Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 40—How to Be Like Mike (Copperman)
131 Plays8 years ago
Michael Copperman, author of Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi), talks about his memoir and trusting the process.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Book Mention
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey what's going on cnfers?
00:00:04
Speaker
You know, as luck would have it or fortune or whatever you want to call it, I picked up how to be like Mike. Life lessons about basketball is best.
Meet Michael Copperman
00:00:15
Speaker
And I was feeling all kinds of good about the wisdom I might find in this. And then it, you know, it says something to the extent of just for teens, Mike in the mirror. And I realized just how low I may have sunk, which isn't entirely true. I'm going to read this anyway.
00:00:34
Speaker
you
00:00:35
Speaker
But, you know, the title had to be like Mike struck a chord because my guest this week is Michael Copperman. MikeCopperman.com is where you can find out all things Mike, all things Copperman. And he's on the show this week to talk about his killer memoir, Teacher, Two Years in the Mississippi Delta. It's an amazing book. I encourage
00:01:05
Speaker
everyone to go out and buy it. It's almost sold through its first hardcover print run, so if you want that coveted first printing, gotta do it now.
Support for Writers
00:01:15
Speaker
That's where we're at. As always, I love to keep these intros short.
00:01:22
Speaker
Usual housekeeping as you know to take this to the next level I'm gonna need a little support and The support I need is continued download share the episode with people that you think might get something out of it and if you can take a minute or two and and rate it and
00:01:43
Speaker
I think that'll help bump it up the catalog, if you will, and it'll just help us reach more people and hopefully inspire more people to keep doing what they do and help to support the wonderful writers who take an hour out of their week, out of their busy weeks to come on the show and talk shop.
Copperman's Early Writing Passion
00:02:06
Speaker
So that would be my one ask of you. So without further ado,
00:02:13
Speaker
Here's Mike Kopperman.
00:02:35
Speaker
A lot of people I've spoken with on the podcast, like they've had that kind of crystallized vision when they were little, that they wanted to be writers. And so, yeah, you're not alone. But it is, it's, it's really cool when people have that, that vision from such a young age. Yeah, I don't know if I, I don't know if I was, let's see, I don't know, I think if I could go back in time and realize what that would entail, maybe I would, maybe I would, you know, change my plan to pick a Wall Street banker and a writer on the side.
00:03:04
Speaker
But no, not really. I've always sort of known that this was my thing. I've always sounded kind of like myself. I mean, there's like this essay that I have from age like eight or nine. That's like this immensely retrospective memoir portrait of this sort of grandfather figure in my life.
00:03:33
Speaker
It sounds exactly like me in high retrospective mode, you know what I mean? I looked at him and I could tell that at some point there had been great pain and sorrow in his life and that the years had weighed heavily on him. I'm like, what kind of eight or nine-year-old are you? Yeah, so you're reincarnated from somebody and they inhabited your soul as an eight and nine-year-old.
Family Influence and Support
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, no. And so interestingly, I mean, I think I really haven't changed all that much. Well, so what, you know, your father is a doctor, correct? Yeah, my family doctor in town. Yeah. So was there any pressure from your dad to kind of follow in that in that vein? Or did they or your folks just like wholeheartedly support the you as you pursued sort of a career that involved writing and educating?
00:04:27
Speaker
You know, I think that so I think my father would certainly have loved it if either my brother or myself had been called into the medical profession. Fortunately, my brother's wife is becoming a doctor. She's in residency right now. So that is satisfying that itch. But my folks always gave me the freedom to sort of be the person that I
00:04:49
Speaker
that I wanted to be. I think that they tended to trust me. I think they had their skepticism during, you know, the long 12 years of labor making this book when I made, you know, something starting at like $22,000 a year or whatever, right? Teaching full time. But I think that I think that they always really did believe in me. And while their frustrations
00:05:16
Speaker
which were my frustrations and not being able to break through or have a book were real. I think they really had faith in me in those ways. So that support always meant a lot. And what does your brother do? My brother is in a postdoc in physics, although in many ways he's more at the intersection of chemistry and physics. My brother's the real smart one in the family between the two of us. He's got an IQ that's off the charts.
00:05:45
Speaker
It's my understanding that he may have just solved some kind of like crazy problem in the working group that he just joined, which they're submitting to nature immediately with him as an author after being there for three and a half months. So, you know, I think, I think, you know, I wish I could rely on, on, on brains, but you know, instead of all, I've got to some words, so. And do you, how close are you and your brother in age?
00:06:12
Speaker
He's two years younger than me, or two, two years and a couple months.
Books, Sports, and Education
00:06:16
Speaker
And how did you guys feed off each other when you were growing up? We were definitely, you know, I don't think competitive is the right word. I think we started off being a little antagonistic the way that brothers would. And then at some point, like about, you know, like we had this conversation like eight or nine, like we were put into time out, you know, at the same time by my parents who thought that, you know, they would stop fighting by
00:06:39
Speaker
putting us both off by ourselves that we understood that it was the equal punishment. And instead, what we determined was that it was probably best to band together against my parents, who were somewhat stern disciplinarians of another age. So we basically did that from there on out. It was a solid front. And I think that concludes today.
00:06:59
Speaker
I wonder, do you think your parents might have done that on purpose? Maybe if we scold them together, they'll forge a better relationship and be with each other instead of against each other. I think that they probably had a premonition that that was a good idea. What they did not realize, of course, was that
00:07:21
Speaker
You know, these alliances, of course, need something to run up against and it was going to be not necessarily to their benefit, right, or collusion. So, yeah. Yeah, they might have been inadvertently creating a team, a team of which they would have to fight against. No, it's okay. You know, I think they'll catch up at some point.
00:07:41
Speaker
So as you progressed through middle school and high school, what were you into through those years? I know you wrestled and you talked about that in the book a bit, but what were you into? Well, I was into books. We used to take these baskets down to the Eugene Public Library and I would just take away, actually me and my brother both, we would just take away cartloads of books as many as they would let us check out.
00:08:11
Speaker
Um, and so I think like probably by the age of 12 or 13, I think I had probably read every single science fiction book in the Eugene public library. That was my sort of early love. So I went, you know, all the way on through just about everything that was high fantasy and science fiction. Um, what were some of those books that you read some real formative, man. I mean, I liked, I liked Heinlein in retrospect, of course, Heinlein is something of a misogynist.
00:08:40
Speaker
even though he's a very talented writer, but, you know, he certainly had an appeal to an adolescent teenager. You know, Munizahart's mistress and, oh, I mean, the whole list. I can't, it's funny, I mean, obviously the, what's the famous one, The Man About From Mars or whatever, I'm getting the title wrong, but it's kind of a classic of the 60s literature. It's where that word grok comes from, I mean.
00:09:10
Speaker
You know, and then of course I got into the punny stuff, which also has an appeal to adolescent males, Piers Anthony, and all of those ridiculous books. And you know, I love Tolkien and all the fantasy. Really, like, it's interesting, I kind of stopped reading, I mean, right about the time that I could probably turn 14 or 15, and like the last set of books that I read there were probably the last writer that I came in with was the writer Tad Williams, and like his Otherworld series, and I think that's really where I stopped.
00:09:41
Speaker
Stopped reading like sci-fi and fantasy. Yeah. Yeah, but you know those those contained worlds were safe for me because I was like You know four foot tall and one of you know, two or three not white kids at a school that was relatively working-class at least through my early elementary and then through my middle school years and so I was you know kind of harassed and bullied and I was tough and mean and so I
00:10:04
Speaker
Wasn't necessarily willing to like acquiesce at the same time I mean, you know, I was also like trained in Aikido from a very young age My father has a fifth degree black belt and I have a black belt and I trained and taught actually at some points and then I kind of found wrestling as a result of You know
00:10:21
Speaker
maybe wanting to protect myself but also just always having that be something which had an appeal to me. Yeah well that's a very sports in general can do this but especially a sport of that nature where you can really take on an adversary and like really you can as you write about in the book and also in your essay too how like one of your father's proud father's proudest moments of you is like when you really just ground out a match
00:10:45
Speaker
and like won it with pure grit and that's something that probably spoke a lot to your personality at the time you know having been maybe a little bit bullied and then being able to grind something out against someone must have been very validating and you know supportive for you through that time.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, my folks were good. I was probably nearly kicked out of my early elementary school because I fought so many times. But when the principal would call my mother, my mother would be like, oh, he was bullied again. I told them they'd do that again. You hit him in the face. So, you know.
00:11:18
Speaker
I would not not probably parent to the year material early on there but but actually I think that that's actually probably one of the things they carried me was my parents need to have my back because I wasn't unfair to other kids. Yeah. I was quiet and silent and super super kind and I had a lot of will and willpower and so you know I found a sport where you could take yourself pretty far
00:11:43
Speaker
really on the basis of will. I think that one of the things that I learned from that sport carried me a long way even though I probably wasn't meant finally to be an athlete given that I don't have a great deal of athletic talent.
00:11:57
Speaker
you know sports a lot of times the the principle of the athletic endeavor can apply to a lot of things I think it's really really applies to the arts in a lot of ways dealing with a sort of rejection and then that perseverance and what did you take away from your athletic endeavors that you've applied to your your writing career well I think the emphasis on process is something that you learn in sports yeah and I you know and I think I would really stand
00:12:25
Speaker
stand by that idea that you need to pay more attention to how it is you're doing, what you're doing, and not what the outcome necessarily is. I think persistence and tenacity are all things that I probably in some ways found through sports to some extent. I think I needed those things certainly to sort of
00:12:50
Speaker
make it through a literary climate that's not always rewarding to literary writers, at least ones that aren't necessarily the most commercial. I think that I did learn a lot of things from athletics. The culture of athletics was not necessarily one which was always, I think, particularly kind to a serious, nerdy, intellectual young person at the same time.
MFA and Finding Voice
00:13:13
Speaker
But I kind of thought- It's like in Parsley Blues, James Van Der Beek's character, he's reading Kecher and the Rye in his playbook.
00:13:20
Speaker
I don't know if you've seen that, but it's a classic, an example of that, right? Yeah, it's funny you talk about process, because Brian Cranston, the actor who played Walter White, I'm Breaking Bad, among other things, and I've heard interviews with him, but also in his recent book, A Life in Parts,
00:13:44
Speaker
he talks about um... and he felt like he was playing on the junior varsity level for a long time in his acting career we use the already is making money doing commercials and that parts here uh... but he was always he was a little too focused on outcome and i was when he started focusing on on process and having process be the reward and of itself that's when things really start to take off for a minute i think it in any endeavor like this like if you try to focus on
00:14:11
Speaker
or money or wherever your publication credits are coming from, you'll drive yourself mad. So I think exactly what you're saying is like focusing on the process has to be its own reward. That's right. Well, and at least from my perspective, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't consider things like what will sell or market or what people actually want to read or what they find entertaining, right? I think that most writers take those things into account. But to me, you know,
00:14:39
Speaker
It's pretty easy to despair when you look out at the, you know, at the literary environment and you kind of roll your eyes, like what is it that is valued? How are things marketed? What is that marketing consist of? Could you really write something for the market that would be, you know, anything honestly, but like sort of imitative drag? And at least in my case, that's not true. I think there are people who, I'm not saying that you, I couldn't write an essay for a purpose or do something like that, right?
00:15:06
Speaker
To me, I got to have my heart in it. And then I have to have something to say or something at stake in me, especially in nonfiction. And those are the things that can drive me. And so really, like, you know, trying to trying to trying to chase the money has never really been has never really been in my wheelhouse. And I've learned that I had to trust that impulse rate, which just means sticking with the process and how you would write. It took me a lot of years to get the MFA out of my system.
00:15:37
Speaker
As a writer, I learned to trust myself again. And so increasingly, that's sort of what I turned to. I need to let my own inner compass guide me.
00:15:47
Speaker
That's, it's funny you say that, get the MFA out of your system. That same thing happened to me. It's when, during my time at my MFA program, an agent came down, he gave a talk to everyone, he like ruffled a lot of feathers by saying like, what he's looking for, he's like, oh, problem with a lot of, you know, basically like you guys, is he's like the MFA voice.
00:16:12
Speaker
which always comes across as this kind of uniform, far too poetic and lyrical. And I felt like the MFA kind of, in some senses, drummed out what was sort of raw and natural about my own skill and talent, whatever that was. So yeah, it took a good three to four years of
00:16:34
Speaker
I don't know, finding that voice again. What was that process like for you, like trying to get back to who you were, that eight-year-old kid writing instead of what you were taught at the MFA? Well, I think in some ways, I had the good fortune of writing a thinly veiled memoir as a novel in some ways early on that pushed me towards parts of the work that became this book, Teacher, and that was
00:17:04
Speaker
a way a kind of gift because while it didn't work as fiction when I stripped away what was made up, which wasn't very much, and then tried to inhabit what was true, it very quickly had some life. I think, though, that I had a lot of ideas about what
00:17:26
Speaker
um what was good and what kind of writer i needed to be and i mean you know i had teachers who perhaps meant well and did a lot to teach me how to read but who you know um because i was young you know imposed some of their ideas uh good naturedly right or or enthusiastically but about what you know anything that i was creating should be or you know
00:17:51
Speaker
people who wanted me to write like the only three or four writers that they respected, which, you know, essentially were, you know, no, going no further afield, perhaps, then Chekhov, Babel, O'Connor, and, you know, and maybe Malamud, if you wanted to, you know, get a little ethnic, I guess we have to just but I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's
00:18:19
Speaker
which is not like a, those are wonderful writers who I take a lot from. Um, but I think that, you know, I think that one thing that sometimes young writers mistake when they go through an MFA is the idea that they have to be what it is that their teachers will respond to or enjoy. Um, and, and not understanding perhaps that even those teachers themselves wouldn't want them to be an imitation of Flannery O'Connor.
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah.
Themes in 'Teacher'
00:18:50
Speaker
Right. Yeah. You know, I just think that I'm glad that I learned to appreciate those books and those writers in fiction. The thing that's nice is that because I didn't get my MFA in nonfiction, it left my prose voice relatively untouched. So my prose voice, my nonfiction prose voice. Yeah. And so when I went back to that, when I wasn't explicitly writing fiction as much,
00:19:16
Speaker
You know, I think in some ways I became more willfully and idiosyncratically the person that I already was as opposed to trying to do something else.
00:19:25
Speaker
Whereas most of the fiction that I wrote on my MFA was really pretty awful. I saw this great interview with Cheryl Strayed on YouTube and she had this great question. It's kind of like a two-part question that she poses to her workshop students. The first is, what question is at the core of your work?
00:19:50
Speaker
Before I go to the second one, I'd want to ask you, when you were writing Teacher or some essays, but especially Teacher, what question was at the core of that throughout the writing process as you were sort of generating the pages? I think that frequently the question that I'm asking is, or that is often being posed is, let's say,
00:20:20
Speaker
what is true that I don't want to admit both within myself and about the world that I'm interacting in. So in teacher that plays out and most especially with regards to myself and some of the culpability that I think I had for you know some of the things I did which were not particularly educational. You know imposing my ideals and my ideas onto those kids
00:20:50
Speaker
having expectations which weren't maybe necessarily possible, expecting to somehow fix an immensely divided and segregated and racist society and heal somehow those kids and push them towards some sort of bright future. My idea of self was predicated on that, and so of course it was completely crushed, right? And I had to tell myself some other story.
00:21:20
Speaker
that usually I think what's driving me is sort of like, what is it that I think is true? And then beneath that, what is actually going on? And finally, I think beneath that, you know, what, let's say, how do I reckon with the mistakes that I've made or the things that I am culpable for, or the harm that came to others, and my role in it, and then how do I,
00:21:50
Speaker
how do you go on and how do you go on and keep your sense of yourself and how do you find some sort of strength in those things? That sounds like not a very clear answer necessarily to that question, but it actually kind of undergirds most essays I write, whether I'm writing about home and family or friends or trauma or event or these kids who I love despite
00:22:21
Speaker
everything else that maybe was in the way there. And, you know, I think when Stray would probably say something like it's all writing towards love, right? But, you know, which I think is in some ways a fair and correct and not always useful answer. But I think for me, I'm always sort of saying, OK, so what did I care about? What was here? There's something here and there's something that I don't know. So it's always got to be that posing to the question. And so I think what is true is maybe not the best way of phrasing that. But
00:22:50
Speaker
There's something like that that usually has to do with me trying to hold myself responsible. And how good or not good an essay is that I write usually hinges on how much was at stake and how much I've given up. Yeah. Yeah. And her next question is like if you were so compelled to answer, if that first question is what gets you to
00:23:16
Speaker
to the computer, to the page to get the work going. At some point you need to put it in terms of someone on the other side of that book. And so like what is the question that you're trying to answer for others was the other question she was asking. And it could be in this instance you're trying to illustrate just what it's like to be for these students, what it's like to be them, but also to be on the other side trying to make an impact and make that change.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think, you know, and I mean, once a book goes out into the world, then you end up spending a lot of time thinking about something that I wouldn't use the vulgar term marketing, right? But you think about how you talk about the book and its relevance to other people. You know, yeah, I think trying to think about it like in the body of my work, what is it I'm trying to show or do I do think I think that if if
00:24:17
Speaker
What is true or at stake that I don't want to admit, um, or how I can sort of arrive that it's something that is felt, um, and significant is, is what drives me when I'm sitting down and I'm just trying to feel my way towards that intuitively. I think what makes, you know, the work relevant to others, no matter what I'm running about usually is that if I've done that right, I think I've given something up that's honest and
00:24:46
Speaker
With regards to this book, you know, I think that what, what the book does is it's true. It, it shows you educational inequality. It shows you, um, it shows you that America has clearly not come so far from the persistent, you know, um, racial inequalities that stemmed from American history, especially in a place like Rome, Mississippi.
00:25:13
Speaker
Um, for, for young black people who didn't have a choice about which side of the tracks they were born into. Um, I think that, you know, and I think that it also in some ways has to do with the intersection of myself and, and that the, the story that I, that I tell that people haven't necessarily seen is, you know, my own sort of intersectionality. And, you know, it's, uh, as the kids would say, it's, it's, you know, it's the American samurai or the China man. Yeah.
00:25:42
Speaker
It comes through the Delta to teach the kids. And I don't give anybody a savior story because that wasn't my story to tell. And so I think in those ways, I think there is a hunger for teaching narratives that don't do the two things that we usually expect.
00:26:03
Speaker
And it's funny, backing up a little bit, you kind of like disparage your own intelligence with regards to your brother, but you did go to this little place called Stanford. And so what was going
Teaching in Mississippi Experience
00:26:21
Speaker
through Stanford, did you always wanna be a teacher or did you come to that partway through your schooling?
00:26:30
Speaker
You know, I never really had all the, I never would have said that education was what I was first and foremost interested in. I didn't think of myself as an educator or a teacher necessarily. I was doing things which were instructional. I was teaching Aikido classes. I helped like create a class that dealt with sort of like multiracial identity issues and, and, uh, and I, I guess I did some other things which were relative instructional, but I, I, that was never my intent.
00:26:58
Speaker
Um, I think more I lucked into teaching and having taught badly and then learn to teach better and having seen what that meant. You know, I've sort of found myself, I found myself being made an educator. Um, I, you know, I mean, that's, I guess the other thing that this book is about in a lot of ways, nothing else really that I have done with my life, certainly writing.
00:27:25
Speaker
I don't think as significant as the time that I spend in the classroom, even when I'm not being a very good teacher. Because I think that it enables me to give as generously as I possibly can to other people, especially, you know, teaching writing now to 18-year-olds, and I should say 18-year-olds who are low-income, first-gen students of diverse background. So, usually those kids, they haven't had a lot sort of handed to them.
00:27:53
Speaker
And they're super, super capable, but they've not always gone to excellent schools. And I can validate their experiences and get them to learn to sort of find their voices. And doing that makes me into a better version of myself. So, you know, teaching something I found, but it's been sort of the great gift in a lot of ways. It's the gift that the kids in Mississippi gave me in some ways. Not gift of teaching well, but the gift of knowing that I wanted to do that thing better.
00:28:20
Speaker
And what drew you to the Teach for America program? As you mentioned, too, that's real competitive to get into. And so what drew you to that? It's hyper competitive. I was idealistic. And the truth is that I, and it's not in this book because I'm respecting somebody else's privacy, but I followed somebody else who was my longtime partner in college, throughout college, who really wanted to go.
00:28:50
Speaker
And it was a far better teacher than I ever will be, actually. So I, you know, I kind of followed coattails, which sounds ridiculous. But then, you know, I got my ass handed to me so badly that, of course, I sort of needed to go back a second year to try to do it better and so on. But, you know, in a lot of ways, I really did have this, like, you know, dangerous minds idea of what it was I was going to be doing.
00:29:17
Speaker
maybe not coded in the, you know, in the white savior complex sort of way, but I imagined doing something which turned out to be very, very different from what the actual experience was like. Yeah. And how quickly did, as you say, kind of like get your ass handed to you? At what point was it day one? Well, you know, I think
00:29:41
Speaker
I think things started to unravel within certainly the first couple of days. It quickly became clear that I did not know how to manage an actual full-on classroom. I can't exactly get back to, I mean, it's interesting, but it's become a blur even though I've spent an immense amount of time trying to reconstruct and recreate those early, I mean, even like those early three or four months.
00:30:09
Speaker
They all kind of blend together But I think it was I think it was fairly early on Yeah, yeah, but what kind of you know self-talk did you use to try to get yourself into the right mindset to to you know, try to To try to I don't know You know make the
00:30:31
Speaker
make an impact that you wanted to make and get people excited to at least focus for a little bit and maybe show them that there is a lot of potential there. You've dealt with a lot of really bright, hardworking kids there that might not otherwise have been told otherwise. I think I tried to talk the best game that I could.
00:31:01
Speaker
myself talk, I mean, other than the fact that I probably perpetually talk to myself and the crazy person, um, I think that I was probably so overwhelmed in the moment that it was almost, it's almost a, I mean, there is, there's a performativity to teaching, right? So when you're in the act of doing, you don't necessarily know, but the things that I was, you know, telling the kids about what we were doing and why we were doing it and what the world was like and sort of naming those things, um,
00:31:27
Speaker
I was grabbing from every source that I had. I was begging, borrowing, and stealing. I was being positive. I was borrowing from my keto training. I was thinking back to every good teaching experience I ever had and who even really knows exactly what I said or what I really meant.
The Memoir Writing Journey
00:31:46
Speaker
It's interesting to sort of get an alternate perspective because I recently got to talk to a bunch of the kids I taught when I went back to release this book.
00:31:55
Speaker
to the Mississippi Book Festival and then to some bookstores throughout Mississippi. And so I met a bunch of the kids who I had taught. And it's interesting looking back at their version of me, because I'm somewhat hard on myself in this book. And they had this idea of this largely immensely positive experience and these things that they were told that they remembered. Of course, I'm selecting in some ways for those kids who have avoided the incarceration or other things that can happen.
00:32:24
Speaker
when you sort of are coming from that sort of community with those options. But, you know, I remember these kids they finished college and I remember being told that they were going to go to college and that they could. So, you know, it's funny because we think about these things as being, you know, this like this rhetoric, right? But I guess in some ways, I guess in some ways the things that I told them about what we're doing and why or that they could stuck. I was making it all up on the spot.
00:32:54
Speaker
What compelled you to to write the book? Well, I mean, you know, a lot of things in some ways, these kids have stayed with me all of these years. It might sound slightly insane to say that I hear their voices as maybe a late section sort of frames things. But in some ways I do. In some ways I've carried those kids in their lives and their stories with me all of these years. And that was not purely a benign sort of
00:33:24
Speaker
sort of burden burden and inspiration, right, was a burden and a bind. I part of me is always going to be an adult and so I am. Yeah, you know, I wanted to write the book because there was something in about about those kids that I needed to understand, or because I think I needed to tell the story so that I could get back to
00:33:49
Speaker
maybe what was finally true which was that whether or not they were going to be alright or not since there are no guarantees and whether or not what I had done was unforgivable or not. I had been changed and I had loved those kids and in some ways I still do love people that they became. I was young and I didn't know enough to have boundaries.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah, I needed to understand what had happened to me there. But it wasn't really a self focused thing necessarily, except in as much as I'm trying to let the reader also understand what that is. I needed to write the book because I needed to know in some ways that like, what I had done, I could live with if I told the truth about it, as opposed to, you know, the stories that I had told myself. And so I think that that's what that's sort of what I needed to do. It was a way of, you know,
00:34:46
Speaker
It was a way of writing myself whole. I mean, you know, people like to say that writing about something doesn't fix anything. Or as Andre Dubus says, it does not rid me of anything he says in the last essay that he ever publishes in the New Yorker 18 months before he'll die. Right. And I think that that's true, that it doesn't rid you of anything. But I think there's something to be said for the reckoning.
00:35:10
Speaker
or the ways that when witness becomes shared, it releases you from some part of that carrying, even if nobody ever really reads your book and sees what it is. And so, you know, I think for me, that's sort of what finally drove me to the material. You know, I should say I am also writing a novel that is grounded in some ways in these kids and that experience.
00:35:37
Speaker
And I had been sort of these years. When I separated the projects, it became clear to me that, um, it became clear to me that I could write a memoir. And it seems somewhat ridiculous because it sort of took me going to bread loaf in 2012 to just sort of realize that I needed to write a memoir, which just meant I was around all these people and they had all written books and I was supposed to be there with them. And it seemed as if they could write books because they just sat down and wrote them. And they thought, well,
00:36:08
Speaker
maybe I should sit down and write this as a memoir because I did publish the five things that are true from it. And, you know, one's anthologized in the, in, you know, creative nonfiction is best of in the third edition. And one of them just got taken by creative nonfiction and one of them's in Guernica and the other one, the Oxford American just paid me for. And, you know, I guess maybe this is a nonfiction project. It seems ridiculous, right? But, you know, at the time,
00:36:37
Speaker
I thought of those as being these alternate projects and the real project was this other thing. And so I let go of that project, that fiction project and said, okay, I'm going to inhabit this. And I had a manuscript in four months. Wow. And then I went back to the fiction, which I'm nearly done with. So it's a weird sort of world, right? We force these forms of these ideas on the things or we have ideas about what something has to be. And I wish that I knew
00:37:05
Speaker
12 or 13 years ago when I started doing all this that you had to just trust yourself and let the work be its own forum and not depend on your teachers or other people to tell you what it was. What was that four month sort of binge write like? What was your routine throughout that whole process as you were generating a book in 16 weeks?
00:37:32
Speaker
Well, I mean, so I had the good fortune of having formed a certain number of pieces into nonfiction, um, which actually was because I wrote them as fiction. And then I realized every single thing I had said in them was true. Yeah. And so, and so I tried, you know, so I tried sending them out and of course they got, they got taken really quickly and I was like, Oh, okay. Like, I guess that means that these are good. So I had these sort of core sections so that they got validation.
00:37:58
Speaker
Um, but, but I didn't have, I needed to go back and figure out what was also true. Um, and, and so I, um, I, you know, I looked at the fiction manuscript and I, I saved some pages, not very much, but some some of it that was within the realm of nonfiction, uh, with some changes and inhabiting it. And then I just started, I went back to the source material because I had the good fortune of having written, um, these long sort of like email letter.
00:38:28
Speaker
Word document things. And it was, I mean, it was like 250 pages of prose that I had saved. I wasn't able to use most of it. Um, but I, I had that, that sort of immediate raw source of what it was that I had written down and said when I was there. So it was very easy to see the things that I wanted to believe that now I could see were not true with the years that had waited there, but I had that to look back at. And then I just sort of let myself, so what's the word, let myself refer right to rhythm and see.
00:38:58
Speaker
which sounds sort of silly, but like, that's actually my like, I'm, I'm, I'm, let's see. I am a terrible poet, and I'm not very lyrically gifted, but I do write to rhythm and sound. And so I just let myself sort of, you know, write what was there. And it was quick, you know, I mean, I'm saying four months, but I mean, it was probably
00:39:22
Speaker
There were a couple stops, which was I got a bunch of it together initially and sort of didn't construct it or form it. And I sent it to my friend, Heather Ryan is a really brilliant prose writer and also the person who helped me start the Oregon writers collective. And then she, um, and she wrote back, like, you know, this seems good, but this is not a book. So write it as a book. And so then I went back and sort of reword again and then, you know, and then write, founded an agent, rather relatively quick for it. We did another revision and it was off. So.
00:39:52
Speaker
And the initial title was Gone. Is that right? I think that was one of the work. Yeah, that was the working title when I went to the editors with it. In the creative nonfiction essay, The Southern Sin issue, it was like, you know, it was, you know, in your little bio, it said it was, you know, tentatively titled Gone. And I wanted to ask you, like, what that meant and why that was the working title and why you ultimately went with teacher. Yeah.
00:40:22
Speaker
Um, well, so, you know, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of children speaking, which is really the, the dialect that I know, uh, note that I, that I could try to recreate for the page and the system that I created for dialect to try to represent it is phonetic. Uh, that is the sounds are there and not necessarily in the spelling is there so that you'll read the word the way that it sounds, even if it's not necessarily the meaning, right? I don't use apostrophes and things like that. Yeah.
00:40:52
Speaker
And so, of course, gone means absence to most of us, and I was long out of the Delta, and much of what I was thinking about were things which seemed to me irretrievably lost in the past, but gone, you know, as the kids would say it, in a book which is really based around them and their voices, is, you know, it means going to. Right? Which is imminence.
00:41:21
Speaker
in absence imminence or something like that. I think that's the definition of immanence, right? I don't actually know how to pronounce that word. I've never said it out loud. But, you know, there's something in that idea that has always been sort of central to the things that I'm writing about. And so I, you know, it's poetic and I could tell a little story about it and it seemed to me to be appropriate. Of course, it was going to be read as gone.
00:41:50
Speaker
Like Gone Girl or there's already a 14 books called Gone and there was just a blockbuster that had come out that was called Gone and so, you know, yeah, my agent got it. He was like, nope. So how was it very difficult for you to to relive a lot of the material that you wrote about to kind of dig at that scar? I think it was difficult.
00:42:18
Speaker
It's interesting to try to go back into what that was and what it meant. You kind of put it all in, and it's not catharsis. When you get beyond something, you have to sort of live it or own it. I did it over so many different periods of time that I think I always helped in some ways. But I would finish a lot of these individual chapters, especially those that are a bit of a punch to the gut. I mean, it would take me down for a few days.
00:42:46
Speaker
you know, but often I let myself process these things as they would come up to in some of these sections that get put in, you know, so I found out a lot of the things that I described finding out. I didn't write those things, so many of them after the factor, you know, I was working with things that I had tried to write when I found out something had happened, so. When you look back at your 22-year-old self, like, who do you see when you see that person?
00:43:16
Speaker
You know, it's interesting to me because I used to think, you know, I saw such arrogance and naivete and I was those things. Everyone at 22 is. Right? Yeah, you inevitably are. You'll be arrogant again, you know, and again and again.
00:43:39
Speaker
I actually think that I look back now at that person and as much as obviously the innocence and the naivete and the arrogance were all going to be there, I see a kid with a good heart who didn't know any better than the world he had sort of reckoned with and I didn't know what it was that I was seeing or what it meant
00:44:06
Speaker
It's taken me a lot of years to be able to look back at what I saw in Mississippi and recognize, you know, among other things, just how deeply, how deeply unjust and hypocritical a country we inhabit and what the system is or means, right?
Leaving Mississippi and Guilt
00:44:27
Speaker
We like to use this language about the American dream or the system. But, you know, finally, when I,
00:44:36
Speaker
When I was there, I still believed in the rhetoric of uplift and nose to the grindstone and hard work. It's not that I don't believe in those things. Still, most people believe in those things or try to do those things. I think when I look back at it, I see that I was basically a young person who had to be woken up.
00:45:05
Speaker
to in some ways what America really was and that only my own sort of unending failures could do that. And then I would have to leave and reckon with the guilt of what that was because the truth was that I did have a tremendous amount of privilege and good fortune. You know, I had parents who were still married and who had given me every educational opportunity I could have. I didn't necessarily have.
00:45:34
Speaker
a life free from facing, you know, various kinds of other racism, but those were institutional barriers to my success. And I had, you know, I had no real idea exactly what it was that so many people face in parts of this country because of the legacy of history and the ways that it continues to play out today. And so, you know, when I look back at myself, I just think, what a kindhearted idiot, you know, like, which isn't a bad thing.
00:46:05
Speaker
I think having a good heart can carry you forward, but I wasn't really prepared to have to understand what it was I was seeing or to have to separate my own self-protective tendencies from what it was that was actually occurring.
00:46:24
Speaker
At what point had you made the decision that you would, after your two-year stint was up, that you would head back or leave elsewhere, head back to Oregon or elsewhere? When did you make that decision? I made it late in my late, I made it at some point in my second year.
00:46:46
Speaker
The truth was at that time that I was leaving once again because I had other people who I was, you know, paying attention to. I applied to only one graduate program, not understanding that I was applying to like, you know, the number five program in the country and I should probably have applied to many. I just applied at home because in Oregon is where supposedly, you know, my future was going to be. And I don't know what I would have done exactly if I had had a different set of choices, but I don't want to be
00:47:15
Speaker
I, in no way could I pin this on somebody else to say that, you know, I was following some sure thing or that I didn't in some ways want to be released from what it was that I was doing. Um, at the same time, you know, as, as I talk about in the book, I don't know that I'll ever really be able to let go of having left, even though I wasn't going to have the same kids in the classroom again or whatever. Right. Um, I, you know, I had, I didn't probably teach as well as I could have.
00:47:44
Speaker
That's for sure. And I also think that, you know, I think that we need people in those schools who are really committed to doing what they can. Not that the solution to educational inequality is teach for America or outsiders coming in necessarily. But just that, you know, the person that I might have become if I was there, we could have been a better teacher. The side is I wasn't meant to teach nine-year-olds.
Teacher Community
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah, I know that's kind of a roundabout answer, but I'm not exactly sure how to answer that question still because a part of me will always sort of look back and be unable to answer the kid who was like, do you want to leave? You know, and what am I to say? No, at least I wouldn't leave you and, you know, get me to a place with a coffee shop.
00:48:32
Speaker
You know what I mean? Like a restaurant where I won't be sort of stared at. You know. You know you detail so well the day to day of being in the classroom and some of the take away like when you get away when you're heading home.
00:48:56
Speaker
What were the down periods like when you were out of the classroom or on the weekends or even on Sunday as you're gearing up for another week? I had roommates and I had three really close friends in the town that I was in.
00:49:14
Speaker
or my roommate. And that community really carried me. These three women, it was very heavily women in the particular town that I was teaching in, which I call Promise in the book. And then my roommate my second year was just fantastic. And there was so much solidarity among the teachers at a school or the people there. It's not surprising that we sort of formed our own very small
00:49:44
Speaker
tight friendships because we were sort of going through the same thing. Yeah, it's pretty common to anyone who's in that sort of core or, you know, cohort or something like that, right, where they're training for something or they're doing something and the intensity of what it was we were sort of doing was that there was also sort of the very broad demographics of just like the the elitism of the program, right, is pretty resounding. But you know, what you had were
00:50:14
Speaker
immensely sort of intellectually capable and immensely educated young people doing something which they were completely out of their depth to actually be any good at. And so, you know, it's not surprising that we sort of, you know, we would hang out we would
00:50:31
Speaker
go to a restaurant, someone would throw a party, you know, because we were often spread really far out in the Delta, you know, you would drive to a party 40 or 50 miles away and think of it. Yeah, there were various professional events where you would do things and so on. So you know, you needed those things as sort of an outlet and a release. So there was weekends and then with my friends in town. These these three women and and and Mr. my roommate and I we would, you know,
00:50:59
Speaker
we would often go places if we didn't have something else that was taking us. So we would go into Oxford for the weekend to just hang out at the bookstore and the coffee shop and have restaurant food and stuff like that. Or we would go into Memphis a lot of times, be in food, you know?
Current Projects and Online Presence
00:51:21
Speaker
Or Jackson.
00:51:25
Speaker
And so we would often do that and take our stacks of grading there and just sort of like, I'll crash in like one hotel room on the floor and whatnot. Very nice. So before, I want to be respectful of your time. I know you got to get going, but just a couple more things. So what's next for you right now? What are you working on now that's exciting you? Well, you know, so I'm always writing Oregon essays.
00:51:51
Speaker
I write sometimes about wrestling, and I write about growing up here, and I write about, you know, kayaking and running rivers. And I think I'll always continue that work that has to do with myself and my family. And I don't think of that necessarily as being a book length project. I found myself writing in some ways about gentrification and inequality in Portland, and most particularly race right now. And I found myself writing some teaching essays as a result of sort of going through
00:52:19
Speaker
Mr. Trump's election with students who are particularly affected by what it is that's just sort of happened And it's happening in our country But I don't know that those things will necessarily lead to a book length project right now I'm working on a on a novel or a novel in stories I guess we might call it better sort of in the voices of kids and who knew a fictional Mississippi town and me
00:52:44
Speaker
Asian teacher that they encounter there. The opposite in some ways of the flip side of what it is that this book is. I'm pretty far into that and I have high hopes for where it might go. It's a difficult book to get the buy-in for because on the one hand, rightfully, we're at a time where black people are demanding the right to represent themselves and that is
00:53:15
Speaker
And that is absolutely their right. And at the same time, we have a general literary audience who is not particularly interested in reading a book in which black children or poor black children are speaking, whether it's not sort of, let's say, telling you some sort of happy or simple story. Let alone a book in which those things are meeting and sort of like the book that I already wrote, there's
00:53:40
Speaker
You know, an outsider who comes in and there's this sort of strange world. So we'll see what ends up happening with it. Yeah, but it sounds like as you were alluding to earlier, you know, you trust trusting your gut and your instincts here. So it sounds like the way you want to write the story is like you probably are going to keep pursuing that because it's just kind of what feels right for you. I'm nearly done with it. And I, you know, to be fair with it, I think I should say that, you know,
00:54:06
Speaker
portions of it have been published in some very, very good magazines or a lot of the individual chapters. And I think I'm very close to maybe, maybe finding some homes for it at very, very good venues. Um, and so, you know, parts of it, I should say, because it's publishable like that. I believe in the book and I think it will find a home finally. Um, and you know, it would be nice to let that go too, because I've been working on that project as long as I've been working on, you know, any of this material in some way. So,
00:54:33
Speaker
If I reach this memoir after 12 years, you can imagine carrying something else around 14, right? I'm ready to let that go. But in the meantime, I'm always going to be writing non-fiction because, you know, in some ways, I am an essayist, I think. Whatever else I am. And I found sort of my groove in that, you know, at some point you stop trying to be the writer that you're not.
00:54:57
Speaker
Just sort of accept what you can do. Yeah, absolutely. And lastly, Mike, where can people find you online and try to find your work? I'll try to link to everything I can and show notes, but where can people find you? Yeah, so mikecopperman.com has a lot of information about the book, and there's direct tabs where you can order from IndieBound or Amazon, if you wish.
00:55:23
Speaker
And, you know, I think a Google search of my name tends to yield a bunch of things as well that are out there. But the website's a pretty good start in terms of getting a sense of at least this book project.
Closing and Giveaway Offer
00:55:34
Speaker
And I'm excited, you know, right now we're nearly sold out the first print run. That's awesome. So if, you know, if your readers want to get a first edition copy of this book, they should get it sooner. But strangely enough, this book has found some traction and some readers. So it's been a pleasure to sort of let that happen.
00:55:53
Speaker
And so hopefully, you know, hopefully folks would find it and help keep that rolling.
00:56:23
Speaker
from you. It was such a pleasure to have this conversation and to talk, you know, writing and craft and childhood. Yeah. With another writer. It all informs what we're doing today for sure. So anyway, thanks so much, Mike, and we'll be in touch for sure. Great. Thanks for having me. Take care, Mike. You too.
00:56:44
Speaker
If you've made it this far, I've got a treat for you. I have two hardcover first printing copies of Mike Opperman's teacher. And he will sign and personalize them. And the first two people to email me, go find it, it's not too hard.
00:57:09
Speaker
I will ship personalized signed first editions of Mike's wonderful book, Teacher, and I mail it to you at my expense as a thank you for listening. So what are you waiting for? Get in line.