She had been driven, with the other fourth and fifth graders, through rain and across the slick of leaves from West Philadelphia toward an old stone building in Bryn Mawr. She sat on the floor with a wide gold band on her head and a pencil in her hand. I was asking her (the others, too) to think about home—what it is. I was asking for specifics—the sounds in the streets, the light in the house, the color of the flowers in the pot. I was reading a little Julia Alvarez, a little Sandra Cisneros, a little Jacqueline Woodson, a little Charles Blow. Tell me what you are hearing, I said. Tell me which details make these memories of homes and houses particular for you.
Many hands up. Many questions. Many details.
Then, toward the end, I asked the children to imagine their someday house—where will you live when you are ten or fifteen years older than you are today? Some wrote a sentence. Some worked with their tutors to write more. This little girl with the golden hairband wrote, on her own, an entire page and a half.
She wanted to read it aloud.
I said yes. Quieted the room.
Her home of the future would have candy walls. It would have yellow, purple, orange, red, TVs, a place for everyone she loves. It would have (this was a final detail) bulletproof windows that were shaped like hearts.
Are you going to be a writer? I asked her. Oh, yes. She said. What do you read? I asked her. Junie B., she said, and (her favorite book of all) the dictionary.
Next week maybe I'll tell her that when I was her age I dreamed of being a writer, too. That being a writer is possible. That anyone who conjures candy walls and heart-shaped bulletproof windows is a heroine of mine. Next week, when she returns, with another story.
In my memoir class at the University of Pennsylvania, we're focusing on failure/mistake memoirs, and what they teach us. To get my own self into a teaching place, I spent considerable time during Christmas and the first weeks of the new year, studying the books that I am teaching—and thinking.
The
Chicago Tribune kindly gave me room to put that thinking on its pages.
I'm thrilled to also be able to share that Daniel Menaker, the author of
My Mistake and an esteemed editor in his own right, will be visiting Kelly Writers House for a publishers lunch and then my class on February 24th, at Penn.
The
Tribune essay can be found
here.
Whenever I want to learn something really important about life, I hang out with my son, a philosophizing dude if ever there was one.
During a recent search for a new career, this handsome philosopher never once allowed disappointment or consecutive near misses or the perplexities of corporate America to daunt him.
You're winning because you never lose hope, I would tell him.
I'm doing what I have to do, he'd say.
One day, texting the words above, he also wrote this:
"I've come up with this motto," he said. "And I plan to live by it."
This year at Penn (a coincidence) I'm teaching failure memoirs. As I prepare for the class, reading, say, Charles Blow and Daniel Menaker and Gary Shteyngart, I'm looking back at my son's live-by-them words and thinking about how implicit that lesson is in each story I read—and how it applies to us all.
We had our son's motto carved into cherry wood and framed for Christmas (my husband's design). It's not a new car, a new suit, a new electronic device, even. But it seemed the biggest gift we could give. Our son's intelligence reflected back at him.
A little more than a week ago I said goodbye to my Penn students.
It wasn't easy.
When we take risks as teachers, when we allow ourselves to get involved, when we are willing to care, to get hurt, to go out on a limb, to push the student who doesn't want to be pushed, the goodbye-ing is hard and heartbreaking.
And yet is clear, at least to me, to a certain Gallup/Purdue University team, and to the writer of this recent
New York Times op-ed, that that kind of caring—invisible to most—can make a long-term difference. Engagement. Well-being. Those are the factors on the table.
Here is the
Times' Charles Blow:
I was surrounded by professors who were almost parentally protective and proud of me — encouraging me to follow my passions (Yes, start that magazine, Charles), helping me win internships, encouraging me to go away and work for a semester, and cheering me on as I became a member of a fraternity and editor of the student newspaper. And, because of them, I emerged from college brimming with confidence — too much at times, depending on whom you ask — and utterly convinced that there was nothing beyond my ability to achieve, if only I was willing to work, hard, for it.
As it turns out, these are the kinds of college experiences that predict whether a person will later be engaged in work and have a high level of well-being after graduation.
The Gallup and Purdue University research underscores what seems intuitively obvious but is also, often, institutionally ignored. That it matters, for example, that professors get students excited about learning. That it matters that professors care about the students. That it matters that shed some light and some encouragement on the dimensions of their dreams.
Common sense? Absolutely.
But how many times have I been told by a student that I am one of the only professors who knew his name?
His name. How many times have I (excited, too) watched a student discover some new part of her soul, some new crazy ambition, and been told:
I didn't know this was okay? My classroom is small, and that is my first good fortune. Many writing professors' classrooms are. But I'd be kidding myself if I thought the first order of business there was to churn out 15 capable bloggers or five new memoirists. My job is to assign the right texts, announce the right exercises, distribute the right critiques, build trust, strengthen community—and pay attention to the students as they each arrive. Look up into their faces, take note of their splinted fingers, read their moods, address the temperature of their days, make room for diversions and tangents that can matter right in that moment, and forever.
My job is to know them, to care about them, to nurture.
It isn't hard. It's merely human.
