Wednesday, January 25, 2006

What selfishness I display in my work.

When student writers are given free rein in their choices of subject matter, they write of a three year old girl so struck by her first nursing home meeting with her great-grandmother that upon returning home thirteen hundred miles away, she laboriously, with crayons and Sesame Street instruction, wrote cards to "Lucy" regularly until Lucy died a year and a half later. The cards surrounded Lucy's bed.

Another writes of the fowling piece, jewelry, wedding dresses, table linen, Brownie camera, mallard-headed mahogany cane, and more that she keeps to keep her ancestors alive.

Another writes of a group of nurses, an off-duty x-ray tech, a doctor, and a mother crowded into a hospital room cheering as a sick and weary young woman sweats out her first step in many months.

When student writers are given free rein in their choices of subject matter, they restore their teachers.

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