The Silken Tent
My Letter to the World
September 2000
September 29, 2000
Friday
A schedule defends against chaos and whim. -- Annie DillardI never meant to be absent yet another month. But here it is, the last business day of September, I need to put up my September piece for On Display, and now that I've begun I see how much I miss this focused writing for an audience, however silent and anonymous they are.
"Throat clearing" is the name writing teachers apply to the sputters that sometimes begin a student piece. Often you can draw a line somewhere after the third sentence and say, here, here is where your opening should be, where your true subject lies. So that first sentence above, and these three here, are my throat clearing for September. Now I'm ready to begin.
So what's new? you might ask. I've settled in, finally, to the rhythms of fall. Lynn is half way through her second hockey season, half way through her first marking period of ninth grade. I'm half way through teaching a seven session course in memoir writing, but less than a quarter of the way through the writing class that I am taking.
And there's my true subject for today -- my roles as teacher and student.
The teaching role involves a course I've taught before, adaped from the work of Denis Ledoux. It's called "What a Time It Was -- A Workshop for Gathering Life Stories." Last spring I responded to a call for someone to teach such material for the Chester County adult night school program. I made a proposal, and was able to secure a venue that, while 80 miles from my house, is less than half a mile from my sister's house. In fact, it's the school where my niece is a senior. So while my travel expenses eat up more than half of what I'm being paid, the opportunity carried certain intangibles that I chose not to pass up.
The class meets Monday nights from seven until nine, and one of the intangibles was the prospect of staying at my sister's, spending some time with her and her family, and then using Tuesday for my Pennsylvania German research, since parts of Berks County I'm not yet familiar with are close by. As circumstance would have it, though, I've yet to follow through on that. I've chosen to come back home (getting in about 11:00) because there were things I needed to do early the next day. Well, maybe next week.
The other intangibles were all the benefits I have ever derived from teaching -- I meet wonderful people, work on my own skills in the area, and advance the cause of whatever subject is at hand, in this case the preservation of the life stories of ordinary people.
I have six students, each with a special slant and motivation for writing. There is an actress of local note who writes about her experiences as a foster child, and a veteran who not long ago looked at the notes he kept during World War II on paper that deteriorates with exponential speed every day and realized that time was running out.
There's the young mother who sees the days slipping by -- you think you'll never forget, but you do. Her work takes the form of letters to her son, now two and a half, in which she tells him about her own childhood and how she hopes to create for him the same loving and secure environment her parents built for her. She is accompanied to class by her mother, who creates for her daughter and her grandson memories of her own growing up.
And there's the artist descended from two generations of Episcopal priests, and the fourth grade teacher who has found herself working with nursing home and hospice residents whose need for telling their stories is urgent.
My role is to give them writing prompts, show them how to string disparate stories into a unified whole, and help them see where digging a little deeper will turn a flat report of an event into a charming anecdote, a slice of life too delicious to lose. What I take away is the gift of having received their stories and seen more possibilities in my own.
That's Mondays. Tuesdays I go to the weekly meeting of Harrisburg Area Community College's English 107, Section 002, 6:30-9:30, held not at the main campus, which is two miles as the crow flies from my house, but at a satellite center, a high school eleven miles west across a bridge that, for the duration of this class, will be reduced to one lane each way.
Over the summer I became aware that my novel project was getting mired from lack of discipline, focus, and feedback. I was familiar with the work of Terry Wallace, who has been teaching at HACC since 1970. I heard him and some of his friends, who had all begun as his students, read from their works in the anthology they published together, and I was impressed (see Local Poets).
So in August, I contacted Mr. Wallace and arranged to become a student in English 107. HACC does not have a visiting or auditing student classification, but I did not have to go through the regular application process since my status as a member of the Class of 1967 covered that. Several days after I paid the fee ($215 for essentially the same three credit course that costs $900 at nearby Dickinson College), the registrar's office called to tell me that they had checked my records and I would not have to take the verbal competency placement test.
One might think, given my age and experience, that I would have little to learn in a second year undergraduate writing class. It's true that, except for the instructor, I am the oldest person in the room (by ten years; the next oldest person is 25). It's also true that I am the only person in the room who knows all the names that Mr. Wallace drops (and how to spell them) and has read all the works he uses as examples. So when he lectures about form and structure and point of view and figures of speech and diction and style, I am hearing material I have presented myself countless times.
We're supposed to turn something in every week, and so far I've taken the easy route -- two manuscripts already prepared for submission and two poems in advanced draft. It's when I got them back with his comments and suggestions, and when we took some work by other students through workshop, that I suddenly saw how much this experience has to offer me.
T.H.S. Wallace, poet and teacher, is by far the best editor and critic my work has ever had. He saw a huge ambiguity in a section of my novel I thought was pretty much in final form. No one else had seen it, but there it was. He took the poem, made three suggestions, moved a few lines and advocated cutting others, and suddenly the piece was publishable, first rate, but still mine.
And I have learned much from the workshop sessions devoted to the efforts of my classmates. They lack the wide background I have in reading, craft comes more slowly to them, but they have things to say and strong clear voices to use in saying it. It's all that young energy again, what I miss so much about the classroom.
I'm moving forward with my work. Terry Wallace is helping me draw the map.
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