Teach What You Need

They say you teach what you need to know. Of course, they also say, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” but obviously those people don’t know anything. When I was little, everyday when I got home from school, I lined my dolls up against the bedroom wall, stood in front of the chalkboard my dad salvaged from a job site, put on a pair of my mother’s discarded high heels and reviewed what I’d learned that day for a very captive audience. My mother said she could tell exactly what each of my teachers were like because I aped their styles, at turns screaming at, berating, coddling or encouraging the plastic and cloth babies at my disposal.

But, despite my early track record it didn’t occur to me to become a teacher until many years after running the gamut of waitressing, administrative and freelance gigs that I scavenged up to pay the bills.

And then, through a series of happy accidents (otherwise known as getting laid off before becoming broke and desperate) I took up teaching. A friend of mine said, “It’s like you were a top careening madly around before collapsing in exactly the right place.” Yes, that’s exactly how it felt.

I don’t have a teaching degree, an 8-3, a salary or a principal. I don’t have to deal with grades or report cards or SATS. In a way I don’t consider myself a “real” teacher and I bow deeply to those I do. Their jobs, in my opinion, are the hardest, most thankless, and most deeply important in this world.

But I love teaching, because to me it is the process by which I learn the most. I learn from my students who- 8 or 68 —contain vast storehouses of knowledge and experience that I don’t. When I was a teenager, my goal, other than to be a famous reader, was to experience everything. In this way I get to do both.

The stories and poems and essays and bits of word play or dialogue shared by the writers in my class expand my imagination, my vision and my vocabulary. As I write right alongside them, the scratching of their pens pushes me across my own blank page. Writing can be a very isolating, intimidating and lonely task but diving in with everyone else gives me the sense that we’re all swimming in the same deep ocean together. And as we read aloud what we’ve just written, I never cease to be blown away. Beautiful, heartbreaking, disturbing, hilarious, strange, unsettling, thoughtful and deeply true words curl up from their pages, shattering whatever assumption about them I might have made before. Turning your insides out tends to do that. Not that it’s a course requirement, or a confession stand, but it’s hard to write for too long without beginning to write the truth. And the truth, whether it winds its way into a memoir, poem, short story or novel, is what helps me understand life- and writing- the best.

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” Scott Ray the Chief Engineer of the cruise ship in Alaska where I was a stewardess, said to me once. “Only sometimes you find that you have to be both the student and the teacher.” I didn’t quite know what he meant, only that I was glad to know, were we to hit a turbulent patch of sea as our small boat careened over large icebergs, I wasn’t the only one on board that knew how to swim.

Home is the Room

Home is the room my mother uses as a canvas to paint a scene of Adam and Eve in paradise, lions and tigers and elephants and me.

Home is the rooftop of an apartment in the fan where I learn how to smoke cigarette butts from the ashtray while my Dad is in the shower.

Home is where my Barbies sleep.

Home is the quiet dorm where I am in charge of the freshman girls but instead catch my head on fire.

Home is an apartment above a Chianti store and across from a pastry shop when I am 20 and hungry, not for education or knowledge, but for decadence and experience, and also Chianti and pastries.

Home is the second floor with the window that you whistle up to once out of 365 days of waiting for your whistle.

Home is the pyramid of rocks my dad stacked at the top of the mountain where he'd planned to build a home but instead built four foundation posts and a pyramid of rocks.

Home is across the street from the house I've lived in my entire life where my mom moved when I was 15, dragging boxes of stuff in front of and behind her, diagonal, 100 yards, from one front door to another.

Home is the apartment across the hall my Dad moved into while I was at school, as a surprise.

Home is the dark hollow open basement with the fireplace and the view of the horses across the lake and the manual typewriter and the oriental rugs, that my Dad gave me the year he finally stopped moving and I left for college.

Home is the boat my Grandpa kept next to the pier that my Grandma fell off of.

Home is the nursing home my Grandpa thought was a whorehouse where he was the Sheriff in the last few years before he died.

Home is the room that was my room as a child that is my son's room now.

Religious (Mis)Education

Now that my son has begun to successfully navigate the world of public education I’m grappling with the idea of introducing him to a religious one. I have my own spiritual connection with the world around me and I pray constantly: Dear God! Thank God! God Dammit! And my favorite, Thank God Dammit! I love folklore and myths and stories and some of the most interesting are found in the Bible--Old Testament or New. But must we leave the gates of our own Garden of Eden for him to gain knowledge about God?

My son, like me, is Jewish because his mother is. And like me, he has more than Jewish blood running through his veins. I’m not sure if the fact that I never dated Jewish men is due to random chance or the Jewish cotillion I attended in middle school where none of my dance partners reached my chin, but like my mom, I married a goy. Whoever and whatever my son chooses for himself as an adult is fine with me. But right now I’m as hesitant to thrust him into the world of religion as I’d be to force him to visit just one booth on Career Day. I think it’s perfectly fine for a person still missing their two front teeth to aspire to be a wildlife biologist, organic farmer and bowling alley repairman in equal measure. And I’m just as hesitant to make him choose a single path to God.

However, as much as I want to spare him the dogma, I worry that he might miss some character building, too. My mother and I attended a New Age Church until I hit puberty when I suddenly found myself at synagogue wearing a Star of David. My first Sunday School teacher, a guard at a juvenile detention center, seemed to derive real pleasure from explaining, in great detail, the labor pains of childbirth. Our teacher the following year regaled us with horror stories about the Holocaust. My next and last teacher dedicated the entire year to suicide prevention, which, in retrospect, was probably a good idea, but not much fun. And, other than teaching me the Hebrew alphabet, I don’t remember our rabbi discussing anything other than the political and socio-economic details of The War in the Middle East.

All of which made the trappings of Christianity on my father’s side pretty tempting. She never said it, but I had the feeling my Grandma wanted me saved, not to be a better living girl, but a better dead one. The trilogy of romantic adventure Jews-for-Jesus books she’d given me when I was twelve were successful as page turners, but not as missionaries. By then I was already studying for my Bat Mitzvah and couldn’t squeeze Jesus into any picture other than the fluorescent velvet one I later bought to hang on my dorm room wall. But I always felt a little jealous of my Grandma’s certainty about salvation, not to mention the endless abundance of lemonade and sugar cookies her church handed out like blessings.

When my Grandma died and bequeathed me- her only Jewish grandchild- the golden crucifix she’d worn for as long as I’d known her, I was touched. I tried to put it around my neck but found that I could not wear it any more than I could belt out the hymns at the Gospel Chicken House where my father brought me once, on a whim. There the hootin’ hollerin’ foot stompin’ good time was almost enough to make me run and dunk myself in the river. But not quite.

And this year as the holidays approach I feel less of a need to shake who I am than ever. I struggle with routine so Hanukkah is eight times more difficult to celebrate than Christmas, but once again we’ll do it all. And though I don’t really think my son needs anyone to tell him what to believe, it’s likely I’ll pass on my almost supernatural love of New Years Eve, when the hope for reinvention and the promise of a clean slate—if only on my calendar— seems even more miraculous then the resurrection.

Give Me Pastries or Give Me Death

My mother, a button maker, used to make a button that said “I was about to end it all when God spoke to me in the form of a chocolate éclair.” I love this because it can be used in so many situations, chiefly “I was about to start jogging when….”

Actually, I did start jogging this week. In the rain and the cold, up hill and down dale, pausing only to blow my nose in a really sexy, athletic way or to yell at one neighbor “Oh GOD! What was I thinking?” I cheer myself on as the real joggers in their real jogging gear leave me behind in a wake of soggy leaves, at last bursting into the house, panting, hotter than hell, feeling terrific and clocking in at a full 12 minutes. Oh Jesus, I think, where are the pastries?

Maybe I was a pastry chef in a past life--- or a pastry. I can’t make them, but I can eat them. And they taste like love. Better, actually.

Donuts, scones, croissants, danishes, tarts, cupcakes, jelly rolls, pies, ladyfingers: the kind of love you can buy for the price of a cup of coffee—and eat with one.

Of course my pastry-tooth comes with a price. The price of my thighs. The price of the jiggle and the squish. The price of the piles of jeans mounting like the dead in the corner of the dressing room stall. The price of the sugar highs and lows. The price of Snow White’s Queen who envies, instead of a step-daughter, her own 23-year-old self who had no idea how beautiful she was- or could be.

When I was 23 and working on a cruise ship in Alaska, the chief steward found a ripped open cardboard box of muffins in the storage closet behind the galley. “What kind of wild animal did this?” he asked. It wasn’t me, but I knew what kind of wild animal it was and could be. The wild animal who craves sweetness when she can’t give it to herself.

What I Wear

I wear socks to bed. I'm that kind of girl- always have been. I don't make them match either. I gave up on that a few years ago when I gave up on laundry. If I took my boots off right now you'd see two different colored socks. One might be pink, one orange and green striped, who knows? All in all, socks might be the wildest thing about me. At least from a glance, if you could see through my shoes.

I've just about quit jewelry, too. I wear two pearl drop earrings that I received a free coupon for in the mail and sent my husband to fetch for me as a gift two Christmas' ago. Rings, too, have been whittled away-- other than my engagement and wedding band. When I got married I was more horrified about the idea of having to wear the same two rings for the rest of my life than the idea of living forever with just one man. Both now seem the most direct, straightforward route, allowing for deviation in more creative ways.

I have a collection of beautiful necklaces that go largely unworn. My mother hated to wear necklaces-- she said they constricted her energy. She disparaged her own neck as short and squat compared to mine-- "a swan's" and recently apologized to me for the disparity in how she talked about her body parts while teaching me to think in opposite ways about mine. I think her neck with its scar the surgeon cut like a smile from collar bone to collar bone to remove the tumor that could have made me a motherless child, is beautiful. I don't feel like wearing necklaces anymore either and I think of her as I let my neck stand plain, stand for itself.

Now, most days of the month I'm more pigeon or crow, less peacock. No more orange, magenta and mellow yellow hair. No more vintage purple prom dresses over orange fishnets and ratty combat boots. I try now, as often as possible, to speak for myself instead of hoping what I wear will do it for me. But then, of course, there are those days when all I pray for are feathers.

Beyond Barbie: Life in the First Person

Life in the First Person: Women’s Stories Uncovered

A novelist. A storyteller. A poet. A freelance writer. A performance artist. A creative nonfiction writer. A blogger.

What do they all have in common?

The first person.

Their experiences and their points of view are different, but their pronouns are the same.

Find out what comes after “I.”

Come out to hear life in the first person with Gigi Amateau, novelist; Denise Bennett, storyteller; Tarfia Faizullah, poet; Julie Geen, freelance writer; Shelia Gray, performance artist; Valley Haggard, creative nonfiction writer and Alex Iwashyna, blogger.

Life in the First Person: Women’s Stories Uncovered will serve as the grand finale in the event series, Beyond Barbie: Piecing Together Today's Woman running in conjunction with Susan Singer’s art opening, “Not Barbie: A Celebration of Real Women,” on Thursday, November 3, at 7 PM at Crossroads Art Center. Tickets can be purchased online at www.SusanSinger.com or through Crossroads Art Center or at the door.

Purchase tickets and find out more about Susan Singer's art opening, Not Barbie, and the event series, Beyond Barbie at SusanSingerArt.Blogspot.Com!



Gigi Amateau is the author of the young adult novel, A Certain Strain of Peculiar, a 2010 Bank Street College Best Children’s Books of the Year. She also wrote Chancey of the Maury River, a William Allen White Masters List title for grades 3-5. Her debut novel, Claiming Georgia Tate was selected as a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. She recently completed 200-hour yoga teacher training. Visit www.gigiamateau.com.

Denise Bennett tells personal stories, her original versions of traditional stories and sacred stories often interlaced with harp and vocal music. She is a member of the Tell Tale Hearts Storytellers Theater in Richmond. Master storyteller Elizabeth Ellis has said of her, “Denise Bennett is a storyteller and a musician of exceptional talent. Her work is timeless, and flawless. Her work reminds us of the love that dwells in the deep heart's core.” Visit her at www.storiesbydenise.com.

Tarfia Faizullah is a graduate of VCU's creative writing program, and the former associate editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Diode, Bellingham Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project award, the Ploughshares Cohen Award and a Fulbright scholarship.

Julie Geen writes a monthly column for belle magazine and is a contributor to Style Weekly. She has published essays in anthologies, most recently “Tarnished: True Tales of Innocence Lost.” Along with raising children, dealing with pets and her own mind, she teaches creative writing classes through Hanover Parks and Recreation. Currently, she is turning one of her screenplays into a novel, and from there probably into a face book post. She blogs at juliegeen.com.

Shelia Gray is a graduate of the VCU Crafts Department, focusing in metal smithing, textiles and glass. She is currently involved in creating wearable art and costumes, as well as performance art and body painting for fashion shows, events and special projects. She’s writing a mixed-media graphic novel which incorporates sculptures and performance pieces. A self-employed gardener, she has winters off to do what ever she likes.

Valley Haggard, the executive director of Richmond Young Writers, teaches creative writing to kids at Chop Suey Books and creative nonfiction to adults at Chop Suey, Black Swan Bookstore and the Visual Arts Center. On the board of the James River Writers, she has written for Style Weekly, Belle, Rhome, V Magazine and Skirt and has published chapters of her memoir in The Writer’s Dojo and Tarnished: True Tales of Innocence Lost. Visit her at www.richmondyoungwriters.com or www.valleyhaggard.com.

Alex Iwashyna went from a B.A. in Philosophy to an M.D. to a SAHM (stay at home mom), writer and poet before thirty. She spends most of her time on LateEnough.com blogging about life, parenting, marriage, culture and her inability to wake up in the morning and not hate everyone. She also writes for Richmondmom.com, teaches at the Visual Arts Center and manages enough freelance work to guarantee sexy circles under her eyes.