By: Dr. J. Bliss
For so long, I wanted my writing to be profound.
I wanted my words to move people, to echo long after they’d been read.
But lately, my students have been showing me something humbling and holy —
that the work was already profound.
When a student places my poem beside Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” for a comparative analysis, I don’t just see a grade — I see grace.
It’s the reminder that my voice, the one I once second-guessed, belongs in the very conversations that shaped me.
It means that something I wrote reached someone deeply enough to teach, to comfort, to reveal.
My students have become my mirrors.
Through their interpretations, I’m learning that the gift I prayed over is already doing its quiet work —
and maybe, just maybe, that’s what profound really is. 🌿
To Be Read Beside Chopin
There are moments in a teacher’s life that reach deeper than a gradebook — moments that whisper, You’re right where you were meant to be.
When one of my students compared my poem “Knowledge is no Longer Bliss” to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” it stopped me in my tracks. Chopin has always been one of those voices I return to — a woman unafraid to write the truth of her heart, even when the world wasn’t ready for it. And now, to see my own work studied beside hers? That’s more than an academic connection. It’s sacred.
Chopin wrote about awakening — about women seeing themselves clearly for the first time, even if only for a fleeting moment. In Bliss, I wrote about that same awakening, but from a different point in the journey: after heartbreak, after silence, after learning that freedom can live inside the ache.
To know that my students see that — that they feel it — reminds me why I do this work. Every lesson, every poem, every late-night edit is a prayer answered. I used to hope my writing would be profound one day, that it would matter. But my students have shown me: it already does.
To be read beside Chopin is not just an honor. It’s a confirmation — that art continues, that truth travels, and that sometimes, the classroom becomes a bridge between generations of women finding their voice.
Where Gilman Ends, Bliss Begins
When I first read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I was a college student—young, curious, and unaware of how deeply a story could shake something loose inside me. Charlotte Perkins Gilman made me awake inside. Her words cracked open the silence that women are taught to live with. She wrote about madness, yes—but also about the madness of being unseen.
Years later, I stand not as a student but as a teacher and a writer, and my own words now stand beside hers. My poem “Ignorance in Bliss” has found its way into the same conversation with Gilman’s work—and I am in awe.
Gilman’s narrator tears down the walls that confine her.
Mine steps through the rubble, holding her own heart.
Where Gilman ends in awakening, I begin in healing.
Where her story unravels, mine gathers.
Both speak of women who refuse to stay buried under silence, shame, or the weight of another’s control.
I once studied Gilman to understand the cage.
Now I write to show that freedom is possible.
And when my students bring my work into dialogue with hers—it is the most sacred affirmation: that what began as my survival has become their study.
This is the legacy of women who write.
We awaken.
We heal.
We hand the pen forward. ✍🏽✨
✨ Where History Meets the Heart
When my students chose to compare my poem “My Three Boys Looking Back at Me” with William Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun,” I had to pause — not as their instructor, but as the writer, the mother, the woman who once carried those very emotions into her pen.
Faulkner’s story has long been a haunting piece of American literature. It holds the quiet ache of racial fear, of inherited silence, of communities caught between what is known and what cannot be spoken aloud. His characters move through the shadow of injustice — heavy, unrelenting, deeply human.
And then, there is my poem.
“My Three Boys Looking Back at Me” was written from a place both sacred and raw. It came from nights of reflection — when the world felt uncertain and the weight of motherhood felt both powerful and fragile. It was born from the gaze of my sons and the echo of every mother who has prayed for her children to walk safely in a world that doesn’t always see them clearly.
To see my poem now placed beside Faulkner’s work in academic study is more than literary comparison — it’s a moment of reconciliation.
It’s the past and the present speaking to each other.
It’s a dialogue between silence and song.
Faulkner exposed the fear.
I wrote from the space of faith.
His words wrestled with the paralysis of oppression.
Mine with the persistence of love.
This pairing reminds me that art continues the conversation history began. My students saw something I didn’t plan for — they recognized the bridge. They understood that literature isn’t just about analysis; it’s about empathy. It’s about standing in the space where pain and possibility meet and asking, “What truth lives here?”
When they chose my poem, they told me something profound — that my words belong in the same room as the writers who shaped the canon I once studied. That realization is humbling, healing, and divine.
It reminds me of my purpose — as a teacher, to guide them toward truth; and as a writer, to tell the stories that echo beyond me.
Because every time a student finds light in my work, I am reminded:
the evolution of me is still unfolding. 🌿
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