Joy in the wings: Daniel Menaker and Jeff Hobbs to spend time with us at Penn

Yesterday, on my way to teaching at Penn, I took a small detour to see a Paul Strand exhibit in the Fine Arts building. Then climbed the steps. Took out my phone. And snapped this shot through the window.

Damn, I thought. How lucky am I to be a spring semester adjunct here. This campus. This place. This Creative Writing arm of an English Department USA Today just ranked second in the nation.

Last year, Avery Rome and I joined forces and hosted Michael Sokolove (Drama High) as a special guest. Michael thrilled our students, taught us many things. This year, I'm enormously blessed to be hosting Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction for The New Yorker for 25 years and served as the Executive Editor in Chief of Random House, acquiring books by some of my favorite writers. In his various editorial capacities, Daniel has worked with Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, George Saunders, Charles McGrath, William Trevor, Norman Rush, Katha Pollitt, Colum McCann, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Salman Rushdie—and many others. He has also written a memoir I loved, My Mistake. I wrote about that here—a blog post that initiated an unexpected conversation.

Daniel will be at the Kelly Writers House on February 24, beginning at noon, when he and I will be talking about the vagaries of the publishing industry. The larger community is welcome. At 1:30, my class will join with Lorene Carey's class to talk in private about My Mistake.

After Daniel was in touch regarding my words about his book, Jeff Hobbs, the wholly compassionate and deep-seeing author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, got in touch about this blog post, in which I spoke of how I was incorporating his book into my teaching plan. Jeff, who lives in California, offered to come visit my class as part of a larger east coast tour. When the dates weren't quite working out as we had hoped, a Skype visit was planned instead.

And so my students will have the opportunity to meet two authors whose books and lives inspire. My students—who are teaching me words like "jawn" and authors like Maira Kalman, teaching me narrative photography and the nuance of talk, the pronunciation of complex cloud forms and the Black Scholes equation. We are learning memoir new, and we are learning it together, and I am beyond delighted that the neon lyric of our conversation will be further radicalized by Daniel and Jeff.

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Michael Sokolove, Avery Rome, Kelly Writers House, Students: what a day we had

Someday I will find a way to express the (what is the word?) (joy?) that I experienced yesterday as Michael Sokolove, the phenomenally gifted author of Drama High, among other books, and the equally gifted editor, Avery Rome, joined my class and Avery's class at Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus.

Michael read, we talked, we learned, we appreciated.

My students wrote and asked and listened.

It may have been raining like the world was ending yesterday.

But inside our room, we were all just getting a good, fresh start.

Thank you.

In a week or so, a video tape of our conversation and mini workshop will be available. I'll post that link when I have it. Then, at last, you can see for yourself how lucky I am to adjunct at Penn, to work with editors like Avery, and to invite a big-hearted, super writer like Michael into the midst.

Wait until you see.

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I forget, often, about the words I've left behind

My dear friends Elizabeth Mosier and Chris Mills sent me this photo last night, following their excursion to Radnor Memorial Library.

We writers live in the forest of doubt, or at least this writer does. This photo startled me—this idea of a dear librarian (Pam Sedor) taking the time to locate my books and to place them all on one wall. This idea of a celebration going on while I've been going on elsewhere.

I forget, often, about the words I've left behind. I focus, too often, on what must be done right now, on what isn't done yet.

I neglect to pause. This celebration at Radnor Memorial Library—discovered by friends—is cause for a pause.

We'll be celebrating Going Over at this very Radnor Memorial Library on April 30, 7:30. This will be my only formal reading from the book, and this party is open to all; cake will be served. Please join us.

In the meantime, today, I am celebrating the work of Michael Sokolove and editor Avery Rome at the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House. My class has read Sokolove's fantastic Drama High. We have questions. We look forward to reflection, to a deep and true conversation.

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The Art of the Interview (and Narrative Profiles): thank you, John McPhee

Thank you, John McPhee.

Here I am, set to begin the narrative profile component of English 135.302 at Penn, set, as a matter of fact, to teach the art of the interview this coming Tuesday (this very one), and there you are in the pages of The New Yorker, with your essay "Elicitation."

Your timing, as always, is impeccable.

I am tempted to quote the entire piece back to my students, back to the world. I will honor the rules of borrowing and quote just a tad. Here we go:

Whatever you do, don't rely on memory. Don't even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day. And don't squirrel notes in a bathroom—that is, run off to the john and write surreptitiously what someone said back there with the cocktails. From the start, make clear what you are doing and who will publish what you write. Display your notebook like a fishing license.

And:

You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. Evidently, you need help. Who is there to help you but the person who is answering your questions? The result is the opposite of the total shutdown that might have occurred if you had come on glib and omniscient. If you don't seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it. If you are listening to speech and at the same time envisioning it in print, you can ask your question again, and again, until the repeated reply will be clear in print. Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box? Reporters call that creative bumbling.

In two weeks, Michael Sokolove will come to Penn and speak to my class as well as the students now being taught by my friend Avery Rome about this interviewing thing. He'll talk as well about his exceptional book, Drama High. John McPhee, you've given us more to ponder. And I (as I always am with you) am grateful.

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the world is full of people who cannot wait to tell you what they know (thoughts on teacherly greatness from Michael Sokolove)

As my work week begins with a long drive to York on behalf of a client, I leave you all with these words from Michael Sokolove, in Drama High, about Lou Volpe, the extraordinary teacher of theater arts at Truman, in Levittown, PA.

Sokolove is reflecting on what makes a teacher great. It is a lesson for us all.

He does not tell her how. He never does. It is the essential aspect of his genius as an educator. The world is full of people who cannot wait to tell you what they know. What animates Volpe is creating moments for his kids to figure it out for themselves. His ego, though not small, allows for great patience. Very few high school directors could be more versed in theater, more knowing about what the finished product should look like. But he lets his kids find their own way there.

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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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