Last semester, in my classroom at Penn, we focused on home—how the stories of our lives (and how we tell those stories) ultimately tangle with this construct.
As part of the
Beltran Family Teaching Award program, I invited my current and past students to write of home for a special publication my husband and I designed. When Anthony Ciacci, a student from a previous year, responded with his essay, I was thrilled—loved the piece so much that I whispered its existence into the ear of Trey Popp, a
Pennsylvania Gazette editor and friend. (Trey kindly visits my class each year to talk about editing and publishing, and I've been blessed to find my students' work appear in the
Gazette pages, including
these pieces.)
The rest, as they say, is history. This week, in the ever-gorgeous
Pennsylvania Gazette, Anthony's piece, modified slightly for print, appears with its own lovely illustration and shine (read the full story
here). I could not be more proud—nor more happy. Anthony is a big-souled guy, an extraordinary brother, a faithful son, and a talent. We need hearts like his at this time.
Congratulations, Anthony.
Maybe it's because I lead but one class during the one semester at Penn that teaching carries, for me, such weight. I begin planning for January in August, often earlier. Choosing the books we'll read, plotting our course, interacting with potential students. I pack as much into every class as our allotted hours allow. Pressing in with ideas, exhortations, readings. Bringing guests like George Hodgman (via Skype), Reiko Rizzuto, Margo Rabb, A.S. King, and Trey Popp into the fold. (Next year we'll be hosting Paul Lisicky, and focused on the art of time in memoir.) Using multiple media, stretching the idea of memoir, expecting much. Finding the good while searching, too, for all that is still possible.
And, this semester, leading two remarkable thesis candidates—Nina Friend and David Marchino—toward work so extraordinary that, I believe, it will represent their calling cards for years and years to come.
Teaching is standing before a class, then stepping aside. It's managing the ripples and waves while keeping the craft on course.
Three more weeks. And then these students will be off on their own, carrying our lessons forward, glancing back, I hope, not just as writers, but as people who value truth, empathy, conversation, and a greater knowing of themselves.
They have huge hearts and great talent. They make me laugh and they work hard. They pay attention to one another. They let the learning in.
Today they surprised me with a birthday celebration and magnificent card (you guys!) and made me cry (again). Forever and ever, 135.302. Forever and ever and ever.
Thank you, my students, and thank you dear provocateur, remembering friends Karen Rile and Jamie-Lee Josselyn. And thank you Trey Popp and Maggie Ercolani and Nabil Mehta, who joined us in our final hour and made the party finer.
I will sleep well tonight.
Okay, so call this a
Beth loves her students blog-athon day, but I am not going to let the moon get any higher in tonight's sky without celebrating Maggie Ercolani, a student from two years ago, who has her first published piece in the current issue of the
Pennsylvania Gazette. She joins my students
Moira Moody,
Joe Polin, and
Nabil Mehta on these pages, and her story is a triumph—a telling triumph and a living triumph.
Let me explain.
Toward the end of this past summer I received an email from Maggie who I knew, from an earlier exchange, had been looking forward to a summer internship at Macy's with Maggie-style enthusiasm. I saw her name in my in-box, opened her note, then recoiled. It wasn't the story I'd expected. Indeed, Maggie was writing to tell me that she had suffered a stroke in the first hour of the first day of that internship. That she had spent the summer in hospitals and rehab. That she had a new understanding of the father about whom she had written in my class—a father who had experienced a traumatic brain injury when he tumbled from a bike. Maggie wanted to write about what had happened so that she might understand. Would I help her? Of course I would. But oh, Maggie, I said. Oh. Maggie.
But the reason Maggie's piece is in the
Gazette is because Trey Popp, an editor there, took Maggie's story on and worked with her to develop it more fully. They went back and forth, Trey and Maggie, until the piece is what it is today. I am so grateful to Trey, and I am so proud of Maggie—for her perseverance, for her attitude, for the textures in her life.
Please click on
this link to read Maggie's story for yourself.
Those are beautiful hands. And what a gift! Sounds as if the giving and loving go both ways. The best!
love those rings
How super cool this is! Yay yay for a happy celebration. I like your blue nail polish : )
Ah, thank you, everyone. And I must correct the record. Those lovely hands do not belong to me. They belong to one of the Fine Fifteen.