I had an interesting conversation with my American Literature students on the last day of class, which was last Friday. I asked them about what over-arching themes they saw in the literature we had studied and what they thought that they gained from the class.  One young man said that he thought the idea of “searching for a home” seemed to appear in American Literature from the very beginning. The class seemed to agree with him and thought that from the very beginning Colonial Literature this appeared in one way or another. Someone else said that in the literature  from the mid-20^th C on there seemed to be a lot of “searching for identity,”   as the emerging women’s voices, Latino voices, African-American voices and gay and lesbian voices began appearing. One young woman kind of bristled at that comment and said something about being put off by the activist tone, the political tone and identity-driven tone of that literature. She said she much preferred the British Romantic novelists, like Thomas Hardy.

I began thinking about this and thinking particularly, because I know this student loves it, about Tess of the d’Ubervilles.  What I don’t think this student sees is that this is as much as transgressive text as some of the pieces we have read this semester.  Here’s story of sexual assault, of class and of displacement. Hardy’s book created quite a stir when it was published. Its heroine is a strong young woman who, although she rejects his advances, is assaulted by a young man who is, in terms of class, apparently her superior and who takes advantage of that “class privilege.”  In 19^th C. England, the idea that one would sympathize with the victim in this circumstance would have been shocking ,and yet Hardy does and creates Tess as a sympathetic character, in fact subtitling the book A Pure Woman.

For this student, Tess represents a romantic story far removed from the “identity politics” that plays out in  the work of many late 20^th C writers, but what she doesn’t see is that Hardy was “betraying his tribe” in a way that many others betrayed theirs later. His language is 19^th C, but his sentiments are clearly not. He is making a very clear statement about the treatment of women and about the English class system.

This young woman’s implication was that many of the 20^th C writers were too “political.” My response to her was that it was easy to be a white-faced, blued-eyed girl in a very white-faced town, but that she might think about what some of the 20^th C writers were saying. I’d say, for example, that Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son”  (“life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”) isn’t just about the African-American experience, but that of any mother who has struggled to survive “gets” the poem, but Hughes’ metaphor is so clear that even someone who has not brought up a child in difficult circumstances understands the poem and the situation.

Yet there were those who thought that Hughes was “betraying his tribe” when he wrote in Black vernacular and not standard English because, they said, it implied that African-Americans only spoke  sub-standard English. This is clearly a shallow argument as people’s reactions to “Mother to Son” attest. It’s a beautiful poem whose language is clear and moving, and if it had been written in standard English, would have felt forced and wrong.

As we talked about what things people had taken from the class, one older student, a woman in her 60’s, said that reading all the different voices in American Literature had taught her empathy.  I hope the young woman student was listening. If she was, she may take another look at our fine writers, at Adrienne Rich, at Anne Sexton, at Hughes, at Plath, at Alexie, and see both how they all “betray their tribes” and how, at the same time, they tell us something important about what it means to live in America at this time, just as Hardy was saying something important about what it meant to live in England in the 19^th C.   As a young woman with some dreams of being a writer, I hope she thinks  about how she will “betray” her own tribe, and what that will mean

J

I ran a Young Writers Camp for thirteen summers at place called, appropriately enough, Story, Wyoming. A writer friend of mine, Dainis, and I started it, and over the years it expanded and we added staff, and changed staff, and kids came and went. But one of the things Dainis and I used to say to each other was that we did it because when we were kids we didn’t know anyone like us, meaning we didn’t know any writers.  We were voracious readers, but the process of how the words got from a writer’s mind to the hard cover books we toted around, or to the paperbacks that we read to tatters was, we realized, a mysterious one,  As we became adults who became writers, we found ourselves looking around and realizing that we had come to be writers without models, and really were, in those early days, kind of flying blind.

I have recently been using Sebastian Junger’s book War as a textbook for two of my English Composition classes. My students have responded enthusiastically to this book which recounts Junger’s time in Afghanistan as a journalist with troops in the Korengal Valley.  It is a thoughtful and serious, meditative book, but it is also full of action and deeply engaging descriptions of life at a remote outpost.

As one of the last assignments of the semester, I have asked my students to write  letters to Junger, commenting on the book, on the parts that were most moving, and also asking Junger questions that they might have about the book, the experience or the writing process.  Students have been sending me rough drafts before they turn in their final copies that I will e-mail to Junger.   What I am seeing is some of the best writing that I have seen all semester. These letters are open and honest. The sentences are clear. They are not trying to sound academic or awkwardly smart by using big words that aren’t quite right for the sentence.  These letters appreciate Junger’s work, and really engage in a conversation with him about the book.

As a writer, I  love learning about what people think about my poetry, and I think I am no different from most writers. We send our work out into the world and don’t always know, especially if we are writing poetry, how it is received. It is a gift for a writer to get thoughtful reactions to a book, but it is also a gift for readers, especially relatively inexperienced readers to have a chance to write to an author, even if they do not hear back.

 Correspondence is an  intimate form of communication. When students write to an author, they are engaging in the same process that the author has engaged in; that is, they are writing and using writing to explore questions that they have. When students have the chance to articulate what a book means to them in a personal way, it’s in many ways a richer process than the standard Comp I essay.

When my daughter was a young reader, she carried on a correspondence with one of her favorite authors. She exchanged a number of letters with Lloyd Alexander  that ranged from her questions about his work to comments about the writing she was doing.  It meant a great deal to her that someone whose work she loved so much would take the time to answer her.

I think about to Dainis, and how we spent those summer weeks engaged with our campers in writing, immersing ourselves in the work as much as the kids were, and I think about the kids who are now grown-up and working as writers and writing teachers.  They did know “someone like us.” They knew practicing writers and, thus, for them, writing was not a remote skill that only someone with “talent” could do, but it was a process that we all engaged in.  I would like to encourage all young readers, and not so young readers, to write to the authors whose work moves them. The writer might not answer, but I can pretty much guarantee that the act will be as important to the reader who writes the letter as it will be to the writer who receives it. Writing to someone is one of the easiest ways of joining the ranks of  people who use words to think, to invent and to understand the world. It is a way of becoming “someone like us.”