Teaching writing at Fordham - hooray - which leads me to a requiem for a deceased mentor/guardian angel

So, the fine people at Fordham University have decided I am capable of teaching a writing class to their  lovely students.  This will be a composition and rhetoric class, which may sound dull to some, but to me this is quite exciting.  Why?  Well, here's why: because I've been teaching undergraduates since 2004 in England and in the U.S. and guess what: they all needed a composition and rhetoric class, even the brightest ones.  Since I was teaching a class in say interpersonal communications or contemporary performance I only had the time to guide the students in their writing, not teach it outright as its own subject.  So, I celebrate this development with great joy and trepidation.

Why trepidation you ask? (I don't know why I've decided 'you' are asking questions, but bear with me, I've been reading essays from the 19th Century - blame the transcendentalists) Trepidation because writing matters so much to me as in it's what matters most to me right now, so the prospect of teaching this skill is both exciting and scary.  I feel a tremendous responsibility to get it right, make it exciting, challenging and of course effective.  If my students are not writing better by the end of the class, I will feel like I failed.  Knowing how to write is the greatest tool a student - not to mention a human being - can have in the contemporary world.  Yes, I know, we're all digital and visual and twittified, but still if you know how to write, which of course implies that you know how to: read, listen, observe, bear witness, communicate and analyze, then you are better equipped to live a full life.  Some would argue with this statement.  I'm willing to debate this proposition with anyone, anytime.  Bring it.

There is then, too, this issue of voice.  Since Virginia Woolf laid down the gauntlet with A Room of One's Own, the importance of women (and we can extrapolate from this any group who has not hitherto been heard and/or had the tools to write and publish) having a voice that can be heard is a big deal.  This is not simply for basic fairness but so that we can see the whole picture (apologies for so much italicizing but I'm obviously worked up...it's that or Initial Caps...) of how people perceive and articulate the world.  Without this information, we are only living in a partial reality.  I would argue that right now, given the gaps between rich and poor, educated and illiterate, etc. in the world and in This Country (as shameful as that is), we are all the poorer for such a partial view of the world.

I am also particularly pleased to be teaching at Fordham because my second step-father's college friend, Walter, who became a mentor/guardian angel figure for me growing up was a professor at Fordham until his horrendously premature death of pancreatic cancer in his mid-50s.  I spent time with him while he was dying (frighteningly quickly) in his West Village apartment in August 1998.  He died in October of that year.  The grief I felt at his passing is barely explicable, because it felt like the floor underneath my feet had been ripped away.  Here was the man who tried to answer all my annoying questions from age 6 onward, who leant the money to me and two other people he didn't even know so we could get our first NYC apartment, who cared about every little thing I did no matter whether he agreed with it or not (and a lot of times he didn't), who helped me get my first theater job in NYC and on and on and on.  We had issues as I got older and saw he was human - all too human.  I think he felt the same about me as I got older and little more, shall we say, um, bratty?  That is the peril of all heroes, they will fall and the worshipper will be Pissed Off, but we got over that.  I'm crying while typing this, realizing now how much I miss him still all these many years later - 15 to be precise.

The woman who gave my resume to the person who hires writing adjuncts is someone I met first at my guardian angel's funeral.  We re-met in a totally different context a couple years ago and have been cheering each other on ever since.  We didn't recognize each other at first but when she told me where she taught I asked if she knew him and she said yes, she had been at his funeral.  I remembered then that she had been kind to me the day, but I could not reciprocate because I felt like I was going to pass out.  I remembered she had long hair.  I could barely breathe.  I think it was Halloween.  A very Walter thing to have his funeral on Halloween complete with Harold Pinter character looking undertakers in a cavernous Catholic church running the show - in Rhode Island - his home state - and where I was born - orange leaves everywhere it seemed - swirling in the breeze.  I had vertigo, nausea, was puking or almost fainting, crying.  It turns out Walter had been my new friend's mentor, too.  This makes sense to me because she is so lovely and we think in some ways weirdly alike.  So there is some continuity here. I like to think Walter is happy.  I do believe that actually.

I have a strange belief that all the people I loved and have died are this pantheon of ghosts/guardian angels.  I talk to them all the time.  And yes, of course, in case you have been reading this blog for a while, that includes my grandmothers.  I hear them answer.  This probably makes me certifiable, but so far, since I do this all silently, I've gotten away with it.  A therapist suggested I write a play about this phenomenon.  I laughed, but she may have been right.  Stay tuned.

As for the grandmothers book, I am still working on it, though not this week.  Right now it's all about creating the Perfect Syllabus...or at least one that's good enough.  But you know, it's me, so it has to be The Perfect Syllabus.  That and deadlines and applications, etc.  I am reading Thornton Wilder's biography, which is turning out to be helpful for the grandmothers book, because he was alive when they were, though he was older, but the detail about the cultural landscape and New England mores is quite useful to help me melt more completely into their points of view.

In other news, my beloved Canadian husband is still stuck in Canada until his visa comes through, but visits when he can.  That is both wonderful and hard.  Wonderful and precious to be with him when we can be, hard because the visits are shorter than either of us would like.  I would not trade it though, because I'm aware that the pain of our separation is in direct relation to how happy we are when we are together.  This too shall pass.  The visa process will end eventually and with luck that will coincide with him finishing up his business in Canada.

I'm too tired to be more articulate alas, but wanted to write a bit of an update.  I hope everyone who reads this is well and following their own internal rhythms through life.  I'm re-reading Thoreau (oh yes, my students will be reading Thoreau) and of all the things he got right, that's the thing he got rightest (yes, kids, I know that's wrong grammatically but I have a PhD so I can do this shit now...bwahahahahaha...).  In regard to writing in voices as they exist (including PowerPoint): a book I will be teaching will be A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which - if you have not read it yet - is genius.  She said her main inspirations were Proust and The Sopranos.  That about sums it up, except it's better than that.

With that bit of not so humble opinion, I bid you goodnight.

Still working on the book

Because working on my grandmothers' book has been so all-encompassing, I haven't had time for the blog.  This will not be a long post except to say: yes, I'm still working on the book...and, more than writing per se, my work consists of reading through hundreds and hundreds (probably in total thousands) of pages of one of my grandmother's correspondence, articles (published and unpublished), fiction and poetry (unpublished).

Her correspondence with one man from 1972-79 (the last years of her life) has proven to be fruitful,  painful, hilarious, tragic, insightful and totally full of bullshit...Her ability to manufacture an entirely fake childhood & young adulthood (and weave it throughout the correspondence fairly consistently) for this person is extraordinary, as is her prescient political commentary and wit.  Then there's her drinking (she tends to count glasses of wine as she writes) and what that does to both the quality and the substance of the writing.  I won't say more than this because it's so key to the book, but as you can imagine it's quite a ride into some kind of whirlpool-like vortex - looking at aspects of myself in a glass darkly (both literally and figuratively).

I tend to bookend my work on the book with one friend (texting her when I've been working, sometimes before I begin) and then debrief with John (my beloved Canadian husband - who is stuck in Canada awaiting residency visa for US but with whom I speak every day and who - happily - will be visiting tomorrow for a few days - hooray!).  I also need to speak with other folks who have similar experiences with growing up with and/or recovering from alcoholism in order to stay grounded in the present.

Sometimes I go overboard and asking others to help reel me back in or doing the reeling myself is very hard.  I'm learning the balance...the hard way of course (I'm an expert in the hard way...) - through experience of doing it 'wrong.'  But this is the only way to do it of course.  No way out but through and all like that.

I have a number of months at the very least of research ahead of me.  I don't know why I thought I could actually write this book without reading all of this stuff methodically, but I did.  I was wrong.  Shocking, I know.  I can be wrong.  Horrors.

So, I'm being methodical and am totally absorbed in this task.  It feels like a generational inventory, an attempt to liberate the present from this deep past (which goes way back before my grandmothers - have genealogies to prove that - written by grandparents and great-grandparents, etc. - tales of alcoholic demise after extraordinary heroism, etc. - relentless cycles of this shit - going back to the 1600s - seriously).

This research has the salutary effect of making me wildly grateful to be sober, alive and in love with (and now married to!) a man who loves me as much as I love him.

I think this is the bit where my life gets better.  That's the message I'm receiving anyway when listening to Whatever You Want to Call It That is Larger than Me in prayer and meditation.  Will I be struck down by lightening for saying this?  Shockingly, for anyone who knows me, I don't think so.

My experience so far is this: I need to do whatever is in my deepest heart to do - that thing that recurs and I've batted away because it seems impractical or doesn't follow the linear path I've laid down for myself - even if that recurring idea/nudge/hunch seems like it's 'not me'.  Whenever I don't follow that hunch/idea/nudge, in my experience, I get blowback for not doing so either in health issues or seemingly intransigent life problems.  When I do follow this deepest heart (which takes a lot of meditation and prayer to touch/feel/hear and then discuss with a few trusted others to make sure I haven't gone off the rails), I am held and cared for in the most astonishing way/s.

I wish this experience for you, too.