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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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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reflections as the end of this teaching semester nears

Maybe it's because I lead but one class during the one semester at Penn that teaching carries, for me, such weight. I begin planning for January in August, often earlier. Choosing the books we'll read, plotting our course, interacting with potential students. I pack as much into every class as our allotted hours allow. Pressing in with ideas, exhortations, readings. Bringing guests like George Hodgman (via Skype), Reiko Rizzuto, Margo Rabb, A.S. King, and Trey Popp into the fold. (Next year we'll be hosting Paul Lisicky, and focused on the art of time in memoir.) Using multiple media, stretching the idea of memoir, expecting much. Finding the good while searching, too, for all that is still possible.

And, this semester, leading two remarkable thesis candidates—Nina Friend and David Marchino—toward work so extraordinary that, I believe, it will represent their calling cards for years and years to come.

Teaching is standing before a class, then stepping aside. It's managing the ripples and waves while keeping the craft on course.

Three more weeks. And then these students will be off on their own, carrying our lessons forward, glancing back, I hope, not just as writers, but as people who value truth, empathy, conversation, and a greater knowing of themselves.

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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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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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Are MOOCs really the future of academic discourse?

Not along ago, my friend Trey Popp wrote a thought-provoking piece in the Pennsylvania Gazette about MOOCs—massive open online courses. Trey enrolled, he persevered, he researched, he wrote. He made us think about the future of education.


MOOCs again take center stage in this week's issue of The New Yorker, where Nathan Heller asks, Has the future of college moved online? Under the guise of research, I stopped to read the piece in full. To think again about a topic that, in many ways, unnerves me.

MOOCs can, of course, be wonderfully supplemental; I've eyed a few courses myself. It can provide, for many, access to ideas and knowledge that simply didn't exist (for those many) before. There are plenty of barriers that get thrown down in the path of those wanting to learn—financial, physical, geographic—and for these hundreds of thousands, millions, even, a MOOC can be life raft material. It can equalize. It can secure.

But as a teacher in a small, crowded classroom on the University of Pennsylvania campus, as a mere adjunct who learns, time and again, that it's not the material I obsessively prepare that matters most, but the spontaneous combustion inside the teaching moment, I worry that the MOOC concept—taken too far, taken to unwarranted extremes—will slowly diminish that which I value most, and what my students (ask them) value, too.

The errant conversation. The tangential. The nonlinear. The relationships—real, non-crowdsourced—that build over time. In my classroom, I watch the postures and faces of my students. I see what they are hiding behind or wanting to express or struggling through. I show up early because I know that one, at least, will be showing up early, too—not to talk about the course, per se, but to talk about the bigger things that they are working through. Private and personal things. Internet aversive things. Nothing they'd ever want another soul to "like."

I teach memoir and literary profile. My students write weekly, read books, are read to. They do the work, and they grow as writers, but what matters perhaps even more is how they grow as people. How, through the writing work, they come to know themselves and broaden the way they think about others. How they allow language to release them, even relieve them. My students enter the room as strangers to one another other, and whether they are Wharton enrolled or bioengineers, future veterinarians or English professors, super geniuses who have essentially skipped through school or students from other lands just learning English, they forge a community that would not exist without the scratched table, the box of cookies, the breeze blowing through the velvet curtains.

All the while I'm learning, too. I'm forging the same life-long bonds. Taking the train to NYC to attend the engagement party of a recent graduate. Sending love to a once student/new mom. Helping students from two years ago publish today. Figuring out how I can get to New Orleans to see my Katie G before she heads to medical school. Writing about my Leah (above) and her own ambitions with children in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Writing recommendation letters and whispering in people's ears.

I do these things—I love to do these things—because my students are real to me, because I know them, because I've watched them, because I've given them room to be not just their academic selves, but their whole selves, because they have become my second family. They are, by and large, young. They are one person each on a large urban campus. They're struggling with others or struggling with themselves, and it means a lot to them (again, I say, ask them) that someone on that campus knows their name, or notices that they're absent, or sends an email:You can do better. Try again.

MOOCs, well managed, can do a lot of good. But let's make sure, as the future of education unfolds, that that other kind of good—that essential, human good—is not ultimately de-valued. Let's not forget what we have the responsibility to teach (good judgment, quiet reflection, attention to others, attention to one's self), along with the terms, the forms, the structures.

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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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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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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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