One of the last things my father did before he died in 1994 was dictate a story into a tape recorder. He was seventy years old, had retired only months earlier and had spent those months pursuing long-deferred dreams. One of those dreams was to take a creative writing course. My father had always considered himself a raconteur. No longer able to attend classes or sit up to type or write by hand, my father completed his last story from his hospital bed, using the tape recorder.

Like my father, I’ve always enjoyed writing, and, like my father, I postponed doing anything about it for the majority of my life. But I decided several years ago that I was no longer going to wait. After eighteen years of practicing law, I left my firm, went back to school and became a high school English teacher at a yeshiva—an Orthodox Jewish high school. Teaching English kept me in constant communion with the world’s great writers, both classic and contemporary. By immersing myself in their voices, I hoped to develop my own and help my students develop theirs.

I loved teaching writing to teenagers. The writing teacher is confidant. The writing teacher is mentor. The writing teacher is cheerleader. The writing teacher is the center of a community composed of people striving to reach others, the facilitator of human connection, and, as such, experiences the joy of being touched.

My students quickly figured out that their teacher was an idealistic and sentimental person. I told them that their goal as writers was to enable their readers to live vicariously, to gather insights about life. I explained that they wouldn’t be able to reach this goal unless they allowed their work to be inspired by what moved them, both intellectually and emotionally. I urged them to write from their hearts.

I meant what I said to my students, and they actually seemed to believe me. Take, for example, Zach. As a senior, he asked me if he could do an independent study course in writing, an opportunity not normally available at our school. I agreed, if he would do two things: (1) revise a rough but promising memoir he had written in my class as a junior and (2) submit it to a writers’ contest sponsored by a leading magazine. For the next eight weeks, Zach and I met regularly to work on his story. I commented; he revised. We did this over and over, and when the story became more polished, we solicited comments from friends and family. Again he revised. The result was a poignant piece about the night that Zach’s brother died, which Zach submitted to the contest. Later, he described the outcome in a speech to an audience of teens whose loved ones were ill:

A couple months later I heard I was a finalist and that during school the next day I’d find out what I had won and where I had placed. I received a phone call at lunch telling me that over 10,000 applicants had entered and I had placed second. Needless to say, my jaw dropped, and when I told my teacher, we were so overwhelmed we couldn’t push down our smiles. Then I began to think what about it is so special? Winning is fun but writing is not exactly a soccer game; the thrill of winning is not the same. Then, as I thought about it, I realized that my story is going to be published and distributed in over eight million homes worldwide. If in one of those homes one person will read my story and possibly be consoled or gain an insight from it, then I will have done what I thought could not be done, I will have brought hope and optimism out of something that I thought would only be sad and depressing.

When that hit me, the excitement and thought of winning was secondary to the idea that I might be able to help someone who otherwise may not have been reached on that same level.

How proud I was of Zach, and how personally gratified. For Zach had learned—miraculously from me—several things about writing that I believe and had taught him: writing is a process, and although it begins in the individual heart and depends on the individual writer’s toil and perseverance, it often develops within a community of supportive writers and readers who are willing to react and comment as the writer, through repeated revision, brings the piece to completion. Thus, most good writing is a joint effort. Collaboration is what gives writing its special, and to my mind, greatest potential: to work positive change not only on the writer, but also on the community that reads.

Now, amazingly, it’s my turn. My first book, Pieces of Someday, a memoir, is about to be released by Gemelli Press, a small Seattle publisher. The memoir is the product of four years of work on my part, and like Zach’s story, countless hours of writing and revision. Also, like Zach’s story, my memoir would not today exist were it not for the community of people who inspired me to write it, and who read it, commented on it and cheered for me as I wrote.  Just in time for Thanksgiving I now offer them heartfelt thanks.

Jan Vallone

http://www.janvallone.com/

I was recently out on a walk with a friend who’s had a tough year; not only did she decide to divorce her husband, she also decided to send her daughter away to therapeutic school; both have drug and alcohol problems.  At first my friend was devastated by suddenly living alone; she had difficulty focusing at work and would unexpectedly break into tears at social gatherings.  But then she read a self-help book she claimed had healed her overnight; it had taught her to live wholly in the present, enjoy every flower she sees, block all but the here and now.

I’m glad this philosophy works for my friend, but it saddens me.  I do believe in cherishing the present, both in time and place, but I also couldn’t live without the past or without the present but unseen. The past has taught me which flowers smell delicious, and which harbor poisons to avoid.  And when I can’t see any flowers, I’m glad to recall they’re blooming somewhere and all I need to do to find them is pull weeds or change my path.

It’s probably because of this that I so enjoyed Annie Dillard’s book For the Time Being, which reflects upon time, the known and the unknown.  I love the way it assembles bits of data—stories from China and Israel, the natural history of sand, wisdom from Confucianism, Christianity and Kabbalism and medical facts about birth and death.  I love the way it poses statistical questions:  Do you remember what you were doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of tsunami waves drowned 138,000 people in Bangladesh?;  Do you know the dead outnumber the living in the ratio of twenty to one?  And I love the way it withholds commentary so we can stir its ingredients together, add our own connections and marvel at the subtle, complex stew.    

Mostly, though, I admire Dillard’s daring; not only do her words take us round the world, they transport us throughout time—from the days of the Chinese Emperor Qin, who unified his country in 221 BCE, to the days of the Galilean Rabbi Isaac Luria, who reinterpreted the Zohar in the 1500s, to the days of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher-priest-paleontologist who discovered Peking Man in the 1920s, to the days of our own time.  What better way to highlight that we humans, each unique and precious, are at once common and insignificant, and that this paradox unites us all.

This brings to mind a personal connection.  I’ve never believed there’s one correct religion.  My tradition is Catholicism; I'm moved by the liturgy, the icons, the organ, the incense, the light through stained glass.  But you might be moved by something else.  And the students I once taught at a yeshiva—an Orthodox Jewish high school—by something different still.

But what should we make of the difference?  Last year I signed up for a yoga class—something I’d not done before—as a means to stay in shape.  As the first class opened, I followed the instructor’s directions and the advanced students’ example:  I sat cross-legged on the floor, straightened up my spine, pressed my palms together, relaxed my face and closed my eyes. 

Then the instructor began to chant:  Yogena chittasya padena vacham.  And the veteran students responded:  Yogena chittasya padena vacham.  And the instructor continued to chant:  Malam sharirasya cha vaidyakena.  And the students responded again:  Malam sharirasya cha vaidyakena.  And because I don’t speak Sanskrit, which I’d never heard before, I couldn’t understand the words, but I discerned far more.  For sitting closed-eyed in that yoga studio, I felt the presence of all of humankind, its people calling, listening, responding—searching for each other and for God.   And the dissonance of their separate voices—many pitchy and off-key—combined strangely into harmony.  And that harmony rose around me.  It ran through me, expanded within me—a harmony distinct from all others, and yet identical to all.  It was the harmony of Gregorian chanting, Jewish Torah cantillations and Southern a cappella hymns.  It was the harmonies I have yet to hear and those I never will.  And in it, I sensed God.

So, for the time being, I’m determined to cherish that harmony, as I know my walking partner would.  But unlike her, I’ll let it blend and rise with the songs I can’t hear in the present and those resounding from the past.  And I hope to preserve it in my memory so I can let it rise to buoy me when the next tsunami comes.

Jan Vallone