Identity Play

Trying on the identity of writer

As I passed around copies of my essay, I looked directly into the eyes of the seven people sitting around the conference table. I had just met them yesterday, and now I was putting my writing into their hands. I reminded myself that I was writing for me, for fun, to explore a new identity. But words are sacred things to me. I wanted to do them justice. I wanted my classmates to see me as a writer, a good writer. My voice shook a little as I began to read aloud.

I did not picture this moment when I signed up for a class on Literary Selfies, a snappy rebrand of the personal essay. I simply wanted to try on the identity of writer. My kids had moved into their own apartments, and I was jousting with quiet rooms and expanses of time, tentatively lunging forward and then retreating cautiously. I was shopping for a new identity, something that I enjoyed and that felt meaningful, something that fit my declining physical abilities. I had signed up for the class because I was engaged in identity play.

In identity play, we are relaxed, rehearsing a variety of possible selves, looking for those that are enjoyable, keeping our options open. In their article, “Identity Work and Play,” management professors Herminia Ibarra and Jennifer Petriglieri describe identity play as “the process of exploration and discovery necessary for creating new identities.” That, I told myself, is how I would approach the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

When the weekend arrived, I walked into the large auditorium in Phillips Hall, scanning for a seat halfway down the sloping aisle. Normally, I would have walked confidently to the front, greeting the students who were already seated, taking command of the room. But it was a warm summer Saturday morning, and after 20 years as a professor, I settled in as a student ready for orientation.

The students around me looked like writers. Their fresh notebooks and pens were arrayed on the small desks that folded into place as each seat was taken. They perused the topics of Eleventh Hour craft talks and free readings at Prairie Lights. Most students were not from Iowa City, and I felt proud as I thumbed through the coupons for local stores and marveled again that I lived in a UNESCO City of Literature.

Iowa City has been my home for longer than anywhere else I’ve lived, and we fit one another like an old married couple. Of course, the humidity gets old in the summer, and no one should know as much about wind chill as I do, but my shoulders drop away from my ears when I browse at Prairie Lights, scoop popcorn into a paper tray at Joe’s Place, and walk down the Ped Mall on a crisp fall afternoon.

Even so, I was starting to question if I belonged here, in this seat in Phillips Hall. I hung my name tag around my neck, signaling I was a student, a writing student. “I’m just a beginner,” I wanted to shout at everyone around me. But when I joined my class – seven students led by author Amanda Montei – I realized I was not the only one who was uncertain about claiming the identity of writer. We introduced ourselves with our real identities. I’m a psychotherapist, a veterinarian, a professor. But what to say about being a writer? I am a writer in that I write things. I have the right to claim that identity, as did everyone else in the class, but does claiming the identity of writer put too much pressure on the situation?

Amanda created a culture in the class that supported exploration and play. We read beautifully written personal essays that provided us with role models for possible selves. We did our own writing too, sitting around the conference table, letting words flow from our pens, glancing at one another to see if we were doing it right. For an exercise on place, I described the University of Iowa campus and the many identities I’ve developed here – student, alumna, professor, parent. For an exercise on the body, I ushered readers inside my body when my dopamine is in short supply. The words looked good on the pages of my notebook.

That evening, I faced the final challenge of the class – developing one of the exercises into a full essay to workshop the next day. In my faculty office across campus, I settled in to write about identity transitions. I wrote about my dad teaching me to drive, hearing his calm voice in my head, a voice I haven’t heard in ten years. I wrote about the challenges of driving with Parkinson’s Disease, uncertain of how much pressure to place on the accelerator. I wrote about parking ramps and the identities I have gained and lost in them over the years. I wrote about abandoning my car in Parking Ramp 4 after realizing that I might never be a driver again. I wrote, deleted, and wrote some more.

The word essay means, “to try.” Not to succeed, simply to try. To shape meaning from words, to pick them up and move them around, delighting at the way they collide and invoke that holiest of states – connection. Reading makes me feel less alone. I longed to create words that did the same for someone else.