The extraordinary week that has been this week found me in a classroom last evening among teens who have lived through the hardest kinds of sorrow and who look at now and look ahead and imagine themselves writing. I'd written a talk. It was soon abandoned. It was more important to sit on a desk with my things sprawled about me and listen for the young writers' stories. We talked about whether or not writing heals, and about whether or not it's possible for writers to write what they do not know. Poems were recited from memory. Early plot lines unspooled. A question asked about the pretensions of books versus the power of movies. One of the girls in the room had been reading Undercover; she described it, with great sophistication, to her peers. One of the young men, a science fiction and horror writer, had also tried to read the book. It wasn't for him, he said, and then he worried that his words had somehow wounded.
I had a copy of Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese" in my folder. I read it aloud. It was a still and perfect moment, a poem that spoke with force and meaning to the writers in that room. You do not have to be good, the poem begins. You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
"I like it a lot," the science fiction writer said. "It means we can be who we are."
I've never been very good at letting moments go. Not skyscapes. Not heartaches. Not eighth-grade talent shows or that moment at graduation when the caps are frisbeed to the sky and the dividing line has been drawn between the future and the past.
So that when I taught young writers for seven consecutive summers, I was, always, in my mind, with those young writers—traveling with them back and forth, trying to see past their page, thinking myself into their process and back out of it again—for their sake, in both directions. And when, today, I was joined on the second floor of a favorite local coffee shop by nine young women, I knew I'd go home with an ache in my heart—they'll all grow up; I'll never know where their lives now will take them.
Their talent runs deep, as does their capacity for thoughtful mutual critique. They listened—they heard—the fragments that I read out loud, some even asking later for titles so that they might read the wholes. There were among them the philosophical and poetical, the one who could write through time and the one who embraced the one moment, the one with a talent for original saturation, the one who knew how to suggest the possibilities of a character's life within the stretch of a single sentence. There was joy as we walked the streets with our cameras in hand. There was compassion for the child we found sitting near a grate, waiting for her mother to come to—well, what, we wondered: to rescue her?
Remain who you are, I urged them, at the session's end. Keep living: whole. And then I read them "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, a poem every true heart must know.
The closing lines:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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