From within the Tempest

The first inklings of this website began several ago when I started teaching this course on Systemic Analysis. I saw what my students were writing, and I knew that it was not meant for my eyes only. Others would benefit from reading their words. I knew this. And I knew I had to make that happen.

My initial thought was to start a journal of student writing, but I soon realized that this would tell only half the story. My students’ journey as writers was intertwined in my journey as a teacher. I decided to build a website that featured both sides: their essays and the curriculum from which those essays emerged.

My work on this website halted with the pandemic and my wife’s cancer diagnosis. The focus, as with all of us, turned to the day-to-day. The mundane. The traumatic. The catastrophic. My projects fell to the side as I focused on my wife, my toddler, and my students. When I wasn’t focused on them, there was just that numbness we all know too well. Not much room for creating there.

These were the most challenging quarters of my life. The same goes for my students. In class, we kept coming back to the image of a tempest. It felt like we were, and still are, struggling to keep our heads above water. And the waves keep coming. Pandemics. Wildfires. Superstorms. Racist violence. Housing crisis. New variants. Division, division, division. Not to mention the way all of this plays out in our bodies and minds.

Before the pandemic I saw my work in the neoliberal university as throwing lifelines to those trapped in a tempest we are compelled to ignore. These last two years, I found that the lifelines extended both ways. We held each other up in the storm. I’m forever grateful to students for that.

My gratitude is expressed in this website. It’s a labor of love. I envision it as an ark that houses a part of me and my students touched by the tempest but not consumed. I know that together we have built something good, something worth preserving in the storm.

As I built it, I realized a few things: My own writing may have stopped during this period (I stopped my “plague journal” after half an entry). But, in a way, this is my plague journal and my journal of navigating the storm as a teacher and human being. I’m not the writer, but I stand alongside my students.

I realize how much I missed in the storm. With my wife healing and my toddler finding more independent time, I have been able to give the student essays more time and fresh eyes. I am incredibly moved to see what they were capable of expressing from within the tempest. I have presented their work in reverse chronological order. Going through it in this way has been, for me, like taking steps back in time through the pandemic to the “before” times. This is useful since I lost a sense of time during this crisis. Days, months, years bleed into each other. It’s nice to have these voices guiding me back through lost seasons. They help me to measure time, not only in terms of trauma and grief, but also in terms of hope.

In presenting our material here we are extending the same thing we gave each other during the storm: a lifeline from the tempest-tossed to the tempest-tossed. May it serve you and others as well as it serves us.

- Niall Twohig, October 2021