Exercise 1.2.a asks me to talk about a Peak Performance...

Exercise 1.2.a asks me to talk about a Peak Performance

A colleague of mine has suggested that the athletic metaphor at the core of this exercise is something I need to pay more attention to -- is athletics the right metaphor for this kind of work?  I will pick that critical question up later.

The best experience of a peak performance in my professional life was an event of about three years ago.  I had written a grant to plan an event to celebrate diversity in writing.  

• The keynote speaker was Terrance “Spider-Baby” Griep, a professional writer and a professional wrestler.  I found Terrance’s advice on writing and on establishing himself as a kind of border-crosser, a transgressor of norms, in both his professions to have been very helpful, and my interactions with Terrance framed my eventual publications on professional wrestling with John Heppen.  In this way, I cultivated my own work while I created an opportunity to celebrate Terrance's.

The event included a celebration of all of the writing of my friends and colleagues, and included a small presentation by and honorarium for local writer-editors I value:

• to the editors of Proof 
• and to the editors of Minerva.

These two local publications celebrate local creativity (and in Minerva’s case, feminism).  In this way, my work in this event celebrated a diversity of voices.

And, in a small way, it integrated my friends.  I mean this in my friends who were present among my UMD colleagues, and in Terrance, who would become a friend as well as the object of research, and in the presence of my friend E. and her two daughters.  I was sweet on E. at the time, though I probably wasn’t ready for a relationship (having been recently separated from my wife).  But she was present, and her daughters, usually quite shy around men, were very comfortable with Terrance -- something that made me very proud.  I bring the best people together.

I would later write a grant to bring several artist friends, including E., into a project on sustainability. music and art.  That grant has not yet been funded, but I will keep trying.  I want to bring those friends together.

That night, when it was all over, I was overwhelmed.  I was filled with what was as close to a runner' high as I could imagine.  Everything was clicking, and everything was clicking as I looked forward.

I created the space for a diverse array of people to tell their story and for their stories to be celebrated.  And I was at least setting the groundwork for my own storytelling, my own writing, in the future.  In creating a space to celebrate my friends the linguists, the journalists, the poets, the wrestler, the feminists, the musician, I was setting the groundwork for my own self-expression, because as we know from earlier posts, love of another is one of the foundational components of self-love.