leave women with the head space and time necessary to create.

One student I admire is a naturally gifted writer, but she refuses to write openly and confidently because she is afraid her father will see her work and disapprove of her, as he has her whole life. I have suggested to her that she break free of this grip, she so far, she can’t.

Another went on a creative tear after she ended a difficult relationship with a boyfriend and is now thinking of getting back together with him. If she does, she says, she is afraid she won’t be able to write again. Another aspiring artist and writer – a very good one – is continuously told by her father never to give up the day job she hates and finds smothering. And another has a husband with drug problems who says they can’t afford for her to spend more time on the work she wants to do.  There are a lot of stories like this, I could go on and on.

The ghosts of men are often in the classroom.

And what, really, is the role of the teacher in this? I am not a shrink, and I have no desire to be one. I believe in feminism, I believe in the power of creativity to heal and give voice and identity to people. So I tread carefully and am conscious both of boundaries and balance. And I am quick to suggest professional help when it seems helpful or necessary.  I have little respect for amateur or para-professional therapists, even thought they sprout online like weeds.

Another very talented student has wanted to write her whole life and suddenly, a long-time relationship ended abruptly and painfully – he found someone else. Suddenly, she has found her voice and is becoming the writer she always wanted to be.

What I am learning is that we often have to talk about liberating our imaginations from the narrow confines and boundaries of men if my students can break out, come out and into the open, and follow the call to adventure. And not lead substitute lives because it is what the men around them expect them or need them or want them to do. This is no something I would once have thought to do when teaching, and it may be a reason I am getting better at it. It is not always a factor, but it is often a factor, I can’t really ignore or dismiss it.

The pathway to writing often comes from passing through the geography of fear – we all have reasons why we think we can’t write well. We were told we were dumb, that our stories were not important, that we need to keep our day jobs, that nobody cares what we do. One by one, as these roadblocks are removed, the inner spirits come up and out. Men are too often the roadblocks.

It is always feckless to generalize about entire genders or species, and I know many very good men who support the women in their lives every day in every day. I hear their stories too. But I also find that the greater success I am having as a teacher – and I am having more lately – is coming from my recognition that the ghosts and spirits of men are often part of my class, part of the instruction.

If we can get past them and the boundaries they sometimes seek to place around the women in their lives, then my women students lift off, like planes coming off the runway, like birds in flight. It is a painful thing, in many ways, to learn, a complex thing to teach.