PULITZER Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen was looking back. So, it turned out, was I.

His post appeared in my feed alongside a Facebook memory: a photograph from the edges of my own graduation, 10 years ago, when I was finishing one kind of learning and ready to begin another. Viet was reflecting on an essay he had written in 2017 in the Los Angeles Times, noting that some portion of it had appeared on an AP literature exam this year. He wrote how his meditation on self-doubt, slow work and the long road to becoming a writer had found its way into an American syllabus, into the category of things worth knowing.

I remembered reading that essay when I was a new journalism instructor in Karachi. It had meant something to me then. Reading it again now, teaching a different kind of writing to a different kind of student, it means something else.

Viet writes about ignorance, not as failure, but as condition. He argues that not knowing can be as useful as knowing, provided you are aware of it. He spent 17 years finishing a short story collection, 14 years on a scholarly book. He sat in a chair for thousands of hours with no guarantee that........

© Dawn