What's Lit* to Me? (Letter to My College Students)

Note: This is something I wrote for an English 201 class at BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College), hence the "In this class" talk. I reprint it here because I think it doesn't do a bad job of answering the title's question.



Why do I love to read fiction? Why do I want my children (someday) and my students (now) to love to read fiction?

Since long before there was written language, people have been making up stories. Some of the earliest ones were made up to explain the world—to make sense of it. Some of them, I suspect, were just made up to pass the time—as entertainment. Either way, writing and reading (or listening to) fiction seems to be something human beings have loved to do for tens of thousands of years. Why?

Inventing and listening to fiction is a lot like dreaming. When we dream, our unconscious mind takes images and memories and rearranges them in different shapes. Our mind, freed from the facts and responsibilities of daily life, wanders, swinging like a trapeze artist from image to image—we are flying, in a sense, on ideas. This is why dreams can be so exhilarating and so terrifying—because the reassuring net of reality isn’t under you: you don’t know where you’re going.

Fiction, like dreams, gives us the feeling of uncertainty: we allow the author (if we’re reading) or our imagination (if we’re writing) to carry us from idea to idea, image to image, without being sure of where we’re headed. We like this feeling of uncertainty: sometimes it fills us with hope, sometimes with terror, but we love it because it is freedom. It releases us, temporarily, from everything we think we know about ourselves and the world. It frees our minds to think in new ways, to change, to grow—it shakes us loose from the dusty comfort of our everyday lives.

For me, good literature is any piece of made-up writing (poem, play, book, short story) that gives me this sense of release. I believe that the feeling good literature provides is a basic human need, and that experiencing this feeling often makes us more complex, thoughtful, aware and alive than we are without it.

Some fiction is written in a simple, straightforward style that can affect almost anyone immediately, without any special study or effort. Some, because it was written a long time ago, or because the writer is using words or techniques that are not immediately familiar, takes a little unpacking before you can connect with it. If the writing is good enough, that work is well worth doing.

In this class, we’ll read both kinds of fiction—the kind you have to work at, and the kind that comes naturally. In any case, our goal will always be the same: to connect, to understand, to dig down to the point where the writing can really work its magic on us.

To paraphrase what someone once said to me in a Tarot card reading about my life: “It won’t always be easy, but it will never be boring.” I think, if you commit sincerely to the work of this class, you’ll find that to be very, very true.

*where literature is defined as stories, novels, poems, and plays