teaching the teachers, and a deeply prized gift

Yesterday, after months of planning, I joined the English teachers of the T/E School District (K through 12) for a teach-the-teachers session. TELL THE TRUTH. MAKE IT MATTER. memoir writing workbooks had been ordered for each of the participants. My job was to connect many of the exercises inside that book to the books that children read. I chose, among others, BOAT OF DREAMS, TAR BEACH, FRIENDS, THE MEANING OF MAGGIE, RAIN REIGN, THE BOOK THIEF, and my own FLOW, GOING OVER, and THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU.

What a conversation we had. What work the teachers themselves produced. We moved from nonfiction into fiction, from fiction into truth, from history into the right now, from the personal to the public, from the silent fear to the empathetic gesture. There are few more delightful things for this teacher-reader-writer than to be among other devoted teachers-readers-writers. I was glad for all of it.

I left the program, spent an hour with my husband, then made the half hour drive to my father's home, where I have been spending so much of these past many weeks. I stayed until the near-dark, drove home in rush-hour rain, and dropped my bag on the floor. After a week of barely an hour or two of sleep each night, after so much TV work, so much other teaching, so much corporate America, so many recommendation letters, I was, for the moment, done.

"There's something for you from Jessica," my husband said.

"Really?" I said.

"Open it," he said.

I did. And here from our beloved Juncture friend (read her words in the sidebar here) was a beautiful card, a startling note, a book called RIVERS by Alison Townsend. Out in Wisconsin, Jessica had heard Alison read. Knowing my own obsession with rivers, my FLOW, Jessica had bought me Alison's book. Alison, as it turns out, knew something about me, a circle was drawn, a beginning touching an end touching a beginning, and flowing forward through our Jessica.

There is so much about our lives that we can't understand.

I do understand love.

Thank you, Jessica.

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The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

Forty times over the course of recorded history, the Thames has frozen through, giving rise to frost fairs and temporary bridges, royal spectacles and common fare, ice skating and drownings. Winters cold enough to freeze a river freeze ale, wine, ink pots, too. They kill those who don't keep moving. They precipitate new forms of entertainment, and despair.

In forty brief chapters, in a book called simply, The Frozen Thames, Helen Humphreys conjures a scene from each of the forty freezings—an oxen driver persuading his charges to trust the ice, a queen out for sport, a purveyor at a frost fair, a frozen-in ship. Some of the pieces are no more than vignettes. Others go a bit deeper. All take the reader through time, through plagues, through inventions, through the evolution of weather itself.

Humphreys has always been an interesting writer—her language straightforward and often stubby, her ideas expansive. In a novel of a few years ago, The Lost Garden, Humphreys took readers back to the Devon countryside of 1941, where a handful of young girls from the Woman's Land Army and a regiment of Canadian soldiers had come together on a ruined estate. The setting is extraordinary and the book has resonance (I think of it fondly still today), despite the fact that many of its passages seem truncated, almost deliberately awkward: No one ever likes me. I’m not good with people. I’ve been too isolated most of my life. I don’t know how to get on with others.

As a river writer myself (though I chose, in my book Flow, to write from the inside of a river's mind, through autobiography), I couldn't help but be drawn to Humphreys' newest book. It's such a wonderful concept, it's so convincingly researched, it's so beautifully produced—squarish in format, colorfully illustrated. If my desire to lean into the text was often prohibited by a rush of declarative noun-verb constructs (e.g., The three boys have come down to skate on the river. The water above the bridge has set fast and smooth. There is no snow on the surface and the ice glistens black and there is no one else moving on the Thames.), I often found myself getting lost inside the circumstances Humphreys has collected.

Here, for example, is a scene one might spend an afternoon imagining:

The river has been frozen for almost two months and a town of tents has been erected upon it. There is a cook's tent where gentlemen come to dine every evening. There are tents that sell ale and tents that sell gingerbread. There are two printing presses and people can have their names printed on a card for posterity. An ox has been roasted near the Hungerford Stairs by a descendant of the man who roasted an ox on the ice at the last Frost Fair in 1684.

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