Loralee Mendez contacted me out of the blue today, thanks to the power of the Internet. She teaches at a local branch of Southwestern Michigan College and had found the book I wrote a few years back, The Square Root of Someone, hiding in her public library. I don’t know what prompted her to read it, but I’m glad she did.
She’s done more than that. She has assigned one of the essays in the book to her class as an assignment to encourage every student to believe in the power of his or her own story. Her summer school class is reading “Meeting My Father,” but other classes have read “Patches.” Both are accessible on this web site.
I had assumed my book was languishing, even though it had been a labor of love for me. It never climbed a best seller list or became Book-of-the-Month or grabbed Oprah’s attention. It wasn’t my ticket to fame, as much as I had hoped it would be.
So I was more than pleased when Ms. Mendez invited me to come to her class and talk about essays and how I got started writing them and why they’re important. I could talk for days on this subject, and I’ve run out of listeners in my own life. Now I have an opportunity to spread the word to college students. And the Word is that everybody has tales to tell.
They can be found in the daily hum of life as well as in unusual circumstances. What matters most is that they be committed to the page — hard copy variety or computer — without worry about grammar and syntax . . . at least at this point. Getting the feelings down is of primary importance. Punctuation and pronouns come later, but it’s the feeling that is the essence of essay writing.
Naturally I accepted the invitation to come to class and talk about my writing and the students’ writing too. And when I hung up from talking with Ms. Mendez, I smiled. A big wide smile. Someone out there is reading my work and even using it to demonstrate a point. I’m as gratified as I would have been had The Square Root of Someone won a Pulitzer.
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