Backstage pass: Author bios

On the weirdness of captioning oneself

Gentle reader,

When I decided to pursue a calling in teaching and writing, there were a lot of aspects of this life that I did not foresee. This is true with every life and work and calling.

I didn’t know that wild people would send me their self-published manuscripts and wacky theories about the end of time and the secret code for reading the Bible.

I didn’t know that I’d have to be recorded on video. (Cue the awkard blinking and hand movements! Cue my horror!)

And I didn’t think about how writing and public engagement require a kind of self-marketing, or at least self-presentation. This is something I imagine few people are completely comfortable with, and, of course, it’s increasingly true for all of us, whether we’re writers or not.

Humans are not brands. We’re persons. And yet, here we are, branding ourselves. My problem isn’t that I’m all that self-effacing but rather that it’s very tricky to figure out how to tell the truth about oneself. It certainly won’t be, can’t be, shouldn’t be “the whole truth.”

“Woman with a Mirror,” Frederick Carl Frieseke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of my favorite teachers in high school told us about how when she went back to college, she was older than most students. She introduced herself as a wife and mother, and then she was surprised to notice that the younger students didn’t include their roles in their introductions, just their names.