By MARTY LEVINE

Shannon Reed has worked in many of the fine arts on her way to becoming director of undergraduate studies in the Writing Program of Pitt’s English department. She was a cellist in high school in Johnstown, a theater major in college, a teacher of high school English and theater in Brooklyn and a playwright and widely published humor writer most recently.

But it was her brother’s experience with a political science degree at Pitt that prompted her to land here finally, she told the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on Feb. 11.

“I realized that I really loved writing and I wanted to study it in more depth,” Reed said. “I do now think of myself as a writer. But it’s a difficult title to take on.

“I was a reluctant teacher” at first, she admitted. “My mom was a teacher and my grandmother was a teacher and it’s not that I’ve always loved working with children and youth.  … I didn’t like the expectation that was put on me that teaching was something a girl could do. When I was growing up in Western Pennsylvania, and even going to get a theater degree … then maybe I could become a teacher — that’s what girls are supposed to be. You’re a nurse, you’re a mom, could be a teacher — you could be some combination of those three — and I really didn’t like that.”

Eventually, she has taught students in every grade except one — and now, of course, undergraduate students. “I’m a better teacher of college students than I was of preschool students,” she said. Teaching, she has discovered, is “incredibly fulfilling and incredibly meaningful. I always say: In teaching, even a bad day, you have affected someone, done something good to someone.”

Writing, she added, “is a very solitary, introverted task and teaching is very performative and extroverted, and I’m in the middle of those things, so having both is really good.

“My students over the years have really helped me by being themselves, by being brave enough to express what they needed or wanted in the classroom, by sharing what they’re writing when they felt vulnerable or didn’t feel like this was the absolute best thing they’ve ever written. The trust that I have felt from them, the care I have felt from them, has also been incredibly motivating for me to want to continue in the classroom.

Asked to describe the best part of her job, Reed replied: “Being the director of undergraduate studies, we have almost 250 undergraduate creative writing majors and about 115 minors in the program, so it’s a lot of students. I don’t have significant contact with all of them, but I do encounter them in their work, and I think what I find particularly meaningful is that the world is difficult and chaotic place right now — it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re dealing with, there’s a lot that’s in an upheaval, all the time, and I love the space in my classroom and office and in the courses we offer for the high prioritizing of artistic expression and the sharing of the self and written word. I just think that it’s been so meaningful for me in my life and it’s so powerful for these people whether they’re writing poetry or essays or short stories or a fantasy novel or whatever, however they’re expressing that …

“The biggest mistake people make in writing,” she explained, “is actually expecting themselves to be perfect in the first draft. There’s this expectation that real writers sit down and crack their fingers and then it’s perfect, and that is actually not true.”

Experienced writers, she said, “agonize out a draft and then feel defeated because it’s not great and then put it away for a couple hours and come back and look at it. The process is not, ‘I’ve crafted something beautiful and now it’s done.’ The process is, ‘Yes, I will try to get one sentence now, then I get a cookie.’ … That process is the same whether you’ve never written before (or) you’re an established writer. … I always say to my students, ‘We’re just going to get something on the page and then we’ll have something on the page to work on. That’s all we’re doing. We’re not thinking about publishing, we’re not thinking about submitting.’

“The other thing I would say is: Give yourself time. Often with my writing I will say all I have to do is write three sentences. I’m going to write three sentences or I’m going to write for five minutes. And then sometimes after three sentences or five minutes I’m, like, great, that’s it, that’s all I could do.”

Or, she said, “I’ll be engaged and I’ll stay and keep going. But even if I stop at three sentences, when I come back the next day or two days later there’s three sentences instead of a blank screen, which means that my subconscious is working on thinking about what I’m going to do.”

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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