The wonderful reality of being a student is that you are surrounded by teachers who each have endless knowledge and experience to share. Yet, it feels easy to miss this opportunity, especially when we don’t often hear about the lives of our teachers.
Sean Mills is a literature and creative writing professor here at Bard Queens. He is known for his sweet and kind disposition, thoughtful literary analysis, and peaceful classroom space. I sat down with him to discuss what drew him to creative writing, and the events that led him to our classrooms at Bard.
Mills was born and raised in Abingdon, a tiny town in Illinois. He lived on the edge of a field, though his family did not own farmland. He enjoyed the visual beauty of the cornfields and a multitude of farm animals that belonged to a neighboring family. He describes his mother as a “city girl,” who rejected a rural lifestyle. His father was much more agreeable to settling down in Abingdon, and had found his first teaching job there. Despite Mills’ father promising his mother that they would only live there for a few years, that small town turned into the background of Mills’ childhood and adolescence, and a permanent home. He deeply enjoyed growing up there, and felt he had an abundance of freedom. Mills filled his days hanging out with friends and riding his bike anywhere he wanted. He also had a strong love for reading, a habit his parents encouraged and frequently indulged in themselves. He now describes his early love of reading as integral to his development as a writer. He notes, “The more you read, the more you’re digging channels for your own imagination.” He also attended a small high school, filled with teachers that would be formative to his early life, and direct him in the path of teaching and literature. “I was always looking up to them. I just had such enormous respect for my teachers. I was hanging on their every word.” When asked if they influenced his decision to become a professor himself, he strongly affirmed: “For sure.”
Back in high school, Mills was not the true creative spirit and writer that we know today. In fact, he had his heart set on going into medicine. He “enjoyed biology immensely”. He was also fond of literature and found that writing came to him easily, but dismissed it, as he felt he already knew he would be a doctor. He describes this behavior as “ridiculous,” knowing now that he was just being narrow minded. In his teaching life, Mills encourages teenagers to be more open-minded. As he says, “Maybe that one subject you’re good at is more than just an easy A”. Mills’ entire pre-med ideal went down the drain in college. “I took a modern literature class in college, and that ruined me forever. I was like, okay, this is what I want to do.” He continued exploring the subject, and found that he connected deeply with personal essays. In college, he was drawn to the humorous and powerful nature of Lorrie Moore’s writing, and said to himself, “I want to do that.” He continued exploring the genre, and developed a love for it. He also learned that poetry was one of his passions. “I felt like the confines of poetry offered me a sort of freedom. It just came naturally, I’m not sure why.”
After becoming hooked on poetry and literature in college, Mills’ necessity and love for writing grew with time. Since his initial draw to the craft, he has since learned more about his personal writing style and creative process. Mills firstly spoke about the turbulence of finding inspiration, which in turn leads to procrastination. He often finds it very difficult to get over the initial roadblock and just start writing. He notes in the interview,”One time I had filled up my journal and decided to rummage around for something to write on, and I realized that there was a stack of half filled journals on my desk. I opened up one that only had three entries, the last dating back to 17 years ago.” Mills, too, struggles to follow through with his writing. The creative process can be very difficult sometimes. “I struggle for inspiration,” he explains, “I wish I could say I wrote every day, and I got up early and wrote. I just try to have faith and keep at it.” To escape the vicious cycle of searching for ideas, Mills finds that the easiest and often most entertaining sources of inspiration are his personal experiences and intimate relationships. For him, the best characters in our lives are not distant fictional creations, but a parent, or a friend – those we know well, and can accurately portray. Despite the difficulty that comes with writing about his personal life, especially when the subject matter involves grief or conflict, he finds it incredibly enriching and reflective. When asked for one piece of advice to struggling writers, he said, “Trust your memory however it works for you. Tapping into it is the key to finding what you need to write about.” During the interview, he recited a quote from the renowned writer Flannery O’Connor: “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” We all have an abundance of material locked within our minds. To be a writer, you don’t need an elite degree, or a masterclass, just a life’s worth of experience. We are surrounded by characters.
Yet, even though Mills has an inclination towards using his own personal life as subject matter or inspiration for his pieces, to him, writing seems to be less about processing and catharsis, but instead a difficult form of self expression. Writing about your personal life can be “very uncomfortable sometimes. When it’s painful, I always feel like, okay, I’m gonna write about this, but not now. Like, overcoming the death of someone in your family you love dearly, and you know you’re gonna write about them. You have to wait till they’re accessible, and you have kind of a psychic distance to do them justice.” Writing, while being extremely enriching, can also be a turbulent and painful experience. For Mills, it takes incredible patience and grace to be able to derive art from hardship.
Mills, as we all know, is now a professor at Bard High School Early College Queens. He loves working here and collaborating with young people. He feels that it both allows him to share his passions of writing and literature with students, and also to create connections parallel to the ones he had with his teachers in high school. When asked what his favorite aspect of teaching here is, he quickly replied, “You guys.” “There are such incredible students here. I just love my students. You’re the ones who keep me going, you’re the ones who keep me young. It’s you guys.” He also loves interacting with students, or simply reading their work. Classes like creative writing and literature are spaces for expression and communication. He loves hearing what students have to say. The only thing he would change is that he wished he could interact with students individually more often, as he says, “But unfortunately, public school teachers have a lot of students.” So, if you are lucky enough to be a student in one of Mills’ classes, make the effort to meet with him one-on-one. The student-teacher relationship is give and take, and he has infinite wisdom to give.