A few weeks ago I found a folder labeled Student writing I love and opened it to find copies of stories and poems and memoirs collected over years.

A story titled Eight Days brought me back to a woman who entered the classroom silently, eyes down, and slipped into a seat. She never raised her hand, she never read aloud, she emanated shyness and something else, something that told me someone awful had made her feel she didn’t matter. Pay attention to her, I thought.

A memoir passage about a child who hid on a high shelf in a closet because her mother couldn’t reach her there brought me back to the eighteen-year-old who walked through the door of my memoir-writing classroom, her motorcycle helmet tucked under one arm. Pay attention to her, I thought.

I remember standing outside classrooms when I was going through times that felt impossible, thinking I had nothing left, no way could I walk through that door and teach. But a single line or look from a student can restore me to myself. The art of writing is sacred, and so is the art of teaching.

To Certain Students, by V. Penelope Pelizzon

On all the days I shut my door to light,
all the nights I turned my mind from sleep

while snow fell, filling the space between the trees
till dawn ran its iron needle through the east,

in order to read the scribblings of your compeers,
illiterate to what Martian sense they made

and mourning my marginalia’s failure to move them,
you were what drew me from stupor at the new day’s bell.

You with your pink hair and broken heart.
You with your knived smile. You who tried to quit

pre-law for poetry (“my parents will kill me”).
You the philosopher king. You who saw Orpheus

alone at the bar and got him to follow you home. You
green things, whose songs could move the oldest tree to tears.

For more information on V. Penelope Pelizzon, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter