Drama High/Michael Sokolove: Reflections

Readers of this blog know that in that wind-wild and yet utterly hospitable Boston of a week ago I was given the gift of my friend Jessica Keener's new collection of short stories, Women in Bed, and found myself full of that ecstatic joy that excellent storytelling yields.

Another gift? Michael Sokolove's Drama High—this time a gift of coincidence, for Michael and I shared the Penguin booth for a while during our respective signings (Gotham kindly sent along copies of Handling the Truth, which we shared with teachers of memoir). I knew of Michael, of course—his work for The New York Times Magazine, his previous books, including Warrior Girls. But I did not expect to find myself so utterly enthralled with this story about a particular high school drama teacher (Lou Volpe) and his cast of Truman High students. I did not expect to feel so emotional as I read—about those who thrill to teach and those who brim with learning, about students who master the raw art of vulnerability, about a very particular play and its casting and its profoundly searing staging.

Masterfully, Sokolove peels and reveals. His own journey as a student at Truman. His respect for this theater phenom, Lou Volpe. His affection (deep, unsullied) for the students he meets. His concerns about the state of education in this country, where the Common Core threatens common humanity and where the very things that the most challenged students need—provocations in the arts, narratives that get personal, unscripted teaching, a chance to speak, teachers who are given the time and room to look up and see—are going missing. In Drama High, we are not preached to, as readers. We are, instead, given a chance to reflect on issues of national import through the lens of a particular school, particular actors, a particular man on a mission.

Surely this book must be given this holiday season to every theater teacher in the country. Surely it must also be given to administrators and parents and students—to anyone, indeed, who likes a very good story beautifully told. I have the deepest respect for Sokolove as an observer, as a journalist, as a man of letters. I have infinite empathy for the many ways he clearly cares about young people and their teachers.

We'll be reading Drama High as we prepare to write our profiles this spring at the University of Pennsylvania. We'll be reading it very carefully, for all that it has to teach us about humanity and the arts, about story and its discovery.

Two more things. The photo above is of Alison Mosier-Mills, the daughter of my dear friend, Elizabeth Mosier, who has shared the theater arts of her talented children with me through the years; this is one of several photographs taken during Radnor High's recent staging of Grease. And Avery Rome, an editor about whom you have read here, is thanked in Michael's book for her valuable guidance. Knowing Avery as I do, I imagine that this partnership was a most invaluable one.

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Women in Bed/Jessica Keener: Reflections

Jessica Keener and I became friends slowly, through social media, though both of us are, in fact, very much real-people people. Look you in the eyes people. Grab a cup of tea and talk people. Walk up Newbury Street in the freezing wind speaking of flowers in the summer people.

Which is what we got to be when I went to Boston for a few days recently.

Last May, while traveling by train to Washington, DC, to surprise my niece on her thirteenth birthday, I read and loved Jessica Keener's much-heralded debut novel, Night Swim. In Boston, Jessica gave me an inscribed copy of her new and gorgeously produced collection of nine short stories, Women in Bed (The Story Plant). Once again I was reading Jessica while traveling—this time through the raucous Tuesday skies from Boston to Philadelphia.

Today, Thanksgiving, I woke to finish these shimmering and unexpected stories. These originals. Like Alyson Hagy, Jessica Francis Kane, Alice Elliott Dark, Susan Straight, Robin Black, Alice Munro, among others, Jessica Keener is an exquisite writer of the shorter tale. She has mastered that nearly impossible trick of condensing entire lives into compelling and telling brevities. Of finding just the right image. Of stealing just the right snatches of dialogue from what, in a novel, would run as full-fledged-and-then-he-coughed digressions or scenes.

We don't need anything more than what Jessica gives us here. We are convinced, persuaded, brokenhearted by these women who don't have what they want, or don't know what they can have, or can't find the proper language of desire. They run, they walk, they sit, they wait, they steer a boat out onto a chlorine-colored sea, and always, always, they return in their thoughts or in their lives to a lying-in place, to sheets and pillows.

Consistently the language is thrilling. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes not.

Look at this paragraph, from "Boarders":

In the shadows of the backyard, pine trees lacing the property appeared more distant than they actually were. The lawn, stiffened with frost, bent like thin, wire mesh under her feet. She headed for the small swing set and began to swing under a big, leafless oak. She knew it was cold but felt nothing.

Now look at this, from "Woman With Birds in her Chest":

In April she struggled in her sleep. Her dreams became shadows of fingers, and the night, a troubling piece of lint in her throat. Beside her Miles slept with his arm heavy on her thigh. She wanted to wake him. Something wrong? Everything okay? he would have asked. But she didn't.

She didn't know. She didn't know.

Lawn like wire mesh. Night like a troubling piece of lint. These are two stellar images among countless stellar images written not to declare a brilliance but to elucidate a moment, a woman, a mood.

I have learned from Jessica Keener, reading this collection. And I think that you will, too.

A sweet Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

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