Hospital Windows

From Life Writing to Allegory and Autofiction

The backstory of how I came to teach a course called "Writing Your Life" and write a book called Hospital Windows could be a journaling exercise in a life writing course. Homework: "Write a description (300 words) about a time when you experienced a dramatic paradigm shift in your career."

So I'm an English teacher. After doing that for a while I become a teacher of English teachers and  teachers-to-be. After doing that for a while, my department head came to me and said, "Tim, I want you to write a course about attitude and values in education." 

Knowing he'd been assigned this task and hadn't chosen it, I said, "No." After he looked at me blankly, I elaborated. "We teach language teaching. Values and attitudes is not our department. They should go to Psychology." 

He finally replied, "We have to do it, and you're doing it. I know you can do it." Alas. Over the next few weeks I pondered how I could write a course for a General Education strand called "Positive Attitude and Values Education" or PAVE. I wasn't optimistic. The Ah-hah moment came to me when I remembered a life writing course my wife Emma had taken, and later assisted teaching, during her graduate studies in literature. She described the experience as immersive, thought-provoking, eye-opening, challenging, and memorable. She also learned something about autobiographical writing and the writing workshop process. It seemed to me that some reflection on one's values and attitudes might be an authentic part of such a course. I got in touch with her professor, Professor Richard Freedman, and before long our department's new GE course was born: Writing Your Life. 

Fast forward six or seven years, and the class, while always popular and over-subscribed, succumbed to another GE curriculum overhaul. Government-mandated national security curriculum topics replaced all the electives in the PAVE stream. But in the in-between years, I learned that--while untrained and inexperienced in life writing, let alone psychology, I could actually teach a course that had something to do with values and attitudes. Telling your own story requires one to first reflect on what that story is. What matters. How much you tell. How you tell it. I gradually learned that values and attitudes have a lot to do with how we determine and measure the meaning of life and how we write our stories. My students and I learned a lot from each other; and I realized an ideal I'd always cherished. The best educational experiences are those that contribute to a well-examined life.

It all ended too soon. As a tribute and thanks to my students, I wrote a story that I'd been living for decades but that - without them - I would never have written. You can read the first chapter and order a copy by clicking here.