One of the rewards of the writing life is teaching writing. I taught composition for some years at a US military base in Naples, Italy. I remember a young soldier who had grown up poor in the Caribbean. He struggled with standard English, with school in general, and walked into my English composition course with probably as much sickening dread as I would have brought to Marines basic training. His name was Henry.
We were to teach the standard essay format with standard assignments (this is the military, remember). Next up was a “before and after” essay. I suggested picking a very concrete topic, and focusing narrow to make a larger point, although the larger p0int wasn’t required.
Henry’s essay was about the difference in his brother’s hands before and after the drug addiction that took his life, from a loving description of the smooth, killed, caring, clean hands of the “before,” to the cracked, stained hands and ragged, split nails of “after,” to the yellow pallor of those hands when Henry identified his brother’s wasted body. The essay took my breath away.
I wanted Henry to read it to the class. For him, this must have felt like being ordered to the front line of battle, but I was the teacher and he was a soldier, so he obeyed. I remember a tall, muscular man with cafe’ au lait skin that grew ruddy with embarrassment as he made his way to my desk and faced the ranks of uniforms.
He read the essay and finished with something like: “And that was the difference between my brother’s hands before and after drugs.” There were about twenty in the class, mostly men. Nobody moved after the last line. Then somebody clapped; then they all clapped. The ice broken, a few shouted; one whistled.
Henry turned to me, tears in his eyes. “They got it,” he said. “They understood what I was saying.” I said they certainly did.
The first plot piece of my novel in progress (current title: Out of the Red Summer) was set when I was in grade school.
Last week, I led a workshop on memoir writing at a local senior center. Amazing stories came out, funny, sad, and precious. Here’s a variant of an exercise we did that I think would be useful for writers, and just people living in families with people who are not exactly, precisely like ourselves.
Recently, a bit of snow in Philadelphia so overwhelmed American Airlines, that we got home 24 hours later than planned. [Insert here the litany of gate changes, delays, cancellations, rescheduling, cancellation, disappearing ticket agents, endless holds on phone, airport shut down, etc.]. While graciously hosted by my favorite sister and niece for an extra night, the experience leads me to suggest a new airport feature: volunteer listeners.
I’m taking Silvia to gymnastics. She scrambles into her car seat and demands a story.
My novel in progress is set here in Appalachia a century ago, when dialect was strong. Which raises a constant writer’s dilemma: verisimilitude and historical accuracy versus out-of-area comprehension. One doesn’t want to replicate my grandfather/hamster confusion.
In my novel in progress, set in Tennessee, 1919, the cook makes cheese straws for a garden party that never happens. Too bad. They’re easy, addictive, and very southern. The recipe follows, adapted from Nathalie Dupree’s New Southern Cooking.
A billboard near me (Knoxville, TN) proposes December 3 as Glock Day. As in: Celebrate this season of joy by gifting your loved ones a major handgun. I do not believe that this is a solution on any micro or macro level of society.
This the Palazzo Donn’Anna, in Naples, the memory of which launched my second historical novel, Swimming in the Moon (2013). My Italian teacher grew up in the vast apartment on the second floor, full of marble, Venetian glass, and monumental 18th C oils. The enormous dining room window was rimmed by a gilt frame that looked out on the Bay of Naples, with Capri floating in the blue distance.
pamelaschoenewaldt.com 