I’ve just finished teaching, on Zoom, a five-day, fifteen-hour writing workshop, through the Carnegie Center in Lexington, Kentucky—nine women, three men—and in addition to being exhausted, I’ve learned more from my students than they did from me.
I called it “Writing Memoir/Writing History” with selections from a number of books to help to lift the process about hint, prompts and so forth—to make us all feel part of a larger community. One of the problems with memoir writers, as I see it, is that we aim too low. We are, in fact, writing history from often ignored points of view—and by widening our focus to include a lot more context, we can make that role clearer both to us as writers and to our audience. I’ll be teaching another version of this workshop in April.
I’m grateful to the Carnegie Center, its devoted staff, and the Kentucky Women Writers for this opportunity; the challenges of teaching on Zoom were very nearly overwhelming but with Sarah Chapman’s gracious help, I managed.
As I stared all week at the thirteen slightly-larger than thumbprint portraits on my screen, I saw the faces of the United States as it progresses today toward including those that were excluded in the long and dismal past: a gay man, an African American woman, and a woman from an immigrant Jamaican family, among many others.
We white people are—or at least some of us are—trying to come to terms with our understanding that we are racist, even those of us who might prefer to be called benign leaders or mentors. Our struggles, of course, are nothing compared to what those we have injured over the past 250 years go through on an hourly basis to reach some kind of forgiveness.
I’m not much good at forgiveness; but the story of my student whose great-grandmother spoke about slavery taught me a lesson. When my student asked her why she didn’t hate the white people who had tortured her ancestors, she answered, “Hate eats you up inside.”
Oh yes.
I thought right away of the statue of Kuan Yin in my garden here in Santa Fe, now crowned with snow, showing what we must all learn.
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