education – Nastasya Parker

My Writingversary

This Week’s Bit of String: Pencils, coughs, and cake

Thirty-three years ago Wednesday, I started properly writing my first book. I was eleven years old, in seventh grade. I hid behind my hair and refused to wear my ugly glasses. When I was forced to speak in front of the class, a classmate hooted, “Turn up your hearing aids, everybody.”

I may not have had much to say, but I had a story to write. I’d planned it for months; drawing up maps and a census, tracing pictures I thought resembled my characters, recording a soundtrack mixtape. I blocked out scenes with my little pencil-people that lived in cardboard tenement blocks, or in drawer compartments above my jeans and sweaters.

And then I finally started writing it. It had taken time to realise I could do more than play-act it in miniature, I could write it. Preserve it. Do the grown-up thing.

On the very evening after I’d begun my writing, I received encouragement at the junior high school’s annual Open Evening. My new English teacher praised my classwork extensively to my parents. She was the first to focus on my writing. It felt like an endorsement on behalf of the universe, the timing of her conviction that I could go far. I remember being giddily pleased, while of course trying not to show it.

In the next two months, with pencils, stacks of double-sided lined paper, and my tiny printing (I’ve no idea why they say that’s a symptom of a control freak), I wrote 386 pages. Whilst maintaining my good grades, too. I have never been able to replicate that accomplishment in terms of volume produced.

Reaching Limits

That draft should have been more than 386 pages. I hadn’t reached the end, even though I knew exactly what should come next. I had thought about it, played reels of it in my mind often enough. I contracted bronchitis and was sick for 3 weeks, then got it again the following month and was sick for longer.

Not only had I entered my Author Era, I was pioneering what would become my Victorian street urchin-inspired cough. To this day, I’m susceptible to it, and it serves as a homing signal for my family to find me.

I was barely able to do schoolwork, and I stopped writing my story. Throughout the following decade, I simply restarted the same story, standing in new sidekicks as I met new friends, and I never got past 100 pages. The first novel I would ever complete, Artefacts, was a very different story although it had a similar protagonist modeled somewhat inadvertently on myself. But my self-perception had evolved over the years requiring a different plot, because my dream ending shifted from being rescued to self-acceptance.

I finished my first novel in 2015, almost 23 years after my original Writingversary. My first published story, in The Bristol Prize Anthology 2010, came 17.5 years after the Writingversary. 10.5 years after my Writingversary, I completed a degree in Writing and Literature while a single mother working full-time. I’ve had quite a few short stories published now. Not so with my novels yet, but I wonder if my 7th grade teacher, and the many supportive teachers and college instructors that followed, might still be impressed.

Marking Success

It’s a bit staggering to consider that I’ve been putting pencil to paper to write planned projects for more than three decades. Naturally, I wish I had more to show for it. Winning the 2017 Gloucestershire Prose Prize and reading at Cheltenham Literature Festival was a highlight, and my story “Pie a la Mode” won £250 in Amazon vouchers from the Funny Pearls humour website. Enough to fund equipment for a pet cat, and even a new hoover to clean up after our dark feline prince Oberon.

*This year’s Writingversary* *destination*

Writing has opened up social opportunities as I’ve made wonderful friends through writing groups, and it’s an integral part of my mental well-being. I don’t feel right if I don’t do it. By building my writing habit over the years, I’ve built resilience as well. I may not have a lucrative career, but I am constantly creating or fine-tuning pieces.

I still sometimes wonder if my bouts of poorliness tend to follow a particularly busy writing stretch. But now, because writing is part of my daily life, I tend to keep working on projects even when a cough strikes, or even flu.

Maybe that’s my best success. Thirty-three years provide many chances to give up, and I didn’t. For this year’s Writingversary, I walked up to the local Garden Centre after work and had a drink in the cafe and a slice of pumpkin cake with maple chai frosting. I scribbled in the golden autumn light. The timing of my Writingversary draws me to this season, and I’m so glad I found a bit of time to celebrate.

Do you remember when you first started writing? How do you celebrate this milestone?

Strange Journeys

This Week’s Bit of String: A pink overnight bus to Russia

When I was nineteen, I had a couple weeks after summer work and before my term abroad in the UK. Somewhat to my mother’s chagrin, I opted to visit Russia during that time while traveling among friends. From visiting Taru in Helsinki, I would go to Yulia in Moscow, then Zuzana in Bratislava.

After obtaining my “entry clearance” at Finland’s intimidating Russian Embassy, which reduced me to tears and impoverished me by $300 while charging the German guy in front of me only $60, I remained determined to visit Russia. I expected further bumps in the road.

*Some building I passed in my St. Petersburg daze. Almost the same pink as the bus.*

I did not expect the rickety overnight bus carrying me across the Finnish-Russian border to be pink. I boarded with dozens of sombre Russian passengers, and secured a window seat. The old woman next to me rested her head on my shoulder and went to sleep.

Throughout the night I peered into the darkness, passing vast swathes of evergreen trees and seemingly abandoned, massive industrial or nuclear plants. We disembarked to have our passports stamped out of Finland, then disembarked again for the Russian entry stamp.

“First time in Russia?” asked the Finnish border guard. At my assent, he slammed down his stamp. “Good luck.”

In a way, I did have good luck. But not in a conventional sense.

After the sleepless night with a stranger leaning on me, I left the bus as soon as it stopped. The sun was just rising, a distant golden glow that could equally have been a smouldering chemical inferno. Only one other person left the bus with me, a guy in his twenties.

As I watched the bus drive away, glad to be rid of it, I heard him say in accented English, “You know we are still outside St. Petersburg?”

I shrugged. “That’s fine.”

“Didn’t you have more luggage?”

I had my day bag over my shoulder, but he was right. My even-more stuffed rucksack, with three months’ worth of belongings, was still in the hold under the bus.

Getting in Trouble

I suppose it’s a classic tale: I caused my own problems. I was frustrated with myself for making such a stupid mistake, in so significant a matter, so early on.

The man on the street with me rolled his eyes as if equally annoyed at my folly. “Look,” he said, “Come home with me while I get ready for work. I’ll help you find your way into the city and perhaps locate your bag.”

Now, this will sound like more stupid decision-making. I was aware I shouldn’t go to an unknown man’s house in a foreign, semi-hostile nation. But if he had truly bad intent, I reasoned, then he would pretend to be more welcoming instead of exasperated. So I followed him.

I experienced my first Russian apartment. Toilet and shower in separated tiny chambers, a mug of bitter black tea. Dmitri, who’d been visiting his fiancee in Finland over the weekend and had returned just in time for work, gave me a St. Petersburg map with Finnish location names, wrote down the bus company’s phone number and address, and saw me off on the correct metro train.

I spent a few hours wandering the city. I only remember fragments, almost 25 years later. Deciphering a couple more Russian letters by noticing a cinema poster for the recent film, The Patriot. Glimpsing the Hermitage, the Tsar’s Summer Palace, from across a busy street, my view criss-crossed by tramlines. Ascertaining directions from an ice cream seller because we could both speak intermediate French. I was miraculously reunited with my rucksack at the coach company’s office, where no one had been the least bit interested in its contents.

Travel Stories

I’ve been thinking about this somewhat misadventurous episode since I’ve just finished a truly inspiring novel with a lot of travel in it: Sarah Winman’s Still Life.

This book has me longing to visit Florence, Italy, wander and look at art and eat amazing food. It’s also been a luxurious read because while the plot has war and flood mixed in, mostly it’s about people being super nice to each other. I might not be making it sound very exciting. But the characters’ love for each other, their tolerance for, even appreciation of, each other’s quirks is a balm as the real world seems to become more bitter and stressful.

In my travels as a student (who probably comes across as naive here), I gained independence but also learned it’s not the end of the world when that independence goes wrong. I don’t often put my travels into story form, although a couple times I’ve been inspired by places I’ve visited.

However, I notice in recounting this that travel puts us in a unique position to understand and utilise story structure. We embark on a journey with certain expectations, but what we want may differ from what we need. Being outside our familiar borders forces us to reflect on who we really are, as we notice we are stuck with ourselves here, there, and everywhere. And even when we bring problems upon ourselves, it can turn out okay.

Amazingly, once I reached Moscow the next day, I had a good time. My Russian friend was passionate about showing me around, and her stories about local history and how the city ran fascinated me. There’s another little twist in the tale for you.

Have you encountered surprising kindnesses while away? How does travel fuel your self-reflection and creativity?

Carried Along

This Week’s Bit of String: A wide range of accounts

Only one exam left. I’m happy for our students that they won’t have to sit through them anymore, but disappointed that it’s the only accepted measure for how they’ve done in secondary school.

My role in exams this year, in addition to reading and scribing for a 16-year-old with special needs, is also to act as language modifier for him. This is a rarely-granted access arrangement, for those with hearing and/ or processing disabilities, as well as reading difficulties.

It means I can assist with clarifying a question, but of course it’s quite restricted. I can’t define or ‘modify’ any subject-specific terminology, and it’s best to leave the engine of the question, command words, untouched (explain, analyse, evaluate, the whole Bloom’s Taxonomy lot). I can help with “carrier language,” the words that form the framework of the question.

Here’s an example. In the first History paper, one of the questions was: “Give an account of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

The student asked me what “account” meant. “Like Instagram or Facebook?”

I rephrased it as “Tell the story of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

This gave him a clearer idea. While the concession of having a language modifier is rare, I wonder how many students unshakably associate the word account with social media, just as an example. For students who are neurodiverse, a word they’re unsure about can be very hard to see past.

Staying Flexible

Adults have this issue as well. There’s a new writer to the writing feedback group I’m in, and both times I’ve sent her my writing, she comments negatively because she’s made an assumption early on and then the story doesn’t comply with it. In a short story where the protagonist was looking after her grandmother, the reader decided that Nan was the name of one of the protagonist’s children, criticised me for mentioning a “grandmother” because that was adding too many characters, and continued to complain that the character didn’t interact with Nan in a manner suitable for a young child.

Revising our assumptions as we go along is a vital skill. Certainly, it’s more innate to some than others. I try to reserve judgment as I’m reading, and when something doesn’t make sense I go back and work out what I may have misinterpreted. I don’t often read book blurbs anymore because they sometimes distort the significance of plot aspects and lead you to expect something different.

This comes from when I read Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You. The back of the book talked about how the heroine “knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home,” and said “knowing what’s coming keeps her sane.” For perhaps my own personal reasons, I concluded the protagonist was neurodivergent, maybe on the autism spectrum. I was baffled and a bit annoyed when she wasn’t.

My frustration was my own fault and based on my assumptions, so I decided not to read book blurbs anymore. I want to get swept up when I read, not anchored down by my potentially outmoded notions. When we read fiction or poetry, all language is carrier language. It’s all taking us somewhere.

Letting Characters Carry

During the last couple of weeks, I started writing my new novel. It feels as if, in a way, most of the language in the first draft is carrier language. That’s what I’m reminding myself anyway. It’s clunky because mainly, I’m seeing how the characters develop the plot. When I go back and edit, I can polish the voice and streamline the form. Many revisions from now it will travel, it will fly, rather than get shoved along.

*I love these roots at an old canal mill site, but for now I can’t get too attached.*

I’ve done a lot of planning and character research, and I feel I’ve honed my craft in terms of focusing the story structure and understanding the direction, kicking off with inciting incidents and such. But I won’t get super attached to anything just yet. I scribbled many notes on my characters’ backgrounds, considering their needs versus their wants, so I feel I know about them, but I can’t presume I know them deeply. I must remain open to what they do, because they could alter my planned plot.

A few pages in, I’m trying to stop thinking about how to rewrite with improved style. It doesn’t matter yet. My characters are more important. This absolves me for now from having to write beautifully or cleverly, which is great since I’m tired and not ready for that yet.

Stories carried by characters engage me more than stories dragged through certain plot points, and I think that’s true for many readers. However, we don’t want the plot to trudge as characters wield the burden of their thoughts too heavily. Later, I’ll correct the balance.

How do you stay flexible? What carries you when you start a project?

Voice Check

This Week’s Bit of String: Forbidden conversations

The exams (GCSEs) for our Year 11 students have begun. I’m sitting them alongside a young man with special needs, in line with his access arrangements.

The first exam we did together, we had a power-tripping invigilator who told us off for talking. The student finished dictating answers to me minutes before the end of a 105-minute exam, and I asked how he was feeling. He nodded, and grinned, and said he felt ok. Then he asked what time it was.

We’re not allowed to tell students, because it might unfairly advantage them (apparently). So I silently pointed at the analog clock set up in front, which many students can’t read.

The invigilator came over and said we mustn’t talk. According to her, I could only speak when reading directly from the paper.

“And if you want to know the time, you have to ask me,” she told the student.

“Oh, okay. What time is it?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

Gah! Thankfully, our usual invigilator is less officious. We’re not rebuked (yet) for asking a frightened exam-taker how they’re feeling.

I wonder if smiling at a student and showing mild concern for their welfare does give them an extra advantage. I wouldn’t feel too bad if it did; there are so many disadvantages actively at work. Many of our students with special needs are already convinced they will fail.

My exam student keeps saying, when we’re studying: “I don’t know how I can remember all this.”

I worry about this developing from a mantra to a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I’ve been suggesting fixes. What if the video clip running in his mind said instead, “I’m good at solving problems. I can try to work out the ones I don’t know.”

It’s hard to change an internal narrative, though.

Rewriting the Internal Monologue

How we talk to ourselves inside our minds can be a game changer. My inner voice, for quite a long time, has been somewhat generous and cuts me some slack in a few respects. It cheers me on through busy days, and it might later say, Great job, you’ve done a tonne of work, have a tonne of peanut butter. You know, stuff like that.

*Sometimes we have to allow ourselves a slower pace.*

It wasn’t always that way; as a young person I completely reviled myself. Trauma and peer pressure and mixed-up interpretations of religion will cause that. Then, after a couple years as an immigrant, on some subconscious level I must have grasped that no person especially in a foreign land would ever provide all the reassuring words I’d always longed to hear. And I settled for hearing some version of that from myself.

It wasn’t a conscious effort. I realised how much kinder I’d become to myself because I listened to how my students talked about themselves, and contrasted my own, long growth.

But lately, my inner voice has been harsher. Once again, this realisation snuck up on me. I was summoned to a procedural absence hearing at work, after all those days I missed with a late winter flu, plus a couple days further back in the year thrown in.

The deputy headteacher said I’m great, highly valued and respected by all staff, and they don’t question the reason for my absences. But… do better, Or Else.

That put me in a panic. How do I avoid getting sick while I’m scribing a GCSE paper, leaning in to hear whispered dictations from a boy who’s blowing his nose rather juicily?

Panic Versus Control

The thing is, I had been really down on myself about every sick day. There’s no excuse for this, I’d think while I bundled, practically immobile, on the couch. No one else missed as much work for this bug. There’s obviously some insufficiency in me.

But when told I could lose my job if I get sick again, the terror I felt came from helplessness. I can’t truly be helpless and at fault at the same time. Maybe it’s time to stop blaming myself, and summon some fighting energy.

Fortunately, I’ve had words from others to help me turn things around. Colleagues from my actual work team have been outraged that I felt threatened. In their view, I do way too much already.

“I know it isn’t easy,” one of my TA friends said, “But you have to put this away in a mental compartment so you don’t think about it, or it will make you sick, and we aren’t going to give them that.”

The SENCo, head of our department, swore she’d accompany me should any further meetings occur. “I’ll tell them that if they let you go, I’d be under so much stress I’d be off sick, and good luck to them covering us both.”

Sometimes, people around us know just what to say. Slowly, our panic and stress ease off. But as wonderful as it is hearing kind support from others, it’s even more important what we hear within—after all, our inner voice is the one we’re stuck with. Might as well make it an amiable one.

I certainly hope to at least keep panic at bay for my students, and more importantly to help them dwell on their positive attributes. I will work on moderating the tones of my internal monologue to be less harsh when I have a slight off day.

How does your inner voice keep you going?

Cracking the Code

This Week’s Bit of String: Letters on on ancient platform

As someone who reads everything around me practically without thinking, I instinctively attempted deciphering signs on our recent trip to Athens. My knowledge of this lettering comes from Russian more than anything else. In 2000, I visited Russia and wandered around staring at buildings and signs.

I identified the letter pi from a movie poster for The Patriot. While out for a meal, my Moscow friend said to me, “The waitress has a name like yours: Natasha.” And I could then spot the symbol for the “sh” sound.

One of my problems was confusing P, D, L, and G. They’re all sort of mountainous little shapes. In Greece, I spent time noting the differences. Other letters came clear through signs for pharmacies, using the phi and the mu. There were inscriptions, such as the mural behind the ionic pillars of the University building. Above marble steps strewn with empty cans and KFC rubbish, the mural portrays the academic subjects as robed women approaching a throned man. Physics, Mathematics, History, with Rhetoric and Poetics gossiping in the rear. Each figure had her subject name stencilled above, presenting me an opportunity to work on understanding the Greek letters.

What really struck me, though, was a votive from 400 BCE displayed under the Acropolis. It was dedicated to Hermes and Aphrodite, with their names carved into the stone in ancient lettering. EPMOY, said the stone. The day before, we’d walked up and down Ermou Street, and I hadn’t realised it was named for the Messenger God. It’s one thing for pillars to stand over a couple thousand years, and really something else for letters to do the same.

Countdown

Translating Greek letters bit by bit is like building a story from “pieces of string” gathered from daily life. It was nice to have a little extra time to contemplate the pieces, being on holiday. At work, we’re running out of time. My year 11s, regardless of special needs, will sit exams starting in just over a week.

For some, reading and processing the questions will be most difficult. I think of the times I’d look at a sign in Greece, work out what the letters meant–and still not know the word because it was too far removed from the English equivalent. Our students with severe dyslexia expend their energy decoding letters, but still have to understand the question, and write essay answers.

For other students, a main challenge is mining the deeper meaning of a text. It’s particularly difficult with poetry. One student on the autism spectrum was upset with a recent mark for poetry analysis. He had worked hard thinking what to write about the poem, and had interpreted it literally.

I told him poets often speak in code. They use symbols to represent bigger ideas. Blake’s “blood running down palace walls” in “London” represents cruel rulers, and Hughes’s terrified hare in “Bayonet Charge,” which I thought was metaphorical until just a month or so ago, a way of describing the hopping, chaotic sparks–this represents innocence harmed in war.

“We’ve got to crack the code,” I told my hardworking, frustrated student. “We have to tell the examiners what the writer might have really meant.”

Beneath the Surface

*Perhaps a bit less left to interpretation here, or perhaps not. Street art in Athens*

The word code comes from caudex, “tree trunk,” early books made of wooden tablets. These would be used to establish rules in writing. So books are essentially code, and whether wittingly or not, some translation will be involved. From the trunk of any volume we read, the meaning might branch out and strike different people in different ways.

Books are a code to the writer’s intent and context. At least, for the purposes of English exams they are. Heavens forbid anyone read or write anything for fun. Another student on the autism spectrum lamented having to revise Jacobean history for Macbeth, and Victorian for A Christmas Carol. It’s a lot to remember, none of which today’s students find clearly relevant.

“We have to know the circumstances around the writer in order to understand why they wrote and what they wanted to teach readers.” I explained, “It’s a good skill because everything we see people post online, they might have a purpose that isn’t obvious.”

“I never do that,” she said. “I just tell it like it is.”

I’m not sure any of us are so upfront all the time though. I’ve certainly seen her excuse herself from class claiming she needs the toilet, while sweeping away with phone in hand. Deciphering the code of an individual person is never fully possible, because our circumstances change and we constantly evolve.

It’s still worth trying, though. An open mind and willingness to take a little time puzzling out another human being is maybe the best reason to hone our interpretation skills. How do you keep yours sharp?

Asserting Authority

This Week’s Bit of String: A new monarch in town

“How do you spell author?”

“A-U-T-H-O-R,” I obliged the boy. My family was providing childcare for another family from church. Their oldest was maybe 8 at the time, not quite a decade younger than I was. I always had a soft spot for him, found him gentle and reflective.

We were at my parents’ kitchen table, colouring. The boy had decided to make a picture book. I was probably doing homework, and wandered off after a while on other pursuits.

*Me with the crown they gave me (ok, not just me) at Goodrich Castle*

Later on, my brother told me our young guest had written his book. It was a kingly tale of Arthur and his knights. Only, when I’d assumed the little boy wanted to spell author so he could do a little “About the Author” page, he was actually asking me how to spell Arthur.

I had caused him to create an entire picture book about King Author and his glorious feats of derring-do.

This made me giggle, and it’s resurfaced in my memory as I plan my next novel. In a way, is an author a monarch? Do we rule over the kingdom (queendom, perhaps) of our imagination?

Uneasy Lies the Crown

Writing, as with any truly driving creative endeavour, is a tough gig. You want to express yourself genuinely, but you want to be widely accepted and received. It’s emotionally bruising.

But what I really struggle with sometimes is making decisions, then forging on alone. It’s up to me to invent an entire story, develop intriguing, complex characters, then come up with plausible trajectories. In the words of King George III as portrayed in Hamilton, “You’re on your own…” There are certainly times when I imagine I’d like to have democracy, some sort of constituents to steer me.

*My very own fritillary, growing in the front garden*

The etymological root of the word author is ‘one who causes to grow.’ In fact, it has the same root as actor: a doer, a performer, an initiator. However, no one really does this solo. An actor takes direction and usually works with an ensemble. A gardener doesn’t cause a seed to grow all on her own; there’s sunlight and water involved. That’s why, as writers, we are constantly developing our ideas under the glow of other literature and art and the hydration of feedback.

In our writing, we also have characters to keep us company. While perhaps not as vocal and irascible as human voters in a democracy, they’re still more volatile than planted seedlings. You don’t always know what you’ll end up with, nor should you. At work, our Art students are heavily cautioned against deciding too soon after receiving their exam brief what their finished product will be. It’s called “design fixation” and it would lower their grade. Instead, they need to show evidence they’ve explored a range of ideas, researched various artists, and grown through the process.

Wrestling with Authority

So our creative work draws from all sorts of sources, and can evolve. We’re not creating free of influence, far from it. But it’s up to us to get things moving and keep them moving. We’re pretty important. It’s obvious, but worth noting that the word author also links strongly with authority.

For a lot of us, assuming authority goes against our nature. We might particularly shy from it when watching it run amok in current administrations with distinctly authoritarian leanings. (The term authoritarian was coined in the late 1850s, early 1860s–I wonder if it started in the US, and whether it was the South or the North first using it?)

In my job, I have to inspire respect from my students, but as a teaching assistant rather than a teacher, I can be friendly and nurturing too. There’s an added dimension this year. We have so many special needs students, we require quite the company of teaching assistants, too many now for the few medium-paid TAs to line manage.

That’s why at the beginning of this year, I became a line manager on half the pay grade required to manage staff.

The head of our department framed this development as potentially forcing the administration’s hand. Maybe one day, they’ll realise they have to pay us more. Seems unlikely; if they’ve got us doing it now, why change?

She told us: “I will do my best to make you believe this is worth your while.”

Those semantic gymnastics impressed me. I remain skeptical that there will be any financial value to the endeavour, but it showed me that even those with authority aren’t always comfortable with it. If she’d been confident about what she was initiating, would my head of department have twisted her language so tortuously?

Several months into being a line manager, I’m getting better at navigating the computer programme required and meeting the deadlines. The person I’m managing has valuable working experience and a masters degree, so my role isn’t to boss her around, it’s to help channel her tremendous strengths in support of our students and team.

That’s more like what we do with our creative ideas. We serve as conduits, not just despots. How do you exercise authority over creative endeavours?

A Flaw-Finding Mission

This Week’s Bit of String: A 30-year-old reading list

Last week when I couldn’t sleep, I invented a new game: Trying to remember which books we studied each year of high school, back in the mid-1990s. This joins other such spectacular entertainment forms as How Many Second Grade Classmates Can I Remember? and Recall the Layout of All the Holiday Cottages I Used to Clean for a Living.

One of my British secondary school system gripes is the paltry amount of books read for English. Two whole years studying nothing but Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, A Christmas Carol, and 15 war poems is such a drag.

On the other hand, we read quite a few books in our slightly deprived rural American high school. In 9th grade alone, we read Romeo and Juliet, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, and I think some form of The Odyssey. We also read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which I didn’t like much, and Cormier’s The Chocolate War, which I detested. It seemed clear he’d written it, with masturbation references and stupid boy behaviour, to impress his teenage son. Not my demographic.

*“Everyday Use” is about historic quilts–whether to display them, or use them. These quilts are part of the annual show at Billings Farm, Vermont.*

In 10th grade, we read Macbeth, Lord of the Flies (sound familiar?), Old Man and the Sea, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I was not a fan of the latter. We also read a volume of memoir essays and short stories, the first things I loved reading in high school. My favourite was an Alice Walker story, “Everyday Use.”

If we hadn’t been required to read such a broad selection, I might not have connected with any of it. I’m glad I didn’t lose interest, because the curriculum had terrific offerings in our junior and senior years.

I don’t remember what I was reading for fun during the first two years of high school, or if I bothered. I had plenty of homework, and my own made-up story-world I constantly nursed. Maybe that was why I resented certain assigned books. I preferred my own stories, woven around my experiences.

So at 3 in the morning a few days ago, I realised: my adolescent self was a narcissistic reader.

Inconvenient Truths

I see it in a couple of my students. Simon Armitage’s war poem “Remains” is great for spotting narcissistic readers. It’s written clearly in the vernacular, sometimes using collective pronouns which almost make you feel complicit. Most of the chatty girls and fidgeting, shouting-out boys stop and fall under the spell.

But one boy from our Trio of Fortitude has to always be the victimliest victim who ever victimmed, so he slouches through the succinct tale of war, PTSD, and substance abuse. This boy can’t pick up a pen because he has a cut on his finger, or his stomach hurts. He is cross that no one has helped him during class with his homework yet, and he might get a detention because obviously he’s not going to do it in his own time.

Now, as a teen I generally behaved myself in class and did the work, mostly on time. Ish. But I wonder if I had it in for Maya Angelou because at the age of 14 I, too, fancied myself the victimliest victim.

For at least a couple years of my adolescence (I think I got better), I was limited in my ability or desire to truly support other people. I became painfully aware of this years ago. I hadn’t realised that maybe this self-centeredness affected my reading. I just kept assuming the books weren’t very good.

Ready or Not

I’m a big advocate of reading for fun. So I won’t begrudge adolescent me for being self-involved 3 decades ago. If we’re honest with ourselves, we all have phases even as adults when we don’t have the strength to read certain things. It’s useful to remember that’s not the books’ fault.

Against the backdrop of negative news in my native country, I like to read books of plucky individuals banding together. I probably won’t attempt rereading Maya Angelou’s memoir of tribulation at the moment, but I do know now that I actually like some of her poems quite a lot.

*These caged birds were painted on a Glasgow wall, 2019.*

While there are always plenty of reading options to suit any mood and even, I daresay, any impending apocalypse, what to write can be a conundrum. I had this issue during the pandemic as well. When the world is suffering severe pangs, and we don’t know what it will give birth to, how do I bring forth a new big project? If I plot and start a novel referencing the current situation, that’s going to change by the day. If I start penning a contemporary novel without referencing current circumstances, is that callous? Does anyone even want to read more about the present chaos, after exhausting ourselves with the news?

Considering all this, I’m setting my next project in a place I love, and I’ve decided to set it during the first Trump election and administration, 2016-2017. We still had the “Not My President” fig leaf that he’d lost the popular vote, and we thought some people just didn’t realise how greedy and racist and misogynistic and authoritarian he was. This parallels the journey of my characters, as they wrestle with learning that maybe they’re not as kind and upright as they have tried to present themselves.

Which brings me back to my discovery about myself. Recognising our own flaws opens us to appreciating more outside ourselves, and I feel as if starting with my characters’ flaws makes me a little less protective of them, a little more open to the courses their journey can take. They say we should never judge a book by its cover. We shouldn’t judge by our adolescent opinions, either.

Have you encountered any books you ended up really changing your mind about?

Elections and Remembrance

This Week’s Bit of String: A trio of fortitude

This year, our school had our Remembrance Day assembly outside. Registration groups lined up on the field behind our young cadets and scouts in their various uniforms. Seagulls shrieked and fallen gingko leaves cut a gash on the grass as if the ground seeped golden ichor.

I was orbiting three Year 10 boys with a spectrum of special needs. In the time it took to get 1300 young people out on the field, they were quite tired of standing and had no interest in our reasons for gathering.

One boy had crumpled to half his size, twisting himself to lean a bony elbow on his upright knees. I guided him to a bench.

When I returned to the group, as the headteacher solemnly began reading poems barely audible from the sidelines, a second boy pitched up his insistent muttering.

“My hands are hot. They’re HOT. This isn’t normal.”

This student always has an ailment to stop him working. His eye is blurry. There’s a cut on his finger. His dog bit his knee and the painkillers are wearing off. He considers “This isn’t normal” to be the clincher when describing these maladies, and the phrase becomes ever more laughable since clearly, having some debilitating injury is completely normal for him. Anyway, I guided him to a different, further bench.

On my return, the third boy proved unmotivated to surpass their meagre mettle. He wanted to sit down too. At this point, though, the assembly had reached the Last Post and we were about to have our two minutes of silence. I told Boy #3 he could stand for just five more minutes.

Back in the classroom, the teacher checked in with me and I referred to the boys wryly as a Trio of Fortitude. I’d pointed out to the trio that the soldiers we were honouring had to stand very long whiles indeed, and live in trenches under awful conditions, etc. But through my annoyance when people can’t spend just 20-30 minutes without being the centre of attention, I feel compassion for the kids.

Each of this trio are capable of insights regarding others, in their own time. When fully confronted with experiences outside their own, though, they bridle against it and instinctively magnify their issues in defence.

More Than Fortitude

The feeling’s mutual sometimes, as you can perhaps tell. I don’t always want to hear about which hurty finger is stopping one of our Fortitudinous Ones from writing, or whatnot. I have my own agenda, and my own problems.

And when a grasping, narcissistic, thin-skinned sexual predator gets elected president of my native country where all my family live, I’m briefly uninterested in the desperation of voters who found it a bit pricey to gas up their SUVs so deemed him the preferable candidate. Personally, I’m ok with paying fuel duties to try and combat the effects of climate change, or with paying prices for eggs and milk that reflect the costs of making these products available. I’ll stick it out, thinking long-term. Fortitude!

To an extent, that’s a reflection of my privilege. My empathy will win out in the end. I’ll be patient with my students and with the voting public because I don’t like anyone to suffer and I do realise humanity is rife with struggle.

If we are tough and resilient without empathy, we get entrenched in our beliefs and when others don’t function in the exact same way we do, we may see them as less human.

Beyond Empathy

For the first several days after the election, I felt physically sick. On Wednesday the 6th, as I walked to school through crispy, sunset-coloured leaves, I remembered the Supreme Court and how he’ll make it even more awful for 30-50 years to come, and I nearly threw up. This is not normal.

*This is just a pretty picture which I stopped and took through my post-election daze.*

I lost more sleep, worrying about the impact on my kiddo and their partner. Will they still be accepted to work in schools? Will there even be funding for jobs in special needs education over there anymore? Should I send money, help them stock up on certain items before the promised tariffs and economy crash? When I do sleep, I have extra dreams about abuse and assault. Seeing misogynists and an adjudicated rapist assume power reopens trauma wounds.

There’s a weary frustration, as I wonder how to persuade people outside my information bubble to do what’s right (ie, vote against racism and sexism and authoritarianism) whether it seems to be in their best economic interest or not. And there’s grief because, well, now how can I go home? Not to live there with my family in the near future, anyway.

And yet, this is nothing like what those soldiers and their families went through in the World Wars, nothing like the terror and loss experienced in the Middle East or Ukraine. When we had our two minutes of silence last Monday, I was grateful to reflect on circumstances vaster than my own, and to move out of my feelings.

Surviving the incoming presidential administration will require a mix of empathy and fortitude. We need to be resilient and practical, and considering the big picture while planning specific action. No matter how tiring it is, we have to keep standing.

Toughness

This Week’s Bit of String: The power of pinching

“You know something I’m good at?” a Year 11 girl says, raising her eyebrows at me over her Jacqueline Wilson book. “Pinching.”

She proceeds to list all the boys she pinched good and hard in Year 7 to keep them in line. She’s often the only girl in the lowest-set class, and maybe her talent for pinching has been key to her thriving in potential chaos. I don’t condone it, but I understand where it comes from.

In first and second grade, I was good at getting pinched. I thought it proved my mettle, and built my tolerance. A couple of boys in my class obliged me by pinching the back of my hand, the tiniest amount of skin to cause the sharpest pain.

“This hurt?” they’d ask, and I’d shake my head, lips pressed together. I was quietly proud of my fingernail-shaped scabs.

As a small human, I was terrified of doing wrong and earning punishment. Because of abuse in my extended family, I knew what kinds of pain were out there and I knew that loved ones could inflict it. When aware of struggles in my immediate family or in the wider world (I was pretty self-absorbed, as kids often are), I internalised and worried about that, too.

Inviting pain, consenting to it, made me feel more powerful. It made me feel tough rather than sensitive.

I look back on this because I’m still prone to concern and deep feeling. Many of us creative types are. Now, my sensitivity is spread across a broader field; I’m aware of so many more problems and wrongs and agonies, many that are worse than my own.

Perhaps just as a pinch is less painful when gripping a wider section of skin, empathy cripples us less when cast over a greater area.

Reinvestigating Empathy

I’ve just finished reading Octavia E. Butler’s dystopia/ sci-fi classic The Parable of the Sower. The narrator of the story is a teen girl called Lauren, a hyperempathic ‘sharer.’ If she sees anyone injured, she will feel their pain, genuinely, sometimes to an incapacitating degree. (This is revealed in the beginning of the story—I’m avoiding spoilers.)

Because it can give her the appearance of weakness among a desperate population, Lauren tries to hide her ‘sharing.’ When she has to fight, she strikes to kill because then she won’t feel her enemy’s pain. Her empathy could make her a target, but it also forces her to be tough, and that’s quite a fascinating juxtaposition.

And our heroine’s empathy makes her wary. Tuned into, and rightly frightened of, the world’s suffering, Lauren educates herself and prepares for disaster. I love how Butler uses Lauren’s empathy as a catalyst for wisdom, combining heart and head, so to speak.

How often do we see our empathy as kind of a drag, as something exhausting? It’s a bit like writing. We actually have a tremendous gift, and when not in its throes we can consider how to let it steel and prepare us.

Resilience

We can only take so much, and when we hear stories, we have limits to how much we can stand to feel them. Or maybe it’s not limits. Maybe it’s more of an inoculation.

My most heart-breaking moment as a teaching assistant (and there is some competition here) was a Monday morning exchange with a Year 7 boy. He’d been allowed to see his mum at the weekend and then returned to his foster home. He said to me in a wavering voice:

*Can a good heart still be tough as rocks?*

“Miss, you know how usually, when you cry yourself to sleep, it stops by the morning? Well… this time it didn’t.”

He was refusing to go into the classroom because he didn’t want to risk crying in front of the group and looking weak. But his feelings were big enough to slay me where I stood. He wielded a power without knowing it.

This happened a decade ago and I carry it as a reminder that no matter how much aggravation my students cause, their inner turmoil is so much worse. When they don’t want to work, it’s often because they’re anxious about failure. If they’re disrespectful, it’s often because they want to impress their peers. They are frightened and often in pain.

Awareness of their angst inoculates me against taking things personally and becoming overwhelmingly discouraged. Likewise, empathy for those who suffer bereavement or chronic illness makes us appreciate those around us and our own ability to keep functioning (such as it may be). Like Lauren in Butler’s Parable of the Sower, we can combine empathy with awareness to make us stronger.

How does your empathy serve as a strength?

Learning Abroad

This Week’s Bit of String: On the way to somewhere else

I’d never have got into this whole immigrant fix, splitting myself between two countries, if I hadn’t done a term abroad while in college. My major was English/ Education in New Hampshire, where contributing to class discussion was key.

In the UK, on the other hand, professors seemed flummoxed when people turned up. They didn’t even expect us to read the assigned literature: “If you didn’t do the reading for this week, I hope you do at some point in your life. It’s a great book…”

*Twin American spires: church steeple and rocket*

I had read each book, as it happened, and was unimpressed having it summarised in a murmur for 3 hours. Screw it, I decided. I’ll do the reading while on the train to somewhere more interesting.

And off I went, to friends in Glasgow, Bangor, Wolverhampton, and especially London. I read, and listened to new-to-me British music (Texas, Robbie Williams, Steps), survived on Kingsmill rolls and Edam cheese and Smirnoff Ice, and fell for three different guys in quick succession, the final one being my now-husband.

I also wrote a wacky but fantastic story about a girl whose heart, in the form of a cookie, is eaten for breakfast. I got an A for that class, after only attending 1.3 lessons. I did the reading!

What I Wrote This Summer

*New England idyll: Billings Farm Museum, Vermont*

It’s always interesting to see other writers post about their vacations in the summer. Some catch up on reading, and many are busy with their children during the holidays anyway. For me, I spend 4 weeks out of the 6-week break going to see my family in New England. There are definite vacation aspects to this—the lakes and rivers, the mountains, the ice cream.

It’s also very busy as I condense a year’s worth of interactions into 1/12 of the time. Half my family are too busy to keep in touch when I’m not there, so I run around trying to help people out and make memories. They are all I have, and they are precarious without me recording them. When not Doing Things, I’m scribbling about them.

This leaves little reading time. I have writing commitments—promised critiques, etc, and also students I check in with even in the summer, so I squeeze those in. What I do find, though, is that the travel, the hiking and driving and swimming and reflecting, open me up to learning a lot of random things. Without the more rigid structure of work and long-term writing projects, my brain relaxes just enough to sponge up new information.

What I Learned This Summer

There were my discoveries while hiking, which I researched later:
The rather formidable Argiope aurantia (ok, yellow garden spider) keeping watch from her web in the lake bridge. It’s also known as a zigzag spider because of that uniquely thick central line. The purpose of this unique pattern is still unknown to us.

The Warren Rocket: My family got together in Warren, NH, near the White Mountains. While other towns have Civil War cannons on their greens or in front of their schools, Warren (population peaked in 1860 at 1100-something) has a great big Redstone missile rocket. (Pictured at the top.) It was funded and transported by a local veteran hoping to encourage interest in space travel.

Signs around the rocket tell visitors about SS Officer Wernher von Braun, who supervised concentration camp workers to manufacture missiles that killed 1400 Londoners. After the war, Americans smuggled von Braun out of Germany to design even deadlier rockets over here, but also realise his childhood dream of sending rockets to space. I wonder what the childhood dreams of his captive labourers were, or those civilians killed in airstrikes.

*You can see why the Morse Museum caught my eye…*

The Morse Museum: Another early morning Warren hike discovery, a building with granite plaques advertising Curios of India and China, and African Game Trophies. Now-vacant, it was dedicated in 1928 to house the collections of Ira H Morse, a local shoe store mogul and game hunter. There’s a colourful bio online of IH and others, written by affectionate family members. They include his adventures but also quirks like how he would “ream out” uncooperative salt shakers, at home or in public.

Speaking of museums, there are a couple in the area which I like to visit.
Billings Farm, a late 19th century agricultural reenactment site. It’s great for learning about cows and dairy, edible plants and farm life (see above). When we visited this year, they were making pasta in the farmhouse kitchen. I hadn’t realised how long pasta has been a staple in the US (it’s much more recent in the UK), but in fact Thomas Jefferson sampled and loved it in Europe, and by the time of the Civil War macaroni was very popular.

The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College: I always stand in awe before the incredible, ancient Assyrian tablets before moving on to the current exhibits. This summer, a diverse selection of art including Musasama’s elaborate arrangement of textiles and natural objects across the floor, part of the Maple Tree Series, made me aware of the maple tree abolitionist movement. Did you know that in the 1790s, free people of colour, white settlers, and native Americans advocated substituting maple syrup for cane sugar, to starve the economy propping up enslavers?

My family creates a good learning environment, with our eclectic interests. Dinner discussions might be about what’s the oldest continuously-used language in the world (Hebrew, Tamil, Sanskrit… Lithuanian and Icelandic appear in the top 10, too). My dad found an 1884 encyclopaedia in our AirBnB and read passages out loud to us. There was no entry for childbirth, but lots of details on “Brawling in Church” and the various statutes against it.

Even though I didn’t do much writing work over the summer, the feeling of my mind loosening to hold more is not an unwriterly sensation. New stories could develop from here!

Do travel and family time inspire your writing?