Theme Essay by Ann Lightcap Bruno
Teaching High School Students to Embrace the Pain
Years ago, I took solace from the words of our very smart marriage counselor when he said, “Marriage is hard.” And, again, when a formidable child psychologist told me that dealing with four-year-olds is hard.
I frequently tell my high school students the same about writing. “Writing is hard,” I say. And they smile cockeyed at me, like I’m making a joke or doing a parody of that Teen Talk Barbie who was programmed to say the same thing about math.
My students are old enough to get this. Through basketball playoffs and play callbacks and robotics showdowns and prom drama, they confront the reality that the best things are hard, even though their recognition of this reality is not yet fully formed. Writing is hard for the kid who beats himself up to crank out a single paragraph, and it’s hard for the one who consistently turns in perfect, timely drafts.
What I have learned over my years of teaching writing is that if a person is willing to embrace the hardness, he or she will, somewhere along the line, create something worth the agony.
In response to Paul Auster’s excellent essay “Why Write?,” one of my juniors told me, “On the airplane to China almost exactly a year ago, I felt like crying without knowing why, so I closed my eyes and wrote on the dark insides of my eyelids.” She went on to say, “I write because I ache a little.”
Perhaps writing is hard because of this fundamental ache, this desire to inscribe our very flesh—our eyelids, for God’s sake—with the story of our lives and the story of what we see around us, the story of the wide world and us in it. Maybe it’s hard because we want to do the experience justice. Or because we are afraid that someone will laugh or that our mothers might someday read it.
We teachers ask our students to conjure up vibrant stories from the ordinariness of their lives. We ask them to pay attention to what they hear and see and feel. We ask them to consider the past. And regardless of whether we are asking them to write fiction, poetry, or personal narratives, we are pushing them to the brim of discomfort and beyond, into aching, into pain, fingering what Ralph Ellison called the “jagged grain” of experience in order to render “a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” Ellison was writing about the blues, but the metaphor is true—isn’t it?—of any worthy endeavor.
One of my very best students apologized for turning in so many essays, poems, and stories based on his parents’ divorce. “I know I need new material,” he’d say. “It’s so hard to write about, but I just can’t help it.” I told him not to fight it, that sometimes our topics choose us. And so he kept on going, and the portfolio he turned out at the end of the semester was varied and vivid and never once redundant.
When my grandmother was days away from her death, just a month shy of her hundredth birthday, I started trying to write her eulogy. My husband told me I might at least wait until she had died. While I agreed that there was perhaps something cold and inappropriate about getting a head start, I pursued this concrete task as a means of steeling myself against the inevitable phone call.
I had a lot of material, a ridiculously long lifetime of anecdotes to draw from. But I was as stuck as I have ever been, unable to commit to paper a single word about this woman whom I loved immeasurably.
On the long car ride from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania for the funeral, I thought about the myriad dead grandmother pieces I had been handed over the years. Earnest, rhyming ninth-grade poems. Cliché-ridden, five-paragraph essays. Messy, Faulknerian tour-de-forces. She was everywhere, the dead grandmother. They wrote about her deviled eggs, her Spanish lullabies, her smoking habit, her worn velvet sofa. They conjured her from recent and long-ago memory.
And they wrote about her funeral—a place I was headed—and the flowers and the food and the people saying incomprehensible platitudes. My students’ writing, all of it, searing and honest and genuine, no matter the cliché, ached in a way that was beautiful.
Somewhere in New Jersey I found my first sentence. When the thing was done, I felt the ache: loss, exhaustion, catharsis, all of it. And I understood why my students put pen to paper in memory of their grandmothers.
The first real writing class I ever took was in college, a poetry workshop taught by a fragile, famous poet who routinely wrote the phrase “overuse of nostalgia” in the margins of my half-baked work. At age twenty, I disparaged my provincial hometown and yet kept writing bad poem after bad poem about my schoolyard near the brewery, my neighborhood above the tracks, the steel mill below the tracks. I could have written about anything, but I couldn’t seem to avoid home.
Much later, I learned that nostalgia is a compound of νόστος(nóstos), or “returning home,” and ἄλγος(álgos), meaning “ache.” Just as the word implies a wistful yearning for what we no longer have, it also underscores the inherent and inevitable discomfort of reaching into the past.
Even when the past is a relatively short one (sixteen years, say, as opposed to forty-three or ninety-nine), it’s still a crazy minefield of formative experiences. Capturing a single one in words is hard. It’s even harder to do it well. My students have shown me that we write about our grandmothers and our parents’ marriages and our failures and our identities because we have a lot to learn about our lives, even when we’re not sure what to say.
We all ache a little as we reach into the clutter of memory. And if we share our work, reading aloud with great trepidation as the others sit listening in a circle of desks, we release the ache into the room. Afterward, the listeners point to the best lines and make suggestions about unclear bits, and maybe they even call us on our sentimentality. But the best part comes when someone says, “I totally related to that.”
Publishing Information
- “Why Write?” by Paul Auster, New Yorker, December 25, 1995.
- “Richard Wright’s Blues” by Ralph Ellison in Shadow and Act (Vintage, 1953).
Art Information
- “Tables” and “Big Chess” © Jeff Shelden; used by permission
Ann Lightcap Bruno, an English teacher at the Wheeler School in Providence, lives in Cranston, Rhode Island, with her husband, Paul, and her children, Oscar and Ada. Her essays and stories have appeared in Memoir (and), Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review Online, Elimae, and The Fiddleback, among other publications.
Ann recently returned to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for her 25th high school reunion and is daunted by the prospect of writing about it.
