I have had two extraordinarily powerful teachers affect my writing. One was Ruth Sand, my fifth grade teacher. The other was Dixie Goswami, a teacher I encounterd at Bread Loaf School of English one extraordinary summer of 1982, when I was 28 and already had three degrees, a B.A., and M.Ed., and an M.A., behind me.
In fifth grade Mrs. Sand asked me to write about how I spent my summer vacation. That summer, the summer I turned ten, had been traumatic to me. My father got a new job and we moved from a pretty town where we had a nice home surrounded by fields and forests to a dirty town in a rented house surrounded closely on all sides by more houses. I moved from a private school where I was richly appreciated and widely liked and encouraged to excell to a grimy public school where I was not appreciated and not liked and thought by my teacher to be retarded. I wrote about all of these matters except about my new teacher. I got the paper back with no comments other than “D. You need to improve your penmanship.” She apparently didn’t care about my summer vacation; she cared about my penmanship. I resolved right then never to let another teacher know anything about how I felt about anything.
Thereafter my writing was a marvel of control. I wrote outlines before I wrote papers. My first drafts were my finished drafts, or nearly. I wrote them slowly and carefully. I had a thesis before I ever started an essay, and I had composed the essay pretty thoroughly in my head before I ever wrote anything. “Writing” was just putting down what I had already thought through. My handwritten or typed drafts were done carefully to avoid having to make any corrections. In my school writing I said to the teacher “Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.” I pursued teachers for directions as explicit as I could make them commit to. When I couldn’t get that, I became very suspicious of them, so I wrote pieces that were as carefully qualified as I could possibly manage, in order to ward off any challenges. That means I avoided direct, bold statements if I didn’t think I could crush any opposition. Those essays were written wholly for the teacher as audience, and wholly to get an unavoidable “A” on the basis of my relentlessly unemotional logic.
This is also what I taught from 1975 until 1982. I shudder to think of myself as a teacher in those years.
In the winter of 1981-82 my high school principal informed me that I was going to be teaching creative writing the following year. I protested vigorously. I had never done “creative writing.” I had never taken a class in it. He was obstinate; I was going to teach it. I was desperate. A flier for the Program in Writing at Bread Load School of English came across my desk. They had scholarships for teachers in rural schools. I applied, was accepted, given a scholarship and one cold, rainy day in June I walked into a room in a converted barn on Breadloaf Mountain outside Middlebury, Vermont and met a human cyclone named Goswami, Southern belle who’d married a man from India.
She tore me apart. She made me do a close examination of all the writing I could find from my whole life so far. I called Mom and she boxed up and sent everything I’d done from kindergarten to Master’s theses. Dixie made me look at it all, hard,
It was a desperate and disheartening awakening. Of 23 years’ accumulation, I had 18 years worth of drek in front of me. I didn’t care about or for any of it. It was all dry, utilitarian cramp, written for teachers conceived of as hostile authority figures by a persona as cold and inhuman and safe as a human could be. I hated it and I hated me.
Thereafter began a decades’ long effort to recover, to discover some kind of human being lurking under my 20 pound bond skin.
Some things changed in my school writing thereafter, and I did a whole lot more school.
For a paper assignment, I wrote a draft to find a thesis, then I rewrote with that thesis in mind. I grabbed a topic and wrote fast to find out what I thought; “drafting” was my discovery process. This meant I came up with more surprises than the former method of composing the paper before ever writing it. Rather than asking for very specific directions, I said something more like “Give me a notion of what you want and then we’ll see what I come up with.” The later school essays were written for curiosity and adventure and much less for the teacher or grade. Emotion became acceptable in arguments and sometimes even became the very subject matter.
This is when poetry became possible.
My teaching went through similarly radical revisions. I no longer knew ahead of time what every lesson would cover and what the student products would look like. Those lessons became surprising and rewarding; the student products also became surprising and sometimes more rewarding. They went from the dry Sand of predictability into the warm mist of Goswami revelations.
It was good. Late, but good. I do tend to be a slow learner. I’m good at getting degrees, but a little slow about learning. By the time I’m fifty…er, no, missed that one, by the time I’m sixty…uh, that’s pretty soon, by the time I’m seventy I hope to be as good a writer as I could have been by now if I hadn’t taken Mrs. Sand so seriously back in 1964.
