Lecturers Kaya Oakes and Mike Larkin talk about the challenges of writing and teaching writing.
Work they read: In this episode of Berkeley Writers at Work, longtime colleagues and friends Mike Larkin and Kaya Oakes reflect on their shared decades of writing and teaching in UC Berkeley’s College Writing Programs. Their conversation moves fluidly between craft and classroom, exploring the joys and challenges of sustaining a creative life alongside a teaching career.
Larkin begins by reading from his essay “In Which Our Hero Resolves Not to Count Words,” a meditation on creativity and discipline inspired by a family story. From there, he and Oakes discuss how ideas take shape and how genre boundaries blur—when, for instance, a short story can be published as an essay. Oakes, a journalist and essayist whose work appears in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, shares insights from her book The Defiant Middle, which grew from an essay for On Being that explored women navigating life’s transitional stages through figures such as Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen.
Together, they consider the interplay between fiction and nonfiction, writing and teaching, and the practical realities of writing under pressure. They trade classroom strategies—from color-coding student drafts to freewriting exercises—and acknowledge that the advice they give their students (“write every day,” “don’t wait for perfect conditions”) applies to themselves as well.
The episode closes with an honest reflection on why writers keep writing despite deadlines, distractions, and doubt. For both Oakes and Larkin, the act of writing remains a vital part of identity and well-being—a creative cycle that connects reading, teaching, revising, and living.
