Meet Charles Jensen

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Charles Jensen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Charles, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I credit my mother for instilling my approach to work and responsibility. She immigrated to the U.S. from Belgium when she was 12. Since I did not grow up with anyone else who was the child of an immigrant, it took me well into adulthood to understand how much of my formative experiences are shared by other first generation children. One of these was a focus on academic achievement. My mom made it clear to me that nothing was more important than my education. Each day when I got home from school, she sat me down at the kitchen table to complete my homework before I did anything else. This, she said, was to ensure it got done, and for me to do it while the school day was still fresh in my mind. I hated it! I was the only one of my friends who had this expectation at home, but now, looking back, my mom gave me a gift. From this simple exercise, I learned the importance of setting and acknowledging priorities, and to fulfill responsibilities before having fun. This skill shaped everything about how I completed work in college, where I graduated summa cum laude, and into graduate school, where I approached my creative writing MFA program with both ravenous curiosity and an unflagging work ethic. In adulthood, I’ve effortlessly carried at least two jobs because I can prioritize my time and responsibilities.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
By day I’m the program director of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, one of the largest and most prestigious open-enrollment writing programs in the world. I oversee the curriculum, the instructors, the staff, and everything we do outside of the classroom to support community. I work with an amazing staff team, all of whom are writers themselves, and more than 250 active instructors. It’s a delight to show up and participate in this community every day, and I find my job supports my other work.

I’ve said that I work at my day job 8 hours a day, but I’m a writer 24 hours a day. That realization caused a big shift in how I think about “what I do.” I started my career as a poet, and I’ve published three poetry collections over the years; the most recent is INSTRUCTIONS BETWEEN TAKEOFF AND LANDING (University of Akron Press, 2022). I’ve also published seven chapbooks of “cross-genre” work, or work that blends poetic techniques with fiction and nonfiction writing. A chapbook is a funny little form of publication; they are shorter than full length books, usually by about half. You might think of them in relation to full books in the way a short film and a feature film are different, or a musician’s EP versus an LP. This year I’m publishing my first non-poetry book, a hybrid memoir that braids together traditional memoir storytelling with discussion of a single film. SPLICE OF LIFE: A MEMOIR IN 13 FILM GENRES has a publication date of May 1, 2024. I also have branched out into writing novels, but I still write poetry often. Every April I write a poem a day as part of National Poetry Month.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think it’s important to foster a culture of “No” in any communities or organizations you work in. Power dynamics and hierarchies usually bully people into agreeing to do things they disagree with, or don’t want to do, and not fostering dialogue about the work means leadership will miss crucial contexts and considerations. I like to empower the people I work with to say no to my ideas or suggestions, and the dialogues that follow have always been helpful and eye-opening. Giving people more than permission to speak, but the responsibility to speak, to be heard, and to be respected in their dissent is one of the most important features of a thriving community.

I think curiosity is really important, and something our culture does not generally celebrate. The less curious we feel about the world and the people around us, the less we can learn and grow ourselves. I think within curiosity is humility. Feeling curious about something is an acknowledgment we don’t know everything, we don’t have it all figured out, and there is something new to understand. Curiosity also demonstrates that we embrace the process of learning, that we are open to changing. There is never a reason for anyone to stop learning.

One thing I’ve learned about working in educational spaces is the importance of strategy. Every class you have ever taken was developed with a goal in mind–the goal is how you will be different after completing the course. In order to achieve that goal, you need the strategy. What will happen in the course to foster learning? How will the student encounter and embrace new information, or how we will look differently at what we already (think we) know? Learning to teach was one of the most important parts of my education. It taught me to look at the skills and knowledge I already have as something unfamiliar so that I could unpack it and create a pathway for someone else to discover. Teaching is also an iterative process, meaning each time we teach, we must reflect on what was successful and what needs to change for the next version. As teachers, we constantly strive to refine what we do and how we do it, and the students help us see if we have the impact we sought.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?
Not to make this too obviously a full-circle moment, but I’ll recognize my mother’s impact again. She died in 2011 after a multi-year fight against cancer. When she was diagnosed, she had six months to live, but her tenacity, optimism, and work ethic gave her those extra years of good-quality living, and she lapped up every minute she could. I remember her being happier than ever during that time. That’s the first lesson she taught me–don’t wait until the end to embrace your life and make it what you want it to be. We have that opportunity every day. The second lesson here is that despite our circumstances, we choose our attitudes and approach. I know people in the world face life-threatening adversity, and I’m not suggesting a good attitude fixes that or even makes it easer, but I think it’s important when we do things like love fiercely (ourselves and others) in those times. We cannot lose the parts of ourselves that make us “us.” My mom was almost a miser with money, and she saved everything she could. But in those last years, she told my brother, “Money isn’t the currency of life. Time is.” I think about that moment all the time. It’s an uncharacteristically poetic expression from a woman who lived her whole life in the tangible world, and I would be disrespecting her memory if I ever stopped tending to its lesson. We have a finite amount of time in this life, and most of us don’t know how much. Time is the only resource we have we can’t make more of, and the only one that gets spent whether we pay attention to it or not. So we must pay attention. Be intentional with our time. Make the most of it we can–and by that I mean using time to deepen our relationships, tend to our own minds and hearts, and experience as much as we can. After writing a memoir, I’m even more cognizant that we cannot change the past, and the past has created us. We should be as intentional in shaping our future, and therefore our future self.

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