more student love: Daniel Blas in the Pennsylvania Gazette

Sometimes I just want to fluff back against a frothy pillow and consider the wonders of my students.

Last week, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote about Leah Apple, now a Fulbright winner, who has changed the lives of West Philadelphia children through an initiative called CityStep Penn. I wrote a recommendation letter for a gifted bioengineer who spent much of this past year inventing (with others) a device that allows children with cerebral palsy to take their own photographs (he invented, and at the same time wrote remarkable memoir/profile pieces for 135.302). I whispered pretty somethings into the ears of people making decisions about students' futures. I exchanged emails with my Katie, who graduated a year ago and has been working in New Orleans with Catholic Charities as a triage artist (I call her an artist) before she heads off for medical school. In the pages of Handling the Truth, my book about the making of memoir due out in August, my students sing. I wrote that book in large part because I love to hear them sing. Because sometimes I just want to fluff back against a frothy pillow and consider the wonders of my students.

Today I am celebrating the work of Daniel Blas, a tall and slender Whartonite with transparent integrity—a young man who may have actually mostly been studying, say, risk and insurance, and reading, say, the Wall Street Journal, but who never failed to move us with his surprising ironies, his soft-shoe humor, his Calvin Trillin touch. Dan came to my class this spring semester at the suggestion of Al Filreis. He sat in the same chair, to my left, every single Tuesday—steady and just the right amount of sure, conveying Springsteen adorations to a prof just slightly obsessed with her own Springsteen adorations. Dan slayed us with details and structural magic. We wanted more.

Here, in the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette, is more—Dan's Springsteen memoir (which is actually about Dan's relationship with his concert-loving dad) abbreviated and modified for the Gazette readers. Dan worked with Trey Popp to perfect this piece, and I am over the moon that "Always Wear Tie Dye" now sits in the pages of this fantastic magazine.

You'll read Dan here and you'll be glad you did. And then, if you haven't already read the Gazette-bound work of my other students, I share it all again below:

Maggie Ercolani
Nabil Mehta
Joe Polin
Moira Moody

To the power of the young. To Bruce Springsteen and Daniel Blas and the dad who started it all.

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I can't show you my students, but I can show you/tell you this

They have huge hearts and great talent. They make me laugh and they work hard. They pay attention to one another. They let the learning in.

Today they surprised me with a birthday celebration and magnificent card (you guys!) and made me cry (again). Forever and ever, 135.302. Forever and ever and ever.

Thank you, my students, and thank you dear provocateuring friends Karen Rile and Jamie-Lee Josselyn. And thank you Trey Popp and Maggie Ercolani and Nabil Mehta, who joined us in our final hour and made the party finer.

I will sleep well tonight.

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Maggie Ercolani, a bold, brave, wise student, debuts in the Pennsylvania Gazette

Okay, so call this a Beth loves her students blog-athon day, but I am not going to let the moon get any higher in tonight's sky without celebrating Maggie Ercolani, a student from two years ago, who has her first published piece in the current issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. She joins my students Moira Moody, Joe Polin, and Nabil Mehta on these pages, and her story is a triumph—a telling triumph and a living triumph.

Let me explain.

Toward the end of this past summer I received an email from Maggie, who I knew, from an earlier exchange, had been looking forward to a summer internship at Macy's with Maggie-style enthusiasm. I saw her name in my in-box, opened her note, then recoiled. It wasn't the story I'd expected. Indeed, Maggie was writing to tell me that she had suffered a stroke in the first hour of the first day of that internship. That she had spent the summer in hospitals and rehab. That she had a new understanding of the father about whom she had written in my class—a father who had experienced a traumatic brain injury when he tumbled from a bike. Maggie wanted to write about what had happened so that she might understand. Would I help her? Of course I would. But oh, Maggie, I said. Oh. Maggie.

But the reason Maggie's piece is in the Gazette is because Trey Popp, an editor there, took Maggie's story on and worked with her to develop it more fully. They went back and forth, Trey and Maggie, until the piece is what it is today. I am so grateful to Trey, and I am so proud of Maggie—for her perseverance, for her attitude, for the textures in her life.

Please click on this link to read Maggie's story for yourself.

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prof pride in my student, Nabil Mehta

I do go on about these young people in my life, but they've more than earned me the right.  They are my students, after all, and they are as talented and hope-affirming as they come.  You'll get to read some of their best lines, in a year, in Handling the Truth.  But between now and then, please join me in celebrating this full-length essay by my student, Nabil Mehta, published in the current issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette.  Nabil is my second student to have his work featured in this beautiful magazine—the second to work with the tremendously thoughtful and talented Trey Popp, the magazine's associate editor.  (To see Joe Polin's essay, go here.)  Both Nabil and Joe are engineering students, by the way.  Which just goes to show that no one—and no major—owns literary talent.

I share the beginning of Nabil's essay.  The rest can be found here. This is work that began life in my classroom before being transformed for publication throughout the summer.

Though I enjoyed, as every proud Canadian must, the silent cold of winter during my childhood in Toronto, it was the summer afternoons that I secretly liked best. Maybe it was the nest of cardinals outside my bedroom, singing a song that to this day puts me back in the same bed. Or maybe it was the sun pouring through the second-floor skylight and lighting up every carpet dust particle just so, or the afternoons playing catch with my brother in the cul-de-sac, disrupted occasionally to assure my mother that I hadn’t broken my arm in the last 15 minutes.

This day, though, was different. The mid-August sun had nothing to illuminate but some carpet under-pad and a few boxes left in the hallway. The bed in which I’d been serenaded had been removed, and the cardinals’ chirps bounced around bare walls. We were moving, I had been told a few months ago, to a place called Connecticut, in the United States.

Isn’t that in Pittsburgh? I had asked.

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