brave play
a.k.a the time I taught 30 students at MelU
I stepped out of my apartment’s elevator and my phone ping-ed with an e-mail from Melbourne University. The Creative Writing Department offered me a tutoring gig. I’d sent my application six weeks prior, the job started in two. I ran to my friend’s grey, hand-me-down car with panda-face pillows parked out front. We were meeting for dinner.
“Dude.”
He saw my face and knew. “Dude!”
We switched destinations to Mansae—a Korean BBQ joint our friendship crew saved for graduations, job promotions, and birthdays. While munching on samgyeopsal, he said, “You know, this job completely aligns with your values.”
He’s the type of person to say stuff like that. Also the type of person to join a 10-day silent meditation that served apples for dinner and forbade eye contact with anyone, board a 23-hour flight to Peru to vomit and shit his childhood trauma away (read: Ayahuasca), and recharge his collection of gemstones during full moons (read: literally).
I say this with adoration. And he’s right.
I moved to Melbourne at 17 and one of my earliest realizations was that local kids had resumes stretching from when they were 14. Coles. Maccas. Rural vineyards. Uncle’s automobile shop. You name it. So instead of joining clubs or socializing, I spent my college free time teaching. It was the first and only thing I thought to do.
I had a mature-aged Vietnamese student with waist-length hair who prepared exactly three cookies for me each week. We met at her house every Saturday to transcribe TED Talks because it was her favorite way to learn “world ideas in English”. She had a long-necked turtle and during breaks, I’d waggle my finger, testing its reach. She paid me in coins and when our time concluded, she gave me a Tupperware because I was “a too-small, single girl.”
I had a 6th-grade student who always had sticky chocolate wrappers in her pockets. We worked on a solar system diorama one time, and she said, “I wish the world was made of chocolate. Even roller coasters!”
“Oh, wow! Wouldn’t everything melt?”
“No, because the sun’s made of chocolate too. Duh.”
It was a library program for special-needs students, and when everyone managed to complete their homework early, we would race to a nearby park and roll off its hills. I’d spend the hour-long bus ride home detangling grass from my hair.
I’ve always loved teaching. My younger sister and cousins will be able to recall the various ‘academies’ I ran on weekends—Princess Academy, Pop Star Training, regular school but with classes like songwriting and snacking.
Maybe it’s genetics. My grandma used to teach Mandarin in the living room of her house. She’d reward her best students with haw flakes and white rabbit candies. My Mom, the eldest of five, tutored primary school kids as a high schooler to help with groceries.
For my first University semester, I was given two cohorts of fifteen. One of the tutorial rooms used to host my 2nd year Short Story class where my very blonde, very pretty, very soft-mannered teacher taught us, “A story’s logic should be an egg in a cage, not a shoe in a cage.”
It was surreal to say hello to my students from the other side of the podium.
I have a youth work/development background alongside Creative Writing, and it bewildered my students at first, how much I let them take charge. (Or in the Dev. world we call it ~co-design~). We established class values from the get-go, I seated them with those who liked the same genres, mediums, writers. They were allowed to request guests (some who came!) & pitch activity ideas. We had polls, check-in surveys, and jazz or lo-fi playing in the background. I brought snacks during low-energy weeks and lent them my favorite books based on what praxis we were learning.
I only pitched one value for both cohorts: “Take the work seriously but not ourselves too seriously.” And that meant equal parts play & laughter and incisive discourse & craftwork. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, and I’m wary of writers who can’t laugh at themselves, the absurdity of our “work”, and the world more broadly.
Some of my favorite moments in class have been—without sounding too Joe Goldberg-esque—watching my students play. Whether it’s creating a cut-n-paste group poem, monologue in response to a Pixar movie soundtrack, or a collage about girlhood and mystical animals. They were down for anything.
When I told a friend this, they laughed. Both of us have worked on the same project for three years, them, a graphic novel, me a young adult fiction.
“I’m so jealous. I can’t remember the last time I just… played.”
Neither did I.
I emphasized the importance of play to my students every week, but somewhere along the way, it disappeared from my process. Research, hitting word targets, deadlines, and revision took precedence. The thought of play-as-process feels luxurious… but also terrifying.
My students’ final assignment was a free-form piece (it just had to include writing). They had six weeks to create something from scratch. I received a tender short film about the nuances of male friendship. A game unlocking memories of a character being bullied, drowned by loneliness, the pressure of excellence, and youthful angst. If played right, the character would metamorphose into a star (literally) in the end. There was also a webpage embedded with hyperlink images, videos, music, and poems about what it meant to be a transman raised in an all-female household and Catholic all-girl school, navigating our current patriarchal, heteronormative landscape.
I cried a lot during grading season, not only because I was blown away by the depth and quality of my students’ work, but also because of their bravery. To shoot a film, design a playable game, and digital work in six weeks without any experience in these mediums would’ve paralyzed me.
“I don’t write movie scripts.”
“I don’t know enough about coding.”
“There’s not enough time.”
I thought and said things like that more and more often.
This is not to say I don’t love my project, but I didn’t realize how shrunken my writing world has become to prioritize it. What can I write about? What do I want to write about? In what format? For what reason? These were questions I hadn’t thought of in a long while, which is silly because my values include (as Dude Friend knew) creativity and curiosity.
During mid-semester break, I enrolled in an Art Writing Class after hemming and hawing since early 2023. I’ve always loved going to galleries and was the type of person to read each plaque, use my savings on artist catalogs, and openly cry in front of installations. I ended up enjoying the 6-hour crash course so much I applied for an Art Writing fellowship that same week.
Whether it’s learning a new language over cookies, envisioning a chocolate solar system, or spending weekends curtsying while balancing books on our heads (hello Princess & the Pauper’s ‘To Be a Princess’), brave play is the core of learning, writing, and learning to write.
I’m lucky to have my students, past and present, teaching me how.
Petition for a post about Princess Academy