sea salt

This morning I started my day like any other. I woke up at 5:30, got dressed, went for a walk and called my sister. But instead of finishing off the routine with yoga before leaving for work, I called a 6th grade classroom in Florida for a Q&A session. My role in this session? The author. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? Who is your favorite author? Are you going to write another book? * Six years ago I was in the Harvard COOP bookstore with my sister. I had just begun my MFA program, and was already dreaming about seeing my name on the cover of a book. We walked through the aisles and scanned the walls of must-reads before circling a round table with a sign that read "Summer Reading." It was the collection of books on required reading lists, the lists compiled by teachers, administrators, and school board members. These were the books that educators wanted their students to read, some because they are fixtures in the literary canon, and oth...

I spoke with a woman who wants my help as she begins writing short stories. "I've never written a story before, never in my life!  I'm a songwriter, but I've never written anything else before." "Look," I said, "in order for anyone to do anything, you have to have never done it before." She didn't respond, so I took a different approach.  "Before you wrote your first song, you'd never written a song before, right?  At one time, Johnny Cash had never written a song before, and then he became Johnny Cash." "Yes, that makes sense..."  My limited knowledge of the language of music helped us get one step closer together.  I speak writing and she speaks music, but somehow we had to communicate if we were going to successfully work together to create something new.  I asked her what she had written so far. "I have the idea for the beginning and the end, but nothing in between.  I don't know what ya...

(Photo courtesy of: Aram Terchunian, Geotimes.org) I said yes on a sandy beach on April 10. The sand was smooth and soft under our feet, the tide was calm, the sun shone. It was an easy beach day, and an easy decision. Yes. Every day requires a new decision, even though my mother is handling most of the arrangements, so I am constantly in a state of answering, "I don't know," or "No," or, "Yes." I like Yes; a decision made, an item checked off the list, a step closer to the day, to every day after that. I said yes on April 10, but I'd been saying it for 730 days. Yes when things were new, easy, and carefree. Yes when things were familiar, tough, and unpredictable. Yes when we fell, yes when we stood again, tired and sore, yes as our wounds healed, yes when the Spring made everything new again. I said no on April 12 when my students asked me to read what I'd been writing. It was a warm, sunny day, and I took my English Composition...

 (published in word~river literary review) "What I love about our students is that there is so much to mine out of them.  They're not used to valuing education, or thinking that they have intelligent things to say, but it's in there..." This is my answer to the question I hear a lot these days: "What do you like about teaching?" It's true.  Our students are at a wonderful crossroads in their education, where they can decide to complete an associate's degree and begin careers, or they can transfer to a 4-year college and earn a bachelor's degree.  No matter what they choose, they are very often accomplishing more than they, their parents, and many of their teachers thought possible.  I'm not sure when I first compared teaching to mining, but I can't think of a more apt way to describe it.  What makes mining unique is that it's not a guaranteed success - you can fail.  This doesn't mean the precious metals or diamonds ...

"There is no character flaw in ignorance. The character flaw is the willingness to remain ignorant." My mother and I had a conversation today about our students.  She teaches high school, I teach college, and we both at times feel we are losing the battle against apathy, laziness, and a lack of intellectual curiosity.  I knew I would face this when I signed my first teaching contract in September, but in my mind it was simply ignorance, a tragic character flaw.  What my mother revealed to me in one simple statement is that ignorance isn't what makes a student - or anyone - tragically flawed.  The tragic flaw is the willingness to remain ignorant, the refusal to change. My concept of ignorance has always been directly associated with people who are racist, uneducated, irrational, intolerant, extremist in any way (leftist, rightist, elitist, supremacist...).  I don't think my associations are unique: hyper-educated New Englanders pick on the "ignor...