What Teaching Taught Me About Writing

The World Music Classroom as a Laboratory for Storytelling

30 August 2026 ~ 3 min read

I’ve been teaching World Music for years, and every semester begins with the same problem: how do you get a room full of people to care about music they’ve never heard, from a tradition they know nothing about, in a language they don’t speak? That’s not a teaching question. That’s a writing question. It’s the exact problem I face every time I ask a reader to step into a world built on Irish mythology, Cork slang, and a cosmology that includes both the Morrígan and a bureaucratic Hell with a customer service department.

The classroom taught me that context is a trap.

My first instinct as a teacher was to front-load: here’s the history, here’s the theory, here’s the cultural framework, now listen. It didn’t work. Students’ eyes glazed over. They hadn’t heard the music yet, so the context had nothing to attach to. It was like explaining a joke before telling it. I learned to flip the order—play the music first, let them react, then give them the context they’re now hungry for. My novels work the same way. You meet Seán before you understand the mythology. You hear the Morrígan before you know the four cycles. The experience comes first. The framework follows.

A student once asked me, during a unit on West African drumming, why the rhythms felt “wrong.” She didn’t mean bad—she meant unfamiliar. The downbeats weren’t where she expected them. The patterns didn’t resolve the way Western music had trained her to anticipate. I told her that what she was hearing wasn’t wrong—it was a different grammar. A different way of organizing time. Her ears had been trained in one language, and she was hearing another for the first time. That moment changed how I wrote the Trilogy’s Hell chapters. The comedy there doesn’t land where you expect it. The rhythm is off, deliberately. It’s a different grammar of storytelling—one where the Devil is a therapy patient and the punishment for pride is an eternity of mandatory wellness retreats. If the reader feels slightly off-balance, good. That’s the point. The classroom taught me that disorientation isn’t a failure of communication—it’s the beginning of real listening.

Another lesson: never underestimate what people bring with them. I’ve had students who knew nothing about Indian classical music connect a raga to something they felt at a funeral. Students who heard Tuvan throat singing and said it sounded like the wind in their hometown in Wyoming. They weren’t wrong. Music is universal not because it’s the same everywhere but because human beings are pattern-makers who find the familiar inside the foreign. Readers do the same thing. Someone who’s never heard of the Morrígan might still recognize the archetype—the figure who arrives to tell you the truth you’ve been avoiding. I don’t need to explain her. I need to write her well enough that the reader’s own experience fills in the gaps.

The most humbling teaching moment came from a student who told me, after a semester of World Music, that the class hadn’t taught him about other cultures—it had taught him about his own. He said he’d never thought about why he liked the music he liked until he was asked to listen to music he didn’t understand. That’s the best thing anyone has ever said about my teaching, and it’s exactly what I hope the Trilogy does. The Irish mythology, the Cork humor, the cosmic absurdity—they’re not asking you to become Irish. They’re asking you to notice what you already carry and what stories you’ve been telling yourself without realizing it.

Teaching taught me to trust the listener. Trust the reader. Don’t over-explain. Don’t front-load. Play the music, tell the story, and give people credit for being smarter and more receptive than you think they are. Every semester, a room full of strangers teaches me that. I try to remember it every time I sit down to write.

~ Liam