Teaching Patsy Yaeger

This essay began as a talk I gave in March 2015 at a symposium called “The Luminous Mind,” a symposium that commemorated Patsy Yaeger. The event took place in a long narrow room just down the hall from the University of Michigan’s Department of English. It is a place I, as a graduate student, associated with intellectual rigor and inquiry, vulnerability and power, stress and anxiety. It was not a place I associated with love—that is, until the symposium that Patsy’s friends and colleagues organized. That day, in that place, people who had known Patsy for decades gathered with people who had known her for just a few years. People who had watched her children grow up sat next to people who only knew her through her words. As one person aft er the other took to the podium, during the formal lectures and then an informal sharing of memories, the same words cropped up again and again in their remarks: wild, whimsical, capacious, generous, and, of course, luminous. We had clearly known the same woman although how we knew her varied.

Patsy was my teacher and later my friend, and I am interested in thinking about how the books she has left behind can help us understand and meet the wonderful, ordinary, and thorny challenges of teaching. In the pages that follow, I use the phrase “teaching Patsy Yaeger” to explore how Dirt and Desire in particular might guide us as teachers as well as scholars. As I imagine it, “teaching Patsy Yaeger” does not signify teaching the content of her writing. Rather, it describes the act of teaching according to principles that shape and take shape in Patsy’s lovely book. More specifically, this essay examines what it might mean (1.) to teach with her deep, unequivocal, and overt conviction that literature matters in our personal lives; (2.) to teach in accordance with who we are as individuals in the way that Patsy so clearly wrote in accordance with who she was; and (3.) to teach by way of generous listening. At once a reading of one of her most powerful works, an exploration of teaching, and a tribute to a luminous woman whom I loved, this essay will, I hope, expand the number of people whose work might be enriched by Patsy’s wild mind.

The opening pages of Dirt and Desire give powerful expression to Patsy’s sense that literature matters—not just in the cultural history of any civilization or in the education and enfranchisement of citizens of a democracy but in our lives as humans as we attempt to make our way through this beautiful and broken world. There, she explicitly identifies the source from which her writing flows and makes clear that that source is unflinchingly personal:

The chapters that follow flow inevitably from my own private quarrels with the South—from a sense that I was gargantuan or oversized in a world of petite and belle-like little girls; from a sense that my own right to testify, or speak out against familial, racial, and religious injustice was censored in school and at home; from a sense, as well, that I did not want to testify, or could not, or did not know how; from memories of the bizarre pressures of being a middle-class southern white girl caught between my father’s southern Methodism and the world of my mother’s hymn-singing, Bible-swinging Baptist past and of being someone destined by the age of five for my family’s peculiar Scylla and Charybdis—the fatal need to choose between the Tri Delts, my Aunt Mary Louise’s sorority, or Kappa Delta, my mother’s—and clearly unfit, in my anger and my awkwardness for either institution.

(2)

In this language, Patsy traces the roots of her study deep into her past, into the anger and ambivalence, the confusion and awkwardness of a girl who would grow to be a woman. She provides insight into the urgency of the writing that follows. When she declares later on that same page: “I need to know” (2), I believe her...