Poem of the Day: "Poems Which Talk Back to Me" by Sharon Olds
Overview and Directions: As discussed, here are five ELA assignments from the English Department to help enrich your time away from school. If you would like to engage with these together, please let me know in the comments section. Some of you mentioned books you would like to read as a group. I can connect students from my five classes for a reading group if you wish. Just shoot me a quick comment so I know you're out there.
I am currently reading: The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Arias by Sharon Olds.
I will add a post on Wednesday and Friday to offer a "Poem of the Day" as well as share some of the reading and work I am doing during this time. Again, if you read a post, please just shoot me a quick comment so I know I am talking to someone.
Attention AP Students: Here is an important update from the A.P. Board regarding the test: Click here. Your class links to the A.P. College Board Classes are below. Most of you joined already. Let me know if you have a problem finding the site. Once you login, you will see that I unlocked all the practice quizzes for you. You should be able to quiz yourself and get results. I did not set time limits, etc., so you can practice as you wish. In the testing situation, you will have roughly 20 minutes for a multiple choice selection and 40 minutes for each essay. I will continue to make posts with helpful A.P. materials for you. Again, leave me comments to let me know how you would like to engage. Zoom, blog, etc.
Learning Activity 34: Write a book review about a book you like by describing the book in such a way to make others want to read it. Record this book talk and share it if you would like with a friend or relative.
Learning Activity 61: Interview any adult about a big, national, “event” from their adolescence. Have them recall a memory of a time when life changed and the whole country/world was impacted. What happened? How did their routines change? How did they get through it? When did they return to “normal”?
Learning Activity 6: Humans are social beings and need contact or perceived contact with others. What are you doing right now to maintain a sense of community due to our distance? What are you doing to maintain a sense of normalcy and routine. Write for ten minutes about this experience and your thinking?
Learning Activity 29: Ideas.Ted.Com with Guy Winch https://ideas.ted.com/author/guy-winch/ peruse and select an article, read and respond with your thoughts and connections. ( I enjoyed, “Dear Guy: I’m incredibly anxious about coronavirus, what can I do?” and also the great video at the end of the article, “We all need to practice emotional first aid.”)
Learning Activity 16: Do a virtual museum tour of the one of the 12 museums highlighted in this article. Choose a piece of art perform a visual analysis using the 4-question protocol:
What do you see?
Where is your attention drawn?
What is there to get (i.e. - what is the meaning of the work)?
What more is there to ask?
Then, write a one-page reflection connecting the piece either to something you’ve read in class (a novel, poem, play, article, etc.) or to one of the essential questions for your grade [insert your grade’s EQs here]. How do these pieces speak to one another? What is the connection between the two, for you?
Poem of the Day: “Meeting a Stranger” by Sharon Olds
Today's Lesson: Update from the State of Massachusetts on Learning during this crisis.
Hello my friends,
The State of Massachusetts has set guidelines about our learning experiences. At the time of this posting, there will be:
No directed curriculum
No deadlines
No graded assignments
Please disregard all due dates and work from Friday, March 13th. Do not stress out about your grades, etc. If you would like to complete work, I will accept it, but no one should feel obligated in any way to do work while we are out.
Having said that, I will provide resources that have been developed by myself and other members of the English Department on a weekly basis for you to choose from and do if you wish to keep learning and active.
For my part, I still want to stay connected with all of you and will continue to post my videos with a "Poem of the Day," sharing some kind of literary experience with all of you. Again, this is voluntary.
We are allowed to finish Wit, as we discussed, so we can have closure. If you want to read another play together, for example, that can be an option, but no one should feel it is expected or that we will do it when we get back, it will be graded, etc. Again, this is voluntary. We can still have experiences, but they will be more individually based.
I am here for all of you, and if you wish to speak to me through email or the blog you are always welcome.
Overview and Directions: Please view the above video for my class instructions.
This will be a daily Vlog to help us keep connected as a class during this troubling time. I will always have a poem of the day, and offer daily lessons on our assignments. You will have the opportunity to comment on the blog post, and I can answer you the following day. We can also set-up class time to all be on the blog for an hour and comment together in real time.
Today's "Poem of the Day" is from Sharon Old’s Arias, titled, “For You.”
Overview and Directions: Please compose an essay using the prompt and text below. This is a close textural analysis from Margret Edson's Wit. When you finish, please post the essay to Turnitin.com. Also, share one of your body paragraphs in this blog space, so we can see your analysis. I look forward to your responses!
"Just a Comma"
Essay Prompt: The following dialogue is an excerpt from Wit a play by Margaret Edson, produced in 1999. Read the passage carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how Edson reveals her values about the importance between literary analysis and real life experiences through characterization and other literary devices.
VIVIAN. (Hesitantly) I should have asked more questions, because I knew there was going to be a test. I have cancer. Insidious cancer, with pernicious side effects – No, the treatment has pernicious side effects. I have stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. There is no stage five. And I have to be very tough. It appears to be a matter, as the saying goes...of life and death. I know all about life and death. I am, after all, a professor of seventeenth century poetry...specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne...which explore mortality in greater depth...than any body of work in the English language. And I know for a fact that I am tough. A demanding professor. Uncompromising. Never one to turn from a challenge. That is why I chose to study John Donne...while a student of the great E.M. Ashford. (Professor E.M. Ashford, fifty-two, enters, seated at the same desk as Dr. Kelekian was. The scene is twenty-eight years ago. Vivian suddenly turns twenty-two, eager and intimidated.)
Professor Ashford?
E.M. Do it again.
VIVIAN. (To the audience) It was something of a shock. I had to sit down. (She plops down).
E.M. Please sit down. Your essay on Holy Sonnet VI, Miss Bearing, is a melodrama with a veneer of scholarship unworthy of you...to say nothing of Donne. Do it again.
VIVIAN. I, ah…
E.M. Begin with the text, Miss Bearing, not with a feeling.
“Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for thou art not soe.”
You've entirely missed the point of the poem, because you've used an edition of the text that is inauthentically punctuated. In the Gardner edition –
VIVIAN. That edition was checked out of the library –
E.M. Miss Bearing!
VIVIAN. Sorry.
E.M. You take this too lightly, Miss Bearing. This is metaphysical poetry, not the modern novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading...which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think that the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?
The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the
enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation.
And Death – capital D – shall be no more - semi-colon! Death – capital D – comma – thou shalt die – exclamation point!
If you go in for this sort of thing I suggest you take up Shakespeare. Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610 – not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:
And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.
(As she recites this line, she makes a little gesture with a comma.)
Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting. Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something...to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause.
This way, the uncompromising way...one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God...past, present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semicolons. Just a comma.
VIVIAN. Life, death, I see! (standing) It's a metaphysical conceit, it's wit! I'll go back to the library and re-write the paper –
E.M. (Standing, emphatically) It is not wit, Miss Bearing, it is truth. The paper's not the point.
VIVIAN. Isn't it?
E.M. (Tenderly) Vivian, you're a bright young woman. Use your intelligence. Don't go back to the library, go out. Enjoy yourself with friends. Hmmm. (Vivian walks away. E.M. slides off.)
VIVIAN. I, ah, went outside. It was a warm day. There were students on the lawn, talking about, nothing, laughing. The insuperable barrier between one thing and another is…just a comma? Simple human truth. Uncompromising scholarly standards. They're connected. I just couldn't...
Cynthia Nixon as Vivian Bearing from Wit by Margaret Edson
Overview: In this unit we will explore the paradoxical presence of complexity and simplicity in our lives. Cancer is a disease that unfortunalty touches everyone in our society, today. In her play Wit, Edson explores our need for human kindness. Today, more than ever, kindness and empathy are values we need to exemplify.
Reading and Study: As a means of introduction, I would like you read, view, and study the following materials. First, read the background on the play and view the trailer. Next, read the background and poems by John Donne. This sonnet is in the play. Next, read a selection from Beatrix Potter, which again, is in the play. These two drastically different works balance each other out with simplicity and complexity. Finally, read the beautifully movie story behind Margaret Edson, who won the highest literary honor the Pulitzer Prize, but decided to continue her life as a Kindergarten teacher in Atlanta.
Written Blog Response: When we completed our introductory study I would like you to compose a 300-500 word blog response covering what you learned about the Margaret Edson, Wit, Holy Sonnet VI and Beatrix Potter. Please include direct evidence from this post. You may also include questions and insights you would like to discuss in class. I look forward to your responses.
About the Play, Wit by Margaret Edson
Wit's main character, Vivian Bearing, is a fifty-year-old renowned literary scholar of John Donne's seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry. The play concerns Bearing's attempts to put her life together as it comes to an end.
By combining concepts of metaphysical poetry and human mortality within the complex mind of a dying scholar, Edson creates an extraordinary character of fortitude and wit. Edson's use of wit, referring to intelligence and wisdom, develops this multilayered work into a play about grace and redemption. An uncompromising look at cancer, the play shows how language has the power both to complicate and to ameliorate understanding. "The play is not about doctors or even cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity," Edson explains. By showing the opposite of kindness, Edson's play effectively leaves the audience "yearning for kindness." Edson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999.
Edson's teaching career progressed along with the success of her play. Despite her newfound fame as a playwright, she continued teaching elementary school in Washington, D.C.–English as a second language for five years and first grade for one year—until she moved to Atlanta in 1998 and began teaching kindergarten.
Fully dedicated to teaching elementary school in her adopted town of Atlanta, Edson does not intend to write another play. She lives with her partner, Linda Merrill, and their two sons, Timmy and Pete.
Purcell, Kim. "Margaret Edson (b. 1961)." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 04 September 2013. Web. 29 January 2020.
John Donne and his "Holy Sonnet VI"
John Donne's Holy Sonnets are a group of 19 devotional sonnets that take on questions of Christian faith and salvation. Published in 1633 (nearly a decade after Donne's death), the precise order of the sonnets is debated by editors and Donne scholars. As such, the numerical assignment for each poem tends to vary from publication to publication, with scholars working from a number of circulated manuscripts from the period. Because the order of the Holy Sonnets is fundamentally unknown, it is important to approach them largely as individual poems rather than a coherent sequence, despite the fact that scholars have grouped certain sonnets together in a unanimously-acknowledged cohesive progression.
The Holy Sonnets open on a note of resignation as an unnamed speaker announces that he has resigned himself to God in the name of salvation. Anxious about his impending death, the speaker continues to wonder what kind of fate awaits him at the end of his life. Thrilled by the prospect of his soul ascending to heaven, the speaker agonizes over the sins he has committed on earth and begs forgiveness from God, only to express worry over slipping backward again into Satan's grasp.
The speaker continues to wonder whether God will pardon him in the end, and takes solace in the fact that the son of God, Christ, is merciful toward man. But the speaker also begins to contemplate seriously the process of death and the deterioration of his body, ultimately challenging the primacy of the body and refusing to fear death after all. Toggling back and forth between his own voice and the voice of Christ, the speaker imagines what death will feel like, look like, sound like, and be like in the end while also wondering why this type of promised salvation is only available to humanity.
Once the speaker has resigned himself to God, he continues to struggle with the notion of what, exactly, that means. As such, a number of the Holy Sonnets express complex and somewhat shocking relationships between the speaker and God. Asking to be beaten, ravished, and enthralled, the speaker begins to associate the process of religious cleansing with the experience of erotics and violence. The figure of God comes to represent not only the Christian "father" but also the Petrarchan Beloved whom the speaker must flatter and seduce despite his frustrations with how the affair will end.
As Judgment Day continues to approach, the speaker contemplates the relationship between the individual and the collective, imagining that his body is actually its own little world. Concerned with both his own demise and the apocalypse, the speaker continues to wonder what the end of life will look like and how the experience will feel. Noting that a woman he once loved has already died, the speaker becomes dedicated to acquiring God's mercy so that he will be able to join her in heaven. However, as the sonnets come to a close, the speaker is still unsure whether he is practicing the right form of devotion and whether he will be able to continue his pursuit of mercy while living in constant fear of imminent death.
"Holy Sonnet VI"(from the Gardner Ed.)
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's deliverie.
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.
Beatrix Potter and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies
The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, and first published in July 1909. After two full-length tales about rabbits, Potter had grown weary of the subject and was reluctant to write another. She realized however that children most enjoyed her rabbit stories and pictures, and so reached back to characters and plot elements from The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904) to create The Flopsy Bunnies. A semi-formal garden of archways and flowerbeds in Wales at the home of her uncle and aunt became the background for the illustrations.
From The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies by Beatrix Potter
It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is “soporific.”
I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuces; but then I am not a rabbit.
They certainly had a very soporific effect upon the Flopsy Bunnies!
When Benjamin Bunny grew up, he married his Cousin Flopsy. They had a large family, and they were very improvident and cheerful.
I do not remember the separate names of their children; they were generally called the “Flopsy Bunnies.”
As there was not always quite enough to eat,—Benjamin used to borrow cabbages from Flopsy’s brother, Peter Rabbit, who kept a nursery garden.
Sometimes Peter Rabbit had no cabbages to spare.
When this happened, the Flopsy Bunnies went across the field to a rubbish heap, in the ditch outside Mr. McGregor’s garden.
Mr. McGregor’s rubbish heap was a mixture. There were jam pots and paper bags, and mountains of chopped grass from the mowing machine (which always tasted oily), and some rotten vegetable marrows and an old boot or two. One day—oh joy!—There were a quantity of overgrown lettuces, which had “shot” into flower.
The Flopsy Bunnies simply stuffed themselves with lettuces. By degrees, one after another, they were overcome with slumber, and lay down in the mown grass.
Benjamin was not so much overcome as his children. Before going to sleep he was sufficiently wide awake to put a paper bag over his head to keep off the flies.
The little Flopsy Bunnies slept delightfully in the warm sun. From the lawn beyond the garden came the distant clacketty sound of the mowing machine. The blue-bottles buzzed about the wall, and a little old mouse picked over the rubbish among the jam pots.
About the Author, Margaret Edson
A Teacher's 'Wit' and Wisdom
by Nelson Pressley, February 27, 2000
The paradox about Margaret Edson, widely celebrated playwright, is that she is not really a playwright. Edson herself has been saying so ever since she became a celebrated playwright last season, when her drama, "Wit," written nearly nine years ago, finally took the theater world by storm.
"Wit," about a stern college professor's battle with cancer, is still running in New York, where it won an armload of awards, including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for drama. A production opened in Los Angeles last month, with more to come across the country. HBO is planning a film version. And Judith Light is starring in the national touring company, which opens this week at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater.
Yet despite all this, Edson, who teaches kindergarten at a public school in Atlanta, maintains that it is impossible for her to think of herself as a dramatist.
"I just wrote this one little play," she explains.
This, then, is a story about arguably the most famous kindergarten teacher in America.
On a cold winter night, Edson, 38, stands erect at the front of a conference room in a downtown Washington hotel, charming a few hundred members of the Association of American Colleges and Universities as she lectures on punctuation. The matching of speaker and topic seems sensible: In "Wit," a good deal of philosophy hangs on whether a key phrase in one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets should have a comma or a semicolon. In advertisements, on programs, even on the published play, the spelling of the title includes the semicolon: "W;t."
On Edson's cue, Rosalind Jones, one of her former professors at Smith College, reads from "Wit" with the playwright. Appropriately, Jones plays E.M. Ashford, a former professor of Vivian Bearing, the drama's main character. Edson plays Vivian, a cold, intimidating Donne scholar who has ovarian cancer. Between bouts of what is often brutal (and impersonal, given Vivian's brusque professional methods) medical treatment, Vivian's mind flashes back to scenes like the one Edson and Jones read.
"And death shall be no more, comma," argues Jones as Ashford to a younger Vivian. "Death thou shalt die."
When her role is done, Jones leaves the stage, but Edson keeps reading her own part; she doesn't want the scene to be interrupted by exit applause. This is a lecture, not a theater. What matters now is the lesson.
The next morning Edson, a Washington native, takes the stage of the arts center at Sidwell Friends, where she went to high school in the late 1970s. She talks about Derek Anson Jones, a close friend since their days at Sidwell.
Four days before this, Edson's triumphant return to her alma mater, Jones--who directed the New York and touring versions of "Wit"--died of complications from AIDS. Edson had planned to share the stage with him this morning. Unhappily, she can't, so she stands before the Sidwell crowd and remembers her times with Jones: the way he stole the show from her as Touchstone when she was playing Rosalind in "As You Like It" at Sidwell; the way he optimistically carried the script of the undiscovered "Wit" in his backpack for years as he was building his directing career in New York.
At the end of these sessions (and at the beginnings), Edson gets long, deeply appreciative ovations. Edson, oddly, stands stock still, impervious to the acclaim; she looks as if she's waiting for a bus. This is not what playwrights do. Playwrights bow or smile or wave or blush. Their instinct for dramatic action demands it.
Edson, on the other hand, merely waits--like a teacher--for the room to get quiet.
She'd Rather Teach
Margaret Edson wrote "this one little play" in Washington almost nine years ago. Nothing about her life up till then pointed to dramatic theatrical success.
She grew up across the street from American University; her father, who died in 1977, wrote for newspapers, and her mother continues her career as a social worker. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, later of "Saturday Night Live" and "Seinfeld," lived next door. The two girls would invent dramas with Barbie dolls or act out fantasies of being college girls.
She dabbled in drama at Sidwell, then went to Smith College, majoring in Renaissance history. Not finding herself particularly employable after graduating, she helped a friend move to Indiana, then settled outside Iowa City (where her sister lived) for a summer, selling hot dogs by day and working at night in a bar at the end of a dirt road. Then she went to Rome to live in a French convent for a year.
After Rome, she returned to Washington, landing a job in the cancer ward of a research hospital. Later she worked in publications at the St. Francis Center (now the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing), cranking out grant proposals.
In the summer of 1991, Edson quit her position at St. Francis and got a low-pressure job working in a bike shop near Tenley Circle. In effect, she was taking the summer off so she could write this one little play that had been taking shape in her mind, triggered in part by what she had seen of cancer treatment.
But she would allow herself only the summer to write. She was enrolled at Georgetown University for the fall, ready to pursue a master's in English. She wasn't setting out to become a writer.
"Oh, no," Edson says, horrified by the idea. "That would have been too dangerous for me."
Why does writing seem more dangerous than--
"Than saying, 'Now I'm going to be a waitress?' I don't know. I haven't thought about it." She pauses. "Because if you're a waitress, you're doing something. You're getting up and getting dressed every day and you're part of the world. And if you're a writer, you're just not good for anything. You're not in the mix when you're a writer. It just wouldn't do for me to be a writer."
What she wrote, that one time that she wrote, was rejected from coast to coast. Finally, in January 1995, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., produced "Wit." Edson says she was surprised at how unsurprising the experience was: "It happened exactly like it was in my mind, as though I was whispering to each person what to do. So instead of being astonished by it, it was . . . correct. That was the most exciting thing--to have it be exactly as I imagined it, to the tiniest detail, and to have strangers bringing that about. It was so proper, so correct, that it was thrilling. I was delirious. And that hasn't gone away."
But she says the production, which won a number of Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, did not make her think, "Aha, I'm a playwright."
"Because I was a teacher by then," she says. "By the time it was produced, I was in my fourth year. I was really into it."
While she was completing her master's at Georgetown, Edson had begun teaching English as a second language through her church, St. Margaret's Episcopal on Connecticut Avenue.
"I started liking my tutoring more and more," she recalls, "and feeling less and less comfortable in the academy. So at the end of that year, it was clear to me that I wanted to be in the elementary classroom."
She launches into a topic that genuinely excites her: the alternative certification plan started by the D.C. school system eight years ago. She was in the inaugural group of the program, which allows promising people from other professions to begin teaching without first wading through the certification process, which Edson says takes at least a year (full time) to complete. Instead, they start teaching right away, taking certification classes at the same time.
"In inner-city schools," Edson says, "there's about a 40 percent exit rate in the first three years for teachers. Alternative certification programs have a much higher retention rate because people go into it knowing more about it. They're not 21. We were older and sadder and wiser, and had had some kind of experience in the classroom. So I taught ESL for five years, and I never could have done it without this program. It was really the big break of my life."
Moving On
It was Jones, whose years of study and dues-paying were beginning to yield fruit in and around New York in the mid-1990s, who finally got "Wit" produced on the East Coast. Artistic Director Doug Hughes agreed to let Jones direct it at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., where it opened in October 1997. The play had been rejected for two years even after its success at South Coast Rep. Edson ticks off the reasons listed in her rejection letters: "cast size, subject, too much talk, too academic, too haughty, too unsure of itself, whether it was funny or sad. . . . Now people are scratching their heads about it. But it was unanimous."
The script was cut by an hour at South Coast by Edson (who hated the cuts at the time), dramaturge Jerry Patch and director Martin Benson. "The effect it has now, especially in Derek's production, is of this very fast-swerving drive," she says. "You're brought very quickly over to laughing and then ripped right back into something harrowing--very shocking, in fact. And it happens so quickly and smoothly in his production that it makes me seem like I really know what I'm doing." She laughs.
There is a thick streak of redemption running through "Wit" (and made abundantly clear in its final image) as Vivian Bearing comes to terms with her tough personality, her illness, her isolation and the implications of Donne's poetry. Edson, a Christian, says it's fair to say that she has written a Christian--though certainly not proselytizing--play, yet it is seldom described that way.
"And that's very interesting to me. To me, it's obvious. Duh."
Edson has said repeatedly--for she is invariably asked--that she will not write again until she feels she has something else to say. "If 'Wit' works, it's 'cause it's the one thing that I had in my heart," she insists. "And I'm not going to go and try to crank that up again."
Of course, the pressure of writing a follow-up to "Wit" would be enough to intimidate even more experienced writers.
"I don't think that's what's keeping her from doing it," says Linda Merrill, Edson's longtime partner, by phone from Atlanta. (Merrill, who wrote a number of scholarly art books while at the Freer Gallery for 13 years, is now curator of American art at Atlanta's High Museum of Art.) "She is very wrapped up in her other life, which is her life as a kindergarten teacher. That occupies so much of her thinking and her energy that she doesn't have a lot left over for anything else. So the rest of this is something that's going on somewhere else."
Edson says, "The job I have now, 'people person' doesn't even begin to describe it. I'm with my students every minute of the day--lunch, everything. So the isolated languor of the writer is just really not part of my world." She laughs again, and you can practically hear the relentlessly inquisitive voices of 5-year-olds buzzing in her ear.
Because she has achieved a degree of fame and fortune--and possibly because of the scholarly tone of her play--it confounds people that Edson continues to teach kindergarten. She got a hero's applause, for instance, from the university crowd when she was introduced as the toast of American theater and a public schoolteacher.
"It's a government job," she says later, rolling her eyes in a neat summation of the drab hassles implied by the phrase. "There's nothing heroic about it."
Still, teaching, given her circumstances, strikes people as a heroic choice.
Edson isn't buying it. "Ms. Rivers in the room next door has made the same choice," she says flatly. "Not out of the same number of options. But all my colleagues are doing the same thing I'm doing. People who know me slightly, or who have maybe read about me or heard about me, find it hard to understand. But to people who know me better, it makes perfect sense. They know the ways that I'm . . . odd."
"She loves to draw, for instance," says Merrill, who has known Edson for 20 years dating back to their days at Smith, "but she's not very good at it. They're funny little pictures, so they're just right for kindergartners. She's an excellent mimic--in fact, she used to take mime classes and she can imitate animals in amazing ways. And that's a skill that you wouldn't think she'd have occasion to use.
"Writing is a lonely profession," Merrill adds, "and it was hard for her to write the play. She likes having the immediate response from her students. And if there's something about it that isn't working, she can change it immediately. Whereas writing a play is a long, drawn-out process, and it's a long time before you know whether you've been effective."
Add to that the fact that Edson--a private school product--appears to be one of public education's evangelicals. To be in a public school is "critical" for her, she says. "Completely. The school where I teach is a Title One, free lunch/free breakfast school. My students are people who would be . . . well-served by good education." Her voice is very soft now; she is deeply serious. "I feel very clear about what I'm doing. I'm perfectly sure of the positive impact of what I'm doing. And I'm the only person I know who can say that. Except for the people down the hall, Ms. Rivers next door."
Yet once upon a time she wrote a play, and it became a very big hit. . . .
Edson comes up with an allegory to explain it.
"A friend of ours, in his garden, decided to build a shed. He'd never built anything, and he just got this idea that he was going to build this shed. And so he got all these books and plans, and he poured a foundation. For somebody who'd never built anything to build such a shed was incredible. He worked for the government, came home from work, and worked on this shed. And this was his . . . shed. And I was working on my play. We had the same spirit: that whatever else happens, I'm makin' my shed.
"So now," Edson concludes, "he has his shed. And I have my play."
Overview and Directions: Please let me know if you will be attending AHS Poetry Night at Café Azteca in Lawrence on Tuesday, March 10, 2020 at 7:00 PM. Note: We will arrive at 6 pm for dinner, and event begins with student poetry readings at 7 pm. It usually runs until 8:30 pm, and you are welcome to hear poems by members of the Robert Frost Foundation after the student portion of the event.
Let me know if you are coming and if you are reading, or just there to support. Thank you!
