Welcome to the first ever blog post from The Blue Earth Review! I’m Jake, a Co-Managing Editor for this
upcoming year. We’re excited to be entering a new phase in the life of this
publication. We hope you enjoy it and stay with us. I’m a second year MFA
student at Minnesota State, Mankato, and I have the honor of teaching freshman
composition to 25 irritated-looking students every semester.
Having spent at least a small part of my life in the so-called ‘real
world,’ one of my biggest frustrations was the inability to have intelligent,
interesting, and challenging conversations outside of Academia. I don’t think
it had anything to do with the people who populate the non-academic world, but
rather what was required of people on an everyday basis. The jobs are
largely tedious and impersonal, requiring a level of disengagement with the surroundings. Whether one is working in retail, food service, or
an office environment, there’s almost always a corporate mentality that leaves
one feeling separate from the outcome of one’s work. There’s no true investment
of passion or pride in what is being done on a daily basis.
On the other side of things, one of the aspects I enjoy most about
being back in Academia, at least for a while, is the honest and earnest
conversation that can be had. I’ll be the first to admit that we can tend to
get sucked into our own world in Academia, forgetting that people are out
there, actually living lives “of quiet desperation” while we chat about
metaphor. But there’s something to be said about doing and talking about
something sincerely. Because so little of this happens anywhere else, it
can feel like exhaling in a comfortable place that you forgot existed.
This is because earnestness can be hard to find in oneself, and―sometimes―even
harder to take in others.
My family has always been very supportive of my writing and “career”
choices. I would go so far as to say, with the little I’ve accomplished,
that they are “proud” of me. And yet, they loathe talking to me at any length
about what it is that I’m trying to do. If I talk about something earnestly for
even thirty seconds, eye rolls abound. God forbid if I am moved by a line or
paragraph or poem and wish to share it with them. If I start to read aloud, I
am met by desperate, annoyed shouts: “STOP! Please.
Stop.” It seems painful to them in the way the sound of my alarm clock is to
me.
I recognize their pained shouts in myself sometimes, when I lash out at
someone who loves something I’ve chosen to criticize. My anger isn’t that they
disagree with me, but that they’ve found something of value in a place where I couldn’t.
So I’m trying to put away my disdain and my judgment, my condescension and my
eye rolling.
It’s too easy and cathartic to mock someone who’s passionate about
something weird. Too easy to accuse someone of single-mindedness when they keep
bringing a topic back to the subject of their obsession. But a person with
obsessions is honest and alive and interesting. These are people we can learn
from and renew our own fervency from. I will not dismiss the Twi-hards, the
Trekkies, or the Superhero Junkies; the Taxidermists, the Turtle Collectors, or
the Yoga Practitioners; the Twerkers, the Vegans, or the Gamers; I will do my
best to sit still and learn from the genuine fixations of others that make me
uncomfortable. I swear to God, I’ll never stop you reading me a poem.-Jake Little
