Writing vs Teaching

‘vs’? Really?
I have spent a lot of time this summer pondering just that.
Teaching has always been a large part of my career, starting with the occasional workshop in my kids’ schools, and then moving on to:
* workshops for kids with specific learning disabilities
* poetry and music workshops in schools both in England and Ireland
* writing workshops for adult writers at various festivals and programmes
* two years as Writer-in-Residence at The University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
* writing workshops in Cambodia
Teaching has always been a large part of what I do. I love it, and to be honest, I seem to be pretty good at it. But up until this point, it has always been an adjunct to my writing life. Writing was what I did. And teaching was a happy offshoot.
 
But as I wrote about in my blog here, my Cambodian writing workshop has exploded. It is now a program called Writing Through Cambodia, with workshops being held in schools and NGO’s throughout the country. And plans are in progress to expand it even beyond the borders of that first country. It started to feel as if all of this was running away with me lagging behind, and so I spent much of the summer thinking long and hard about the role of teaching in my career, how important it is to me, and how it connects with my own writing.
 
You often hear writers say that they teach in order to make a living. Lord knows, most of us can’t make much money from our writing alone. People have often said to me, “You’re so lucky that you can spend your time writing without all the bother of teaching.” Hmmm. Well, there are always things which can interfere with writing time. You don’t need to be a full time teacher or professor to have that happen. But here I am now with a choice. How much time do I want to devote to running, developing and expanding Writing Through? Am I on the verge of choosing one over the other? If I end up spending more time teaching than writing over the next year or so, will that mean I am still a writer?
 
This turned out to be quite an existential question for me and the answer came when I started to think about “my bookshelf.” 
 
I published my first poem in my first magazine ten years ago. Since then, I’ve filled most of an entire bookshelf with my publications. Why was I surprised about this? I don’t know, but I was. And it made me realise that writing isn’t just what I do, it is who I am. Everything else grows out of that fact and is sustained by it. But teaching is something I love. It feeds me in a very special way, and it gives me a purpose outside of myself and within the world around me.
 
All the talking and thinking and scheming of the summer has led me to this conclusion — the writing program I have started is now crucial to who I am and what I do. I want to, and need to, devote as much time as it takes to get it right and to help it reach the people who are asking for it. Maybe this will mean that I write a bit less than I  have over the past decade. Maybe it will mean there will be fewer poems. Maybe the next novel will take a bit longer to write. But that’s okay, because I trust that the things I feel inside me that I need to write, I will write. I am still a writer, just as I have always been a teacher. And there need be nothing adversarial between the two. For me, it can’t be writing VS teaching. It must be writing-teaching, both together, supporting and  underlining each other. Maybe that seems obvious to others. But it took me two months of soul searching to figure it out.