Three days ago I spoke to Loralee Mendez’s college class, the one she teaches on creative writing. She asked me to come because she had used one of my published essays — the one about meeting my father for the first time when I was forty-eight years old — as part of her course curriculum; and, since I live in the area, she thought her students might be interested in meeting a real live essayist.
I can’t tell you how flattered I was, because when I send my little personal creations into the vast publishing world they often return rejected. So if Loralee Mendez wanted me to talk about writing, and my writing in particular, I was ready.
What greeted me last Monday morning was a heterogeneous group of men and women from various points in life. One was an older man, returning to college for re-training after his job had been outsourced. Another was a professional tattoo artist working on his degree. Another was a firefighter; another a young man who’d entered college at age thirteen. I was impressed with how each of these people defied the standard college student profile.
I talked about how I became a personal essayist, about some of my life’s experiences that colored the written word. I also talked about how to get better at this craft called writing and what it means to be a writer. No doubt, most of these students had other career paths in mind, but it goes without saying that writing well offers better opportunities in all of them. Writing well means being able to make oneself understood; and making oneself understood means getting ahead.
Over the course of the class, Ms. Mendez had had her students write personal essays culled from their own experiences. While I did not have an opportunity to read them, some students verbally shared what they wrote about. The firefighter wrote about incidences that had propelled him into his career. One young woman wrote about her first love dumping her two days before Prom, and how she went to that event alone. Another woman wrote about having a child at age sixteen.
How proud I was of their candor, their grabbing topics that matter to the world at large. Of course, other firefighters have described how they chose their career paths; and other sixteen year old girls have written of giving birth. But these students were the only ones who could tell their story, who could possible write their unique perspective and inspire someone else. They need to write their stories, because nobody else will . . . or even can.
I left the classroom feeling proud, but it wasn’t because of what I had said or done that morning. Rather, it was a pride I had not only in those students whose names I didn’t even know but also in their teacher, Ms. Mendez, for inspiring such creative work.
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