At the end of last week’s posting, I used the world’s oldest literary device – leaving you in suspense about the contents of the envelope that my friend Bruce Thomas’s son handed me as we were leaving the memorial service for Bruce. A number of you took the bait and wrote back to say you couldn’t wait for the next posting. I hope today’s entry isn’t too much of letdown for you, but the gift in that envelope meant a lot to me.
I have to postpone the reveal just a little bit longer because the gift requires some context to make sense to you, Dear Reader. In 1971, after I had directed an innovative new program called Teachers and Writers Collaborative (TWC) in New York City schools for almost three years, Rosellen and I decided it was time to move on. We had two small children, no money with which to enjoy the wonders of the Big City and were hungry for the kind of rural breathing space we had become accustomed to in Mississippi in the years before our return to NY.
A friend of a friend who lived in Vermont, told her local school superintendent about the impressive work we had done at TWC nurturing young writers’ creativity. Based on her endorsement, he invited us to move north to replicate the program and expand it to other districts in the state. Although he wasn’t offering any money to back his invitation, he would cede to us an unused, newly built wing of one of his schools that we could use as we chose. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse, especially after a friend’s family foundation offered us a grant of the munificent sum of $9,000 to support our work for the coming year. I’ve written about this adventure before. In fact, it became the subject of my first book, Vermont Diary, which was published by Teachers and Writers Press.
Enough context. When I drew the materials from the envelope that Sam Thomas had bequeathed to me, I found two sets of material. The first was a set of letters Bruce and I had exchanged over a period of thirty years, which would have been reward enough, a reminder of a growing and literate friendship. However, the weightiest of the contents was a 25-page document I had written in 1972. I had no memory of the existence of this document, nor am I entirely sure how Bruce came to possess it. At the end of the first year of our work in the Fairlee, Vermont Resource Center, I felt that I had an obligation to send a report to our friends, John and Lucia Mudd, whose family foundation had funded the work. The length and depth of this report suggest that I must have spent that entire summer chronicling the project. I probably told Bruce about this epistolary report, written not in Foundationese but in the form of a letter to friends, which every good writer knows elicits a brighter, looser and more readable product. I assume that I printed a copy for Bruce, and he had valued it enough to house it in his files for more than 50 years.
Rosellen once published a poem called “I Found This Poem in My Drawer. I Don’t Remember Writing it.” That’s exactly how I felt about this document that surfaced from Bruce’s file cabinet. I don’t remember writing it and there’s much in the content that I wouldn’t have remembered without prompting from the text of this letter/report. It’s an important historical artifact in my life because it recounts what turned out to be the beginning of my long and rewarding life as a teacher.
I had been in what Bruce used to call the gravity field of children for years, but I had never actually been responsible for “teaching” them. My training as a psychologist provided some tools for understanding children’s behavior, but I had few pedagogical tools to bring to the work apart from some ideas about how to engage kids in writing. Ironically, my greenness turned out to be an advantage, as well as a drawback. Not knowing what the conventional moves looked like meant that we were inventing our own, and that resulted in some of the most creative work I’ve ever done. Spending hours with kids in the darkroom we built and using the images they produced to stimulate their writing was not something prescribed in a standard teaching education curriculum, but it excited both us and the kids because we were naïve enough to imagine we had invented it.
We came equipped to the work with an unwavering belief in the inherent creativity of children, which would blossom if nourished by time and the necessary resources, so we packed our allotted space with typewriters, printing presses, a dark room and a stage, along with a wide variety of paper and writing implements and encouraged the students to take full advantage of opportunities their regular classroom did not offer.
I was even more overwhelmed by the style in which I reported our work of that first year. There was an energy and sparkle to the writing that I’m not sure I can replicate anymore, sparked by the immediacy of the experience I was reporting on that I haven’t had access to since I left the classroom. I’m going to quote here a small section of the text in the hope that you’ll agree that there’s something attractive in the writing itself. I can dare to do that without being accused of bragging because the gap of 55 years that separates me from the writer of these words arms me with immunity from boastfulness. It feels like someone else’s work, not mine.
“Some of our children were vastly better carpenters than we were. Whatever one might say about the plastic world they aspired to or were already living in, their world abounds in more practical knowledge than mine ever had. They had seen their fathers put up houses or additions or hunting cabins; they were more likely to know the difference between a mole and a woodchuck or how a cow was made to yield continuous milk; they knew the difference between a distributor and a differential. My growing-up world seemed so much more ethereal than theirs. I never learned how to do anything. I was given the impression that there was something sullying about even wanting to know such things. That was the domain of the drawers of wood and drawers of water.”
And so on for 24 pages, the kind of prose that I wish I found more often in education writing. Bruce’s gift was to remind me of what I was capable of as a writer, as well as recalling the rich, long-ago experiences that nourished that writing. Thank you, Bruce.
