Writing Every Day

I have always, for as long as I can remember, wanted to be the kind of person who wrote every day. As a child and into my teen years, I filled notebook after notebook with journal entries, but many of these outpourings begin with, "It's been a long time since I've written." I wanted to write every day, and felt guilty when I didn't, but somehow I never got into that habit.

After the earthquake, I started writing much more, back to the compulsive way I used to write when I was younger. I blogged endlessly. I wrote essays and emails and speeches. I've always written poetry, off and on. I started writing more of it, and that has continued through the past year and a half as I have worked through intense emotion.

Since school got out just over two weeks ago, I have been writing a poem every day. I've mentioned this before on this blog, and talked about how much I'm enjoying it, but I wanted to post a bit more about the experience.

I keep several lists of ideas on my desktop and I jot things down as they come to mind. Two of them are connected with teaching. Nancie Atwell suggests using the concept of "Writing Territories" with middle school writers; students make a list of their territories, the things they know about or are interested in, to help them find ideas for their writing. When I first taught this lesson I made my own list and ever since, I have added ideas to it and removed others once they have found their way into my writing. Nancie Atwell also has a lesson called "Where Poetry Hides," based on a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (this one). Atwell asks students to walk through their homes and write down a list of objects that could contain poems, like the skunks in Nye's piece. When I first taught that lesson I made my own list, and that, too, is still on my desktop. (I've made no secret of how much I love Nancie Atwell's writing and how much I want to be just like her when I grow up. I gush on and on about her here, among other places.) Then I have a less formal TextEdit file just called "Ideas," and that's where I save passing thoughts that I don't want to forget. I do this on paper, too, on little scraps and in a notebook.

All of this is to say that I have lots of ideas to write about. But you'd think that writing every day would deplete the lists, that eventually you'd run out. But my experience is the opposite. The more I'm writing, the more I'm generating ideas, so that I often find myself choosing among five or six ideas begging to be written about because I don't have time to deal with all of them. I'm constantly noticing, constantly scribbling notes to myself. It's as though I'm in a more receptive mode than usual.

I also find that when I'm writing more, my attitude about what I am writing is playful, and I put less pressure on myself. If a piece doesn't work out, I don't beat myself up as much or tell myself that I have no writing ability whatsoever. (What, am I the only person that does that?) Tomorrow's piece will be better, I think instead. I'm a writer, I think instead. How much healthier than feeling every time you write as though it has to be a masterpiece, and then being frustrated every single time because it never is. (I think graduate school really ruined me as a writer, at least for lots of years, because of the pressure I put on myself, but that's another post.)

For several years I have been sharing my writing with my students, as recommended by lots of the education writers I read. The Kelly Gallagher book I finished last week (review in this post) talks about the "Grecian Urn syndrome." Gallagher says that when he first started sharing his writing with his students, he would write it and revise it and polish it, and when he eventually showed it to them, it would be like a Grecian urn, shiny and beautiful, but not really attainable for the kids. They didn't see how he got there, but were confirmed in their view that good writing "just happens." When I'm writing all the time, I am much more in touch with the process, much more aware that it doesn't "just happen." I have more pieces to share with my kids (though of course I choose very carefully which ones), but I can also show them how it came about. So all this writing makes me a better teacher.

I've already said how much I'm enjoying writing, but I want to say it again, because it's just a revelation to me. Writing is a joy again, as it hasn't been since I was a child and wrote stories without worrying about whether they were good or bad, but just because I loved to write them. That was before grades and essay contests and writing seminars and workshops - and there's nothing wrong with any of those things. But I write now because I love to write. It almost doesn't matter if anyone reads it. (I say "almost" because of course there are a few people who read almost everything I write, once I'm ready to share it.)

I started this post by saying that I've always wanted to be a person who writes every day. Now I am. I don't know if this will last into the school year, but I'm betting it will. I love exercising regularly, and when I miss it, I feel not guilty but just less well, less alive. Writing is the same way. It makes me feel alive and happy. I'm not doing it because I feel guilty if I don't. I'm doing it because I love it. I'm a writer. I write.

Reading Update

I'm finishing up lots of books that were lying half-read on my bedside table, waiting for me to have time for them. Here are some:

Book #21, Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe, by Doreen Baingana, is, as the subtitle suggests, short stories about Uganda. Specifically, the stories are about three sisters. One spends some time in the United States (as my regular readers know, I love stories about immigrants). The stories are sad and vivid.

Book #22 is the kind of book you take notes on, and I have a whole file of notes on my desktop now that I'm done. The book is Teaching Adolescent Writers, by Kelly Gallagher. This was the perfect kind of teacher book: a combination of inspiration, theory, and extremely practical stuff you can do in class tomorrow (except that it's summer, so in my case, in eight weeks or so). Especially nice was the reminder that there are quite a few things I'm already doing right. I can always use that.

This next book wasn't half-read but it's been on my shelf for a while. Every book on writing or teaching I read seems to recommend it, and I finally got it down and just read it. "It" is book #23, Stephen King's On Writing. King's advice is practical and down-to-earth, but also full of why he writes: because it's just plain fun. Listen to this:

"On some days...writing is a pretty grim slog. On others...I feel that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It's like lifting off in an airplane: you're on the ground, on the ground, on the ground...and then you're up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy, because it was what I was made to do....It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."

In my own far-less-successful way, writing is about that for me too. Getting happy!

This post is linked to today's edition of the Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Flooding

I am still in the poem-a-day mode and very much enjoying all the writing. Some days I throw caution to the winds and write two poems.

But this week we also mourned, because Monday night a huge rainstorm caused terrible flooding in which at least 23 people were killed and also led to an increase in the number of people sick with cholera.

My first reaction to a disaster of this kind - and there have been many: hurricanes, floods, the earthquake, political unrest - is deep discouragement. Why again? Why so much suffering?

On Tuesday I wrote a poem about the flooding and about those feelings.



The Flood, Port-au-Prince, June 7, 2011

From those who have little,
Even what they have will be taken away.
Jesus said that,
And I see plenty of evidence
That it is true.

What Mackensia
Salvaged from the earthquake,
She lost in the flood.
What cholera left
To Jesula,
She lost in the flood.
What life had graciously
Allowed Marie-Claude to keep,
She lost in the flood.

Brown torrents of water
Carried it all away.
Birth certificates, food,
Beds, clothes,
And the neighbor's pig.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


My friend Shelley posted the photo at the top of this post, a photo of a mom of seven children who lost her home in the flood. Remember, these people are already earthquake survivors.

If you'd like to help Shelley and Corrigan help the people in their neighborhood, through their organization, The Apparent Project, you can find out how to do that here. Here's the website for their organization. They do amazing work with empowering women and families, helping people to earn a living through making beautiful jewelery so that they won't be forced to give up their children. So many of the orphanages in Haiti are filled with children who have living parents, parents who could not take care of their children due to extreme poverty. Here's some of what Shelley and Corrigan do when they aren't cleaning up after a flood. Hint: Donna Karan has visited recently.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

You Can Help!

Would you like to help people affected by the flooding in Haiti? Do you feel overwhelmed and wonder what you could do? Here's an opportunity to give, and a matching grant will double what your money can accomplish.

You'd be giving through The Apparent Project, which works to empower Haitian parents to be able to keep their children instead of giving them up, as so many poor people are forced to when they can't take care of them. As Corrigan says in the post linked below, The Apparent Project doesn't do handouts, but this is a time of emergency.

Read this to find out more.

Seventh Grade Quote

My eye is always drawn to quotes about middle school, and this post and this one contain some examples.

I just saw another one in a review for this new book, Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, by Ian Morgan Cron, and you know, this is the second time today I've seen a reference to this book. I may just have to read it.

Here's the quote:

“Most seventh graders don’t set out to make trouble. They are like puppies with impulse-control disorders. Opportunities for mischief arise, and they can’t stop themselves. This is why they should be crate-trained.”

Here's the review.

Reading Update

Books #19 and #20 could hardly have been more different.

Flies on the Butter, by Denise Hildreth, is the story of Rose Fletcher, who came from South Carolina, and is now going back. She has become a high-powered children's advocate in Washington D.C. but can't forget the pain of her childhood. The book describes her ten hour drive and all the things that happen to her along the way. I really wanted to like this book, especially because it was a gift from a student. I found it as relentlessly charming as an episode of "Touched by an Angel." I couldn't believe in the characters, who all seemed to be stereotypes. For example, Rose orders a salad in a diner and is brought, instead, a plate of fried chicken with all the fixings by a waitress who knows in her heart that that is what Rose needs. Rose, a committed vegetarian, obediently cleans her plate.

By contrast, Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernières, doesn't have a stereotype in it. I read de Bernières' previous book, Corelli's Mandolin, a long time ago, and it made a huge impression on me. Although the movie was mediocre, the book is brilliant, and after the Haitian earthquake I thought many times of the earthquake scenes in that novel. De Bernières' writing reminds me a little bit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it's hard to read for many of the same reasons - the cruelty, the unflinching descriptions of horrible sights, the profanity, the suffering. However, it's wonderful to read, too - because of the humanity, the love, the tragic characters caught in history and doing their best to live their lives in spite of the currents around them which they can't control.

Birds Without Wings is really the story of Turkey. Like Corelli's Mandolin, the story is told from many different points of view. We see the development of Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern-day Turkey, but mostly we are in the village of Telmessos, among the colorful characters, Christian and Muslim, who live there. Iskander the Potter, one of these people, tells us:

"I blame these Frankish peoples, and I blame potentates and pashas whose names I will probably never know, and I blame men of God of both faiths, and I blame all those who gave their soldiers permission to behave like wolves and told them it was necessary and noble....I wonder sometimes whether there are times when God sleeps or averts His eyes, or if there is a divine perversity. Who knows why one day a man drowns because a deep hole has been carved in the fording place of a river, where men have passed safely for centuries, and there was no hole before?"

Iskander is known as a maker of proverbs, and the title of the book comes from one of these proverbs: "Man is a bird without wings, and a bird is a man without sorrows." I learned a lot about Turkey by reading this; I had no idea of the forced migrations of Christians to Greece and Muslims to Turkey, for example. It was difficult to read the descriptions of war, and death, and torture, but this book was rewarding enough that I was willing to do it.

This post is linked to the June 11th Saturday Review of Books.

All Right Here

by Sara Groves

It's every loss and every love
It's every blessing from above
Here I am all added up
Oh, it's all right here

It's what I know and what I'm guessin'
It's half-truths and full confessions
It's why I choose to learn my lesson
Oh it's all right here

And I'm not God I'm a girl I confess that I don't have a sea of forgetfulness
No, it's all right here
It makes me stronger and makes me wince
It makes me think twice when I pick my friends
Oh, it's all right here it's all right here

It's caution and curiosity
And it's all the things I never see
Welling up inside of me
Oh, it's all right here
It's what is best and what is worse
It's how I see the universe
It's in every line and every verse
Oh, it's all right here

And I'm not God I'm a girl I confess that I don't have a sea of forgetfulness
No, it's all right here
It makes me stronger and makes me wince
It makes me think twice when I pick my friends
Oh, it's all right here it's all right here

Every heart has so much history
It's my favorite place to start
Sit down awhile and share your narrative with me
I'm not afraid of who you are

I'm all here and you're all there
Some of this is unique and some of it we share
Let's add it up and start from there
Oh, it's all right here

Oh, I'm not God I'm a girl I confess that I don't have a sea of forgetfulness
No, it's all right here
It makes me stronger and makes me wince
It makes me think twice when I pick my friends
Oh, it's all right here
It's caution and curiosity
And it's all the things I never see
Oh, it's all right here
It's what is best and what is worse
And it's how I see the universe
Oh, it's all right here
It's all right here
Oh, it's all right here
I'm all right here
Oh, I'm all right here
I'm all right here, all right • •

from Sara Groves' site

Enough Already

Flooding, mudslides, death, more loss of property. Here's a summary of the situation in the Port-au-Prince area. Don't be deterred by the bad translation; this is the most complete description I can find. Here's some more information.

Monday

It has been raining in Port-au-Prince as long as anyone can remember. Well, at least since last Wednesday. It is overcast, gloomy, gray, and miserable. The furniture feels damp to the touch. The forecast calls for rain through this coming Wednesday, too. Ugh.

Here's a poem I wrote back in November 2007 after a similar rainy period when we didn't see the sun for days. The first thing everyone in our neighborhood did after the sun came back was laundry.


November 2, 2007, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

After a week of rain
The clothes come out to sunbathe.
On roofs, on bushes
On clotheslines,
They luxuriate,
Enjoying the warmth:
Pink, lacy Sunday dresses,
School uniforms,
Shirts and skirts and trousers,
And blushing underwear.
After a week of rain
It feels good to stretch out in the sun,
Freshly laundered,
Ready for service again.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


I hope we'll soon see everybody's laundry all over, since that will let us know that the sun is back.

Of course, my ongoing refrain is, "At least I don't live in a tent." I can't imagine how much more miserable this weather must be for the tent-dwellers in the city, whether it's 375,000 or 680,000 of them. Most of the tents I see are no longer very waterproof; you can often see big holes in them. These tents were not designed for constant use for going on 17 months.

Having said that, you would think I wouldn't have the gall to complain about anything at all, but I am going to complain, just a tiny bit. I hope my readers will indulge me.

We had a transformer blow-up late last week, and the electrician who came over said that 160 volts of power were coming into the house. That would explain the smell of burning as two surge protectors bit the dust. It would also explain why we have no city power even though the people across the street, who have their own transformer, do.

I haven't complained about electricity in a while on my blog. I used to complain about it all the time, especially before I had been so open about my location. I feel that Haiti gets enough negative press and I don't like giving it more, so since I have now whined, I will tell you that EDH (Electricité d'Haïti) is working hard for everyone to have electricity! Here are two of the billboards in the current advertising campaign:


This one says: "Together, let's work for a country that's all lit up." (Or maybe even better: "an enlightened country.") Then at the bottom it says, "Haitians and EDH are working together to give more people more electricity."


And this one says: "EDH is working to give more people more electricity." (Literally, it's lifting its foot.) "More electricity = more work. More light = more opportunity. Let's start working for a different country where everyone has electricity.")

I couldn't agree more! Let's!

Poetry Friday: A Pie Instead?

Last Thursday was the first day I didn't have to teach. I wrote a poem instead. I wrote one the next day too. I loved having the time for my own writing and I kept going; every day since the end of school I have written at least one poem. I have a long list of ideas, and I find that when I am writing regularly, I'm constantly generating more. I am hooked!

I don't think I have enough distance from any of these poems to post them yet. Instead, today, here's a poem about a poet who decided to make a pie instead. I am extremely fortunate to have several people who read and appreciate my poems, but like Grace Paley I sometimes think something to eat might be appreciated even more.

The Poet's Occasional Alternative
by Grace Paley

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

You can read the rest of this wonderful poem here.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

The Numbers

Haiti is in the news again, and as usual it's not for anything good. I feel a bit about this new story the way I did back in February 2010, when a certain woman from Idaho was arrested for stealing children in Haiti. We only get a certain number of column inches. Why do they always have to be filled with stories like this?

"This," this time, is the allegation that the Haitian government and NGOs exaggerated the death toll from the earthquake. Here is Time Magazine's article about this and here is the piece by Timothy Schwartz that Time quotes. While the Haitian government used figures like 230,000 and 300,000, the new report prepared for USAID says the actual number who died was between 46,000 and 85,000. (By the way, notice that that is still a huge range.)

While I am unhappy at the idea that officials would simply make up numbers (and we still don't know that for sure), I ask you to think about how things were in Haiti at that time. There were bodies stacked in the streets. Every government ministry had fallen down. Bodies were buried in mass graves without any kind of records being kept. Some bodies have still not been recovered from beneath rubble. The government was helpless in the face of the disaster and couldn't meet the most basic needs of the people; are we really going to criticize them because they couldn't do statistical analysis? When we talked about it back then, we always said, "We'll never know how many people died." And, USAID notwithstanding, we never will. Nobody even knew how many people were in the Port-au-Prince slums to start with; how do we know how many died? Schwartz's mention of NGOs and international organizations losing no one is entirely beside the point. People who have jobs with NGOs and international organizations tend to live in sturdier houses than the average member of the population.

And besides, in what universe is the number 46,000 (to take the lowest end) deaths ever preceded by the word only? When compared with 300,000, that may seem like a small number. But it's not. That many people died in a single event? What about the ones who died of injuries later; are they counted? And of course, what about the survivors who are still, more than 16 months later, living in inadequate shelter? Shouldn't we be focusing more on them than on quibbling over numbers of deaths?

Let's not use these new numbers to allow us to shrug and say, "Well, they lied. Obviously that earthquake wasn't a big deal, after all." Here's what Time has to say:

"The huge death toll and widespread destruction helped justify an international outpouring of aid for the impoverished Caribbean country, including $5.5 billion pledged during a March 2010 U.N. donor's conference."

While of course there are ongoing problems with aid and how it is administered, I would hate to see worthy projects not get funded because of this.

Every one of those people who died was an individual, a person who was loved by other people and who is mourned. We lost one student from our school and several of our kids lost parents. Every single one of us lost people we loved. Each one of those deaths mattered, mattered infinitely. Stalin said it best (and those are words you won't read on this blog very often): "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic."

Cleaning Up

I've been cleaning up my room today, shutting it down for the summer. I'm about to go home for the day, and I have half an hour or so of work for the morning. I have to wait until then to have my walk-through anyway. All that's really left is covering everything with plastic to keep (some of) the dust off of it.

We made it. We got through. Now for the summer.

Poetry Friday: Love is a Babe

School is out. One thing I have been looking forward to, while grading the mounds of work, entering the grades, writing the comments, was writing a poem. It had been so long since I had written one, and yesterday I did.

I listened to this, Why Write?, today, after receiving it in my weekly NCTE email. It talks about how the best moments in life are when we communicate, and that writing is a way to do that. I write for many reasons, but that's one of them, the chance to communicate with other minds.

Isn't it amazing to read a poem written hundreds of years ago, or in another language, or by someone very different from you, and to find it still communicates with your mind?

Today I am posting a Shakespeare sonnet, written some four hundred years ago, that speaks to me today as I find my love for the people in my life growing stronger and deeper. I've used this one with middle school students, and I find they really appreciate it when you read the second last line in a certain way: "Love is a babe." Yes, yes it is.


115

Those lines that I before have writ do lie,
Even those that said I could not love you dearer;
Yet then my judgement knew no reason why
My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer.
But reckoning Time, whose millioned accidents
Creep in 'twixt rows and change decrees of kings,
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents,
Divert strong minds to th'course of alt'ring things!
Alas, why, fearing of Time's tyranny,
Might I not then say, "Now I love you best"
When I was certain o'er uncertainty,
Crowning the present, doubting of the rest?
Love is a babe; then might I not say so,
To give full growth to that which still doth grow.


I'm glad Shakespeare wrote this, and that I can read it today and connect with his mind. The poem I wrote yesterday wasn't in Shakespeare's league, but it communicates with other minds too. And that makes me happy.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

First Day

The last day of one thing leads to the first of another, and today is the first day of summer vacation. Officially, it really isn't; today is a teacher work day. I showed up dutifully on campus, and met my husband (who had gone in far earlier), who greeted me with the dreaded words, "Hi. You're not going to be happy with me." It turns out that a visiting organization needed a room for a seminar, and my husband had allowed my room to be elected. Since I can't do the work I had planned for today and tomorrow, I have been lounging and reading. Nothing very intellectual, either: Facebook, and a copy of People magazine (a friend sent me the commemorative edition from the Royal Wedding, and I thoroughly enjoyed it).

This afternoon I think I might take a nap.

Last Day

Today was the last day of school. We had our Eighth Grade Promotion this morning, and then we had a DVD for the kids, but most of them just hung out together, waiting to be picked up.

Tomorrow is a teacher work day, and I have a full day's work ahead of me shutting down my classroom, but I went ahead and pulled down my bulletin boards, and then sat looking around the bare room. What a year it's been. It feels like a great achievement to have just survived it, and almost a bonus if anybody learned anything. At the beginning of the year many of the kids were jumpy, panicking at sounds or vibrations caused by passing trucks. I sympathized because I was exactly the same. Some days they wanted the door open so they could make a quick getaway in case of an earthquake. Some were grieving huge losses; some had been under the rubble themselves. We were all fragile, our lives disrupted; we were finding new ways to live. Now we're certainly not "over" the earthquake, but the problems and drama of each day were more normal by the end of the year, more the way things used to be before January 12th, 2010. The speeches in Promotion mentioned that day and how it marked all of us, but the earthquake wasn't the focus; the kids were. Kids who, while crazy-making, are brimming with potential and are going to be fabulous adults in a few more years.

On their final quiz, I asked my students to tell me what they had written this year that made them the most proud, and their answers were wonderful to read. Some spoke of speeches they had made, some of poems that expressed who they really are in a way they hadn't done before, some of stories or profiles into which they'd put a lot of effort. Few mentioned grades; they were telling about what they were proud of, not what their teacher appreciated. The pieces they valued most were the ones that were most personal, which is exactly why I do Writer's Workshop. One talked about her earthquake piece, which, she said, was "engraved on my heart." Reading about their favorite books made me happy, too; there was so much variety, and so much excitement in their recounting of plot twists. One student talked about the "BFF feeling" her book had given her. (I love that! What teacher doesn't want students to have a book as a BFF?) On Tuesday I finished the read-aloud I was doing with my seventh graders, with about ten minutes to spare in our last class period together. I couldn't have made that work out so perfectly. (It was Peak, by Roland Smith, book #18 of the year for me.)

In general, this last couple of weeks contained many positive, encouraging interactions with kids, after a month or so that had been difficult. I'm ending this year the way I began it, loving my kids and hopeful about their future. Sure, many of them still have iffy punctuation (sorry, ninth grade teachers, I really tried; next year's eighth graders will still get some attention before you deal with them), and my middle schoolers have lots of growing up to do. But we made it through the year, our first post-earthquake year, and as I said goodbye to them and prayed for their summer, I thanked God for bringing me back to Haiti for this school year.

Pretty soon, I'll start thinking about next year; I'm already making my shopping list. But for right now, as I clear the debris in my room, cover my shelves with plastic, and put everything away, I'll be praising God for this year. We made it. He brought us through. I'm so grateful.

Poetry Friday

I'm awfully busy today, since it's the last full day of classes. I don't think I'm going to get around to a Poetry Friday post of my own, but fortunately other people did better. Go here for the roundup.

Happy Haitian Flag Day!

Reading Update: The Help

In her afterword to The Help (which was book #17 of the year), Kathryn Stockett quotes Howell Raines:

"There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism."

That's basically what this book is about: relationships between white families, but mostly the women and children, and their black house help in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. The good, the bad, and the very ugly. Stockett says:

"Regarding the lines between black and white women, I am afraid I have told too much. I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us....I am afraid I have told too little....What I am sure about is this: I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s, I don't think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman's paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital to our humanity."

I can relate so well to Stockett's angst here, and I admire her courage in writing about the cruel, complicated world of her childhood the way she has, almost to the same degree that I admire Nadine Gordimer for writing the book July's People. I relate as a privileged, spoiled (and yes, bleeding heart liberal) white woman writing about Haiti, and feeling always that I tell too much and too little. Stockett uses the analogy of her mother: she says that she can complain about her mother, but nobody else had better try. For me that's complicated even more by being a foreigner and not even being able to call Haiti my mother the way she calls Mississippi hers. I relate as well as a person with a lovely, lovely lady who works in my home and whom I love like a sister. (I know, it sounds as though I am protesting too much, but it is really true.)

But enough about me. Let me say something about the book.

Skeeter Phelan is a member in good standing of the Junior League of Jackson, Mississippi. Like every other white person in town, she was raised by a black maid, and this woman, Constantine, was the person she loved most in the world. When Skeeter went to college, Constantine disappeared, and Skeeter can't get anyone to tell her exactly what happened. There are lots of other things about Jackson life that are starting to confuse and disturb her, too, and this discomfort and her need to find out about how to clean houses for her newspaper job, lead her to begin talking to the help in her friends' homes. The book is told in Skeeter's voice and also in the voices of Aibileen and Minny, two maids. As I am thinking about the characters in this book, I realize what a great job Stockett did of showing us the whole gamut of Jackson society. Most of the people are presented even-handedly (although Hilly Holbrook doesn't seem to me to have any redeeming qualities and it's hard for me to understand how she and Skeeter ever got to be friends, let alone best friends). We see families who love their maids and treat them well, or at least as well as they can figure out how to, given the horrible attitudes which prevail in the town. There are others who treat their help in ways that are painful to read about. Aibileen takes care of children, and like Constantine did with Skeeter, she tries to raise them right, to compensate for the neglect and mistreatment they get from their mothers, to communicate to them that they are lovable the way they are.

This was a thoroughly engrossing book, full of memorable characters. I recommend it.

Poetry Friday: J. Patrick Lewis

I was excited to hear last week that J. Patrick Lewis was the new Children's Poet Laureate. I was going to post about it this morning but Blogger wasn't cooperating. I just said goodbye to my seventh graders, and I can't remember all the eloquent things I was going to say, but I did want to link you to an interview at the Poetry Foundation site with Lewis. You can read that here. Here's a quote to whet your appetite:

"Great poetry is a circus for the brain. It’s ten pounds of excitement in a nine-pound bag. But children won’t know what that means unless we offer them the best. Soon, they’ll be asking for second and third helpings. Even though few children will become poets, poetry helps them realize that one of the most phenomenal gifts humans get free of charge is the English language. And there is nothing in any language more beautiful, more inspiring and thought-provoking than poetry."

At Lewis' own site, you can find some bookmark poems to print out and laminate. My favorite is very appropriate to the mosquito situation in my classroom:


Bzzzzzzzz!

Never
never
keep a
trick pet
mosquito
for you'll
never
sleep
once
she has
turned
torpedo.

J. Patrick Lewis is going to be a great Children's Poet Laureate. He's an excellent choice.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Angels

In this post I shared two poems that asked angels questions. I said I was going to write my own poem asking angels questions, and I did. Here it is:


Questions for the Angel

Excuse me?
Guardian Angel?
I have some questions.

You know how people say
"Your guardian angel's been busy"
When you escape an earthquake
Or when lightning barely misses you?
Well, what about all those other people?
The ones who didn't escape,
The ones whom lightning struck?
Where were their angels?
On coffee break?
Do angels drink coffee?

And why, Mr. Guardian Angel,
Why aren't you enough for me?
Why do I need powerless human beings
When I have your muscly guardianship?
Why am I not satisfied by your cool angelic touch
Or the brush of your wings?

Speaking of wings, why can't I fly?
Sometimes, Angel, it would come in very handy;
Maybe you'd be less busy then,
Because it would be easier for me to dodge.
And maybe I could stumble less, be more graceful,
More like you, in fact, though only an earthly angel.

Do you feel anything, Angel?
You look impassive in the paintings,
Alabaster smooth and white,
Calm, unruffled, free of the storms
That shake me.
Is it that you know how things really are?
And if so,
Would you tell me, please?

You don't talk very much, do you, Angel?

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


I asked if anybody else had an angel poem to share, and Janet sent these.


Denise Levertov's poem "St. Peter and the Angel" starts like this:

Delivered out of raw continual pain,
smell of darkness, groans of those others
to whom he was chained--

unchained, and led
past the sleepers,
door after door silently opening--
out!
And along a long street's
majestic emptiness under the moon:

one hand on the angel's shoulder, one
feeling the air before him,
eyes open but fixed . . .

You can read the rest here.

And here's Steven Curtis Chapman's reminder that even though there may be lots of questions we want to ask angels, there are some things humans know that angels wish they did:

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.