Friday, July 18, 2014

Find Your Writers Before They Go

I am neither a Jewish New Yorker, nor an African American poet.  These truths are simple and irrefutable.  Yet through literature all things are possible.  One morning last spring a dear friend and colleague texted me: "Maya Angelou died today."  I realize that I am now of the age when the living writers I love, those whose words have informed and inspired me, are going to be dying.  Someday there will not be a new collection of Billy Collins poems.  My children and I agree that we can't even let ourselves think about the day when the Breaking News will say "J.K. Rowling, beloved author of the internationally popular Harry Potter novels..."  Yeah, I can't go there.

Two of my favorite writers have already died, so they will be the subject of this blog.  The writers we find in life allow us to live as we never have, be people we can never be.  Yet another bullet point in the list of reasons why reading is so important in life.
   

Nora Ephron



I once joked that I wished every movie starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (Smores, Like Gold in My Hand) It isn't because of Meg's girl-next-door smile, or that Tom is the Everyman.  It's the writing.  It's Nora.  I love her quick wit and sassiness. I love the clarity of her voice and the clean, simple style of her prose.  Ephron reveals truth in compact, simple sentences, a skill she honed as a journalist and one we all would do well to imitate.

She once said her mother advised her to see that the tragic stories of one day could be the comic stories of the next.  I have found her mother's wisdom to be true as I attempt to raise five children as a single mother who teaches high school.  The night the ants invaded the bathroom on a Tuesday I found myself on my hands and knees, sobbing about the frustration and injustice of my life.  I did not see the humor in that moment, nor did I want to write.  I just wanted to sleep.  I submit the novel version, however, might read something like this:

The Night of the Ants

They came in through the bathroom window, not nearly as welcome as if they had been a peppy Beatles song.  They came in huge and marching determinedly down the side of the shower, across the floor, around the perimeter, up the door, under the toilet paper, around to the garbage, under the sink, and back again in a seemingly endless circle of life except without the wisecracking meerkat or uplifting pop anthem.  They were carpenter ants.  The terrifying encounter came at 1:45 a.m. when I stumbled into the bathroom and was already busy before I ever opened my eyes.  I felt something tickle my feet. I opened my eyes, blinking furiously in horror to adjust to the light and the parade of smelly black ants everywhere I looked.  There was no shutting the bathroom door and dealing with it later.  It was the only bathroom for six people.  It had to be handled.  I had to handle it.  I dove in--ant spray, Windex, Clorox wipes--whatever I could find to swipe, kill, and destroy.  I worked furiously, with fear and loathing, so that any little person to enter the bathroom that night would not be greeted with the same nightmare vision.  They returned again and again like some kind of Terminator Ant Model #10,000 from far into the future.  Where the hell is John Connor when you really need him?

Nora Ephron comes to mind when I have a moment I think I can't bear.  If nothing else, surviving the moment means I might eventually be able to write something decent about it.  

The plays, screenplays,  and collections of essays she produced are laugh-out-loud-funny, even as they describe the lowest points of her life.  She turned her divorce into the darkly comic, brilliant screenplay Heartburn.  In explaining why she did not divorce sooner, even when she knew the marriage was over, she said she had an inordinate capacity for making lemonade.  This resonates with me as I look back on my own twenty-eight year relationship that died long before the marriage ever took place.  I have made too many pitchers of lemonade in my life.  As I grow old, I hope wisdom and humor will be layered into my pain the way they are in Ephron's work. She is a mentor for aging, not necessarily gracefully, but honestly.

Remember that your writers are those you want to quote.  My Nora Ephron quote saw me through the darkest days of my divorce.  I wish I had read these words at eighteen, but at least I have them now, and so do you, Dear Reader:

             "Above all be the heroine of your life, not the victim." 



Maya Angelou


When I started teaching at Santa Cruz High School in 1996 I was familiar with Maya Angelou's poetry.  I had not read any of her autobiographies.  For the next six years I taught I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to class after class of sophomores.  The book was core literature for all tenth graders.  It only takes a few sentences of Angelou's story to be transported to rural,  Depression-era Arkansas and transformed by the way Angelou's poetic prose uncurls off the page and attaches itself to your heart.  In her taffeta dress, with high hopes that she will feel like a movie star, her awkward, self-conscious,  younger self flees the church and we feel along with her "the unnecessary insult" not of being poor, black and a girl, but being aware of what that means--"the rust on the razor that threatens the throat."  Angelou was parent-less, poor, and living in an era long removed from my own.  I was a middle class white girl raised in rural California who attended a private Catholic college, but not for the moments her book held me enthralled.  

One gift of reading great literature is that it provides writing models.  A strong writer's voice, so difficult for my students to achieve, is easier to conceptualize when you read the strong voices of great writers.  Angelou doesn't sound like Hemingway doesn't sound like Poe doesn't sound like Dickens doesn't sound like you.  My students and I could look at Angelou's word choice, the order of her sentences, the music of her language and enjoy a master class in writing.  

Finally, as a new teacher Maya Angelou helped me to discuss sexual molestation, life in the segregated south, broken families, the insecurity of coming of age and being a young person who doesn't feel pretty or smart enough.  After tackling those issues through her text, what couldn't I teach?  If reading Angelou's work filled me with joy, teaching her work filled me with confidence.

On the day she died, I hadn't taught Angelou's book for many years.  The first thing I did when I arrived in my classroom that day was to take out my well loved, pencil-marked copy.  I reread passages I had highlighted and discussed with years of students.  I sat at my desk and cried.  I will miss her voice.  I feel so blessed that she will forever be one of my writers.  Perhaps she is one of yours.








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