Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Is This Big Fat Fantasy Epic a Tax-Deductible Business Expense?
It’s tempting to come up with some cheap shot punchline about how tax returns are a subgenre of fantasy literature. I’d poke at the puzzle longer, but I believe in the rule of law, so my tax returns are a good-faith attempt at nonfiction. There are times when I wish I hadn’t been drawn up as a Lawful Good character — goodness knows I tried at least to be Chaotic, but I could never keep it up for long.
One of my favorite quirks of private practice as a tutor is the unlikely list of expenses that truly are for work. Yes, some of these books are things I would have read anyway, but not necessarily things I would have bought anyway. I once spent three months rereading and rereading every short story in Garth Nix’s Across the Wall collection, because my students couldn’t get enough of his Old Kingdom, and I had to be a few levels deeper into the book than my students were, no matter what they did with it.
When I was my students’ age, the SAT had two sections, not three. The verbal section was heavy on analogies, which the College Board has long since purged from the test. They added an essay in 2005, which to me feels like last week, but to my students, that’s a time when their ages were in single digits.
I’m secretly haunting an 8th grade English class at Hammarskjold Middle School. I tutor some students who are in the same class, so I get to see their teacher’s assignments, comments on student writing, and most recently, study guides for midterm exams. I glimpse the teacher through the fog of my physical absence from the classroom–I even forget from week to week whether the teacher is a man or a woman–but traces of my spectral influence may be detectable in my students’ work.
Kids under age six are not lying to you, not exactly. When they want something to be true, they genuinely cannot tell that it isn’t. When they fear something might be true, no amount of reassurance is enough, because 
I confess: I’m horror-illiterate. Being horrified on my way to some other reading experience is often worthwhile, but reading just to poke my 
No wonder the writer I was back in college never finished anything big. She lacked the patience for the kind of slog I’m slogging through now. She knew some nice tricks — could turn out a kickass sonnet in two hours by writing backwards, last line to first — but if she had ever managed to produce a complete book-length draft, she would have wandered off to a next never-to-be-finished project once the revision got tough. She would not have been game for as many rounds of tightening, fact-checking, and continuity repairs as I have had to do for the novella collection I’m sending off to its small press publisher next week.