A 21-Year-Old English Nerd Learns to Read

So, this past semester I took a class called "Expository Writing II" in which we were allowed to write whatever we wanted, as long as it was, "nonfiction prose." So I wrote blog posts. But none of them actually made it onto my blog, because I was busy tearing them apart and nitpicking and trying to make my professor's suggestions sound the way I wanted them to sound. So honestly, I edited most of them to death and don't really feel like posting them any more.

But I'd like to publish a few survivors over the coming weeks, followed probably and hopefully by some thoughts on my recent trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and also on some books I've been reading. Because it's summer! And that means time to write things that aren't for school! Even though these technically were for school... but you get the point...

I am future English teacher. Fear me.

If when speaking to you I wrinkle my forehead and look up and to the right, I am silently correcting your grammar. My free reading list a) exists, and b) last year included Austen, Atwood, Fitzgerald and Vonnegut. I didn't choose the literary life. It spotted me in second grade reading group getting pumped about the social commentary of Andrew Clements' Frindle and declared me an indisputable nerd. 

Second grade Frindle fans become English teachers’ pets in high school, and then they go to college and study English Ed to one day make their own pets of likeminded students and torture the rest with social commentary and grammar correction. It's the circle of literary life. 

When I'm sitting around on summer vacation reading Fitzgerald, I'm usually analyzing and dreaming of classroom discussions. I am an analyzing addict. But I've recently discovered a phenomenon that challenges the foundations of my nerdy perspective and I think, maybe, will make me a better English teacher.

This year in my string of literature courses, I found myself in "Children’s and Adolescent Literature." This will be great, I thought. I'll read teen fiction and think of new ways to torture teenagers. But I was surprised to find that, since this was a literature and not an education course, the professor expected me to read for myself. That meant, she challenged, not analyzing but just feeling and identifying and reading. 

It seemed an unfair request. And then. We read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. 

No, this was not my first time reading Harry Potter. I was a proper child of the phenomenon. But this time I read it with the lens of my course's foundational question: What makes good children's literature? 

And I was stymied. Traveling through the familiar corridors of spells and moving portraits, I kept my eyes open for symbols, characterization, themes, and the undeniable spark of greatness. Harry Potter is incontestably a great work of our time. But I could not for the life of me figure out why. What made this book so different? I came up with only one explanation: it was magic. 

So I started thinking about other literary wizards, and that led to John Green, an author I consider the most realistic and impactful voice in current young adult fiction. And I imagined approaching any one of his novels (several of which are taught in high school classrooms) with an analytical eye. 

The young adults John has created (yes, we're on a first name basis) stared out from the pages at me with the same defiance as Harry. There was little for me to divine from the text, and this time I identified two reasons. A) The books did not lack symbolism. But the symbols did not need explanation. Right there on the page, they made clear sense and served their purpose. B) They were written in a way that openly invited the reader to make of it what you will. They contained within their numbered pages an infinite space: room for the perspectives and understandings of a wide array of readers.

I am newly awed by these remarkable works of fiction that defy even my propensity toward analysis. They are good stories, well told. They stand alone. 

I am reminded of Mark Twain's note that opens The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." 

I never understood that. I think I know now what Twain was trying to say. I'm not willing to relinquish all my English class analysis in the face of Huck Finn. But I am willing to treat those English class things as tools to refine my students' and my understanding of the great, not as building blocks to create it. Greatness is just story. 

John Green, too, sees fit to preface his The Fault in Our Stars with a plea to his readers. He writes, "This book is a work of fiction. I made it up. Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide in a story. Such efforts attack the very fact that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species." 

This nerd turned English teacher will always like symbolism. I will always like anything that helps me understand and appreciate literature’s delectability. But the ability to analyze symbols is not the most important thing I will give my students. That gift will be made-up stories that matter. 

Nykerk Hall of Music

Music expresses that which cannot be said, and upon which it is impossible to keep silent. - Victor Hugo

"How was Chile?" (Variations include How was Argentina, Spain, South America and wherever you were)
"It was great. It's good to be back though."

This conversation, inevitably, is the current framework to my life. I'll admit to being a little tired of it, but all things considered, I don't mind too much. Mostly because both of those assertions are fundamentally true.

My trip was great. It was a whole host of other adjectives as well, but great is an adequate descriptor. And it is, refreshing, energizing, comforting, strange and wonderful to be back at Hope.

Hope College is, I think, a much more complex place than its tulip-toting image. And there are aspects, especially in regards to the unstated expectations this environment puts on us in social and spiritual arenas, that I was more than ready to leave behind last fall. And to those who are experiencing similar frustrations, my advice is just that: leave.

Make it happen. I know there is scheduling and finances and countless other excuses, but I firmly believe you have control over your priorities and if travel is something you truly desire there is always a way. Take a May Term, go on an immersion trip, spend a semester, a summer, a week outside the bubble. Yes I said it. I acknowledge the existence of the bubble. I spend a lot of time arguing against that concept, because I believe that your "bubble" is your personal experience and bemoaning being trapped in it is useless, because there will be one wherever you go. I had a bubble in Chile. But it was a different bubble. And that can make all the difference.

I'm going to get off my Study Abroad soap box now because what I really want to talk about is how grateful I am now to be here at Hope. In these first days of the semester, which I think hold more novelty and promise for me than they did even Freshman year, I am blessed by the expected and the unexpected.

I relish returning to the most infinitesimal of routines.

In Dimnent Chapel, the preacher says, "This is the word of the LORD," and I join the murmur - "Thanks be to God."

In my cantankerous old car, I turn familiar corners without thinking.  

In the smooth-cornered classrooms, I finger the pages of syllabi, read over education department policies (In English! I still marvel). I breathe in the smell of school.

The ice crystals that formed on the inside glass of our front door

But then - surprise! The snow pours down and they give us real live actual snow days, for crying out loud. The unexpected extended vacation is delectable, my new roommate and I hole up in our lovely house and watch old episodes of "Downton Abbey."

At the evening worship service, Sara, a senior from Honduras, is invited to read the communion rites in Spanish. My ears perk up and I drink in the silky sounds like Chilean wine.

What I am trying to say is that I am delighted to live for a short time in this strange series of moments where the most familiar things seem new.

Here's just one more:

I swing open the door to Nykerk, pick up a thick black folder and perch on the edge of a red backed auditorium seat. The Second Altos, few and proud, are glad to see I have returned. The director goes to the piano, plays a series of notes. It's just a warm-up, one I've sung a thousand times.

But this time, when I open my mouth, I am spellbound. The sound swells around me, imperfect, we have just begun to breathe. But that point of beauty, one harmony of many voices - I'll never be able to put it into to words.

Thus ends the first semester I'd gone without singing in a choir since the third grade. I have returned to the music - and the textbooks, and the snow.

Thanks be to God.

After it warmed up, I went for a Sunday evening walk. Sunset over frozen Lake Macatawa

Poem #4

I actually wrote this poem a year ago, but its one of my favorites and I thought I would post it to celebrate my return to the land of windmills and snow. And maybe motivate me to blog again. It's good to be home.

Holland, MI

I live here.

City of south mitten territory.

And I am always writing of islands,

full of temples and wet tropical heat.

Here we boast impervious to any weather,

when it is 50 degrees in February and snows in April.

Start downtown – where the coffee shops two blocks apart

with letters for names spar lazily for customers.

The streets lined with trees planted by my great-great-grandfather.

Last spring when the tulips bloomed early so only stems were left

by the time the festival brought elephant ears

and wooden-shoed dancers to the streets.

Summer on its heels and the street performers on Thursday nights:

Justin’s card tricks draw a crowd

of round-faced children and their incredulous grown-ups.

There is a belly dancer and a human statue,

and seafoam toffee sweet and spongy from the Peanut Store on the way down 8^th Street.

On the other side of the school, cut across the tracks

to the donut shop on the corner by the train station.

The Amtrak whistles by going south to Chicago,

while students slump together in booths at 2AM when everyone knows

the donuts are hot and fresh and if you ask the man behind the counter

in boxers and an apron he will tell you

about the refugee camps on the way from China.

The neighborhoods thick with 1^st and 3^rd and 4^th Reformed Churches.

You run out of corners at Lake Macatawa 

with the piers full of boats and Kollen Park.

On 17^th Street with Mi Favorita Grocery where you can buy paletas,

and bicycles the local hoodlums strip for parts sit like skeletons in side yards.

Spanish spills from front porches,

families lucky not to live in the migrant camps

who will still leave for Texas in winter.

Temple Tattoos which caters to the impulsive decisions of college students

and high schoolers smelling of pot –

follow them to Smallenburg Park next to the rescue mission,

where the skate park is not quite as good as the one they tore down

so the college could erect a new music building.

Take River Avenue to the north side of town,

past all the buildings plastered with Dutch names:

Dykstra, Dewitt, Van Raalte, VanAndel, VanAnything.

When the houses emerge on the other side they are big and brick-solid.

These are lake folk,

sending their children to schools with Spanish emersion programs,

and toting their little blonde heads to the beach

where the dunes rise and the water is cold and unsalted.

In the winter when the lighthouse ices over

and the waves freeze strange and artic.  

Over the rise the DeVos mansion sprawls like something medieval.

Here we speak of bubbles, which must have shimmering walls.

We point to home on our hands and

put on firm Midwestern pride like winter jackets.

In the morning the lake effect pours relentless from the skies,

blanketing the numbered streets from 1^st to 152^nd.

The train tracks, the forgotten bicycles and the trees downtown. 

All of Holland, covered in snow.

Home

My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. - Wendell Berry

Those of you who have stuck with me from the beginning (thanks for your support, Mom and Dad) will remember that I began this process as somewhat of a blogging cynic. But as hard as this is for me, I'm going to have to admit I was wrong.

Turns out, blogging my experience in Chile has been incredibly constructive and even necessary for me. Sitting down every week and sorting out my days and thoughts into something that was not just words on a page but a structured, thematic reflection (Shameless English nerd. I think that's clear by this point.) allowed me to understand what I was learning as I was learning it. And in the hardest moments, reading through those reflections reminded me that I was actually enjoying myself as well as growing and changing. 

Another surprise is that this blog has given me a chance to enjoy writing more than I have since about the third grade. Thank you to each one of you who expressed to me face to face or via facebook that you were able to identify with or learn from something I wrote here. Once again, the wise and wonderful Ali expressed it perfectly. She told me, "You make your experience meaningful for other people." And I sincerely hope that's true. It's what I've been trying to do. 

Welcome home hug from my awesome little sister. 

Thank you for coming with me to this point. Now, I am sitting in the green chair in my blue bedroom, the same spot where I wrote my first post, looking out the window at the moon and the darkness falling over snow-covered ground: December as I know it. And it strikes me how all the things I dreamed about sitting in the various bedrooms I occupied over the past few months, slide so quickly and comfortably back into normal for me. And that old normal, the one with the morning bus rides and all of the bread - it quickly becomes intangible. Stories now. But stories I know I will be telling, to whomever is willing to listen, for the rest of my life. 

I have to say that its been a blessed homecoming. I'm so grateful to my family for their grace for Spanglish and for not looking at me too oddly when I bring my mate into the kitchen. And to my friends for asking good questions or just talking about regular old Hope College stuff with me. 

For the first time in my life, I truly feel like I'm able to manage my expectations for this next part. I know full well that not everyone will get it. That's totally and completely fine. I've come back before, and I've also sat stateside and welcomed others back, and I know. I know that the sudden shift in realities can feel overwhelming, but the truth is that I have experienced something different. And really, that's no different than my friend who goes to school in California or my sister in Pennsylvania. I can't picture their environments either. 

Place matters, and every experience is different. But just because my experience took place in Chile for a while, that doesn't mean any more or less that it was personal and special, or that I am privileged to share it in memories with the people who were there with me, and in stories with the people who were not. Life goes on, here. I am different. And so are you. I can't wait to see how. 

The warm welcome of 13 degrees.

So in that spirit, and also because of what I expressed at the beginning of this post, I've decided to keep posting on this blog. I'd like to keep thinking things through in this space. My current plan is to try and write every other week. I won't be posting anything on Facebook, so if you'd like to keep reading it will be completely up to you. 

So. So long to Chile. I can't guarantee any adventures to come here, but right now that sounds perfectly alright to me. Once again, thank you for reading. Thank you for listening to me. It means more than probably any of you know. 

Algarrobo

Life is school, and you gotta show up. - Kid President

After 4 weeks of research had been printed, bound, presented, toasted and shared - and before 19 gringos and 4 patient program directors gathered to close the program and celebrate with a delicious meal, I took off my tennis shoes and walked down the beach.

I didn't have anything particular on my mind, just the surreal sensation of watching the waves roll onto the same sand that had welcomed a scared and weary girl to Chile.

It's hard to see the sailboats but doesn't it kind of look like my blog background?

And that's when I saw Ali, a great friend and one of the wisest and most passionate leaders I have ever met, coming toward me at the end of her run. She stopped, and we talked. We talked about the strange feeling of leaving so soon, and the experiences to which we will be returning.

And then Ali said something I will never forget. She said, "I came here to go back."

When Ali goes back to the University of Utah, she will be campaigning for student body president. And she will be taking the work and learning she did here about education and politics and movements of young people and creating change right where she lives. (And that's just one of the stories of the incredibly cool people who came to Santiago with me this semester.)

And me? I too, came here to go back. I came from a world where I had an obvious place. I knew what I was doing there, whether that was singing in choir or teaching ESL or hanging out in the pine grove and Scott Hall. And in those places I was capable of spending most of my time thinking about other people. Welcoming them into that world I knew so well, keeping the conversation away from me, and how anxious I truly felt.

And then I left, the full weight of that anxiety stripped bare and hoping just to get through and come back and figure things out from there. Then, in a circle in the airport, I met 18 people with whom I would be spending one of the most intense and significant experiences of my life. And I was afraid of them. I was afraid of how different they were from me, and how intelligent and politically aware they were and how I could find no comfort in welcoming them to anything because I didn't know where I was.

And guess what I found out? They were scared too. Like me, they missed their families, and got lost on public transportation and frustrated with the language and pretended to know who Paulo Freire was. But we were all welcomed. We were welcomed by the mountains and the campo and our own little home called Casa SIT.

And we welcomed each other. Carolina helped me find my way. Katherine invited me to explore the city with her. Albert made sure I was safe. Kendra found tranquility with me. Roshard encouraged me to think deeply. Andrea touched me with her vulnerability, and wrote an awesome and at first seemingly impossible Spanish paper with me (on Paulo Freire, thank you very much.) Reciprocidad. Solidaridad. 

And eventually I stopped looking at their passions and wisdom and feeling inferior. And I started feeling confident. Confident that when these people take old passions and new learning back to their own places, there will be hope for change, from the New York Islands to Salt Lake City.

And me. I'll be back in Holland, Michigan. It's no secret that I love that place. But the girl who came to Chile with her mind and heart set on going back, she's gone. There won't be any picking up where I left off. Instead, I will be continuing on from here. Letting the experience of three and a half months thinking about learning and hope in a funny thin country spill over into ESL classes and the pine grove. Ready to stop clenching so tight and let in a little more peace.

Ready to be welcomed back.

I warned Ali that our encounter on the beach might show up in my blog. She said, "Then let me take a picture."

Poema #3

I swear I didn't plan to do this it just happened organically. 

Last Days in Santiago

These days,

the sun wakes me before the alarm,

streaming through blue checkered curtains.

Ready to stretch the days into longer hours,

just as I have begun to count them.

At the breakfast table,

I eat ripe, in-season peaches.

On this end of the axis,

summer spins on the last calendar page

and ads for Christmas swimwear.

The dog-walkers emerge from hibernation;

children play in sprinklers on grassy strips.

On Sunday mornings in my neighborhood,

they cone off half the main street for cyclists and joggers.

The mountains sit stoic.

Shadows dance across them in different patterns:

they have not moved a muscle.

After I have gone into the hills,

down further South

to the white tips of volcanoes,

brushed the coastline with my fingers.

Seen the rough speckled summits,
out the airplane window,

stretched out underneath like a blanket.

Crossed the borders, and come back.

The man-made towers of steel and glass,

they have not changed either.

But surely something has.

When the men on the street

mutter Que hermosa as I pass,

I purse my lips and walk straight.

But when the play ballads on the bus,

I give them my spare change.

I have learned to press the verb endings flat,

butcher grammar to show affection,

of which there is plenty to go around.

I have learned to say chao in a chorus.

Chao, cuidense, que les vaya bien.

And now, finally –

Adios.

La Sebastiana

En mi casa he reunido juguetes pequeños y grandes, sin los cuales no podría vivir. El niño que no juega no es niño, pero el hombre que no juega perdió para siempre al niño que vivía en él y que le hará mucha falta. 

In my house I have brought together playthings small and large, without which I could not live. The child that does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child that lived in him and that he will greatly miss.

-Pablo Neruda

Well, I tried to get on the bus and instead of helping me up and saying, "Hola, Señorita Laura," the driver closed the doors in my face. I must be back in the city.

There were, however, some pretty amazing things waiting for me back here. Like the beautiful faces of my Seet-mates (so named for the Spanish pronunciation of SIT: Seet) who greeted me when I showed up un-announced at Thanksgiving dinner with hugs and laughter. And the beautiful time we spent sharing our holiday, however rag tag it might have been. Failing pumpkin pie, I made peach cobbler and Sloan showed up with the perfect accompaniment: blueberry sauce. No cranberries to be found either. And the ability to skype my family while they ate their pumpkin pie (I'm not bitter, really) and Katie played me her Thanksgiving song on the ukelele. So cute I felt like I was in a Google Plus commercial. And showers. I really like showers, guys.

Also, summer came to the city while I was away and I seem to have returned a friendlier, more vibrant and fashionable place. I think maybe Santiaguinos just don't like the cold.

Nevertheless, my first move upon coming back to Santiago was to leave again, and go to Valpo. I felt I had some unfinished business there. Namely, the unfinished business was to enjoy, but I also accomplished a goal I've had since arriving here: visit all three of Pablo Neruda's houses.

Isla Negra

I would generally consider myself a fan of Neruda (though I need to read more), before coming to Chile because of the complex beauty of his poetry and now as an icon of Chile's art and struggle. But his houses are an art of their own.

La Chascona

Neruda believed in space, and its capacity to shape experiences. And, like any good writer, he believed in symbolism. Isla Negra (near Algarrobo, where we spent our orientation weekend) stretches long and sprawling, like Chile. La Chascona, which I loved as its own island of serenity in the middle of Santiago, is for all the world, a ship. And La Sebastiana in Valpo goes up, with one room for each of its five stories, each one curving cozily in on its inhabitants in stacked circles.

La Sebastiana

I'd have to say Isla Negra is my favorite, partially because it houses in grandest scope the poet's collections. There are paintings of watermelons lining the walls, a table full of guitars and a whole room full of seashells. When asked about being coleccionista, Neruda replied that he was in fact cosista. That is, not so much a collector as a pursuer of things.

Something about that sentiment has stuck with me. I love significant objects. I just like tangibility. I like being able to hold reminders of my experiences in my hands, trace my memories with the my fingers. A bead shaped like a turtle from Pine Ridge. A teacup that belonged to my grandmother. A small smooth stone I picked up outside my back door in Chapod.

Surrounded by these things, I feel at home. I feel a little uncomfortable admitting that, because it feels slightly materialistic. But I think that in reality it's the opposite. I have little interest in things with no meaning. It the objects that tell stories that I love. Symbols, you might say.

El Poeta

In Neruda's houses, there are African masks, European paintings and Asian screens, momentos from his travels that he brought home with him to Chile, where he would sit comfortably in a chair he christened too, (called La Nube, The Cloud) and look at the water and write.

I think that's a way to make travels part of home. I'd like to surround myself with my stories from far-off places. Chapod, Santiago, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires. Algarrobo - where we will soon return to present our research projects. Now with altered perspectives, profound friendships and significantly improved Spanish. And then I will pack up my suitcase, with my stories and my things.

Disclaimer: The above quote really has nothing to do with post, except that Neruda said it and I liked it.