Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 59—Jessica Lahey Reads "I've Taught Monsters"
129 Plays8 years ago
Hello, friends, fellow CNFers, it’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction. Today I welcome back Jessica Lahey of Episode 51 fame, author of the NYT bestseller “The Gift of Failure” and, most recently, the author of the essay “I’ve Taught Monsters,” which appeared in Issue 63 of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction. For this episode, Jess reads the essay in its entirety and she gives a knockout performance. I noodled around with music for a bit, but I couldn’t find the perfect tracks for it, so I just let it stand: Jess simply reading her wonderful essay. Before we get to her reading I want to ask you something: What are you struggling with? Is there something in your work that’s giving you trouble or are you hitting road blocks? I want to know. Ping me on Twitter or email me. Maybe I can help. Also, be sure to share this with a friend, leave a review on iTunes if you got any value out of this, and let me know if you dig these author readings. Also, it’s Saratoga horse racing season and some of you might not even know that I write words too. My first book, Six Weeks in Saratoga, came out in 2011 courtesy of SUNY Press. It’s a timeless story about the track and the 2009 season. Want to support me and the podcast? Buy a book! It’s in paperback.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, friends. Fellow CNFers, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction and how you can take some of those actionable pieces of advice and apply it to your own work. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara.
Jessica Leahy's Essay Reading
00:00:29
Speaker
Today I welcome back Jessica Leahy of episode 51 fame, author of the New York Times bestseller The Gift of Failure, and most recently the author of the essay I've Taught Monsters. That particular essay appeared in issue 63 of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction. For this episode, Jess reads the essay in its entirety and she gives a knockout performance.
00:00:56
Speaker
I noodle around with music for a bit for this particular essay, but I couldn't find the perfect tracks for it. It just didn't resonate well, so I just let it stand as is, just simply reading her wonderful essay.
Listener Engagement and Feedback
00:01:09
Speaker
Before we get to her reading, I want to ask you something. What are you struggling with? Is there something in your work that's giving you trouble, or are you hitting roadblocks? Do you not know how to start? Do you not know where to pitch? Do you not know how to write a query letter?
00:01:25
Speaker
I want to know, ping me on Twitter or email me. Maybe I can help. Also, be sure to share this with a friend. Leave a review on iTunes. And if you get any value out of this, those reviews are killer. Sharing it also helps. And just let me know if you dig these author readings because they can be pretty cool in a way to showcase the work a little more. And that's always been the ethos of this podcast.
00:01:51
Speaker
So that's it.
Teaching Privileged Students
00:01:52
Speaker
Here's episode 59, Jessica Leahy returning to read from her essay, I've Taught Monsters. Thanks for listening.
00:02:13
Speaker
This is Jessica Leahy reading I've Taught Monsters, part of the Creative Nonfiction How We Teach, issue 63. I've taught monsters, ancient, ravenous monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, Grendel and his mother, and Polyphemus hurling rocks at the sea.
00:02:34
Speaker
Their stories are best taught out loud and without irony, lest dramatic interpretation give way to camp. When Beowulf dives into the heaving depths of the lake in pursuit of Grendel's mother, I let my voice slip down as well into dramatic, low tones to convey the dire threat as the hero observed that swamp thing from hell, that tarn hag in all her terrible strength.
00:02:59
Speaker
then pitch my voice up into a frenzied crescendo, volume rising in tandem with the stakes as Beowulf struggles to clout the fearsome she-monster on the head with his war-sword. For over a decade, I taught monsters to the compliant, privileged, and well-nourished learners of a private school.
00:03:19
Speaker
My duty was clear, to guide them through the rigors of a classical middle school education, thus ensuring acceptance at the vaunted secondary school of their parents' choice. No matter how earnestly I threw myself into a no-holds-barred dramatic monologue, the vast distance of Beowulf's time, language, and culture from our own would blunt the impact of the Tarnhag.
00:03:43
Speaker
Yet, even when I couldn't deliver fearsome drama, my students would toss me a few points for commitments and effort.
Teaching in Rehab: New Challenges
00:03:50
Speaker
They appreciated that I was willing to humiliate myself in service to their education and a thousand-year-old horror story. Sure, these students knew monsters. A few of the smaller horrors slipped in through the cracks in their defenses. Divorce, bad grades, the death of a pet.
00:04:06
Speaker
But, like Grendel and his mother, true terror remained distant, held at bay by a carefully crafted and maintained force field of wealth and privilege, safely and neatly shelved among Tolkien, Rowling, and Pauline before darkness fell.
00:04:23
Speaker
Yes, yes, they'd nod. We understand, Mrs. Leahy. These monsters would have been terrifying for a geet. Yes, yes, we know Mrs. Leahy. Grendel and his mother represent the deep, eternal fears of humankind. Yes, we wrote your assignment in our plan book. We solemnly swear to read actively and reverently one point for imagery, two for alliteration, three for a kenning.
00:04:50
Speaker
And then, two years ago, I bade these privileged learners a tearful goodbye and set off for a distant socioeconomic shore inhabited by very different type of student where the teaching methods I'd used for years no longer translated.
00:05:06
Speaker
Now, as a writing teacher for an inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility for adolescents, I teach the walking wounded of the opioid epidemic. Most of these kids have never heard of the swirling-toothed creatures of Greek mythology, let alone Grendel's mother. However, they know monsters. Monsters as ancient as their early memories, as harrowing as any nightmare.
00:05:31
Speaker
A few lucky ones have supportive families and some have even attended great schools staffed with effective teachers. They arrive well prepared to continue plugging away at their grade level work. Many, however, have no families and have attended dilapidated schools riddled with educational and social cracks. These students don't have time to waste on dactylic hexameter or
00:05:54
Speaker
archaic imagery, they need a battle plan and they need it now. Their monsters loom large, terrible, and close. We don't have a lot of time together due to the rehab's therapy-heavy schedule and the perils of inadequate insurance coverage, so expediency is the new name of my teaching game.
00:06:15
Speaker
I have traded in Beowulf and the Aeneid for the more immediate and accessible works of Jandy Nelson, Sherman Alexi, and Stephen King. I show up to class every day with a lesson plan, but until I take the emotional temperature of my students, I can't know what lessons will work. I arrive at school armed with Plans B, C, D, and E with F and G filed away just in case.
00:06:40
Speaker
School begins with a walk from my renovated farmhouse classroom on the rehab grounds to the locked adolescent unit housed in the east wing. I enter the main door, pass a security desk, and enter a key code in order to gain entrance to the facility. The rehab treats men, women, and adolescents, but these populations are kept strictly segregated because estranged spouses, broken families, and abusive partners often occupy opposite wings of the same building.
00:07:09
Speaker
Paper covers the windows of the entrance to the adolescent wing in a vain attempt to maintain visual and symbolic distance from the mental and physical threat of the adults, but voices seep in through the thin barrier. As the students gather in the common room, I read their faces, take in their postures, listen to their complaints and questions.
00:07:30
Speaker
By the time my students are assembled and the alarm on our exterior door is disabled in preparation for our departure, I've already calculated the likely successes of Plans A through E and have hastily cobbled together H and I in response to the emotional temperature of the group.
00:07:47
Speaker
The class changes from day to day as wary new admissions come in and trusting veteran students are discharged. A single charismatic ringleader can persuade the rest of the class to give me the benefit of their collective doubt or upend the confidence of the entire group. On the worst days, when fuses are short and emotions are brittle, I toss my well laid plans to the winds as we walk the short distance from the unit to the classroom and once again put my trust in Stephen King.
00:08:19
Speaker
King's On Writing, a memoir of the craft, has become a particular favorite among my students. My students know kids like the young Stephen King. Heck, they may even be young Stephen Kings, writing stories in their beds under the eaves and playing in the barons of their small New England towns. Many of these kids have also lived poor, dog-patch with no sense of humor, but it's King's struggles with addiction that give him immediate credibility in my classroom.
00:08:47
Speaker
My copy of the book falls open to the sections I read most often in order to frame writing assignments. Sometimes it falls open to the first section of the book where King recounts his earliest memories expressed as snapshots from a herky-jerky childhood. He writes of medical horrors, farting babysitters, and wasp-filled cinder blocks with a clarity and humor that captures the attention of even my most distractible students.
00:09:13
Speaker
In response to these scenes, I ask my students to emulate King's style and describe their own snapshots, no matter how fragmented. Most of the time, this assignment is a hit, but for some, it's torture. Students who have endured nightmarish years in group homes and foster care or under the wrath of abusive parents push their chairs away from the offending blank paper proclaiming
00:09:37
Speaker
I don't remember anything from my childhood. These protests usually give way to a storytelling session in which they tell rather than write their histories, while I take notes and guide them back toward the intimidating permanence of ink on paper.
00:09:52
Speaker
A student may begin her essay in the first person, up close and personal with her memories, then pulled back as her story begins to swerve too close to the painful territory. Her first person, I, falls away to a second person, you, or even a third person, she, as my student struggles to distance herself from the uncle tapping on her bedroom door, or her mother passed out on the hallway floor.
00:10:17
Speaker
My job is not to analyze the reasons for the distance, but to help her locate her first person, I, to face her monsters head on, from the introduction all the way through to the denouement.
Using Stephen King to Confront Fears
00:10:30
Speaker
On other days, when the class needs to be swept up in the vast panorama of narrative rather than a mere snapshot, I read the final section of On Writing, in which King recounts being run down by a negligent driver on the back roads of Western Maine. Before I begin, I ask my students to raise their hands when they hear something that strikes them as great descriptive language, writing that transports them out of the classroom and onto the shoulder of Maine State Route 5, or the helipad at Central Maine Medical Center.
00:11:00
Speaker
Hands fly up as they hear about King's leg reduced to so many marbles in a sock and the Pepsi that his wife Tabitha brings him described as sweet and cold and good. Maybe, just maybe, a student will remark that the description of the Pepsi sounds a lot like the plums from the poem I read to them the week before, which were also so sweet and so cold.
00:11:29
Speaker
It's only happened once, but it was glorious. My favorite assignment, however, is one in which we name our monsters. And the excerpt I read for this assignment is a favorite among my students. In it, King recounts the moment he realized his drinking had spiraled out of control. Rather than deciding to get well, he doubled down on his addiction with the only hand he had left, lying and secrecy.
00:11:57
Speaker
But, for the ten years when King's conscious mind was occupied with that losing hand, King's unconscious was hard at work, obsessively chronicling in his stories the circumstances, narratives, and most notably, the monsters of his addiction. This was the decade of the alien-come-cocaine protagonist in the Tommyknockers, and of Annie Wilkes, the drug-pushing psychopathic nurse in misery.
00:12:22
Speaker
As King admits in On Writing, Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie's pet rider.
00:12:32
Speaker
My students get it. Even when they have not yet admitted out loud that they have a problem with drugs or alcohol, even when they have been committed to rehab against their will, even when they are fighting against the reality of their addictions with teeth and nails and tears, they get it. They know what it's like when the monsters escape from their subconscious even as they painstakingly lock their doors and cover their windows with the thickest paper they can find.
00:12:59
Speaker
Once Stephen King has revealed the true form of his most secret monsters, I ask my students to do the same. If Annie Wilkes is Stephen King's addiction incarnate, what's yours?
00:13:11
Speaker
Journey into the dark places, the black tarn, a haunted basement or a back alley, and report back to us. Show, don't tell. Help us see your monster's sharp teeth or lice-infested pelt. Smell its moldering rot or acid tang, and hear the drip, drip, drip of its copious, greenish drool.
00:13:36
Speaker
The goal of the lesson is to help them expose, describe, and contain their private terrors on the page, to imprison them within the safe confines of ink, line, and margin.
Encouraging Reluctant Writers
00:13:47
Speaker
If I've done my job well and have managed to infect my students with a tiny bit of the enthusiasm that I worked up during my introduction to the assignment, 9 out of 10 students will agree to put pen to paper. I used to let the 10th student off the hook, particularly if he'd just come off a bad detox or if she'd recently had a grueling therapy session, but not anymore.
00:14:08
Speaker
Now, I view a 90% response rate as a solid starting place, a preliminary offer, if you will, and an opportunity to hone my negotiation skills. I distribute pencils and paper to the 90%, and while they work out their first drafts, I guide the tenth toward the creepy barons of his own history and hand him back the pencil he tossed at me in frustration.
00:14:31
Speaker
In the two years I've been teaching in the rehab, my win-loss record has improved steadily, mainly because I've heard all the excuses before. I've already dropped out of high school, so this is bullshit. It's popular, usually uttered while tipping back on two chair legs and pushing my preferred pencil and paper to the far side of the desk. I know how to write already is another perennial classic.
00:14:56
Speaker
You can't make me do jack shit is my favorite, and unfortunately for the student not strictly true. Participation in an education program is a mandatory part of graduating from rehab, and a gentle reminder usually clears up any confusion on this point. While I've learned how to respond to these protestations, I've also learned that the excuses which students offer are hardly ever the real cause for their reluctance to write.
00:15:22
Speaker
My job then is not to deflect or smack down their excuses, but to find out more about the journey they'll have to take in order to get a glimpse of their monsters.
00:15:33
Speaker
For many of these kids, writing can be just as frightening as conjuring the monsters of their addictions. Some of my students fell through the gaps years ago and have remained undetected or overlooked for so long they can hardly string together a coherent paragraph. Others have undiagnosed learning disorders that render their printed work illegible and unintelligible when read aloud. For others, the monsters are simply too big to fit on one sheet of paper.
00:16:01
Speaker
Fortunately, the team of therapists who support my efforts in the classroom and counsel the kids once they return to the safety of the ward stock plenty of paper for their use. Reams of it if needed. Once I've persuaded my students to participate and once they've begun to get those first stubborn and awkward words done, I write too, even if it's just my grocery list. They need me to go away for a bit and give them time and space to establish a rhythm.
00:16:27
Speaker
As distracted as I may appear, I'm in full-on peripheral vision class monitor mode. I hold my breath as the scratch scratch of pencils on paper begins hesitantly, then rises to a crescendo, and eventually slows as they find natural endpoints to their descriptions. As they finish, I ask for permission to read their work and thank them when they give it. Their monsters are as diverse as the students.
00:16:56
Speaker
Some are literal monsters, lifted straight from horror films or comic books, caricatures of evil crafted under the 16-point centered title, My Monster. My Monster is green and orange. It's something that is fun but not good for me, one student writes in a page of simple sentences and elementary vocabulary. Another student conjures his monster in more subtle shades.
00:17:21
Speaker
something like impure, filthy, conspicuously unclean, that walked on two feet, kind of dragging himself along like he was both emotionally and physically exhausted.
00:17:36
Speaker
Some of these monsters lie, feigning love and comfort. My demon feeds off me, making mistakes and bad decisions. It knows that when I feel bad about myself, I'm far more likely to run back into its arms, so it's always there. Just waiting.
00:17:53
Speaker
Some monsters are not monsters at all, but rather ordinary people or objects and situations beyond their control. One boy likens his addiction to a baseball that craves flight and free trajectory of a home run, yet knows it will crash to earth unprotected.