Beyond Words: My student, Josh Jordan, publishes his memoiristic essay in the PA Gazette

There are privileges associated with teaching. I've written about them here. The communities that form. The stories that emerge. The power, and the hope, I discover in those who come to my University of Pennsylvania classroom to write.

Also? Continuing those conversations long after the class is done. Hearing from students who are out in the world, who send their continuing stories my way, who tell me not just the big stuff that is happening in their lives, but the small details they find arresting.

The things they notice.

Josh Jordan is among the mix of students I've been hearing from all summer long. Today he's sent a link to an essay now published in The Pennsylvania Gazette. This is a version of an essay that was written in our classroom last semester. We all loved it then for what it taught us about this young man's heart, his capacity to hear through silence.

And so it is my pleasure to introduce you to Josh Jordan. His piece is here.

I thank Trey Popp, of the Gazette, who said yes and then worked with Josh to make this a Gazette story.

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for Christopher Allen, in memoriam, lost to gunfire while covering the Sudan War

Earlier this morning my father called with the very sad news that Christopher Allen, a 26-year-old war reporter, has lost his life while covering the Sudan conflict. The story is being reported across the country as well as here, in our Philadelphia Inquirer.

I'd been watching the Harvey news, terrified for that large swath of our country, for the people already lost, the land under water and siege. The very particular, very specific death of Chris entered into my swirl of sadness.

What do we do for the people who have been lost? It's a question I had already been pondering as I write my September essay for the Inquirer.

Right now, today, I simply want to share the best of Christopher, whom I met on a train while headed into Penn to teach several years ago. He impressed me at once—the intensity of his questions, the politeness of his phrasing—and soon I'd written him into Handling the Truth, the passage above, never thinking I would see him again.

Why would I see this perfect stranger again?

Later, however, I learned that Chris was the son of my father's friends. That he had graduated from Penn and moved to the theaters of conflict. That he was determined to be there, to cover the wars, to find the humanity in bloodshed. I spoke with his parents about Chris when he was gone. In the nave of a church, when he was home for a spell, I spoke with him. A few emails were sent.

He was just 26 years old, covering a war, and now he's gone. His legacy remains. Here is Chris, writing in his own words, for the Pennsylvania Gazette.

Updated to include this piece, written for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Online now and slated to run in this weekend's print edition. 

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in which my student, Anthony Ciacci, writes of home and shines in the Pennsylvania Gazette

Last semester, in my classroom at Penn, we focused on home—how the stories of our lives (and how we tell those stories) ultimately tangle with this construct.

As part of the Beltran Family Teaching Award program, I invited my current and past students to write of home for a special publication my husband and I designed. When Anthony Ciacci, a student from a previous year, responded with his essay, I was thrilled—loved the piece so much that I whispered its existence into the ear of Trey Popp, a Pennsylvania Gazette editor and friend. (Trey kindly visits my class each year to talk about editing and publishing, and I've been blessed to find my students' work appear in the Gazette pages, including these pieces.)

The rest, as they say, is history. This week, in the ever-gorgeous Pennsylvania Gazette, Anthony's piece, modified slightly for print, appears with its own lovely illustration and shine (read the full story here). I could not be more proud—nor more happy. Anthony is a big-souled guy, an extraordinary brother, a faithful son, and a talent. We need hearts like his at this time.

Congratulations, Anthony.

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"My students and their fictitious doubles," in the Penn Gazette (One Thing Stolen)

Thank you, Trey Popp, for sharing this story about my students and the characters they inspire in the new as-ever-gorgeous edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette.

The focus of this particular essay is One Thing Stolen, a novel Chronicle Books released this past April. One Thing Stolen  takes place partly on the Penn campus and partly in Florence, Italy. Its  primary characters—Maggie Ercolani and Katie Goldrath—were named for students I loved (and love).

Meanwhile, in a forthcoming novel, This Is the Story of You, my Mira Banul, the star of that story, carries the last name of my student Sean Banul. Mira must be especially strong as a monster storm devastates her world. She has a cat that waves. Sean gave me both strength and a waving cat. He gave me willing use of his last name.

Some people wonder why I write so many books. The answer: Because so many people and places inspire me. Indeed, my most recent students are already transforming the landscape of my imagination.

An excerpt from the Gazette story is below. The entire piece can be read here.

To be a Penn student is a privilege, absolutely, but privilege isn’t necessarily or even primarily the natural domain of the young people I meet. They are emergent, they are bright, they are headed toward something, but few among them have had it easy. The students who gather around the table in that Victorian twin have lost siblings, parents, teachers, best friends, faith in the bedrock, parts of themselves. They have been diagnosed, they have been uprooted, they have stood in danger’s way, they have endured violence and prejudice. They are, at times, the first members of their family to matriculate in college. English is not always their first language. Home is a word they are still defining. I say that I teach at Penn, but that is a preposterous shorthand. I show up, and I’m profoundly educated.

I am inspired.

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Honoring Greg Djanikian in the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette

I felt blessed when Pennsylvania Gazette editor John Prendergast invited me to write a 3,000 word story about Greg Djanikian, who trusted me to teach at Penn, who talks with  me many spring-semester Tuesdays when I arrive early to teach, who inspired a key character in my forthcoming Florence novel One Thing Stolen, and who writes some of the most gorgeous poetry anywhere. I wrote of his most recent book, Dear Gravity, here.

To write this story I spent an afternoon in Greg's beautiful home (filled with the artistry of his wife), interviewed Stephen Dunn, Julia Alvarez, Al Filreis, Gerald Costanzo, Fred Muratori, and others, and returned to a dear student, Eric Xu, who brought valuable insights to the Greg's beloved teaching.

The story can be found here.

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The Pan-Asian Dance Troupe: The World According to Movement

We could not take photographs until after the show. We simply had to take it in, to be there for it, in the present now.

It was the Pan-Asian Dance Troupe's presentation of "Spirit: The Four Elements." It was Christine Wu, my former student, who had once written, memoiristically, of choreography and dance, and who now stood as troupe president on that stage in all her gorgeous tendernessfiercenessjoyfulnesstalent. In a show that was surprisingly wide-ranging, elevated, clever, classic, and contemporary, Christine and more than two dozen others gave us the world according to movement.

They drove a raucous audience toward congratulatory crazy.

There was "Ti Cao! Morning Exercise," inspired, as the program tells us, "by the early morning fitness routines of Chinese school children." There was the wildly inventive and rhythmic "What Does the Nut Say?," a piece featuring "nuts, coconut bras, and half-naked dudes." There was "Road to a Geisha," which began with the flicker of paper umbrellas and ended with loose hair and Korean hip-hop. There was a stunning water dance that quieted the crowd—water in cups on heads, in cups in hands, in transporting stillness. Big sticks, flashing swords, old-world costumes, long sleeves, diaphanous flags. One striking image, one imaginative dance—and then another and another.

In between these and so many other pieces were glorious film fragments—the big steaming earth, in some footage, flickers of the dancers themselves in the rain, on a bridge, near a pond, by the big doors, even at the ice rink of the Penn campus, in others. There the dancers were, doing martial art. There they were stomping on puddles. There they were doing wickedly fast scratch spins.There they were—costumed and smiling.

To my right, in the pews of Iron Gate Theater, sat the ever-gorgeous Chang, also a former student—an intensely intelligent straight A (so far, she says) engineering student, who once brought me hot chocolate, drew me pictures, and this week remembered my birthday with a gift. To my left sat poet-bio-engineer-er Eric, whose gentle nature belies the brilliance of his academic career. Elsewhere in the pews sat our beautiful, talented, headed-for-a big-writing career Angela. We were there for Christine, we were there for the troupe, we came to see, and oh did we ever.

Christine, the intelligence and quality of your show was not unexpected, coming from you and your troupe, but it was so fully rewarding. Chang, Eric, Angela—thank you for being you. And Katie Goldrath, my Katie of an earlier year, my Katie of the Pennsylvania Gazette story—how wonderful it was to walk with you through the Penn campus and up to Manakeesh, before the show. You are going to make such a huge difference in the lives of others when you graduate with your medical degree. Indeed, you already are.

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what is your memoir about? my students provide shining examples

Life: It gets all tangled up. Those of us who want to write about it have to separate the skeins.

The students of English 135.302 (University of Pennsylvania) are now hard at work on their memoirs, and I cannot wait to read them. While I wait, I look back and honor the work of my former students—excerpted in Handling the Truth.

Speaking of former students—Daniel Blas, whose fine memoir was adapted for the Pennsylvania Gazette last year—will be returning to class today to speak with Trey Popp, one of the Gazette editors, about the process. If you didn't get a chance to read Dan's work the first time around, here's your chance.

Now from Handling the Truth:

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Sometimes you can get at [the life questions] obliquely, through structure and white space. Sometimes you do it by rubbing the now against the then. Sometimes we accentuate the terrible discrepancy. Sometimes we are writing toward forgiveness—of ourselves, of others. This is the beauty of memoir. If all your memoir does is deliver story—no sediments, no tidewater, no ambiguity—we have no reason to return. If you cannot embrace the messy tug of yourself, the inescapable contradictions, the ugly and the lovely, then you are not ready yet. If you can’t make room for a reader, then please don’t expect a reader to start making room for you.

Kim, my dark-haired student with the Cleopatra eyes, chose to write her memoir about luckiness, unluckiness, and love. My favorite paragraph:

Love makes you dependent; pain pushes you to the breaking point of self-actualization. My parents’ support and the stability they provided for me is something I’m still trying to justify by replacing their hands with my own, finger by finger. Every day I lift a barricade to get through hermitage and extroversion, harmony and entropy, my mother’s love and my mother’s illness, innovation and inundation. I was lucky, I was born an American, I was born healthy, I was born into a loving home. I was unlucky, I was born judgmental, I have seen terror, I have seen desperate cries for life. So we continue: surprised, derisive, and awake by intuition.

Jonathan wrote about prayer as hobby, and about religious fanaticism:

Prayer was my new hobby, easily eating up an hour of every morning. My religious observance became systematic: I had to make sure experimental conditions were optimal. Experiments fail if they aren’t perfectly calibrated—perhaps my prayer was similarly ineffective because I was ignoring some ritualistic detail. Scientific precision was giving way to religious fanaticism. I was too skeptical of reality to reject superstition so quickly—and I had so much to lose. For two years, I was blinded by minutiae. Then I found academic biblical analysis.

Gabe wrote about surviving a heart condition; more than that, though, he wrote to imagine what a son’s illness means to a mother:

This was also probably what she begged for when, after I had gone unconscious in the hospital that day in February, the doctor spoke with her and told her that her son was very sick and that every effort was being made to save him. She had flown to Peru the night before to be with her father who was on his deathbed. She must have hung up the phone, heard the echo of the handset hitting the cradle resounding in her head, and felt her knees buckling beneath her. She somehow gathered strength, said what she thought was a last goodbye to her dying father, and boarded a plane towards Philadelphia. Those eight hours of flight must have been claustrophobically helpless. No jet plane could have flown fast enough to make this trip bearably short. No altitude could have brought her close enough to God so that she could scream loud enough in his ear to please save her son.

Responsibility—to one’s self and to others—was the theme that engaged Stephanie.

How much of your life, the life you know, is actually your own? We all do things for others, stretching out limbs like a thigmotropic plant clinging to the structure of another to both give and receive life-sustaining supplements. But what do we do for ourselves that we do not do for others? What moments are we robbed of, what people do we give too much to? And when, if ever, are we truly independent?

No one can or should tell you what to write about. But if you don’t know where the memoir impulse is coming from, if you can’t trace it, can’t defend it, can’t articulate an answer when somebody asks “Why’d you want to write a memoir anyway?”—stop. Hold those memoir horses. Either the mind has been teased for years upon years, or there’s that small thing that won’t be refused, or there’s something else genuine and worthy. But nobody wants to hear that you’re writing memoir because you need some quick cash, or because you think it will make you famous, or because your boyfriend said there’s a movie in this, or because you’re just so mad and it’s about time you get to tell your version.

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How do we write atmosphere, and give it tension? What I learned from Eva Figes' Light: With Monet at Giverny

I have Ivy Goodman to thank for Eva Figes. Ivy, a writer I first encountered long ago, when asked to write a review of her collected short stories, A Chapter From Her Upbringing, for the Pennsylvania Gazette. Ivy has been an essential part of my writing and reading life ever since—her reach is wide, her mind is gleaming, she whispers the names of important books into my ear, and often sends something unexpected my way.

I am grateful for Ivy.

A few weeks ago a slender novel called Light: With Monet at Giverny made its way to me, a gift from Ivy. Its author is Eva Figes, a writer born in Berlin in 1939. Yesterday, while a single carpenter banged away on kitchen cabinets, I stole upstairs, to my son's room, to read. My son has the largest room in this old house. It feels empty with him gone. I'd never sat there before, and read in his chair, but that was the place to be, for oh, my, what a book this is, and absolute quiet is the sound I needed.

Light recounts a single day in the life of Monet, at his estate in Giverny. In the early morning, he rises to paint. Down the hall, his grieving wife does not sleep, and in the house grandchildren stir, and stepdaughters are about, the help, an anxious cook. We will watch Monet in his pursuit of light, in his return to his house, in his lunch hour, in a walk with a friend, in a stroll through shadows with his saddened wife, but we will also come see, thanks to graceful tricks of authorial omniscience, the thoughts and regrets and dreams of the others who have come to Giverny and live through this day.

Little Lily will wonder "for perhaps the thousandth time why the sunlight should be full of dancing motes, gleaming and moving, when the rest of the air seemed quite so empty." Alice, the wife, will "lose all sense of time, as though she had been in a different place, somewhere that belonged to the night and what was left of her night thoughts, where, habitually now, she spoke to those who had only existed in the dark of her own head for years." Marthe, the spinster aunt (and step-daughter to Monet) wonders "what it would be like to do something, anything, from choice." And Jimmy, Lily's brother, will allow a balloon to escape.

But light—on the river, above the shadows, through the slats of window shutters, on the crisp of rose petals, in the wine—is really the protagonist here, and Figes draws it out so spectacularly that I held my breath as I read. This is atmosphere as suspense. This is weather as plot, and I must quote at length from one of many brilliant passages to show you what I mean:

Five o'clock. The top of the willow tree still shone in the green light. The same light was visible on the slope beyond the house, and on the open fields between the railway track and the river. But the water of the lily pond was sunk in the cool shadow, and only the air above it still gleamed fitfully in the slanting light, soft and tenuous as it came through the trees, playful as mist on the substances of shadow below, which it could not disturb. It was as though a tangible split had occurred between sunlight, shadow and substance, and now earth and water were sinking into themselves, taking leave of the sky. Dragonflies and a swarm of midges could still cross the divide, hovering in the air above the depth of shadow, catching the fitful gleam, but the lilies had begun to close up their colours as the water darkened and the sky withdrew from its surface and stood high above the trees.

I read Light after reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Melissa Kwasny's Nine Senses. I read it following review work on two other books. Like Kwasny, Figes reaffirmed for me what it is that I am truly looking for on the page, and what I must learn to do to be the writer I hope someday to be.

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Celebrating Craig Park and his first published essay, in the Pennsylvania Gazette

We'd already settled into our paces in English 135.302 this past spring when Craig Park joined our ranks—a trim guy in a slim jacket; dark eyes; a closely-shaved head. I wanted to know what he hoped to achieve in our class and asked. He looked at me, let a beat of time go by. "That's an awfully personal question, isn't it?" he asked.

Hmmm, I thought. This should be interesting.

And it was interesting—completely interesting—as Craig soon proved himself to be a gifted writer, an astute critic, a young man with wild stories to tell. He's terribly bright, this Craig Park—bracingly talented with language, tempo, detail. But he was also quick to admit how tricky memoir is, how hard it is to help a story (even a monstrously good one) transcend itself.

Some students come to us with talent and smarts to spare, and Craig was absolutely one of those. Others come with a willingness to say, I don't know this particular thing yet, but I'm willing to do what it takes to deepen my understanding—and range. Craig also proved himself to be one of those. That combination—in any person—is a powerful one, and as the semester wore on, I gained great respect for the intelligence and heart that Craig brought to his work. I pushed him, and he let me. That, too, counts for a lot.

Still, Craig's sentences—the long, the short, the lacerating, the gentle, the sometimes philosophical. I had nothing to do with them. Craig had that going on from the start.

I'm proud and pleased today to share Craig Park's first published essay, in the pages of the esteemed Pennsylvania Gazette. Great thanks to Trey Popp, who comes to my classroom each semester and makes room for these young writers.

Craig's essay begins like this, below, and carries forward here.

I stood by the highway on-ramp and waited for the next potential ride. I had changed out my selection of signs, and I was testing the effectiveness of a minimalist “South?” on a floppy cardboard rectangle. I hoped the one-word request achieved the necessary generality. People don’t tend to stop for hitchhikers demanding specific destinations, but my open-ended pleas struck me as inevitably effective given my proximity to a north-south highway. “Inevitably effective” might have been a bit too much confidence, though; after the fifth or sixth refusal, I started to worry that I wouldn’t make it out of Jersey by nightfall.

To read the published Gazette essays of other students with whom I've had the privilege of sharing the classroom, please visit my Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir page.

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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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Announcing Cleaver Magazine, Issue No. 1: Literature, Art, & Some Chickens

Not long ago you heard me boasting here about my dear friend Karen Rile, uber Penn prof (check out this article in the Pennsylvania Gazette on a recent award Karen deservedly won and what she did with that honor) and (with her daughter Lauren) lit magazine maker.

Today, I'm again privileged to share the news that the first true issue of the magazine has been launched (the last issue was the meta issue, or the half issue, or the .5). It's called Issue No. 1. It features some astonishing work by talents new and established, and it's worth every second you will now spend reading it.

I insist. You will stop now and you will read it.

There are, I warn you, chickens afoot. But I had nothing to do with that. Almost nothing to do with that.

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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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it's all circling back: Dangerous Neighbors, Joe Polin, You Are My Only, Into the Tangle of Friendship

It's funny how things are circling back to me this week—Susan's review of You Are My Only, Bonnie Jacobs' discovery of my Into the Tangle of Friendship within the pages of Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God, and, early this morning, a note from the very brilliant young reader and critic, John Jacobson, who wrote to say that Emma, a reading/blogging friend of his (Booking Through 365), had read Dangerous Neighbors upon his recommendation and had had kind things to say. 

I was particularly moved by Emma's observations about the end of the novel, something about which very few have commented.  And so I share those words here, with the hope that you will visit Emma's blog and discover not just her review of Neighbors, but her fine mind in general. 

End: This book may have one of the very best YA plot climaxes I've experienced in recent history. While I knew instinctively how the climax would end, it still affected me. This is very, very powerful, and it might be the crowning glory of the novel. 5 flowers.

(Note to readers:  Emma talks about William in her review, a character that I, too, have not forgotten.  I hope I'll be able to share William's story, now completed as an 1871 prequel, with you in total soon.)

Finally, in this week (and it's only Tuesday!) of looking back, I am celebrating Joe Polin, a former student, whose beautiful essay was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette last year.  Joe is coming to class with editor Trey Popp to talk about how an assignment becomes a story becomes a submission becomes an edited final piece. 

Let's just say that I've been looking forward to this class for a long time.  I'm hoping Joe is still wearing his smiley-faced tie.

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The Wondrous Joe Polin Has His First Published Essay

I do go on about those University of Pennsylvania students I have the privilege to teach, but why shouldn't I?  They are brave and beautiful and bold and lovable, and they have talent coming out of their ears.


I'm not typically able to show you that talent, but today I can.  That's because Mr. Joe Polin, an engineer (mind you!) who was enrolled in my class last semester, has just published this beautiful piece, his last work in our class, in the magnificent Pennsylvania Gazette.  It's called "Off the Rails."  It's about Joe's Cuban grandfather.  It starts like this, below, and to read the whole, simply click on this link here:

Santiago de Cuba, 1933:

The doctor examined the newborn twins, his forehead wrinkled with concern. He bent over the nearer one to listen to his breathing.

“Are they okay? Are they healthy?” the father asked.

The doctor finally straightened up, meeting the father’s gaze. After a moment of consideration, he said, “Give this one your name, he is perfectly healthy. This one”—he pointed to the smaller of the two twins—“isn’t going to make it. He’s too weak to survive.” 

I miss those students as fall gets underway, but in the spring I will be back.  If I see Joe Polin while he's rambling down Locust Walk some Tuesday, I'm going to give him a hug, whether he likes it or not.  For that matter, if I see any of those students .....

Thank you, editor John Prendergast.

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Photo Shoot

I wrote, a while ago, about all the babble that goes through my brain when a camera is pointed in my direction.  I am not, within, what I am without.  Do any of us achieve that perfect correspondence?

But for the recent Pennsylvania Gazette story about the life I've lived through books, I was invited to a enter the cinematic world of Chris Crisman, another Penn grad who has made it his business to appease and to ease and (somehow in the midst of it all) to make art.  You would never know it, by looking at this shot, but the lens was so close to my face when this picture was made that I suspected Chris of doing a study on the tangle of my eyelashes.  (Lancome, next time, I was thinking to myself.  And also:  I wish I'd gone to bed last night.)

Clearly, though, Chris knows what he is doing, and I share this outtake from the shoot today because Chris made Memorial Hall, a Centennial-era building, the true and deserving subject of his shot.  It's a beautiful place, newly and justly restored, and can't you just picture it back in 1876—the crowds massing in the high heat of summer, eager for the art within?

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Heart in the El Paso Times

My many thanks today go out to Ramon Renteria of the El Paso Times, who wrote this lovely piece about my journey to Juarez and The Heart is Not a Size. My thanks, too, to Amy Robinson, of Pasos de Fe, the organization that prepared a temporary home for us across the border in the summer of 2005.

Mr. Renteria makes reference, in his piece, to this essay, originally published in the always-impeccable Pennsylvania Gazette, edited by my friend John Prendergast.

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