Karen Tei Yamashita – Teaching Statement 2000-01
Associate Professor, Literature/Creative Writing

I came to UCSC in 1997 to teach creative writing and literature. My trajectory into the university is different from most literary academics, but I think it's necessary to talk about it since that history informs my practice as a teacher. I began my writing career in the mid-seventies when I traveled to Brazil to research the immigration of Japanese to that country. I lived in Brazil for almost a decade and returned to the US with a draft of a novel based on that research. From the mid-eighties until my teaching appointment at UCSC, I worked for a public broadcasting television station, raised my family, and wrote. By the time I came to teach, I was a published author of three novels—two based on my experiences and research in Brazil and one on the City of Los Angeles. I had also in the meantime worked in collective efforts in multimedia theater, taught and mentored creative writing at various sites and for the National YMCA WriterÕs Voice. When my books were published in the nineties, I found myself supported not only by my own Asian American community, but by fellow writers, by the publishing community of small independent presses, and by literary scholars who read, critiqued, and engaged in discussions about my work, while also including my books in their courses.

As I began my duties at UCSC, I believed that it was time to return, through teaching and engagement with a new generation of writers and readers, the extraordinary gift of opportunity, travel, research, and support that has made my writing possible. I believed also that I had finally gained the experience and expertise to do so. My dedication to teaching and the sharing of my knowledge is grounded in this ethic of returning a blessing and to extend a sense of generosity to encourage students to fulfill their talents and to pursue their individual and special intelligence.

At the same time, I arrived in Santa Cruz with a great desire to be in a place dedicated to learning. After years of researching and reading on my own, the opportunity to be in a university with an extensive library and among scholars and educators is for me a special boon. In this sense, my teaching is driven by my own desire to learn. One of the questions often asked of writers is whether they are able to write while teaching. The answer from many writers is often a frustrated "no," and it is probably true that not much actual writing gets done during a busy teaching schedule. At the same time I have learned to use the understanding of the university as a research center to create courses that ask questions to create paths of discovery not only for students but for my own research and intellectual awakening. I think of my syllabi as works-in-progress and open-ended structures to introduce students to a body of work and thinking responsive to their curricular needs but also to my own exploratory paths. A portion of the required reading or perhaps a trajectory in the thinking of every course I design is always new to me or experimental; my personal investment in the questions of the course, I think, drives a sense of questing, generates excitement. I ask students to engage with me in the research of the university, to understand their educational process as work done in community.

The Creative Writing Program at UCSC is an undergraduate program within the Literature Department. Literature majors may concentrate in creative writing and are admitted to the concentration by a process of selection. I teach creative writing workshop-seminars in advanced and intermediate fiction, and in methods and materials for writing fiction. I believe our program is ideally situated within the literature department distinguished by its breadth of literary offerings in several languages, covering a wide arc of time periods and theoretical perspectives, giving writers the opportunity to read widely, think critically, while pursuing creative projects. I believe also that writers are best served by their extensive reading of diverse literatures. I mention the larger context of our program because I don't think that I teach in isolation but that I am supported by a program that offers the intellectual background and critical skills needed by writers. I try whenever possible to attend colloquiums and lectures by my fellow professors, in part to be aware of their particular scholarship and literary interests in order to direct students to their courses and writing, and when possible to invite them to share their expertise in our seminars.

My colleagues in creative writing and I have worked over the past years to build a program with continuity and vision, to build among our students a community of writers, a camaraderie of intellectual and creative support. An important strategy for creating community is the involvement of students in the editing and production of literary journals. While professors are not directly involved in this process, we encourage creative writing students to participate as editors and staff and insist that they include, and pass their expertise on, to junior members. Two such literary journals have been ongoing: The Red Wheelbarrow and Chinquapin. I have also helped to initiate a two new on-line projects, both published on the Creative Writing Program website: a student journal, e-Crit, now in its second year, and a new student review journal featuring UCSC alumni authors.

A very important component in the pedagogy of our program is the invitation of authors and of professionals in the business of writing and publication. Every quarter, my colleagues and I host writers who discuss their work and writing process with students in seminars and give public readings of their work on campus. Students are given the opportunity to read, critique, and discuss published work with the writers themselves or to question editors and publishers about their work and careers. This contact with the world of writing is invaluable to students who are trying to find their particular talents and usefulness within the literary world.

Through an Instructional Improvement Program grant, I participated in discussions with other instructors to devise clear strategies for defining beginning, intermediate, and advanced fiction workshops. This has been particularly helpful in guiding students through our program with recognizable markers for passage into subsequent levels of expertise. Beginning workshops initiate students to critique through workshops, stimulate writing through exercises, and introduce basic story concepts. Intermediate workshops emphasize an understanding of traditional formats, in particular the writing of a traditional short story. Advanced workshops encourage students to further explore craft and to gain literary acumen through the realization of individual projects.

Perhaps because I am not a graduate of a writing program, I do not have any particular writing workshop model in mind when I teach. I have conceived the workshop as a "workshop-seminar" in which we combine the traditional workshopping of student creative work with discussions of literary texts in a seminar format. Ideally, students learn the craft of writing through personal experiment and respected examples. For my advanced fiction classes, I usually select fiction or essays by writers of contemporary fiction for exploration. Students work in partnership or groups and make presentations of the material as it relates to their concerns as writers. In this way, we examine from a writerly perspective, questions of craft or technique, genre, meaning, and research, and begin to build a vocabulary and critical framework for reading new creative work. This building of a vocabulary and critical framework is essential to the workshop half of the class, devoted to individual creative writing and to the intense critique and scrutiny of that work in small groups. While I allow students the freedom and responsibility to conduct these small workshops independently, I circulate to the various groups to listen in. I usually reserve my own comments for individual students in writing. In my fall classes, I encourage students to think about writing "books"—a collection of short stories, a novella or novel—in preparation for their senior thesis and to challenge them to find their particular process as writers. In my spring classes, I encourage students to find a rhythm or routine for their writing and to initiate a comprehensive list of authors for summer reading or a plan for researching material for their own writing.

Once a year, I also teach a large lecture course in Asian American literature. Since I have been the only instructor to provide a literature course in this area, I have created a rotation of three courses to examine this literature from various perspectives. I teach an introductory course to offer a broad overview of the literature, following patterns of immigration to the US, while examining cultural contexts, questions of ethnicity, identity, gender, language, and aesthetics. The second course in the rotation looks at this literature in diaspora, focusing on issues of migration, global capitalism, transnationalism, exile, and tourism. The third course has taken a look at the literature as it is situated geographically in the global and cosmopolitan city of Los Angeles, a recipient of multiple migrations of Asian peoples.

Despite the size of lecture classes, I always try to treat these classes as smaller seminars by allowing time for smaller group discussions and by encouraging presentations by students. I have sometimes partnered students as correspondents to encourage interactive commentaries of the reading. Along side of more formal critical papers, I also usually create a creative outlet for student commentaries such that students have variously written personal memoirs, fictional epistolary, created graphic and narrative maps, poetry, short stories, or narrative mimicries to express their critique, understanding of, or engagement with the material. Some of the best writing in these courses has been creative. Encouraging students to approach this literature from a personal or creative involvement changes the dynamic of the classroom, engages students, especially but not only those of Asian ethnicity, in personal epiphanies about the nature of our society, our means for expressing this, and the important work that literary narratives accomplish.

As with my fiction workshops, I always invite a series of authors and lecturers to my literature courses. As an Asian American writer, I have access through friendships to many of these writers and poets, and again, there is no substitute for being able to converse with and to hear the voice of a living writer. In this I have had the support of the Literature Department, the Asian American Studies Cluster, and the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and these lectures and readings have always been open to the larger public on campus. Hosting visiting Asian American writers is also my way of extending outreach between disciplines and to the community beyond the classroom.

I want to thank those students who nominated me for this award and who have supported me through their own enthusiasm for their work. I feel very honored by their recognition. I feel it is really I who should honor our students, some of whom will be the first in their families to graduate from a university, many of whom have worked long and hard to earn the right to learn, all of whom have made a special pact with literature, reading, writing, and a lifetime of learning.