A Certain Sincerity

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