In this episode, Ben Harwood interviews Professor Mason Stokes about his personal journey from an aspiring jazz musician to becoming a literature professor at Skidmore College. Mason explains how an injury and a growing passion for literature led him to switch career paths and eventually focus on African-American literature and queer theory. He also discusses his upcoming novel, All the Truth I Can Stand a historical young adult fiction inspired by the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard. Mason reflects on the complexities of Shepard’s story and how his novel aims to restore individuality to the narrative. The conversation also touches on Mason’s earlier works, The Color of Sex and Saving Julian, which explore themes of race, whiteness, and queer identity. Mason then shares his experience teaching a course on “Writing with AI,” where he explores the balance between using AI as a tool for writing assistance while emphasizing the importance of the human writing process. He reflects on the ethical challenges of AI in writing, the limitations of AI-generated feedback, and the irreplaceable value of personalized, human-centered instruction in the classroom.

Ben Harwood: Something that may not be available on your website. Can we talk a little bit about your personal background? Can you tell us how did you come to be a professor at Skidmore College?

 

Mason Stokes: Let’s try to make a long story into a short one, because you never know how these things are going to play out. You think you do, and then you don’t.

 

I thought I was going to be a jazz musician. I was a drummer from the age. From eighth grade on. A professional drummer. I went to the jazz studies program in college. I thought that was my career path and ended up not loving the jazz studies program.

 

But it sort of took the fun out of music for me. I also ended up having some surgery on my hand that kept me from playing for a while. So I did what made sense at the time, which was to fall back on the only the thing I remember loving and that was English classes in high school.

 

I wouldn’t say I did this with great intention, but it was. If music didn’t work out, what did I still enjoy?

 

And it was reading novels. So I changed my major. That somehow led me to graduate at some point.

 

But then you have to figure out what you do next. And lacking a better option than grad school, I went right to grad school.

 

I’m not sure I’d recommend that for people.

 

I think taking some time off is good, but for me it made sense because I didn’t know what else I wanted to do than to continue studying literature.

 

And in grad school. That’s where I really woke up. That’s where my mind sort of took off.

 

I encountered professors in text there that lit me up a little bit.

 

And one of those was a professor of African-American literature.

 

That became the thing I focused most on and cared most about.

 

As a white guy, it’s a little weird to be finding yourself sort of professionalizing African-American lit, but I think it had something to do with growing up as a kid in South Carolina and seeing a really fraught and divided racial landscape and feeling outside of the way in which a lot of people were thinking about whiteness and blackness in that moment.

 

And I just thought better about cared more about African-American literature than I did others.

 

That led me to publications, to a dissertation, eventually to a job at Skidmore back in ‘97.

 

African-American literature was my focus.

 

But I also expanded into questions of gay and lesbian literature, queer theory, history of sexuality, having a lot to do with my own identity as a gay man and trying to find in literature and theory a way of thinking through my own identity in relationship to both whiteness and heterosexuality.

 

So, you know, it’s one of those lessons where you can think you know what you’re going to do, and then you discover what you’re going to do.

 

But it has something to do with love and passion.

 

Ben Harwood: Your new website features an upcoming novel: All the Truth I Can Stand. The book’s going to be out in November. Can you give us a little sneak preview of what inspired you to write this book?

 

Mason Stokes: Sure. All the Truth I Can Stand is historical young adult fiction.

 

It’s written with young adults in mind, age 14 up. But I think it’s available to anybody who wants to read.

 

And it is inspired by a real life event, a real life tragedy, which was the murder of Matthew Shepard in October of 1998.

 

Matthew Shepard was a gay University of Wyoming College student who one night in October, was picked up by a couple of guys taken out in the prairie, robbed, beaten and left for dead, tied to a fence.

 

He died six days later without regaining consciousness.

 

His death sparked increased interest in gay and lesbian civil rights in hate crimes legislation.

 

It became a mass cultural event. This person who had been targeted because he was gay and murdered ruthlessly. More recent journalism has discovered more complexity in that story, a complexity that actually is quite unsettling.

 

And there are new details about that murder, none of which make Matthew Shepard any less of a victim, but all of which make the story more complicated than we thought it was at that moment.

 

And that gave me, as a novelist, a space to imagine.

 

I wanted in this novel to stay as close to the historical record as I could, while allowing myself the freedom to sort of invent around the edges of that record, to fill in gaps that perhaps we didn’t know, to let ourselves imagine characters and actions that might help us better understand what was happening on that night in October in Wyoming.

 

So it is speculative historical fiction, staying true to the historical record, but trying to find a way to better understand the more human side of that story.

 

Because what happened was a chapter that was turned quickly into a symbol, a martyr.

 

And anytime you do that, you will risk erasing the individuality of the person.

 

And I was hoping, with this novel, to restore that individuality, restore that complexity, even as it makes him a flawed, imperfect person, which, of course, we all are. I think what I’m hoping readers take from this novel is that you can be flawed, imperfect, troubled, and still be worthy of love and respect and mourning.

 

Ben Harwood: You’ve also read other books, Saving Julian and the Color of Sex.

 

How do these books reflect your scholarly interests, and do they have a connection back to your teaching?

 

Mason Stokes: Yes, to both of those questions. So it’s interesting, those books. The first one, The Color of Sex, was my first scholarly book, and that is a scholarly exploration of white supremacist fiction.

 

I was interested in the construction of whiteness as a racial category, and one way to figure that out was to think about those explicitly white supremacist texts of the late 19th century and try to figure out what is whiteness.

 

How is it working? Why is it such a pathology in that moment? Why such hatred? In that book, I was interested in normative structures of whiteness and heterosexuality.

 

Saving Julian was my first novel, and I’m still interested there in the normative structure of heterosexuality, because that novel is a kind of tragicomedy that’s really about ex-gay conversion therapy.

 

That allowed me to think about a world of people trying to make so-called gay kids straight, trying to straighten up, to praying away to gay.

 

So I was still interested in what is heterosexuality.

 

How does it work? How is it constructed? How do you teach it? How do you perform it?

 

But in the context now of ex-gay conversion therapy, a really insidious attack on queer identity, it turns out to be an interesting window into heterosexuality as its own kind of fraught, anxious space.

 

So that novel, it’s essentially a comedy, but it’s got a serious undertone because it’s about a very serious project.

 

Ben Harwood: What feedback have your students given you about reading your books, or about some of the courses you teach on on queer literature and others?

 

Mason Stokes: Yes, that’s a great question. You know, we we get these student evaluations at the end of every semester, and they can be interesting.

 

One of the things I remember most is a comment that said, “great class, but that color green really does not work on him.”

 

And I realized the exact sweater that this person was talking about.

 

It was a pale green that I thought was a good look that semester.

 

This is my gay and lesbian lit course, where you have to respect people’s fashion sense because we pride ourselves on these things.

 

So when you know someone said that color green doesn’t work on him, I learned from that and never wear that color again.

 

I retired the sweater. But, you know, more seriously, I’ve learned things that really matter to me as a teacher.

 

Another instance in that queer fiction course was I sort of lost track of the diversity of the authors on that course was an embarrassment for me, because I pride myself studying race and sexuality on keeping that in the forefront.

 

But this course had gotten a little white, and I was reminded by that of students.

 

And I revamped the course.

 

And one way to do that was to mess up the chronology of it, because early gay lesbian literature is predominantly white.

 

And so I needed to find a way to invert chronology.

 

When I queered the chronology of the course, not chronologically, but early, late, early, late middle together mixing up any kind of temporal coherence. That allowed me to diversify the earlier part of the course in ways that felt more satisfying to me and ultimately my students.

 

You know, I’ve been at this 27, 28 years here or longer before.

 

I still learn from those evaluations, whether it be about a sweater or about syllabus construction.

 

And so that stuff still matters to me. And I appreciate the care that students bring to that process.

 

Ben Harwood: Okay, so revising existing courses…, you went out on a limb here, if I can say, last year you taught with something entirely different. You taught a course on AI in writing… Was that it? How did that go?

 

Mason Stokes: Yes, it was an experiment, and I think it remained an experiment for me.

 

I went into it, shortly after that November of whatever year it was, when OpenAI finally made ChatGPT available to a general audience.

 

Alot of academics in that moment had the sense that the sky was falling.

 

Their first response was, “Oh my God, it’s the end of my discipline, the end of my teaching, the end of my world.”

 

That may be true, but I didn’t want that to be my first response. I wanted my first response to be, how might this help us?

 

What can we do with it? How might it be a tool?

 

So I designed a course called, “Writing with AI,” as an experiment, trying to simply to answer those questions.

 

I structured a number of assignments that involve various uses of AI from the extreme, having students rely entirely on AI for a draft. My students couldn’t edit it themselves. They put in the prompt. They turned that in.

 

We graded it. We workshopped. They revised it themselves then, or we flipped that.

 

They wrote a draft. We had AI revise it. We played with all sorts of permutations throughout, and I was trying to figure out, what does it mean for writing and what does it mean for the instruction of writing?

 

I wish I could tell you I’ve got clear certainty about what I learned from that, but I’ve got a few ideas that I take away from it.

 

AI is here with us no matter what we do. There is no going back.

 

No putting the skin back on the snake.

 

So what do we do? And I remain convinced that AI is going to be a useful tool for both writers and writing instruction.

 

I want to emphasize it as a tool. I think if we get to the place where it does your writing for you, we’ve lost something essential to what writing means and what thinking means, because writing isn’t simply what we do once we know what we think.

 

It’s how we discover what we think. For a lot of us, it’s a process, and so if we outsource that to some other entity, we’re also outsourcing thought and we’re outsourcing thinking. And that worries me. I think that’s a loss.

 

That’s important. But again, there are all sorts of ways in which I’ve discovered AI to be a useful technology.

 

Think of it as a mentor. We can construct and have constructed AI personal bots that are deliberately tailored toward writing instruction, even toward individual courses.

 

I put in my rubric for grading, my assignments, and set that up to allow to help students as a kind of friend or peer mentor.

 

If a student is in a dorm writing an essay and needs help with a draft, worries about the organization, AI is pretty good, ChatGPT in particular, telling you whether that paragraph is well organized or not, whether your thesis is clear, whether all of your paragraphs relate to that thesis.

 

Of course, it’s also good with style and mechanics, but I’m more interested in its ability to help us diagnose macro level issues in terms of writing.

 

And that usually has to do with focus on organization.

 

So if we imagine it as a sort of someone who, like a writing center tutor, would help us think about work in progress, I think it’s going to be really useful. But I think there are all sorts of ethical concerns that we’ve yet to iron out.

 

I know that students are pressed for time, and they are overworked and given the opportunity to get some assistance, they’re going to take it.

 

I understand that we need to figure out where the line is for that assistance and what seems both ethical, but what seems also conducive to learning.

 

And I think outsourcing the work to AI is neither ethical nor conducive to learning.

 

But finding an AI, a kind of partner in the writing process, is both ethical and conducive to learning.

 

So I hope we are all beginning to figured that out. But we’re not there yet.

 

This is a complicated, pivotal, sort of paradigm shifting moment for us.

 

Ben Harwood: I wonder if AI, generative AI especially, if that’s simply going to speed things up, and if we can address the ethical parts, do you think ultimately students can become better writers faster?

 

Mason Stokes: That’s a really interesting question.

 

Those of us in writing instruction have been working on this question of pace and speed and labor for a long time.

 

From my point of view, can I grade a paper more quickly?

 

And I’ve tried for over 30 years now to be quicker in my grading, and I’ve shaved a couple of minutes.

 

But still, it’s an incredibly labor intensive process to offer specific comments, developmental comments on an essay.

 

So the notion of speed, I get it for me.

 

But I also am concerned that at some point, there’s there’s a sort of point beyond which you simply can’t get faster with the thing that takes time.

 

Now, from the student’s point of view, if they’re struggling with a topic and go to AI to brainstorm that topic, that’s going to save time.

 

If they’re struggling with organization and ask AI for help outlining a possible argument, that is going to save time.

 

But I think the hard work of putting words next to each other and putting sentences next to each other is fundamentally a time consuming process.

 

I wouldn’t want to emphasize speed or haste as a central value of writing,

 

I do think in the process there can be certain short shortcuts in the process that won’t sacrifice learning.

 

There’s there’s some point at which we’re not going to be able to go faster because writing itself is a labor intensive, time consuming enterprise.

 

I don’t know about you, but I do a lot of my writing when I’m not writing. When I’m walking around the block. When I’m on a bike. When I’m in the shower. You can’t speed up those processes.

 

You can’t really speed up the arrival of insight. The arrival of a new idea.

 

It takes sort of living with it for a while.

 

And I think it’s important to know that and not to find a sort of more efficient or economical way to write.

 

Ben Harwood: Right. And writing, in a way, is a fundamentally collaborative act as well. I mean it assumes, yes, you’re the author, but you’ve got a reader as well.

 

Mason Stokes: True.

 

Ben Harwood: I mean, I wonder in terms of one thing you can’t speed up is the development of interpersonal communication skills, right? And really high quality, high niche feedback and attention from one human to another.

 

And so, from having students in your classes, they’re getting incredibly high quality feedback that on a humanity level is never going to be available from a machine.

 

Mason Stokes: I tried, as a part of this experiment in my writing with AI class, I had AI grade one batch of essays.

 

I put in my criteria, my rubric, and I put in their draft and revision and asked it to not only to grade it, but to comment on it.

 

I charted it on a graph.

 

It was all A- or A. All of it.

 

There was no deviation, really. And in terms of the comments, it was very general and therefore unhelpful.

 

It can say good sounding general things about an essay, but it couldn’t dig into the specifics of what needed to happen next.

 

Now, that may change. It’s always getting better. My guess is, as people tailor AI toward writing instruction, that it will get better.

 

I still believe, though, there’s something about me being in a room, knowing a student, knowing what that student’s history past interests are, that this makes me a better commenter on that essay than technology.

 

I think that I know it’s true now. I think it’s going to remain true for a while, which is why I emphasize AI is not the thing that is going to solve the grading problem, but it’s the thing that can help us with revision, with process.

 

Ben Harwood: Mason Stokes, thank you so much for coming on the SkidPod today.

 

Mason Stokes: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.