Rebecca Brewster Stevenson's Blog: Small Hours, page 5

Of Teachers and Why We Love Them, My Favorite One, and Two Birthdays

[image error]I think we’ve seen the last of them for this year: the first-day-of-school photos that spill down our social media screens. Darling children in their new clothes and unscuffed shoes, grinning for the camera and holding their signs: Amelia, second grade. Dylan, fourth. And the less-than-darling, I’m-too-old-for-this children, holding signs or not, wearing I-couldn’t-care clothes and looking at the camera slit-eyed, or wearing cutting-edge clothes and grinning, arm akimbo.

Every student in this country has started back to school by now. The other day, a boy in my daughter’s math class announced that, two full weeks in, they had completed exactly 5.5% of the school year.

This was not excellent news to Emma. She wasn’t sure that 5.5% was worth registering.

Nearly three weeks ago now, I visited her school with her at student orientation. With five minutes to pass between classes–threading our way in and out of buildings, up and down stairs–we sat in each of her classrooms for ten. Her teachers met us at their doors, encouraged us to take copies of the neatly stacked hand-outs. And in what must have felt to them like a hot second, they explained the scope and sequence of their courses, their methods of teaching and evaluation, and briefly listed (if we would be so kind) those extras we could provide that might be handy over the course of the upcoming year: whiteboard markers, boxes of tissues, hand sanitizer.

None of them knew that I have been a teacher, but like every parent in that room, I’m sure, I was interested in how my child would do in that class. I wondered if the methods employed would work for her unique mind, her way of perceiving the world. And, as a teacher, I had that other perspective: knowing what it feels like to greet student and parent alike for the first time. Knowing that I would be navigating relationships with both, listening carefully to both. Seeking to know each student insofar as he would allow it, as was appropriate. Seeking to like each one. Knowing that my standards were high and earnestly believing that my students could and would get there, that it was my job to give them everything they needed to reach those goals.

Emma’s 5.5% has been well worth her time already. I hear it in the way she talks about her classes: the experiments, the discussions. On the way to school this morning, she was telling me about parent functions in math; last night before bed she was discussing Malcolm Gladwell and rhetorical analysis. She likes each of her classes; she likes her teachers very much.

***

Once, years ago, I saw a comment about teachers on Facebook that saddened me. It was made by a mother of grown children, each of whom had been educated through college and perhaps beyond. She was complaining about teachers asking for pay raises. Why did they need to ask for more, she wondered aloud on social media. They only work nine months a year. They get the entire summer off.

I didn’t reply, but if I had, I might have said something about the work a teacher does around the edges of her day, those hours when she’s not required to be in her classroom. I spent hours and hours at planning and grading when I was a teacher. After an eight-hour day at school, I easily and often put in two to four additional hours of work at home, especially in my earliest years of teaching.

Listening to my daughter’s teachers talk about the upcoming school year, I had a difficult time assessing the value of their expertise. This one has a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a Master’s in teaching. She will conduct her students in performing experiments that will help them draw conclusions about acids and bases, and she will–at the same time–ensure that none of them blows himself up, or his neighbor, or school property.

When you are a teacher– I wanted to say to this Facebook remark– you don’t work with your colleagues. You almost never see them. You work instead with people who are vastly younger than yourself in age and experience, vulnerable people, people who are not in charge of their own lives and so sometimes (often?) are victims of poverty or anger, who are trying to understand the world while you are trying to teach them the beauties of a sonnet.

Please put a price tag on that and then pay the teacher accordingly. Or give her the summer off. Or both.

***

[image error]Every year I was teaching, my husband would compose a list of “class rules” and write it on a white board in my classroom. This is fall, 2007. Sorry for the flash. Again, 2007.

Of course I realize, too, that some people are terrible teachers, that they entered their profession in error or that, over the course of years, they have become calloused or embittered to the point that it might be best for them to stop teaching altogether. But that doesn’t happen because teaching is easy. That’s never why.

***

A teacher is a person with two loves: her subject and her students. They vie for dominance within her, and she is at her best when their marriage erupts in the classroom: when her delight in a sonnet equals her delight in her students discovering the same.

This doesn’t happen every day. It can’t.

And the most difficult part of a teacher’s job is when he is altogether unable to enjoy the thing he loves in deference to loving his students. They present with needs, difficulties, challenges, issues (or essays) that he must give his full attention while his love of sonnets molders behind the classroom door.

And that is part of the job.

***

My very favorite teacher helped me learn to write. I can’t say he taught me: like the best teachers, he understood that the best learning was a process of discovery. But he provided the insights and the examples, and he made me write. And then he only gave me praise when I wrote well.

He was an excellent teacher, and in what I consider to be among the best of the essay-ish things I have ever written, I recounted his excellence and my blundering foolishness in the face of it, and my regret.

He was a teacher, but he was also a writer– and it was his love of good writing that equipped him to teach me. No doubt it was also his hours spent evaluating my writing and that of others that prevented his getting more writing done. I wish I could thank him for that.

But there is this: he has released a book. Or rather, a book of his writing has been released (ugh, passive voice–he would have hated that), compiled and edited in the years since his death by his colleague and another of my favorite teachers, Dr. Gloria Stansberry.

[image error]Fragments is a collection of Bill Donnelly’s short stories–some fiction, some not–that showcase his love of language. He taught me to love the dictionary, and this book demonstrates that he loved it too–for all the wonder and surprise a rightly chosen word can deliver.

 

He was a brave writer, unafraid to experiment with writing–and this is what he encouraged us to do, so many years ago now, in his Advanced Writing class.

I think he knew what I have learned: that writing is always a risk; that you never show up to the task alone, despite how solitary you are; and that perseverance just might produce quality. So it’s always best to try.

He said, “Fragments are not the enemy. I like fragmentary sentences, vivid imagery, humor, weird repetition and variation, sound effects, contentious dialogue, electrifying facts, surprise.”

 

 

I did not know him well, but I can vouch that the above is true. It describes not just the way he wrote; it was the way he taught.

The book is titled Fragments because, I think, of his avowed love for them. But the book is fragmentary too: pieces of a life.

And that’s the thing I like best about the book: I can hear his voice as I read. No matter which story, it is Bill Donnelly’s voice reading it aloud. He is perched on a desk at the front of the room, his long legs bent in front of him. He is sucking his cheeks, he is pausing, he is enunciating the words exactly so. And I am riveted, listening, hearing not just the words but their sounds, not just their sounds but their rhythms–and finding my own voice because he shared his so generously. I am sitting there listening, and I am learning how to write.

I received my copy of the book a few months ago, but I’m writing about it today to celebrate. The book itself is a few months old, and today my novel celebrates one year since its release. I guess one could call it my book’s birthday.

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So this is another gesture of gratitude to Dr. Donnelly, who above all others, helped me find my voice as a writer– or who, at the very least, most emboldened me to try. It is the page, after all, that teaches us to write. But Dr. Donnelly provided me immeasurable help.

Once more, Dr. Donnelly: thank you.

[image error]William Francis Donnelly, III    1935-2015

 

Fragments is available here. 

 

 

Words Over Coffee

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His email arrived sometime in May, or maybe late April. An invitation. He’s a writer, a someday filmmaker, and he wanted to talk Art.

I’ve known Joel since he was born, I guess. His family and ours go to the same church; his age falls just between that of Everett and Emma. I’m sure they tumbled over one another in the church nursery. But he first truly registered with me when, at about four years old, he spoke to me on the church sidewalk with all the gravitas of a grown-up. He was adorable.

Since then, I’ve watched him grow up in the way that parents watch children not their own: out of the corner of my eye. But in recent years, he’s been around more, hanging out at my house with my children. Among teenagers I’ve known, he’s emerged as that scarce and winning type: deeply thoughtful, with the confidence to discuss those thoughts with adults not his parents. We’ve had some good conversations over the years.

Now an invitation in the inbox: words over coffee. Would I meet with him at a coffee shop and talk art-making? Talk writing, to be specific? His schedule was flexible. Would I meet him?

Yes, and I was looking forward to it.

The problem was time. When could we meet? I was working on a magazine article, a project requiring research within the limitations afforded by Everett’s upcoming graduation. My answer: Sure! I’d love to. But can it wait until after May?

There’s no hurry, he said, which was good. May flew by, as did the graduation festivities. Our home’s exterior, due to long-neglected damages, was undergoing a modest reconstruction, as was my magazine article. Meanwhile, a wedding loomed.

Can it wait until after the wedding? Mid-July at the latest. I’m sorry.

His answer: No problem.

So then the wedding and all the travel, and a return to a house interior– due to recently developed damages– undergoing a modest reconstruction. The living room furniture was in the dining room, construction dust was everywhere, and the suitcases had exploded on the bedroom floors. The magazine article, meanwhile, was in a sorry state of disrepair. And we were leaving town again in–what was it?–a few weeks.

Me, embarrassed and tired: After that?

Him, cheerful: That’s fine.

But things still did not look good. Remember all that time I spent on the magazine article and consequently not on the clean-up? And you know the faithful miracle of housework: It always waits for you. Mine grinned at me from dust-coated walls.

The article, meanwhile, Was Not Good.

And we were anticipating a wedding reception. Not a wedding, mind you, but a party to celebrate our newlyweds here among their North Carolina friends. There was a house to clean up and a yard to make right. There was Emma’s back-to-school preparations. I sprained my ankle walking the dog. I had no time for the article and absolutely no business meeting anyone for coffee.

Me: So sorry. So, so sorry.

Finally we met this week–but mostly because he was here at the house already, hanging out with Everett. Our conversation wasn’t in a coffee shop; there was no coffee involved. He sat on our living room sofa and I on a nearby chair, happy to not be on my feet (er, ankle) for awhile. He ate his Chick-fil-A French fries and, with all the gravitas of a grown-up, asked me:

When you’re starting a story, do you think about the concepts and ideas you want to communicate, or do you start with plot, or with character?

Here was something I hadn’t thought about in awhile. Not in a long while. Suddenly I was recalling Maddie in her earliest days–such a long time ago.

You start with ideas. No, with character. Well, but character must absolutely drive the plot. One can play with believability. Almost anything is believable–potentially, anyway, if you handle it right. But you can’t readily believe a person suddenly doing something out of character.

And what does one do with the ideas or images that come to mind–those random ones that seem completely insignificant to the larger work? Are they worth writing down, or do you wait until you’re sure of a thing and then take the time to develop it?

No, you don’t wait, because you never know. You never know when an idea or an image isn’t exactly the one you will–someday–be reaching for. Write it. Bring it to life and then, if need be, squirrel it away. You never know.

I had a useless character while writing my book who kept coming up. I didn’t know what to do with her. Truly, I had no idea why she mattered, but I kept writing her, and I kept writing her in. In the end, she was enormously significant to the story. I needed her throughout, but she came of her own volition. I can’t explain it to you, and I’ve heard other writers say the same thing.

We went on like this for the better part of an hour, each of us talking about that what comes in the exhilarating isolation of creativity. I summarized some concepts from my book for him. I told him about how, for years, any church communion service I was part of had my head teeming with ideas. I had little notebooks of grocery lists and errands that were punctuated with thoughts on the meaning of the Eucharist. It was a vital part of my book, I told him, and now that I’ve finished the project, these ideas don’t come to me anymore. I can receive communion in penitent and grateful prayer, just like everybody else.

He told me about a concept he’s working on. He showed me the paragraph description that was an opening scene, and in a few moments of reading, its quiet and fearsome tableau filled my living room. He talked about it, and behind his eyes, I watched the strange multi-fold labor of the creative: ideas made manifest in character, then teased out in images that invite others into the room.

He said: the most terrifying thing in the world is a blank page.

Yes, I said, remembering that fear and wishing that I were staring down a blank page again.

But I had to go. Time to get Emma from school, and then hit the grocery store, and then a meeting at church at 7. I was running late already, having lost track of the time because for ten-twenty-thirty minutes I was talking about writing, that thing Annie Dillard describes as “mere,” but that, for some of us, is akin to life.

We continued talking as we walked to our cars.

He won’t go to film school. Quentin Tarantino (among others) says don’t bother. Joel says Tarantino said to make a short film. And I thought about my training as a writer: two classes, one workshop–all of it twenty and more years ago.

I picked up Emma. We went to the grocery store. And the ensuing days have been full of preparations for the wedding reception– all of them must-do’s for that joy-filled reception.

The “words over coffee” had happened– without the coffee, but rich with reminders of what I love to do. I’m grateful to Joel for the conversation, wedged as it was into an unforgiving schedule. And I’m looking forward, more than ever, to confronting a blank page.

Soon.

“The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.” — Annie Dillard

“To this day I actually think that…rather than go to film school, just grab a camera and try to start making a movie.” — Quentin Tarantino

“The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly…. that page will teach you to write.” — Annie Dillard

 

Such a Thing as Always

And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere there must be more of it.

C.S. Lewis, Til We Have Faces

Before our son’s wedding in July, I had never been to the Pacific Northwest, never seen British Columbia, never been in Seattle.

Well, okay, I had been in the Seattle airport. But views of tarmac and airport kiosk don’t count as actually seeing a place. Proximity isn’t presence: I had never set actual foot on actual Seattle soil.

Before taking the train to Vancouver for the wedding, we spent four days in Seattle. Our AirBnB had a view of the water and of the Space Needle. We went to the top of that Needle, we took a Duck Tour. We made our obligatory trek through the Public Market and spent an afternoon in the aquarium. We loved all of it.

Seattle is famous for rain. They say it rains all the time there. They say it rains nine months out of the year.

But in the four days of our visit, the skies were cloudless, and every day we were there was warmer than the day before.

My husband declared that it never rains in Seattle–a fair claim, based on our experience: We’ve been to Seattle. It didn’t rain.

***

 

Chilliwack, British Columbia is 63 miles and a hair southeast of Vancouver. Where Vancouver is all brittle glass and waterfront, Chilliwack is a broad basin ringed with mountains, an agricultural plain become, in many places, a sprawling suburbia. From any one of the mountainsides surrounding this verdant town, you imagine you are seeing all of Chilliwack from end-to-end: the roads that cross it coming together at right angles or not; the subdivisions and neighborhoods, the downtown area with its restaurants, businesses, and hotels.

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This is its latest iteration. Even now, gorgeous townhomes and neighborhoods are claiming square blocks. New developments cling to the lower sides of the surrounding mountains. Chilliwack is become Vancouver’s bedroom community, where once upon a time it was all farms.

And before the farms, a long time ago, Chilliwack was an ice sheet hemmed by mountains. Then the glaciers receded and Chilliwack’s Fraser Valley was, for a time, a lake. Eventually, so say the geologists, the land under that lake pushed upwards, emerging into daylight and becoming the plain that encouraged farmers to dig in, plant a field and a farmhouse, make a life.

Chilliwack as we know it hasn’t always been Chilliwack, you see. There is no such thing as always.

***

What I noticed first was the cottonwood trees. I didn’t know their name; I didn’t know that’s what I was seeing. But driving through this vast basin, it was their height that compelled me, and their breadth, and the way they stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder along stretches of what looked like prairie.

The trees border rivers but also stand elsewhere, brakes against the wind. They have thick trunks and a long reach and leaves that look thick and waxy but still turn onto silver backs in the breeze.

I am told these trees can be a nuisance: in the spring they release some gauzy, cotton-like filament that drifts through the air and embeds itself in the grass. My Alaskan nieces told me about the chore it is to pluck it in handfuls from the lawn. Apparently, a rake won’t do the trick, and to be sure, the task sounds like a tedium.

But the romantic in me imagines the cottonwood filament floating in the air like something out of a fairytale. And I love the way cottonwood leaves turn and catch the light. There is something in their rows reminding me of poplar trees that, once upon a time, I watched from a terrace in the south of France. They bent together in the wind just like the poplar trees did that marked the edge of my friend’s backyard in Pittsburgh.

***

Until two days before the wedding, we had never met any one of our son’s bride’s family. We got out of our car and began walking under the willow tree toward their front door, and out of the house they came, one after the other, the beautiful reality of the faces and voices we’d known on Facebook and over the phone.

We could hardly wait to meet them–this family from so far away and somehow also so like us: each on the edge of loss and gain in this strange arithmetic of marriage. And each of us doing this for the first time: sending a child out from the family to become a family of their own.

I will freely admit to weeping when I saw and hugged Shanna’s mother: each of us was grieving in this stricken and overjoyed way, and I knew she understood like no one else at the time.

It was the only time I cried publicly during that wedding weekend. I say “publicly” on purpose.

***

With a mental hand, I reach in and grab whichever of the teeming memories comes readily to mind. It is William, just two, at his sandbox.

*

The sandbox is red and shaped like a crab with a dome of a shell that we threw easily to the side for digging. William and I, without jackets in the warm autumn midday, are perched on the edge of the sandbox. I am quite pregnant with Everett and very tired, and we are approaching William’s nap.

We fill a bucket with sand, and I show him how to tamp it down. We fill it up and pack it in; we make a level place and overturn it. And then I tell him, “It’s the moment of truth,” and we pull the bucket gently away to see what we’ve made.

We do this again and again, and every time I say, “It’s the moment of truth,” because I somehow think this is funny. And then one time he finally tells me to stop saying that, and so I do.

*

We played together in that sandbox countless times, and these are the details I recall–these and the fact that I was ready for him to take a nap and therefore kept a wary eye on the time. I loved to be with him and also I needed these moments to not last forever, because I needed a nap just as much as he did.

I think we heard the wind in the tops of the loblolly pines that traced the edge of the yard. I think we felt the warm sun through our sleeves. I think I kissed, so many times, the top of his warm blond head.

Bill and I gave him that sandbox for his second birthday. We hadn’t known what to get him. He didn’t expect anything; he didn’t understand the sometimes overblown concept that is a birthday.

He needed nothing, but we wanted to give him everything.

***

On the morning of the wedding, Bill drives me across town to where I, along with bride and bridesmaids and Shanna’s mother and aunt, are getting ready for the day.

It is a Saturday, mid-morning, mid-summer. The landlord of our AirBnB stands on his deck shirtless and holding a yellow coffee mug, talking to his neighbor.

“What are you doing today?” his neighbor asks him.

“Nothing,” he says.

We pass a woman trimming a shrub at the end of her driveway. We pass three teenage girls in shorts walking down the sidewalk, and the one nearest the fence trails her fingers in the chain link.

July 8, 2017, was a normal day for some people. Maybe it was a normal day for you.

***

Ask me about permanence, and I will tell you that I know it to be impossible and that I also pretend it exists, and that above most things, maybe all of them, permanence is a thing I long for.

***

One of the beautiful things about cottonwoods, and poplars, and maybe all trees, is their receptivity. They’ll take on the sun and the cold, the light and the heat. I realize they have no choice. But it’s the way they respond to these things that is so lovely. The way cottonwoods, birches, and poplars take on the wind, for example. I like that.

Willa Cather was a student of trees, apparently, and of life, as writers will (must) be. She said, “I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again: one can learn a lot from trees.

***

(Will’s groomsmen stood shoulder to broad shoulder, handsome in their fitted gray suits. I worried that we hadn’t reminded them, during the rehearsal, not to lock their knees: if you stand still with your knees locked for too long, you can faint dead away–and no one wants that, especially in a wedding.

It wasn’t a problem in the end, but this thought was something that distracted me briefly while my firstborn son was getting married.)

***

It was a beautiful wedding. It was truly one of the happiest days of my life. So far.

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***

The day after the wedding, a group of us hiked up to Lindeman Lake. It was a gorgeous hike that was all steep inclines and often a scramble over rocks. The view throughout was wooded and lushly green, with needle-shaped pines and thick ferns and waterfalls. It was what I had always thought the Pacific Northwest should be.

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We climbed for more than half an hour, and it was arduous at times–a far cry from the hiking we’ve done in our more gentle Appalachians. When we finished, we emerged at the edge of trees to the rocky border of glacier-fed Lindeman Lake.

I had heard about this lake. I knew it was cold, and I knew what I had to do. There could be no hesitation. If I stood at the edge and thought about it for any time at all, if I allowed the air to cool me after that hike, I would lose all sense of necessity and nerve.

So I immediately stripped shoes, socks and shirt and clambered onto the sloping rock. And I jumped.

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Lindeman Lake is turquoise, clear and stunningly cold. The shock of it is enough to knock your breath clean away. My brother-in-law, who lives year-round in Alaska, had himself a fine little back-stroking time on the lake, but not me. I got out of that lake as soon as humanly possible.

None of us went in a second time.

***

I think I want permanence, and then along comes a need for the opposite. Like my very brief swim in Lindeman. Like my need for a nap, all those many years ago, when I sat with my son at the sandbox.

But there was something about Will’s wedding–or maybe just the days leading up to it–that made part of me wish for the sandbox again: I wanted to sit in the sun one more time with my golden-haired boy just two years old. In my imagination, I would sit there again for hours.

It’s a longing for permanence that I didn’t at all desire at the time.

***

Before I became a mother, I found a song for my children. It was a Beatles song that was then covered by Alison Krauss, and while it might have been a song for an unknown and hoped for lover, it was to me a song of longing for my as-yet unborn children.

I sang it to Willliam before he was born and after. Of our three children, he was the one I sang it to the most. And when I danced with him at his wedding reception, it was the song we danced to.

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Love you forever and forever, love you with all my heart. Love you whenever we’re together, love you when we’re apart.

Because I will always be his mother. Always.

 

 

 

 

 

Delightful Perplexity

I might have been ten years old, maybe younger, and we were taking my visiting aunt and uncle to the airport. Why I brought my tangled mess of necklaces along in the car with me I’ll never know, but my aunt noticed my struggles with them and asked me to hand them over.

“I love untangling these,” she said, and in short order handed them back to me neat, tidy, and wearable again.

***

A tree grows through our lower deck. They built the deck around it years ago when, presumably, it was a much smaller tree.

But the tree was significantly enormous by the time we moved in, and over the eighteen years of our occupancy, Bill has several times cut away the boards where the tree emerges through them, making room for its widening girth.

A few yea[image error]rs ago, he told me this was no longer an option. He had cut as far as he could; the tree had expanded and now was pressing against the supports beneath the floorboards.

Today we had that fixed. Experts came and cut away a portion of the deck, then rearranged the joists and laid new boards down.

Voila!

I love that there are people in the world who know how to do these things.

 

***

For the last several weeks, I have been editing a friend’s book. This friend is my editor, in fact: she spent long hours laboring over the 300-some pages I sent her way, making corrections and suggestions, gently informing me of the flaws and–in some cases–disasters in my project.

And so this job of editing her work is a bit of a turnabout for both of us. She came to the conversation well-versed in what might be helpful: a list of concerns she had for the book, things I needed to look out for, problems she knew or feared were obstructing narrative or impeding clarity.

She was, of course, right. While the story is fascinating and her diction acute, the project itself is complex. She tells the true story of her grandparents’ lifelong work as missionaries in Haiti. Equipped with first-person anecdotes and explanations of her grandparents as well as her own memories ( Elizabeth grew up in Haiti as the daughter of second-generation missionaries there), her sentences are at times necessarily over-full: how to include these historical facts, that transition from the previous paragraphs, and this specific connection to a singular person, memory, moment?

It can be quite an entanglement of phrases and clauses, with all clarity fleeing the page.

This brings to mind my teaching days, when students would send essays and papers my way. The electronic documents made commentary simple: a highlighted passage opened a side-bar conversation where I would explain my concerns with a given sentence or idea. And there was opportunity for response: the document was shared between us, and any answer a student might give would be sent to me via email and [image error]would also appear beneath mine in that side-bar.

Of course, no student ever responded. No matter the warmth or humor with which I tried to encourage the writer. This was not, to their minds, apparently, a time for conversation. They took my edits and suggestions and did with them what they would–the object perhaps so often being to finish and off-load the essay, the paper, the whathaveyou.

But with Elizabeth, it’s different. She replies. She makes new approaches. She concedes that I’m right about the word-choice, or she begs me to let her keep a passage. It’s a dialogue about both history and writing–and it’s fun.

I find that I love, too, those tangled sentences, those overloaded series of clauses that are packed with vital detail. I highlight them. I consider them. And then I break them apart. Here a semi-colon, here a colon. Here a sentence unto itself because–Ah!–the emphasis is so much stronger that way. Here we cut this out because it derails the narrative; here we cut that because it is too dear. And here we rearrange: the end of this sentence must be the beginning–you see? It’s so much clearer that way.

It’s a puzzle, I find. A delightful perplexity. A challenge to the brain that my mind absolutely itches for. I love to get my proverbial hands on those words and phrases, to pry them apart and rearrange them, to ensure they are suitably girded and rightly selected in the first place–all the while keeping in mind this project’s third and most important party: the reader.

The reader. We mustn’t forget. How will he see it? Will this make sense to her? Will they find themselves caught up in the morning fog of Haiti’s rugged mountains, passionate for the needs of the Haitian people, and, so readily, loving Elizabeth’s grandparents?

This is why we write, yes? For the reader.

And so we must make time to be sure that our readers–who have trusted themselves to our hands–can forget themselves in our book.

And this is why we edit.

 

Our House

Things are a just a little bit thrilling at the Stevenson household these days. I suppose it isn’t obvious on the surface. On the surface, daily life is what we’ve got: the boys to school every day, Emma to school every day, Bill to work. Soccer practice and games and a chorus concert for Emma; work and friends and final exams for the boys.  On the surface of things, the cars come and go from the driveway, carrying one or more of us here and there, just doing the daily things.

But the actual calendar tells a different story: one of Everett’s high school graduation on the horizon and Will’s wedding in British Columbia not terribly long after that. Which means that inside the house, in addition to the dailies of meals and chores and the writing and editing that I should be and absolutely am doing (right?), I am planning parties and going through photos and–only occasionally, of course–sighing deeply over How Very Fast a childhood–even three of them–flies by. 

Somewhere in the process, I cam across this post about Everett, and I’ve decided to re-post it here for posterity, for joy, for the beauty it is to know him now and to have known him when he was six-and-a-half. Read it, if you’d like.

Six-and-a-Half

When you are six and a half, you might have two new front teeth that have just broken through the gums and are making their slow and steady descent.

When you are six and a half, you might go to bed on Tuesday night with your animals in a bed of their own. Yes, you might, very carefully, have made a bed for them On your bed, using a pillow from the sofa for their heads, and the throw blanket for a cover. You might have placed Injury there, a green beanie baby bunny that you’ve had forever, so named because he gets hurt a lot; and an unnamed yellow beanie baby bunny that Mr. Howard gave to your little sister; and a blue beanie baby dog that you named Abandoned because someone found it on the trail; and a small stuffed seal, that you might refer to as a Beaver, because that’s what you think it is.

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When you are six and a half, you might go to bed on Wednesday night with a full arsenal under the covers including a yellow water gun (empty) and a cap gun that no longer works, and a Very Noisy blue plastic machine gun that came in a police set for Christmas and is Not To Be Used On The Main Floor of This House. You might also have two sticks to be transformed on the morrow into a bow and arrow, and a small plastic paintbrush that looks like a paintbrush but is really a magic wand. And right before your mother kisses you good-night, you might pull from under your pillow the bit of white rope, the end of which is tied into a lasso, because you wanted to be certain you didn’t lose it.

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When you are six and a half you might spend hours with your big brother building Star Wars ships out of Lego pieces, and you might use them to frequently recreate the Battle of Hoth on your bedroom floor.

When you are s[image error]ix and a half, your cozy blanket, your thumb, and your mother might be Very Important to you.

When you are six and a half you might, with Readily Measurable Confidence, wave a cheerful good-bye to your own mini-van, and have a Really Splendid Time at your friend Peter’s birthday party, and come home with a kind of swagger, and say it was fun.

When you are six and a half you might be able to Run Really Fast and only ever run that way, Never Slower.

You might… if you are Everett.

 

It’s Okay to Ask

[image error]Time spent teaching is never lost.

I spent an hour in a 9th grade classroom yesterday. The first time in nearly five years.

This was at a public school, Durham School of the Arts downtown. The place where my daughter now spends her days, where my middle son used to spend his. And we’ve lived in Durham for nearly-ever: I’ve driven past that school hundreds of times.

But yesterday was my first time teaching there, and this as a one-time guest. Fifty minutes with a creative writing class. Thirty-one students. Poetry and prose and metaphor packed between the bells.

***

I’ve taught in public and private schools, many years ago and only five years ago. The schools had different philosophies and perhaps some of them were better formed than others. But yesterday I realized again how much they are the same, whether I’m in a public middle-and-high school in the Pittsburgh suburbs or a shanty school with a corrugated roof in Nairobi’s Korogocho slum: Here the students sit, and here sits or stands the teacher.

And Then What?

It’s the Then What that interests me.

***

Yesterday it was metaphors and extended ones. It was listening for the metaphor in Cory Fry’s current song Underground and then discovering the weight of the metaphors in a clever poem by Sylvia Plath.

As teacher, one can’t be in a hurry with these things. To rip the thread from the spool is to leave your students abandoned, distracted, unlearned or annoyed. You have to tease it out, to let them talk to you. Good teaching is, I’ve learned, so much less my telling them things and so much more their telling me. 

Which was why I loved it yesterday when Aaman said he thought Fry’s underground was a mine, and why I reveled in Lorin’s observation of the “percussive influence” in the song. Why I loved that Emerson declared they could do without songs about love, thank you very much, and that Katherine noticed the nine syllables in Plath’s poem aligned neatly with the nine months of pregnancy.

And when they realized, as a class, that the poet was talking about pregnancy in the first place, we had that sonic boom of revelation that many teachers live for: the metaphoric light bulb, the newborn understanding, the thing I was always after for my students–no matter where I taught–when each one or even one of them says: I See.

***

I miss teaching.

***

But yesterday was fifty minutes. It was an island of time. It was a window the students let me climb through, unburdened by a week’s load of lesson plans or papers to grade or the learning modifications that require a lesson’s reconstruction. It was without obligatory phone calls to parents or tardy slips, without concerns because this student isn’t paying attention or asks to leave the room too much. It was without getting up too early or deciding (again) what to wear (the students pay attention to these things: “Mrs. Stevenson, you wore those shoes with that shirt last week.” Good lord).

Yesterday was a song, a poem, a paragraph from Fitzgerald. And then the bell.

***

I think any scholar of the New Testament is supposed to love Peter the most. Aren’t we supposed to love Peter? What with his foolhardy faith and his big mouth, his walking on water and his, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life” (John 6:68).

And I love Peter. I do.

But I love John the Baptist the best, I think. He was raised in the church, so to speak. Reared believing, like me. He leaped in his mother’s womb when he heard Mary’s voice, and He knew the Messiah on sight: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (Matthew 3:14).

And when his disciples grew anxious because people were all going to this Jesus fellow to be baptized, he understood–didn’t he?–where exactly he fit in the scheme of things: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).

It’s a good thing to know what one is called to, or not. To know that your time is up, your job is finished, that someone else can absolutely do the job just as well as you can, perhaps (so likely) better.

It was right and good for me to leave teaching when I did. And I miss it still. Which is fine.

***

The best moment for me with John the Baptist is when he was in prison for speaking the truth. He’d been in there for a long time, and I’m pretty sure he knew–he was no fool; he knew the temperament of the Galilean rulers–this would not end well.

He sent a message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3).

John. Prophet. Believer. Cousin of Christ. Asking whether Jesus was the Messiah.

***

John teaches me this: It’s okay to ask. It’s okay–years out, even five of them–to wonder about His work in your life. It’s okay to miss what He’s shut the door on. And it’s okay to be overjoyed in the life you currently have, to see the goodness and the blessing and the labor of it, and to still love the thing you once did. To wait in hope for the next thing, to work hard at the thing you are doing, and to remember with inexpressible sweetness what it was to be with your students–your students–all those days, all those times, before.

It’s okay to ask, says the imprisoned John, as long–always, always–as He is the One you go to with the questions, and then you stay put for the answers, even if He seems quiet for a long time.

He is always good, and He is always true. And the poetry of that right there is enough.

***

 “And Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”          Matthew 11:4-6

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Field Day

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It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but really, he wouldn’t have been able to hunt for eggs yet anyway.

Soon enough it was the field where he first played soccer, and Everett and Emma after him. Once, on the sidelines of a friend’s game, little Everett accidentally scratched Will’s eye, and we ended up spending a good portion of the afternoon in the emergency room.

And once, distracted by the action of six-year-old William’s game, Bill and I both were surprised to find the game stopped by the cry, “There’s a baby on the field!” and one of us (both?) went hurrying out to retrieve our toddling daughter.

At age four, little William came crying toward us. He didn’t like the game. He didn’t want to play anymore. I stood with infant, stroller and toddler and wondered what to do, but Bill made an early show of fatherly wisdom that we still talk about today:

“You don’t have to play,” he told our teary boy, “but first I want you to go back out on the field and kick the ball one more time. Just once more.”

William re-entered the game and kicked the ball once, twice, lots of times. And he played soccer forever after.

Our days of sitting sideline on that field are long over now. Each of the children graduated to different sports or different fields or both, and now that field serves only as backdrop to the pool. Occasionally I see parents like we once were toting bags and chairs down the hill, their children racing ahead of them. We ourselves haven’t been down on that field in I don’t know how long. We have no reason to go.

But it’s funny how I know that field and how it’s divided up for games. There is where I sat with my in-laws, there where baby Emma played in the grass during practice. There where Will sustained the eye injury, and where his father encouraged him back onto the field.

***

We pulled into the driveway this afternoon to see our kids all leaving the house. They were dressed for playing. “We’re going down to the field to play soccer with Nathan and Katherine. You come too!” they said.

It was 82 degrees and the sky had only scattered clouds. We changed our clothes, we grabbed some blankets. I brought the novel I’m currently reading.

And of course we took the dog.

***

The days around here are full and normal. All five of us aren’t always home for dinner; people come and go based on class, meetings, work, friends. But I am consistently aware of two realities:

we are on borrowed time and
this isn’t going to last.

By the end of the coming summer, Will will be married and Everett off on his gap year or in college.

Everything will be different so soon. Which is fine and good and the normal, healthy course of things.

But what I’ve decided in these weeks and months of “last times” is to *not* pressure the family to make something of it–to plan trips and getaways and special events. Instead, I’ve just decided to let it come and enjoy it.

It’s been working out nicely.

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***

This afternoon, in glorious 80-degree, sun-soaked winter light, I tossed a Frisbee with my dog and family. I watched my kids play soccer and walk handstands across the field. I lay on a blanket next to my husband and listened for the umpteenth time to his recent playlist, which includes all kinds of things I would never hear if it weren’t for him, plus the occasional number from Hamilton.

I watched our dog make friends with a bear (okay, it was a dog, but it was hard to tell) named Gus, and I watched my husband make our dog a drinking bowl out of a Frisbee.

I lay on my back and read my book. I lay on my back and watched hawks make wide circles in blue sky. I lay on my stomach and sang harmonies to Bill’s playlist and realized that I actually can read something as gorgeous and complex as Wolf Hall while enjoying Mood Robot. 

I closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my clothes. I listened to the sounds of my grown and near-grown children play soccer with their friends. I watched their young, strong, powerful bodies run across the field. And later I discussed some of the merits of Wolf Hall with Nathan and Katherine, who asked me to read them a sample. Which, of course, I did.

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***

The field at the bottom of our neighborhood is where my children learned to play soccer. It’s where baby Everett gave little William an eye-scratch and where Emma got a soccer trophy (I remember how badly she wanted one).

But today, if you were to come down to the field with me, I would show you where our grown-up children played and where I played with them, where the soccer goals were and where Will did his handstands.

Where our blankets lay and I used my purse as a pillow and read a book or didn’t on a February afternoon.

It was right there. I remember.

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Transformation

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It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but really, he wouldn’t have been able to hunt for eggs yet anyway.

Soon enough it was the field where he first played soccer, and Everett and Emma after him. Once, on the sidelines of a friend’s game, little Everett accidentally scratched Will’s eye, and we ended up spending a good portion of the afternoon in the emergency room.

And once, distracted by the action of six-year-old William’s game, Bill and I both were surprised to find the game stopped by the cry, “There’s a baby on the field!” and one of us (both?) went hurrying out to retrieve our toddling daughter.

At age four, little William came crying toward us. He didn’t like the game. He didn’t want to play anymore. I stood with infant, stroller and toddler and wondered what to do, but Bill made an early show of fatherly wisdom that we still talk about today:

“You don’t have to play,” he told our teary boy, “but first I want you to go back out on the field and kick the ball one more time. Just once more.”

William re-entered the game and kicked the ball once, twice, lots of times. And he played soccer forever after.

Our days of sitting sideline on that field are long over now. Each of the children graduated to different sports or different fields or both, and now that field serves only as backdrop to the pool. Occasionally I see parents like we once were toting bags and chairs down the hill, their children racing ahead of them. We ourselves haven’t been down on that field in I don’t know how long. We have no reason to go.

But it’s funny how I know that field and how it’s divided up for games. There is where I sat with my in-laws, there where baby Emma played in the grass during practice. There where Will sustained the eye injury, and where his father encouraged him back onto the field.

***

We pulled into the driveway this afternoon to see our kids all leaving the house. They were dressed for playing. “We’re going down to the field to play soccer with Nathan and Katherine. You come too!” they said.

It was 82 degrees and the sky had only scattered clouds. We changed our clothes, we grabbed some blankets. I brought the novel I’m currently reading.

And of course we took the dog.

***

The days around here are full and normal. All five of us aren’t always home for dinner; people come and go based on class, meetings, work, friends. But I am consistently aware of two realities:

we are on borrowed time and
this isn’t going to last.

By the end of the coming summer, Will will be married and Everett off on his gap year or in college.

Everything will be different so soon. Which is fine and good and the normal, healthy course of things.

But what I’ve decided in these weeks and months of “last times” is to *not* pressure the family to make something of it–to plan trips and getaways and special events. Instead, I’ve just decided to let it come and enjoy it.

It’s been working out nicely.

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***

This afternoon, in glorious 80-degree, sun-soaked winter light, I tossed a Frisbee with my dog and family. I watched my kids play soccer and walk handstands across the field. I lay on a blanket next to my husband and listened for the umpteenth time to his recent playlist, which includes all kinds of things I would never hear if it weren’t for him, plus the occasional number from Hamilton.

I watched our dog make friends with a bear (okay, it was a dog, but it was hard to tell) named Gus, and I watched my husband make our dog a drinking bowl out of a Frisbee.

I lay on my back and read my book. I lay on my back and watched hawks make wide circles in blue sky. I lay on my stomach and sang harmonies to Bill’s playlist and realized that I actually can read something as gorgeous and complex as Wolf Hall while enjoying Mood Robot. 

I closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my clothes. I listened to the sounds of my grown and near-grown children play soccer with their friends. I watched their young, strong, powerful bodies run across the field. And later I discussed some of the merits of Wolf Hall with Nathan and Katherine, who asked me to read them a sample. Which, of course, I did.

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***

The field at the bottom of our neighborhood is where my children learned to play soccer. It’s where baby Everett gave little William an eye-scratch and where Emma got a soccer trophy (I remember how badly she wanted one).

But today, if you were to come down to the field with me, I would show you where our grown-up children played and where I played with them, where the soccer goals were and where Will did his handstands.

Where our blankets lay and I used my purse as a pillow and read a book or didn’t on a February afternoon.

It was right there. I remember.

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Perspective

[image error]She has a full day of work ahead and a forty-five minute commute. Her three children will be at school all day, after which two will have music lessons and one hockey practice. Her husband is out of town on business all week.

She posts a picture of her alarm clock: 5:45 AM, and the words, “Only Wednesday.”

***

She is my workout buddy on Wednesdays, younger than I by, perhaps, twenty-five years. We are warmed up, waiting to run, to heave the barbells, to do the burpees. The clock is ticking and we are talking about the days, about last week’s class, about what we’ve been up to.

I can’t remember the context exactly, but her words make sense and also are words I might have said–words I did say–years and decades ago, but nothing that I say anymore.

She says, “It’s a good thing. It makes the time go faster.”

***

He is home from class, making his lunch before launching into his to-do list. Which is considerable. He is in the kitchen and I am on the deck, talking with him through the open door that gives on to the breakfast room in this house we moved into when he was two and where once, long ago and yesterday, I painted his two-year-old belly with a smiley face.

I say aloud, “I can’t believe it’s already the 25th of January.”

And he says, “I know. I’m so glad.”

Because he’s getting married in July, and when you’re getting married in July, you want it to be July Right Now.

I smile to myself, and I don’t say what I know: July will be here in five minutes.

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What Every Writer Wants

[image error]Silence, maybe. Space to write. A quiet column of time in which to give audience to all that’s in one’s head.

That might be what a writer wants.

But that’s not always true. Having made room for these things precisely, a writer can find that they are absolutely not what she wants. She can find herself repulsed by the blank screen, even terrified. Given the space and time, she fails to write and instead examines her hair for split ends, the interwebs for distraction, or, with blindly searching fingers, the table’s undersides for abandoned gum.

Okay, maybe not that last bit.

No, the writer wants silence and space not for their yawning emptiness but for what might possibly, conceivably come of them–if silence and space result in something.

It’s the Something that the writer wants: that perfect word, that shining sentence. The paragraph that miraculously hits the mark.  And then scores more paragraphs, coming with ease or terrible labor, that somehow bring to light that thing that was in her head–the thing that was the reason she looked for silence and space in the first place.

But then, what of it?

Once–more than once–satisfied with a string of paragraphs, I sent them off to a dear friend. Here, I was saying. You know the story, or you know it well enough because I’ve told it to you. Read this, I was saying. This, I was saying, is good.

And she responded, in good faith, with something sensible along these lines: I see what you’re saying and I think it’s good, but I don’t really know how it fits, you know, within the structure of the whole, so I can’t really tell, in a way, how good it is.

It was true– and it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t be expected to appreciate it. She couldn’t even understand it, really, perched isolated like that in the body of an email.

A writer doesn’t really want to write email, I think. Not really. This writer doesn’t, anyway.

So what, in the end, does a writer want?

I’ll tell you.

A writer wants what I had on Friday evening, sitting comfortably in a living room I had never seen before in a town I’d never visited. I was sitting with readers, all members of a book club, and their names and faces were brand new to me–but their love of books was not.

I can tell you that a writer wants readers like those souls sitting there, who had read my book and were considering it, who had opinions and ideas of things in the book that they liked or didn’t, were sold on or maybe were not sold on at all.

A writer wants readers like Melanie, who suddenly spoke up about some paragraphs of the book she especially liked. She said she read them and she read them again. She folded down the corner and marked them, and then she read them aloud to her husband. She told us all why she loved this part, how this part especially rang true for her. How she knows that sometimes faith and life are like this: not things you can plot out so specifically, but that somehow occur, are born, come to light nonetheless.

Melanie said she especially liked that part–and I said I liked it too. I said I loved it, in fact. That, in fact, it was one of my favorites, and I remembered silently that I sent that very part to a friend once who, through no fault of her own, couldn’t possibly appreciate it at the time.

A writer wants moments like this–when the sitting in silence and isolation result in paragraphs that result in a book that connects one like this with Melanie. I didn’t know her until Friday, but I will always know her now and will know, on the chance occasion I re-read that more-favorite-than-some-to-me passages in the book, that Melanie loves it too.

Thank you, Melanie, for loving that part of my book.

Every writer, I think, wants a Melanie.

Afterward, Frank walked back alone to campus, chilled with perspiration. The sky was invariably dull; his mind teemed. He could reconcile none of it. Belief was audacious at best, with repercussions he couldn’t conceive of. Maybe belief was even stupid. And it wasn’t a sudden revelation, in the end. It wasn’t a specific conversation that did it. He can’t remember which time it was–the day or the month–when the leaden sky was peeled back at the corners and Frank was able to see.                                                                                                      Healing Maddie Brees, p. 50