taking HANDLING (and memoirs I've loved) to Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, PA

In an hour I'll set out for Bethlehem, PA, where I'll spend the day at Moravian Academy, a high school that has dedicated much of this year to stories of self and memory and that selected Handling the Truth as its all-school read as part of the process.

Moravian also invited students and faculty to read three memoirs I recommended—The Answer to The Riddle is Me (David Stuart MacLean), Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson), and Gabriel (Edward Hirsch).

We'll begin with an all-school assembly and a conversation about non-traditional forms. I'll then travel to two sophomore-level classrooms to workshop emerging student ideas and to talk more deeply about the making of truth.

A day I have anticipated happily for several months now is about to begin.

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When the poem is the elegy and the elegy is the memoir: Gabriel: A Poem/Edward Hirsch

This morning, before the gears on the work-a-day-world began to turn in earnest, I read "Gabriel: A Poem," Edward Hirsch's book-length elegy for his departed son.

It is hallowed and hollowing, a work of pristine mourning. Memories seamed and broken. Threads that fall away until we see the soul of the boy himself— adopted, challenged by tics and relentless recklessness, the bright splash in a room. He is a child no one can keep safe from himself. A child who goes out during Storm Irene to a party he sees advertised on Craigslist. A child who does not return and cannot be found for four terrible days.

And then he must be buried.

It ransacks the soul, reading a book like this. We peel away as the lines peel away; no periods at the end of any line, no finished sentences. We look and we cannot stop looking until Gabriel, and his searching father, are a part of us.

It is a poem. It is also memoir. Like Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming it suggests, again, another form for the hardest and most important stories lived. The most important things lost and lifted to the page.

Words:

In his country
There were scenes
Of spectacular carnage

Hurricanes welcomed him
He adored typhoons and tornadoes
Furies unleashed

Houses lifted up
And carried to the sea
Uncontained uncontainable

Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble

With thanks to Nathaniel Popkin, whose craft essay in Cleaver Magazine last week reminded me that I had meant to buy and read this.

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Brown Girl Dreaming/Jacqueline Woodson: a whole story, a lesson on writing

This morning I have been raised up by Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's masterpiece. I have sat with her poems and her life on my lap, seeing with greatest clarity. A story of growing up in the south and in the north, of reading slow and remembering deep, of telling stories that might have been as if they happened yesterday. Life is apportioned but it must be lived whole. In fractions we find our trembling unities. In love, our idea of home.

This is Woodson's story. But it's also the way she tells the story, the deep, clean beauty in the lines, the wisdom in the narrative idea, the authenticity of the recurring themes, not a single (bless her) gimmick. It's how she speaks for all of us, how she makes us want (at once) to pass her story on. It's how she  makes me remember, when I read her book, sitting in the back of a teacher's conference in Boston, only last year, with Nancy Paulsen, Woodson's editor, beside me (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin). Woodson was on the stage. Paulsen was smiling.

"She's written such a beautiful book," Paulsen leaned over and whispered, and I said (all honestly), "I have no doubt."

Not one.

Have no doubt about this book. Read (if you haven't already) the whole, but start with this single page called "writing # 1." It, like the entirety of Brown Girl Dreaming, calls to all of us:

writing #1

It's easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak,
the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair,
crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.
But as I bend over my composition notebook,
only my name
comes quickly. Each letter, neatly printed
between the pale blue lines. Then white
space and air and me wondering, How do I
spell introduce? Trying again and again
until there is nothing but pink
bits of eraser and a hole now
where a story should be.

Perfection? I think so.

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what do you want? to write (a shred), to read (up next, on my list)

But what do you want? a friend asked, and I said (hurrying past, on an errand, again), Time.

I'd give you some of mine, if I could, he said.

I believed him. I walked on.

This is a Sunday. I claim it as mine. I spent the morning writing a shred of this strange new inchoate book of mine, the one that will take a very long time; let it take a very long time. I don't want to be in any other imagined space than this one. I don't want to write to be done. I don't want to know, even, if the world will want this book of mine. I just want to write it. Twenty-five thousand words in, and who knows what the hell will happen next. I write to find out. I write to invent the language that this story must be told in.

This afternoon I will choose among the books I have lately gathered unto myself and read. Little Failures. Brown Girl Dreaming. Rain Reign. I'll Give You the Sun, The Dinner. And also, a gift from Daniel Torday's publisher, The Last Flight of Poxl West, which is due out in March and which has been called many great things by many great people.

A writing morning. A reading afternoon. The gift I gave myself for Christmas.

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