March 12, 2007
Monday

Yesterday I mentioned that I was somewhat reluctant to write about an emotionally wrenching experience, mostly to spare my readers the “here we go again” feeling of attending yet another funeral with me. Instead of writing about death again, I said, I could write about Millersville basketball or my sister’s new book.

It had been a week of high emotion. Every day brought a new birthday greeting from a friend, one of them so tender and unexpected that I had trouble expressing my feelings. Writing about the funeral was good for me, allowing me to put a period on the end of the sentence that marked the end of my sixtieth year. I got up today ready to move into whatever is the next big thing.

And to write about Millersville basketball and my sister’s new book!

The Marauders played two games this weekend in North Carolina. We were able to follow them via a webcast that consisted of lines of text containing the events of the game, refreshed every minute or so. This was a very strange way to watch a basketball game, sitting in front of my silent computer, knowing that the game was so close and so exciting that the energy inside the gym must be electrifying. Millersville defeated Mount Olive College 89 to 85 in overtime on Saturday, and yesterday got past fellow PSAC team California University 82 to 72. Tomorrow night they face Barton College, a tough competitor that as the host site enjoys the home court advantage. We’re hoping to be able to follow the game live on AM radio.

My sister’s new book (of which she is a co-author) is Mentor Texts:Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6. According to the publisher’s blurb:

How do children’s book authors create the wonder that we feel when reading our favorite books? What can students and teachers learn from these authors and books if we let them serve as writing mentors? In Mentor Texts, Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli [my sister] show teachers how to help students become confident, accomplished writers, using literature as their foundation.

I really like this sentence: “This practical resource demonstrates the power of learning to read like writers.” Examples demonstrate “how students take risks as writers” and show “the power of the teacher as writer.”

I wrote a lot in high school, encouraged by the wonderful Sister Mary Kilian, whose faith in my intellectual abilities was unwavering. I continued through my first two years of college, when I came under the influence of a teacher named Leon Feldman, himself a poet, another great champion who challenged me to take risks and put myself on the page. By the time I started teaching in 1969, however, I’d stopped any personal creative work, in part because there was just too much academic work to do but also because I’d come up against a toxic critic, a poet/professor with whom I had a complicated, ultimately damaging relationship.

For twenty years I wrote nothing personal, nothing creative, nothing that had any spark or soul. Even my diary seems cold and emotionless when I read it now. In 1989 I attended a week-long “creative writing for teachers” conference and began, very tentatively, to put myself on the page again. I took classes, went to workshops, and sojourned in the rich literary atmosphere of Dublin during the glorious August of 1994. Nearly ten years later, fresh from a sabbatical during which I studied with a gifted fiction writer and also began producing literary nonfiction, I was writing nearly every day along with my students, devising new ways for them to explore the ways in which whatever literary theme we were addressing was at work in their lives.

The power I gained and the power I tried to create in my students ultimately proved too threatening for the traditional power structure in my school, and I had to separate myself from the profession and the community I’d served for three decades. But it helped put me where I am now, a season of joy and light. I hope some of my students are crazy happy too, and writing about it.