One Monday morning in late fall, my back and neck ached as I sat at my desk at the community college where I had recently started teaching. I tilted my head in a painful stretch as I waited to meet with the students in my writing class for office hours. I wondered if the garden I’d been toiling over was worth it. The day before, a chilly, bright Sunday long after my first growing season was over, I had spent the afternoon thrashing around in my dying garden beds with a rake, pulling up dried squash vines, rotten cucumbers, and other remnants from my mildly successful first garden.

On top of the rotting vegetables, spider webs, and a ladybug infestation in the neglected lemongrass plant, both beds were covered with an inch-deep layer of walnut and hickory nut husks from the trees that tower over our yard. The nuts were too small to be gathered by the rake, and I didn’t want to shovel out too much of the good dirt. The only other option was to pick up the shells by the handful, a maddeningly tedious task.

“In Oregon, all you have to do is spit on the ground and stuff will grow,” Mary, a family friend in Colorado who also happens to be a master gardener, had told me when she learned I was starting a garden. She laughed, but I wanted actual advice. I was asking everyone I knew for suggestions, but not getting any helpful answers.

In middle school, I would water Mary’s garden for spending money in the summers while she and her family were on vacation. Her yard was almost an acre, with raspberry bushes clinging to the fences on the east side and pots of rosemary, basil, and catnip bunched in decorative displays on the deck. In the center of the yard was a landscaped garden, complete with a path winding through fragrant rose bushes, bright orange tiger lilies, and countless other flowers I couldn’t name. In the middle of the garden, a bench sat under an archway covered with vines. It felt like a fairytale.

It took me hours to water that yard, but I loved it. It was the first time I remember feeling like an adult with real responsibilities, and in my mind, I was doing the hard work. Now I see she had done the hard work long before; watering was the reward, when you got to admire the literal fruits of your labor.

When my students started to arrive at my office hours that morning, one after another told me they hadn’t finished the essay that was due the next day. None of them seemed to care much about not having finished it, either. At the beginning of the term, I had told them, “You will fail this class only if you stop writing,” and I meant it. All they had to do was keep writing--write something, even if it was terrible, then get feedback and work on revisions. I saw this as a lesson in perseverance and resilience, not just for writing but for life. It became clear to me now the endless repetitions of my single class rule hadn’t germinated.

I asked student after student the same questions: How could I support them? How did they plan to catch up? I felt like nothing I could do or say to help them was working. I could feel how overwhelmed they felt, but listening to them and offering suggestions to help them with their writing felt like tiny pieces in the big and complicated puzzle of their lives. It felt surprisingly like struggling to rake a million nuts out of my garden beds when I wasn’t confident I’d be able to grow anything better the following summer anyway.

When my husband and I bought our house, one of its charms was the row of blueberry bushes lining the front windows, branches bowing with fruit. Since we moved in toward the end of summer, we didn’t get a full crop of blueberries till the second summer, when we picked what seemed like pounds of them every weekend. We could pick an inconceivable amount of blueberries, and they would reappear on the branches just days later, like magic. We made blueberry pancakes, blueberry muffins, blueberry ice cream, anything we could think to put blueberries in. Even after all that, there were still leftovers to put in the freezer.

But, in my excitement over how easy it was to get the bushes to produce blueberries, I may have killed them. Toward the end of that second summer, the green leaves developed what look like singed-looking tips, with brown and red burns spreading toward the center. A simple internet search revealed it could have been over-watering or under-watering, but there was no way for me to know for sure. All I could do was prune them in the winter and hope they would come back the next spring. I had been over-confident, and one season wasn’t quite enough for me to figure out exactly what blueberry bushes required.

Despite my lack of gardening knowledge, I built raised beds for veggies that summer as well. My neighbor across the street had several beds overflowing with bushy green leaves and healthy vines each summer. When she saw me working in the yard and I told her she’d have to give me some tips, she brushed it off like gardening was easy for anyone. Sure, I thought. Just spit on the ground, right? I smiled back at her, but inwardly I sighed. All of my plants were significantly less vigorous than hers, and my kale was especially stubborn, not growing all summer but not dying either. Then, when the weather got cooler and everything else in the garden died, or I had just given up on growing anything else, the kale shot up in leafy bunches, flourishing when I least expected it.

 I had managed to grow two kinds of basil, fragrant oregano, and a thriving lemongrass plant, whose long leaves burst over half the bed like a giant green firework, overshadowing the less robust peppers and squash. I took my wins where I could get them, encouraging myself with the reminder this was the first time I had planted and grown anything on my own. These small victories of the summer and the joy of spotting a new sprout made the frustrating and difficult work of cleaning out the garden beds worth it—but only just.

When I finished meeting with the last struggling student that morning, I felt hopeless and stuck. But, as in my garden, I was surprised by a new bloom that opened up just a few hours later. In my night class, one student, who is my mom’s age and was a teacher in Ukraine before she uprooted her life, moved to Oregon, and started learning English, stayed after class to tell me how much she had liked the readings I’d chosen and enjoyed thinking about how they all fit together. In her end-of-term reflection, this same student told me about how she was initially afraid of the course and worried she wouldn’t understand the readings or be able to write in English. When she got her first graded essay back, she wrote, she was so happy and proud of herself that she wanted to show everyone the comments I’d written. She reflected she had met new approaches to learning and delighted in seeing her skills in writing grow, even though it was far from easy.

I went home holding onto these comments like flowers in a bouquet, so fulfilled by the words from one student that the frustrations of the morning no longer seemed so terrible.

My classrooms are full of immigrants, single parents, English language learners, LGBTQ+ students, international students, students who work full time, adults making a change in their lives, teenagers struggling with depression or trauma or homelessness, veterans, people who have been incarcerated, and 18-year-olds who are going to school to pull not just themselves but their siblings and parents out of poverty. The diversity in my classroom means each student has different experiences and interests, and, like the plants in my garden, needs different support and nourishment. Most of my students aren’t in college simply for the sake of learning; they are there seeking a more tangible outcome. Providing my students with what is necessary for each of them is the biggest challenge I face every day. Often, it doesn’t seem like completing assignments for a writing class is what’s necessary. But still, I hope to show them the act of writing, of finding your voice and learning to use it on the page, is.

Writing may not sustain us the way water and sunshine are necessary for plants, but I believe writing is more than just an important educational skill. Writing is essential. It can heal us in ways doctors can’t. It can help us work through difficult times and understand others who are different from us. Writing can help us figure out what we think or show us we know more than we thought. It’s our deepest way to communicate with ourselves, and to explore the minds and imaginations of other humans. I believe writing empowers my students by being a vehicle for their voices in the world when those voices might otherwise be, and often are, silenced by others or by their own self-doubt. Writing is a hard copy of confidence you can carry with you.

But at the same time, writing is a luxury. A privilege. Writing is not considered a smart or practical option as a career if you are looking to make a living. In fact, part of its charm, like art for art’s sake, is the craft itself: writing for love, not for money. Writing often comes last to other responsibilities that put food on the table or ensure a stable future for loved ones.

These opposing truths—that writing is necessary and that writing is also frivolous--jam up against each other in my own life every day. I often feel guilty I have the audacity to call myself a writer and the privilege to pursue a career as an adjunct writing instructor. I can have these two jobs I love, but don’t pay well, because I can rely on my husband’s engineer’s salary, yet all of my students work full time jobs (or more than one job) and go to school to provide for their families. I am constantly asking myself how I can possibly convince them writing matters, that it can be as essential for them as the other, more pressing things in their lives, when my own experience doesn’t contain nearly the same pressure they feel every day.

Convincing students to love writing as much as I do might be a bit extreme. Maybe impossible. So I settle for convincing them writing—like gardening—is both maddeningly difficult and gloriously fun, no matter how experienced or good at it you are. Sometimes I get so caught up in devising ways to encourage my students to write any words at all without getting frustrated or giving up I forget about the fun. Then, when one student suddenly admits they have come to love writing, or they have started to see how it matters, it catches me off guard. Each time, I feel a smile spread across my face like a burst of sunshine.

This, I realize, is the same silly, almost unbelieving smile I get when a watermelon or a pumpkin I planted appears in my garden, and it feels like a miracle. When I started the garden, like when I first started teaching, there were times I felt fully confident because I had read lots of books and talked with experts and found the best materials, and I thought that would be enough. I worked really hard, fertilizing and watering and weeding and hoping, but still, most of the time I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I made a lot of mistakes and vowed to learn from them next season. I could see not everything I planted would thrive. When something did flourish, I didn’t expect it, and I was overjoyed.

In my first year of gardening, I had just enough success to make me feel accomplished and enough challenges to motivate me to improve. Most importantly, gardening reminded me to think this same way about my teaching and to help my students think the same way about their writing. There will be some students who I am not able to help be successful, at least in terms of schoolwork. But writing is more than grades. For those students, my hope is there’s a writing seed planted in there somewhere, and even if I don’t see it now, a bloom might pop up when it’s least expected.

The cement path to the front door of our house was outlined by two bare patches of dirt when we moved in. I promptly added a few low-maintenance perennial plants, but the space was still mostly dirt. The day I finished clearing out the garden beds that first fall, I wanted to do something productive rather than destructive, so I scattered and planted allium and crocus bulbs in between the rosemary, lavender, and penstemon. I imagine those bulbs wintering under thick blankets of dirt—like the students who sometimes seem to be drowning in the dark, heavy stresses of life outside my classroom—and I hope the darkness and dirt is nourishing some future blooms.

What I learned that year, and what I continue to learn every year, is real success happens when I listen for what my students need to flourish. I can plant seeds and give them the best foundation for growth, but ultimately, growth happens when I stop focusing solely on what I want to teach or how I want my students to grow and, instead, consider what they are teaching me. I can plant the seed for writing and give my students the tools, but when they write, they’re teaching and growing and saving themselves. That’s more powerful than anything I could give them. This, the power of writing to spark or clarify or change something in you and in someone who might read it, is why writing matters.

When I can feel my students thinking, “What is the point of writing when we have other, more important things to deal with?” I don’t always have the answer they want to hear. The answer I give them is the same as what I told them at the beginning of the term: the point is to learn how not to stop, even when everything seems to be saying you should. We may not be able to see it now, buried under the dirt, but there’s a world of potential in each tiny seed. Writing is the link between hoping and becoming, connecting us like thirsty roots reaching out in the dark.

-Amanda Knopf

Amanda Knopf Rauhauser is a college writing instructor, writer, and softball coach who lives in Oregon. She holds an MA in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she received a Thompson writing award from the Center for the American West. Her work has been published in the Oregon Humanities magazine, Ranchlands Review, The Twin Bill, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram @a_writing_rauhauser or on Twitter @avknopf.