What if one combined eastern European folk tales with the U.S. Army’s prescribed methods for calling for fire? What if I’d been required to start an IV on the girl I broke up with? What if we didn’t have to think of writing — our own and others’ — as scarce and solely owned?

But I always want to do more of the “What if?” in class; I always want to encourage students to ask themselves and one another, regarding their texts: “What if?” And I’m getting better at it, very slowly. It means staying very close to the students’ own language, for one thing. And it means asking them to use one anothers’ language, to the point of inhabiting one anothers’ perspectives. It’s a tough double move, because it’s a sort of tunneling inwards into another person’s psyche, and — at the moment of understanding — doing a quick kick-reverse out and saying, “But look where else we could go, too!”

In a 15-week semester, we don’t get to that spot until late in the game. Which leaves very little time to coach students — and ask them to coach one another — on how to make these moves on their own. And this is why I’m so fixated on these thoughts I’ve been having about personal writing: because I think (I hope) the perspectival work I have in mind with such a first assignment might be a way to help the process along more quickly.