Like Sylvie, the protagonist of my new novel, Wayfarers, I grew up in downstate cornfield Illinois, where I was an odd duck in a small pond. I was always reading, always writing. Poetry, and stories, and two-hundred page novels about Sphinxes and bottomless pits and killer tornadoes. I was terrified of tornadoes, actually—I think a lot of kids growing up in central Illinois were, and are—and so, in fifth grade, I wrote a novel about a civilization that had moved underground (literally). My teacher, Mrs. Madonia, saw me working on it, probably when I shouldn’t have, and offered to read it. I gave her this giant doorstop of a book, and a bunch of bad poetry about my middle school heartaches, and I remember her returning it the next day. You could do this, she told me. Be a writer.
Now that I’m a teacher too, I think about her putting that giant stack of paper in her briefcase. Bringing it home over the weekend, to her house, and settling down on her couch with a cup of tea, or in her chair by the window. Carving out hours of her own time to read what, let’s face it, was definitely not the Next Great American Novel. And all because she saw me for who I was: a little girl who loved something, who needed someone else to tell her it was okay to love it. That it was good to love it.
After college, I spent ten years in grad school, taking writing workshops and teaching undergrads poetry and fiction. I loved those classes, but I lived for the summers, when I taught at a gifted program for high schoolers. Five weeks with the same class, eight-thirty in the morning until two-thirty in the afternoon. I’d have eight, or nine, or ten kids, from all over the country and, sometimes, from all over the world, and for those five weeks we would eat and breathe fiction and poetry. They wrote encyclopedias about the intricacies of their families and their imagined futures; poetry about love, and change, and the politics of having a body; stories made up of emails sent into the void, letters stuffed into the mailbox of someone not writing back. They wrote furiously, passionately, impossibly well.
I took a full-time job teaching high school creative writing at Interlochen. I took their work home at night. I made a cup of tea, sat on the couch, and took out a green pen. Marked the lines that sung, the lines that could be tightened, the moments that made me feel like my students were somehow both sixteen and also, older than the universe. I loved the moments after class, too, and before, students running in to show me cat videos, temporary tattoos, new haircuts. Students waiting outside my office to ask a hesitant question that lead them to another. What should I do with my life?, or, Should I break up with my girlfriend? She kind of kissed my best friend, but she said it was an accident, or I think I might be a writer. I think I might be gay, or I think I need to move out, maybe move in with my grandma, or Everyone says we should hate the world right now, but I love it. I love it and I want to fix it. How do I? How does that work?
And always, at the end: Do you know any books about that?
