Many years ago, I taught college composition at a small art and illustration college in Chicago. The students in my classes were a diverse and irrepressibly creative bunch with an intimidating range of writing confidence and experience—a true challenge for a relatively inexperienced writing instructor. My attempts to make them love and appreciate writing as much as I did were clunky and artificial at best in the earliest years of my career, but over time, as I got comfortable with my own insecurities and fears, I stopped trying to tell them how to feel about and experience writing and started listening to how they already felt about and experienced writing.
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