Writing Addict

I get up in the morning and my first thought is “thank You” because my life is great. My second thought is, how, where, when, what will I write today?

The rewards that I give myself for finishing a writing project are writing in my journal, writing letters, new notebooks, new pens, new pencils, and writing a new project.

Before I had literacy I drew squiggly lines on paper, pretending to write.

As soon as I had literacy I pointed to a book of nursery rhymes and said to my father, “I want to do that.” He immediately (and I mean right at that moment) left the house to purchase me a folder, a notebook with an African elephant on the cover, paper and pencils.  I still have the folder and the notebook.  My first poem was about my dad. (Entitled, “My Dad.”)

In high school classes I wrote in my notebooks and filled them with journals and short stories and novel starts. My teachers were flattered by my attention and praised my copious note-taking. The only teacher who knew differently was my mother but she let me keep writing anyway.

One boy I passed notes with in school only liked me in letters. For weeks he wrote me long handwritten notes and eagerly awaited my replies. In writing he was a passionate admirer. In person, not so much. I remember him fondly as my first reader.

I have had whole friendships conducted almost entirely through notes and letters. Real letters on pieces of paper, written in pen and pencil. 

I have written a novel every year for the past ten years.  As soon as I finish one, I begin another.

If I am not writing, I’m thinking about writing. If I am not writing, I'm thinking that I should be writing instead.

I’ve canceled social engagements because I was in the middle of writing something and I didn’t want to stop. My friendship circle has been reduced to people for whom this is okay.

I’ve written ten thousand words in a day before.

I’ve done things with my writing that I’m not proud of.  For cash.

When the editor of Esopus, an extraordinary magazine that I respect and love, regretted the small stipend that he could pay me for my story, I told him that I had written the story anyway for free. I told him that the weeks of working with his precise attention to my words were the best in my entire writing life.  I wrote him a handwritten thank-you note with drawings. (But I kept the cash.)

Whenever I pass a lonely house in the middle of a field I think, I wonder if that house has electricity so I could plug in my laptop. I wonder if it has a fireplace and a cozy chair.  I picture myself getting up early for a long hike and then settling in and writing all day long and that being my life now. 

I think, whoever lives there is lucky. Whoever lives there has a great life.

My writing supplies for Summer 2013.  Palomino Blackwings, baby.  Oh yeah.

No Such Thing As Lazy

I taught a young man who devotes hours of after school time to filmmaking. He has already won several media awards and he is only seventeen years old. At a recent convention in Los Angeles, he won first place in a competition that required participants to execute a music video from first idea to finished product in six hours. As a student, his journal is filled with pages and pages of extra writing, lengthy extemporaneous thoughts on everything. On top of that, he literally ran into my class every day in a scrambling, madcap wrestle with his classmate for their mutually favorite desk.

“I’m lazy,” he said to me one day. “That’s why my grades are bad.”

A couple weeks ago I went to the movies with a friend I greatly admire. We teach next door to each other and sometimes during my prep periods I have to stop what I’m doing to listen to her lecture. She’s incredibly knowledgeable, since she has a Master’s in Shakespearean Literature that she went all the way to a university in England to earn. Over post-movie yogurt she told me about her summer plans that include working several days a week, traveling, treasure-hunting, and lots of socializing. She has a writing project (twice the word count of mine) that she is revising, and more ideas to come.

“But I’m just so lazy,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

Yeah. No. These are not lazy people.

Lazy is an overused word if there ever was one. My student has tons of energy for becoming an excellent filmmaker.  He has energy for writing and for creativity and for knocking over anyone in his path on his way to his favorite desk.  My friend has energy for so many things I can’t even count them. These are not lazy people.

Traditional school systems value uniform academic success across the curriculum and athletic competition. These are wonderful pursuits if the people engaged in them have the energy for them.  But what about the students who have the energy for art, film, leadership, relationship? What about people who love math but aren’t excited about literary analysis, or who love to read and solve geometry proofs, but honestly don't care if their team wins in P.E.?

When we label people lazy we discount their true passions and gifts. We also give them a hidden excuse for not doing the required work in areas where they struggle. If I understand that I am a lazy person then I have an embedded reason not to work out when I don’t feel like it, or clean the house I live in with my family when I would rather do something else.  If my student has a self-image that he is a lazy person, then from what reserves does he draw the energy to do the tasks necessary to at least pass all of his high school classes? The truth is that he is not lazy. He has a surplus of energy and when it comes to film making and writing, a tremendous work ethic.

As a teacher, I work to help my students discover where their energies lie.  Their passions are clues as to where they can find the most success and happiness, as well as incentive to complete the tasks that do not interest them.  When we value the things we do have energy for, then all of the work we do becomes more purposeful. The things that we are lazy about can still get done, but maybe we stop beating ourselves and others up for not excelling at everything.

I have tons of energy for writing, reading, teaching, yoga, walks, and cleaning. I am lazy about shopping, dressing myself, interior decorating and making things with beads.

What about you? What do you have energy for? What are you "lazy" about?

I have lots of energy for dancing (thank you Angela James for the photo), not so much for tanning.

Behavior Is Information

We teachers engage in bravado around our abilities to control the behavior of our students. Teachers in conversation with other teachers will brag about how well they control their classes. They have rules such as "show respect".  I have that rule. I also have been a teacher long enough to know that things sometimes break down in ways that puzzle and trouble us and make us feel disrespected.

Most teachers, whatever the outcome of their lessons, are doing the best they can in any moment. The alternative is akin to turning your back on the ocean. Criticism on the art of surfing the big waves is rarely useful unless it comes from veterans who have been rolled once or twice.

From one who has banged her head on the reef too many times: The behavior of your students is not a matter of your pride or even that overused word “respect”. The behavior of your students is information. What a teacher does with that information is what is important.

Over a year ago, I ruled over a group of eleventh graders taking a California Standards Test. The school was a charter with an emphasis on academics. The students were “chronically under-served” in the education lexicon. This means poor and hailing from backgrounds that make Charles Dickens look like a guy who might write for Chicken Soup for the Soul.

In the middle of the test, Gabe started fidgeting and making noise. Mary yelled at him to knock it off, and she and Gabe engaged in a brief but highly escalated and profanity-strewn argument that Gabe cut off by storming out of the classroom. “You better control your class,” Mary said to me.

My immediate reaction was to feel slighted by Mary and ashamed in front of the other kids. I  wanted to go outside and shout at Gabe to go to the Deans for a punishment that would involve suspension. I would not stand for this kind of disrespect in my classroom. I was a professional, after all. I had better control my class.

But instead, I took a breath. Then another. On the second exhale, I looked at the information. Gabe couldn’t be still. Mary was tense and unhappy.

The kids were two hours into a test that made some of their teachers nervous enough to lie to them that the score would have bearing on their college transcripts (it would not). Their daily schedules were disrupted, including school meal times that for some of the students were their only meal times.

The surface information was helpful but I knew even more. Mary’s family put enormous stress on her for high achievement. She was anxious and angry most of the time.

Gabe had divots in his head from gunshot wounds incurred during his past life as a criminal.  He was a successful, high achieving drug dealer back in the day, but for the past eight months since his release from incarceration he was trying to be a student. This with gaps in his math education, post traumatic stress, an ADHD problem (a true one) the likes of which I have rarely seen in twenty years, and his belly filled most of the time only with what he could get at school.

In other words, none of it had to do with me.

For the next two days of testing I arranged for Gabe to take his test in the library with the special ed teacher.  In a private conversation I told Mary that her comment was unhelpful given the circumstances and hurt my feelings. (No swelling violins in the background, she really didn’t care but at least she was “respectful” about it.) After two days I took Gabe aside for a long talk where he did all the talking about the solutions he had been thinking about for his anger and his old ways of behaving. We agreed that in the future when that happened, he had my permission to go outside and remove himself from the situation. I complimented him for doing this in the first place, but maybe next time he could do it before all of the naughty words and yelling. We finished the final days of testing together as a group without incident. We ended the year without incident.

Most students will be their best selves in your presence if you get to know them as much as you can. I use journals as a built-in cheat to their inner lives, but I also engage in conversations and ask them questions and pay attention to what goes on in the hallways and in the rows.  I ask questions and listen more than I talk in conversations with students. I don’t know everything, but I know enough to understand some of the bigger picture when something goes wrong. 

In a best-case scenario, I use the information pro-actively. When I think back on the Gabe and Mary fight, I realize that the time I was weak was not afterwards, but long before. Gabe and I should have had a trouble shooting chat beforehand. I should have passed Mary the secret that nobody in college admissions gives a fig about the CST, and she with her proficient and advanced scores on everything, her high GPA and her decent ACT numbers had little to fear from Gabe being a fussbudget.

Student behavior is information. No more and no less. Use the information to make decisions that solve or prevent problems.  Turn off the criticizing voices in your head, because those voices aren’t the ones facing the big waves, you are.

Hang ten.

The waters are sometimes not this calm and peaceful.

Summer Me

I have two women living inside of me and they are Summer Me and Schooldays Me. When I have long days without a structured job to attend, I turn into a person I would not be able to stand under normal schoolday circumstances. Schoolday Me would scoff at Summer Me and privately feel not only superior in character, but mildly offended at the other's self-indulgent aimlessness. Summer Me admires Schoolday Me in every way but also knows that she could never ever be that busy.

For example,

Schooldays Me: I better get up at 5 in order to exercise so I can get in my strength training as well as my aerobics and still have time to meditate.

Summer Me: I better get up at 7 or else I'll be too tired to get around to exercising at some point before noon and maybe I'll just take a meandering walk instead of going to the gym anyway.

Schooldays Me: I wear a pedometer to track all of the steps I take during the day in the course of work.

Summer Me: Maybe I'll go this way. I don't know. Whatever.

Schooldays Me: Now that I'm done with my eight-hour workday, I think I'll clean the house, do the grocery shopping and cook a meal. Then I will make sure my daughter is bathed  and ready for school tomorrow and that everyone has the laundry they need done for the next day. Before bed, I will make my lunch and my daughter's lunch. I will also prepare my breakfast and grind my coffee beans to be ready for tomorrow morning.

Summer Me: I can't believe I went to the gym AND the drugstore this morning. I better take a nap.

Schooldays Me: Did I get my 1,000 words written today?

Summer Me: Have I done anything besides write today?

Schooldays Me: I am wearing Spanx and control top pantyhose under my pants and blazer and high heel shoes. Always important to look professional.

Summer Me: I am wearing my husband's old pajama pants. Always important to at least wear pants.

My Summer Me looks up to my Schooldays Me as if from the bottom of a pool. There Schooldays stands, waving her arms around and looking too hot in her long pants and high heels. She should stop working so hard, maybe. She should maybe jump in the pool.

My daughter, who much more resembles Summer Me than Schooldays Me in every particular.

The Ghost Daughter (What I Was Thinking About)

Two years ago I stood in the check out line at the grocery story, Casey Anthony staring at me from the cover of the People magazine. I don’t follow crime stories usually, but this one followed me. I couldn’t help it. I was fascinated. Do you remember this thing? A young woman claims her little kid went missing a full month after anyone has seen her. The authorities find the thoroughly decomposed body of the child months later in a pile of duct tape.

But the prosecution is inadequate to the task of conviction and the judge lets her go. Everyone thinks she did it. But free she goes.

I looked at that magazine cover and I thought, huh. Well, what if the little girl was never found? What if she disappears and then pops up eighteen years later as a grown woman looking for that terrible mother?

The archetype of the terrible mother is fascinating. There’s nothing scarier than your own mother having it in for you. At first I wrote the mother character as a sociopath. I did tons of research on sociopathy in preparation but then I found out in the writing that sociopaths are boring.  They’re narcissistic one-hit wonders. Writing pages and pages from the point of view of a sociopath was like eating a gourmet meal with a stuffy nose.  Nothing tasted like anything without empathy, desire, concern, and love.

So I scrapped the 25k words I started with and rewrote the whole thing from scratch. I don’t know Casey Anthony and the story wasn’t about her anyway.  The story is about the terrible mother inside all of us, and about the life-giving earth mother beside her. It is about sociopaths, but about how people cope and survive in the wake of true evil, and about how survival is the ultimate revenge.

The Ghost Daughter is about the staying power of true love, even when it comes at too young of an age to bear it with justice and respect. It’s about trying to have power over others as a way of forgetting when you were powerless. It’s about being homeless in one way or another your whole entire life and then finally arriving at a doorstep that you can call your own.

It’s about religion and loneliness and music and the desert. It’s about mothers and daughters and babies that are lost but still haunt you forever and forgive you for being terrible before you knew how to be good.

So I sent out queries and partials and one whole and I hope for the best for this baby that is The Ghost Daughter. Once more into the breach, my friends. Wish me luck.

Kali, goddess of time, change and death.  Pretty much the most unmotherly person ever.