Read an Excerpt
Nowhere Near the Line
Pain and Possibility in Teaching and Writing
By Elizabeth H. Boquet University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-576-5
CHAPTER 1
Pain
I quit kindergarten. Not on day one, when Mrs. Navarre gave me my first-ever spanking, because she found me playing in the third-grade yard. With my cousins, the people I played with every day at home. Not on day two, when I had to make do with the fat, clumsy, safety scissors that refused to cooperate with my preferred left hand. But by day three, when I woke up from nap time to find that my seatmate had hacked off one of my perfectly-plaited braids while I slept ... well, I was done.
With my braid in my left hand and Mrs. Navarre's hand in my right, I marched down to the principal's office that afternoon for the first time, but not the last, and was sent home for the first time, but not the last. It was up to my parents to figure out how to get me back to school, which they did the next day, and how to keep me there, which they did, though it was never a smooth path, even when it appeared relatively straightforward.
On back-to-school day this year, I called my brother to wish him a happy first day. He too is a professor. He has even worse educational tales to tell.
"Can you believe," I asked, "that we have spent our whole lives going back to school, year after year after year?"
"No, I cannot," he said flatly.
"What would you have done," I asked, "if someone had told you, all those years ago, that at fifty-seven you would still be getting up in the morning and going to school?"
He didn't miss a beat. "I would have shot myself," he said.
On the day I began drafting this essay, news alerts were popping up on social media about yet another episode of school violence — this one the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon that killed ten people (nine, plus the perpetrator, whom we all should count). Colleagues prefaced their shared Facebook links with "Enough is enough!" and "What can we do?" and "How do we stop this?!"
But it was a remark by Lawrence Schall, President of Oglethorpe University and co-founder of College Presidents for Gun Safety, quoted in an article written by Paul Fain, that stayed with me as I shaped this material into its current form:
When I was starting College Presidents for Gun Safety, one of the concerns I heard was the idea there were just too many issues on which to articulate an opinion. Where would it stop? Where would we draw the line? In light of this latest tragedy, on a college campus that could have been any of ours, I would say: We are nowhere near the line yet. Let's worry about that one when we get closer. (Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2015)
Here, I walk this line, tracing the overlaps and intersections of my lifelong education around guns and violence, as a student, a teacher, a feminist, a daughter, a wife, a citizen, and across the dislocations and relocations that are part of a life lived in and around school.
The weekend following the Umpqua shooting, with one eye on a storm skirting the East Coast, I stacked and restacked the large plastic bins filled with report cards, yearbooks, and other memorabilia, making sure they were out of our one potential flood zone — a temperamental casement window just to the right of the oil tank. This should have been fast, physical labor but it was instead slow and contemplative, as I couldn't help but paw through the boxes' contents. Every once in a while I came across a note passed in civics class or a high school Playbill signed by a cast and crew. Rarely did I find anything that I wrote for a class or that was in any way part of an academic assignment.
I didn't find, for example, a paper I wrote for my eleventh-grade English class, in which I argued passionately against gun control, one in which I quoted the familiar bumper stickers — "Guns don't kill people. People kill people" and "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." My first research paper. It included a real-life interview with, and primary sources provided by, my Great-Uncle Alvin, a former president of the National Rifle Association.
Guns were everywhere as I was growing up — stuck between spare pillows in a bedroom closet; stuffed into a purse; lining the halls of our main family gathering place, Sunnyside, home to my mother's sister, Anse, and her husband, Uncle Bill, an inveterate collector. Uncle Bill had a working Gatlin gun, a shooting range between the house and the cane fields, and a tiny shed where he made his own ammunition. It smelled of unfinished pine and gunpowder and seemed so sensible that my own father bought my brother a reloading machine for Christmas one year and set it up in the attic of our house. Guns were what men bequeathed to each other. I have my grandmother's wedding rings, my brother has my grandfather's rifles. Each bears our family's history.
Other guns circulated like stories, passed from hand to hand, with no proprietary sense, as my husband Dan learned one summer. Cleaning out our garage for bulky trash pick-up day, he found an old revolver tucked in the bottom drawer of a soon-to-be-discarded dresser. We live in Connecticut, home to some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, even before the shootings at Sandy Hook. "Where did this come from?" Dan wanted to know.
As soon as I saw it, I remembered the day I finished packing for the move from south Louisiana to western Pennsylvania, where I was beginning my Ph.D. program. My 1986 Honda Civic was bursting at the seams, but as I hugged my parents goodbye and folded myself behind the wheel, I made room for one more item, the loaded .32 my dad was handing me, which I slipped just under my seat. No telling how many state lines I crossed with that gun beneath my knees.
I palmed the pistol and told Dan the story. "Is it even registered?" he asked. "Oh, absolutely not," I said. "Absolutely not." A police officer, he took the gun to headquarters the next day and ran it. Not a trace.
The question of the trace animates inquiry for me. I move across landscapes wondering what else happened there, what stories might be told other than the one I am living at that moment, preternaturally conscious of the violence, real and symbolic, that makes any current scene possible. I have a longstanding fascination with the contemporary photographer Sally Mann, whose work "examine[s] the uneasy confluence of past and present, history and memory, life and death" (Hafera 2007, iii). Mann's series What Remains, for example, followed from the murder of a fugitive who was tracked onto her family's farm and killed. In this series, she documents the deterioration of her beloved greyhound's corpse, and she travels to a body farm at the University of Tennessee, where researchers study human decomposition. Her landscapes of Civil War battlefields near her Virginia homestead highlight the return to nature of places that were once dramatically populated by bodies in contact and conflict.
On April 25th, 2014, I arrived at Cathedral Academy in the early afternoon, along with nearly a dozen other Fairfield University students and faculty, for the culminating event of our Cathedral Academy/Fairfield University Poetry-in-Schools project, a celebratory reading of poems from the project's chapbook Ripples on the Water, Poems in My Heart. Cathedral Academy is a high-need elementary and middle school in Bridgeport, CT. We had been partnering for over a year on a six-week poetry series that included fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms led in imaginative writing exercises by a team of Fairfield University advanced poetry students and professors, writing center undergraduate and graduate tutors, and first-year writing students. As I entered the multi-purpose room — stage festooned, student artwork strung, kids buzzing — I learned that one of our participating teachers had been called home, to Milford, the town in which I also live.
"Because," her colleague explained to me, "of the lockdown at Jonathan Law High School."
I had heard nothing of a lockdown, even though Dan is a police officer in Milford and Jonathan Law is both in our neighborhood and in his assigned patrol area. I quickly checked my phone. No reassuring text. ("Bomb threat. False alarm," for example, is an all-too-common one.) No missed call or voicemail. I spotted an empty folding chair on the perimeter of the room and sat to do a quick search of breaking news in Milford. Up popped a grainy photo of a smiling dark-haired young woman trying on a turquoise formal gown. Stabbed in the hallway, just before the start of classes, the morning of her prom. Additional details as they become available.
Possibility
The Poetry-in-Schools project is an extension of a Poetry for Peace contest that Fairfield University has sponsored since 2008, through the Writing Center and other partners, as part of the University's Martin Luther King commemoration programming. That contest invites students in kindergarten through eighth grade in the Bridgeport and Fairfield school districts to submit poems written in response to the prompt, "What does peace mean to me?" We regularly receive over 1,000 submissions, with entries from nearly every school in both districts. As the event became one of our signature campus–community programs, we wanted to deepen the connections, so my poetry colleague, Carol Ann Davis, and I set out in search of district partners who might be interested in developing a collaborative poetry series.
After five years of successful events, we initiated the Poetry-in-Schools program in the fall of 2012, scanning the Poetry for Peace rosters in search of repeat (and successful) teachers who might be interested in partnering. Unexpectedly, tragically, our first district partnership emerged in the town where Carol Ann's young children were in school, twenty-five miles from Fairfield's campus: Newtown, CT, where on December 12, 2012, twenty children and six adults were shot and killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School.
For six weeks in the spring of 2013, we met on Monday evenings at Hawley School, the other elementary school in Newtown, though workshops were open to all third- through sixth-grade students and their parents. Leaping poems, table poems, bubble poems, place poems. As the weeks progressed, poems cross-referenced each other, players appearing as characters in each other's writings; parents, children, and friends composing collaboratively. The title of the resulting collection, In the Yellowy Green Phase of Spring, is taken from one of the collaborative "table" poems, a guided writing exercise whose first line begins "From here, I ..." and whose subsequent lines, all but one, are kept hidden from the other writers as the unfolding lines of poetry are passed from left to right, writer to writer. This title line (like all the lines in the table poems) can't be ascribed to a particular author. It belongs to us all. Here is its poem:
The Great Unknown
From here, I can see the world
We are in the yellowy green phase of spring
Birds fly in the sky a lot during spring
Some people like to write in a journal
I like to write about flying birds
My cat, the fluffiest cat in the world, purred softly on my lap
I saw the flag at the front of the room jerking like a chained bulldog
The umbrella flew open as the wind took it
I wish I could wake up with a few less unknowns
The summer after Newtown — Newtown now not only a place but an event — Carol Ann and I worked with a program for student leaders from Bridgeport high schools. During one workshop, students designed and presented their ideal high school. The first group got up. And then the next. And then the next. Some had maker spaces, community gardens, experiential learning. Others mentioned services and supplies many of us take for granted: technologies, academic support, even more garbage cans so that the schools could be cleaner. And one after the other, they highlighted something no school could do without: Security. Metal detectors. Guards. "More attractive" door locks to replace the chains that wrap around the door handles in some of the main hallways.
When the time came for questions, I asked whether any of them had considered that an ideal high school might be one with no security measures. Students became animated, their responses ranging from incredulous to adamant. Some laughed aloud. Others protested vigorously, emphatically slapping their hands on the desk or their knees. One or two eyed me skeptically, raising an eyebrow at my privilege. A school without security, they seemed certain, would be no place for learning.
The text I received from Dan late in the day on April 25 — Cathedral Academy Poetry Celebration Day, Jonathan Law High School Prom Day — was achingly spare. Two words: "Bad day."
The smiling, dark-haired young woman was Maren Sanchez, the daughter of a friend; Dan was a first responder, accompanying Maren to the hospital. The ambulance was crowded, and my husband is large, but along he went, squeezing behind the paramedics, scaling the equipment, and finally hanging by a strap from the ceiling above the gurney as the EMTs worked below, to no avail.
About the young man who killed her: "He was her friend," Maren's mother Donna said to me when we spoke. "They've known each other for-ev-er," she said. A point reiterated by a minister at the memorial service, who said, "Chris and Maren were friends." And then, "I'm sure she has already forgiven him." I'm sure she has already forgiven him.
This, in a school with security, an assigned armed police officer. With routine lockdown drills that presume an AK-47, hundreds of rounds of ammo, an unauthorized intruder. What drill is there for two kids who have known each other since the fourth grade? Through movie nights and skate park parties and talent shows and beach cookouts? What drill is there for that?
The day Maren was murdered, an email message arrived in my inbox from Melissa Quan, Fairfield's director of service learning. She acknowledged this latest episode of school violence and how it had touched me. In the subject line, Melissa wrote, "Joining you in your mission." In the body of the message, she paraphrased a foundational question from Mary Rose O'Reilley that I often invoke: "Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?"
Melissa's email reflected back to me work that has indeed become my mission, in many ways without my realizing it, and has helped me to become more purposeful in both doing and making visible this work. The power of O'Reilley's question lies in its simplicity, in its directness. The answer must be equally straightforward — for me, for O'Reilley, for my colleagues who partner with me in peaceable work. The answer is yes. It has to be yes. Otherwise, we should all be doing something else.
Our end-of-year writing center staff gathering took place only a few hours after Maren's memorial service. I considered re-scheduling, I considered skipping, I considered attending as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day at all. Then, a day or two before the meeting, an opening came in the form of a note from Carol Ann, inviting the writing center staff to do some therapeutic sculpting as part of our semester reflections, using materials from an organization called Ben's Bells, which has a location now in Newtown. Ben's Bells seeks "to inspire, educate, and motivate people to realize the impact of intentional kindness, and to empower individuals to act according to that awareness, thereby strengthening ourselves, our relationships and our communities."
Too often, we think of kindness as a quality someone either possesses or does not. We admire a kind person as a rare object. We speak of kindness as a random act, something that surprises us precisely because it is unusual, unexpected. Kindness, however, is really a habit, an orientation, something we practice and, indeed, can become better at. Kindness is something we practice in relation to community, and some kindnesses are not associated with any one individual but with a sense of collective purpose. By the time a Ben's Bell is completed, for example, at least ten people will have had their hands in it. Some will have fashioned the clay, others will have painted a bead, still more will have fired and strung them. None of these hands will have known the other hands involved in the final creation — no bell can be made in one sitting — and yet all will have trusted that the next makers will care for it, will seek out its beauty, and will bring it closer to brightening a corner of the world.
At that final staff meeting, as lumps of cold, damp clay passed from hand to hand, we didn't force the connections between sculpting, tutoring, community, and writing. We talked some. But mostly we made tiny clay birds' nests, hearts, peace signs, and pig faces with perfect snouts.
"This was just what I needed," one tutor said.
That's enough.
In her book, Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, Jackie Grutsch McKinney (2013, 81) invokes Jerome Bruner's work to remind us that a story does not "just happen": "Stories ... shape our lives by how we interpret them, by how we tell them, by what they do." McKinney goes on to tell her own story of taking an enrichment drawing course at a local community college while in graduate school and of learning in that class about the importance of drawing the negative space, a technique that counters the tendency to draw what we see in our heads at the expense of drawing what we see right in front of us. To do this, the artist must "not actually think about drawing the object but [must] instead focus on drawing the space around the object — drawing the negative space" (88). The technique changes how we see and what we see; it calls attention to the dimensions beyond the immediate object and positions that object differently in its own space and in our field of vision.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nowhere Near the Line by Elizabeth H. Boquet. Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
