Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
By Lily Schneider
Dr. Allison Carr spoke to first-year students on Sept. 22, 2022, at the annual Common Reading Lecture held at Weber Chapel.
Each year, students and staff members come together to create a custom reading anthology for incoming first-year students. The reading contains various excerpts from a diverse set of writers, each accompanied with introductions written by students and faculty across campus. The aim of this program is to help first-year students become acquainted with the campus community, introduce students to college level texts, prepare them for their first semester courses and endorse new experiences and ideas through the varied collection of viewpoints. After reading the anthology, students wrote a short personal narrative that explored the idea of this year’s theme: Renewal.
Dr. Allison Carr, author of “Failure is Not an Option”, is the Associate Professor of Rhetoric and the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Coe College located in Iowa. She teaches courses in nonfiction writing, critical/rhetorical theory, environmental rhetoric and writing studies. Carr researches the affective/emotional dimensions of teaching and learning, which led to her research on failure within the writing process. During the Common Reading Lecture, Carr related these experiences and interests to the theme, as well as how she overcame failures based upon the principles of renewal.
Carr began her lecture by describing failure “as a reset button for your brain.” She defined failure as a transformative experience that evokes renewal in an individual. Carr explained that she had been writing about the topic of failure for more than a decade, after being faced with her own setbacks in life. More specifically, she began her research and writing after an earthshattering failure in 2011. Carr explained that failure is a term that resists a definition and is exceptionally difficult to define; it is a word that she describes as “slippery and sticky” due to one’s individual experiences with failure, as well as the various backgrounds and experiences one has. As she dove deeper into failure within her writing, Carr found in her research that she did not want comfort for her failures, but an experience that was geared toward a sense of purpose. Therefore, Carr was influenced to write what she sought to read. The thesis and main drive of her writing is this: “failure has purpose, and with that, invites renewal.”
Carr admits that she initially did not know what to write about when offered to compose a work about her experience of failure. She put it off numerous times as the editors continued to offer her extensions but kept writing about subjects that were off topic. She also corrected her initial interpretation of how failure leads to success in her writing, such as how “accidental innovations” are “exclusionary to failure” and the creators of these innovations were not focused on failure, but the sheer luck that generated the product, such as the discovery of penicillin.
As a part of her dissertation, Carr conducted an experiment with 200 participants. The goal was to use interview questions to determine the effects of failure. Using participant answers, Carr discovered that there was one common theme that tied back to most people’s interpretations of failure: shame.
It was made clear that failure feels terrible and singular and “contains a range of emotions, but one thing that remained similar for all participants…was shame.” Carr emphasized that emotions are complicated, and shame only depends on another category of the spectrum of human emotions, such as anxiety or fear.
“Shame is a two-way street,” Carr further explains. “To overcome the feeling of shame resulting from failure, we require reassurance of our place in the social fabric.”
Although failure is not pleasant for everyone, Carr states that failure is necessary to endure and learn about.
“A lack of curiosity about failure…may close off our abilities to recognize failure at all,” Carr asserts.
She then went onto questioning how we can repair or renew this; is it with the lack of recognition or opportunity for growth? What does it truly mean to begin again? Through reading poems to herself and displaying them to her students on Zoom while quarantined, Carr discovered and stated that “failure helps us feel a little less alone.”
We all have a common interest in renewing our connections to each other, especially after we all experienced forced periods of solitude as the result of the pandemic. Throughout the entirety of her research and writings, Carr advises us to do one thing: resist the pressure to have everything figured out in hopes of avoiding failure, but rather, to embrace that failure. Failure is always an option that can lead to renewal, even when we least expect it to.