How to use this Page

At Radnor High, I was hosted by the exquisite Michelle Wetzel and Fran Misener and that most fabulous Molly Carroll Newton (of Radnor Memorial Library). There were brownies, pretzels, sandwiches. There were students who had much to say, teachers who made room for the session, a vibrant and vast library world. There was a story about a family member who lost his life in East Berlin because he would not relinquish his bicycle to the guard. There were healthy debates about risks and choices. There were the kinds of conversations that leave a happy buzz inside my head.

The art above is by Fran Misener, one of my hosts for the day. (I so love this.)

The poem below is by Eun-Soo Park, who leads the book club at Radnor High and who had me sign his copy of Going Over for a friend who was off on a field trip that day. She really wanted to meet you, he said. So I think I should give the book to her.  (I so love that.)

Eun-Soo wrote:

The Cost of Freedom

Waiting with words trapped within 
Ready to burst with irrepressible emotion
Unable to make a choice
For fear of stumbling into regret.
Bonds broken, lives at stake,
Stuck with a feeling of stasis.

Time passes.
Every second, a wasted opportunity.
What stops a fleeting rush toward freedom?
The danger, the worry, the risk of death.
But what really hinders the dreams of life
Is believing that one can exist without freedom.

Jake wrote as well. I share his words here as emblematic of many of the wonderful words the students of Radnor High produced during our time together:

The promised land is a distant light,
A chasm, deep and dark.
Too wide to see where it ends
Crossable, but with a steep cost.
The fear of the unknown: the final barrier.

My work with these students is not done. My pleasure is ongoing.

Finally, Ms. Wetzel gave me a gift of air which also turned out to be (surprise) a pair of air-colored earrings. I believe that it was those very earrings that got me through a long ride and a final river talk yesterday. Michelle, you were there with me.

(I so love that.)

Add a Comment

... for here I am, a seventh-grade library aid, at Hanby Junior High outside Wilmington, DE. I had been working in school libraries since I smashed my wrist as an eight-year-old—so badly that I'd wear one form of a cast or another up until tenth grade, when my bones grew up enough for the surgery I required. Libraries instead of gym: it became one of the many stories of my life. Another story: I was just about the worst (by which I mean least imaginative, entirely boxed in, useless) writer you can imagine; I have no idea why I thought I could make poetry, or any language-based profession, my life.

I would continue to work in libraries as I moved to a new state, home, and school district in eighth grade. After graduating from Radnor High, I went to the University of Pennsylvania where, hoping to relieve my father of having to pay any additional expenses for my education, I worked in the Van Pelt Library when I was not catering (or going to class).

Libraries. An accident made them part of my every-day life. An ability to work past my own extreme limitations as a writer enabled me, after much tossing of much horrific stuff, to pursue a dream I had.

Though truth be told: I'm still working on becoming a real writer.

Add a Comment

I have just returned from the matinee showing of my very own high school's production of Grease, which stars an incredible cast of singers, dancers, attitude shifters, and actors, among them my young friends Alison Mosier-Mills and Cat Mosier-Mills. They belong to that lovely couple Elizabeth Mosier and Chris Mills—okay, so "belong" is the wrong word. But they look just like them, and they have talent coming out of their ears. My father, who was my date and always is at these productions, had a smile on his face for two long hours, and so did I, for many reasons.

I share some of the photos I took—without a flash, I promise. Please also note the uber talented Blake Thomson, a member of my own St. John's Presbyterian Church. He's the blond greaser who shows up in many images; you know it's him because he's kneeling before the old non-souped-up Beamer.

Congratulations to the entire cast!

Display Comments Add a Comment

As the founding editor of Ploughshares and the former Chair of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, DeWitt Henry has stirred, ushered, and promoted all manner of writerly dreams. He's put first stories into print and published the work of our greatest living (and sometimes not living) authors. He's sat in classrooms, seducing and exhorting.  He's said to others, You can. You will. 

With his memoir, Sweet Dreams (Hidden River Press), Henry traces and comes nearly to terms with his own fantasies and emergent needs, as he tells the story of his rising and his wanting. Much of the book is devoted to a childhood and adolescence spent in the very swath of the suburban Philadelphia that I have, since my eighth-grade year at Radnor Middle School, called my own, and so I turned the pages of this book with acute interest, admiring the precision of Henry's recall—the stunning accuracy of descriptions about a place that has changed entirely and, then again, changed hardly at all.

I have (unknowingly) walked by two of Henry's childhood homes many a time; in Sweet Dreams the porches, yards, rooms, rooftops come alive with Henry's artist mother and alcoholic father, with siblings that struggled to find their own way, with episodes of generosity and scenes of terrible despair. I spent my time at Radnor High; DeWitt did, too, with peers whose last names are familiar to me. Henry walked among the ponds and water wheels and the majestic Walton Estate before it became Eastern University. I have walked there, too, plenty of times, taking photographs like the one above. The local movie theater can be found in Henry's pages, as can Eaglesmere, an outpost I have visited. Roadways and greenways and pause and hurry—it was then, it is now, and Henry brings it to vivid life.

Sweet Dreams is a coming-of-age book. It is a book about the boy who grew up with candy wealth, fell in love with a toy printing press, and decided, early on, to be a Writer. One can decide to be a Writer, but the world, in some ways, has to stand equal to that dream. It's a contest of wills, or it can be seen as one, and DeWitt takes us through the bruises and glories. He dreams out loud. We're there.

Here he is talking about the aforementioned Walton Estate (Walmarthon), now the heart of the Eastern University campus:

... Walton's was ten minutes or so away—you waded and pushed through overgrown bushes, ferns, and low hanging branches, with dankness, cobwebs, and with shade from the branches interlocking and arching above, while woodpeckers hammered, echoing, and cicadas whirred. You'd come out, then, following a creek, above the smaller of two ponds, set in the estate's open expanse of lawn, gardens, driveways and walks. A big white house, lived in, was to the left, far off were the gatehouse and wall, and far to your right, the castle-like mansion, deserted now.

 

 

Add a Comment

"A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials, through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality... Location is where we start."

— Louise Erdrich, quoted in A Jury of Her Peers, by Elaine Showalter

Outside my window at this hour the smoke billows up from the neighbor's chimney and the pink sky goes sweet blue, toward black.

This is my home, my view, my slice of somewhere, and again and again, it appears in my books.

I write about suburban Philadelphia because as a teen I lived here and as an adult I returned here. I write about Juarez because once, in 2005, I took a trip across the El Paso border that changed my life. I write about a cortijo in southern Spain because I've been there, because once a man tall as royalty took me out into his dusty hectares in an open-to-the-sky jeep and said, Might I introduce you to my fighting bulls? I conjure a secret poet at Radnor High School because I once was one of those, and I story ghosts through a garden much like Chanticleer, down the road, because I spent two years walking through, week after week, and because a stone I had made for my mother rests there, beneath the katsura trees, and because I don't know where I'd be without seeds and all they beget.

I write where I've been, who I've been, what feels like mine. I have this place that I love. I begin here.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Every now and then, I have the chance to sit down with an emerging writer, and a week or so ago, I had that privilege with a beautiful young woman (and recent Radnor High graduate) named Caroline Goldstein. Caroline and I sat at Chanticleer and talked about books and life, about the blurred lines between fiction and truth, about the power of place in the books I write, and about many other things.

Today, Caroline's story about Nothing but Ghosts and other Main Line endeavors appears in Main Line Suburban Life, and she's done an immaculate job (they teach those writers well at Radnor). The story makes me doubly happy, for it features a photo taken by my talented friend, Mike Matthews (photo not available online). It makes me triply happy because it brought me back in touch with Sam Strike, who is a dear out here where I live and a wonderful mentor to younger writers.

In any case, I hope to see some of you this evening at the Doylestown Bookshop.

Display Comments Add a Comment

"Recently I was going through some of the poetry I wrote as a teen, and truly there’s some pitiful stuff. So sentimental and sloppy and overcooked and romantic, and yet, there it sits in the high school magazine, alongside the work of my genuinely genius brother (number one at Radnor, tops at Princeton, a soaring PhD from Stanford), not to mention David Brooks of Bobos in Paradise fame. There it was, somehow earning me the community poet award, the night just before graduation. I was given gifts as an aspiring young poet—more than my poetry ever actually deserved. Mostly it was this gift of learning to believe in myself so that I would keep working at this thing called writing, keep testing myself, keep reading the works of others, keep trying, until I could get some part of it right. I was emboldened by others. I learned to persevere. And because of this, I found a way to make language my ally, to emerge in the world as myself."

— from my talk yesterday to the gracious, intelligent, and warmly inviting women of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church

Display Comments Add a Comment