Becoming a Writing Coach: An Origin Story
Why did I become a writing coach? Because I had my first teaching job at Brooklyn College and was faced with a classroom of Haitian immigrants, I needed to learn how to teach writing. Not literature analysis, reading, or grammar. Writing using those aforementioned subjects, a sense of humor, a willingness to learn on my feet, and a deep empathy for my students struggling to remain in the United States, take care of their families, and find jobs. They wrote about these things, and I found work by James Baldwin, Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and articles in the newspaper, stories about assimilation, loss of home, and identity. We wrote and we read and I corrected their essays and found forms like letters home, poetry, and storytelling that helped them become better writers. I learned the teaching of writing is an extension of voice which is personal, unique and easily silenced or distorted. I loved that work. I still do.
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Finding the Self: Identity and Serenity
Am I still a daughter after my parents have died? I am mulling this issue of identity with the new relationship, a granddaughter born to my only child. He is now a father, and I am still his mother, but that role has moved into the shadows while this new history is formed. I can remember the wonder of him, the shock of understanding my life no longer mattered more, the intensity of love I had never experienced.
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The Baby, the Cruise, and How to Stay Married
She’s gorgeous and the best moment was my beloved son saying, “Mom, you can watch a YouTube video on how to hold a baby.” I, being a perfect mother did not respond with sarcasm or guilt inducing lists of all the labor (sic) involved giving birth to him (seventy-two hours of back labor). I smiled and said, “Thank you darling, maybe I will.” They are new parents with their Ming vase. My role is a wonderful mystery. How to be a grandmother is a manual I could use. I love her from a place I have yet to understand.
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