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An End and A Beginning
(Or Mining Your Own Treasures)

Liz Newall
Clemson University
Clemson, SC

And he was wonderful.

At Clemson, I went to a reading by Nikki Giovanni. She interspersed her poetry with her observations on life, education, justice, injustice, and humanity based on her own experiences, somewhat different from those of Kurt Vonnegut.

And she was wonderful.

At North Carolina readings, I listened as Reynolds Price revealed some of his childhood experiences, his becoming a writer—and Doris Betts as she recalled some of her very different writer's beginnings. They were, of course, not the same as Kurt Vonnegut's nor Nikki Giovanni's. and at the risk of sounding like Browning's Last Duchess--"too easily impressed/too soon made glad"—they too were wonderful.

It occurs to me now why these varied writers were equally impressive—they had mined their own unique treasures.

When Bea asked me to speak at the SCCTE conference, she said I could tell something about my own writer's beginnings, a little of my life as a South Carolina writer. This takes a look back, as reflections tend to do. But as I recall a few images that somehow played a part in my becoming a writer, I ask you to retrace your own beginnings and to consider your own treasures.

Think of your unique path to the love of the word, the story, the greater appreciation of literature. That inner force that calls on you to compare headlines to classics, that understands how myth is often "truer" than what most people think as true. That force that led you to become a teacher of writing and a writing teacher.

I don't think you can review the evolution, or convolution, of a life's calling—especially writing—without recognizing the role of teachers.

My sister, who teaches at Code Elementary in Seneca, was my first teacher, making sure I knew the alphabet and numbers one to ten and especially how to write my name before I started school so I wouldn't "embarrass the family." She was my own private kindergarten teacher. She sat me in front of a little free-standing chalk board—she was in her glory—and I learned.

But my first official teacher was Miss Hodges, keeper of the path to wisdom throughout first grade. It was a narrow path. I recall a classmate walking out of her shoe while we were marching to chapel. She left the shoe where it lay rather than break line. My sister, who had Miss Hodges two years before, recalls the same episode. I'm not sure if the shoe thing happened each year with a fresh victim or if it had become part of the Miss Hodges' mythology.

But what I do recall about Miss Hodges that had a bearing on my appreciation for books is an exercise she did about midway in the year. She directed us toward a shelf of books that we'd not been allowed to use before in class. Then she told us to get up from our desks, go to the shelf, select a book that we "liked," and bring it back to our desks. I can remember the sudden thrill of an adventure, of actually being able to choose—not usually an option in Miss Hodges' classroom. I picked out a book that was fairly thin, just right for small hands. It had a bright cover and large beautiful words. The words were spaced on the page so that I could appreciate the shape of the letters and the way they came together to make words.

I thought I had done rather well, but Miss Hodges did not. She said she assessed our reading ability by the books we chose. In my case, I had chosen an "unchallenging" book, she said, indicating my reading ability was not very advanced.

My first reaction was that I had been tricked by the bright little book. But then, I realized, even as a six-year-old, I had been tricked not by the bright little book but by Miss Hodges. It was not a critically painful lesson, but it was a lesson. I learned that my own opinion about a book is more valid than someone else's. and I should add that I've since vilified Miss Hodges a time or two in my own fiction (probably much more than she deserves). The bright little book, too, has been vindicated.

As though God and book spirits of the universe took pity on Miss Hodges' students, the next year in second grade we had Miss Kate. Miss Kate glowed with love for us, her students. All the subjects she taught could have been my favorite—but the one activity I remember most is that she read to us. and the book I remember most was The Secret Garden. What joy! She read, and we listened. Each day I looked forward to escaping into the world of English gardens and mystery and children very much unlike me, and yet somehow like me too.

I recall few other creative exercises the rest of elementary school, but I do recall one assignment—"go home and write a poem"—which had an unexpected impact on my sense of writing. I think it was in the fourth grade, but the teacher who made the assignment fades with the significance of what happened. That night, I sat on my twin bed in the high-ceiling room I shared with my sister and her twin bed and stared at my surroundings. I looked, perhaps for the first time, at the pale blue walls, the tall heavy-glassed windows, the oil heater wedged into the bricked-up fireplace—good fodder for writing a poem now, but not then.

My eyes settled on the most colorful, dynamic item in the room: a leaky 10 gallon aquarium. Despite the fact that most fish we bought from Woolworth's didn't make it past the first week, the tank that particular night was alive with color, shapes, movement. I stared at the zebra fish and neon and whatever else had survived our hard well water.

And as I stared at the fish, I begin to wonder what they must think of their surroundings beyond the tank—the larger world of blue walls and mahogany furniture and the giants who moved around them. What they must think of me. It was at this point that I "switched places" with the fish through my imagination and began writing from "inside the tank." It was a moment. The teacher liked the poem well enough to display it in the classroom, even though the handwriting was nearly illegible and the lines wandered up and down without intention. For me, it was a treasure.

The experience of shifting points of view was enough to make me a writer, if not in practice, then in potential. I even wrote occasionally at home for the fun of it. I wrote a screen play for "Gunsmoke"—Miss Kitty was kidnapped while Marshal Dillon was out of town. I wrote mostly dialogue that went something like this: "Don't blame yourself, Matt. You didn't know they'd take me with them." "I should have, Miss Kitty." "But how could you?" "It's my job." "Oh, Matt!" The marshal starts to say something, then tips his hat and walks away. So it wasn't Spielberg quality. The point was I heard their voices, I was able to get outside my own head and into totally different characters. I wrote it in a notebook. It was hard to read. But it was mine.

In high school, I had the rare experience, for that particular high school, of having a "new teacher" in English. He was not only new to the school but new to teaching itself—so new, in fact, that he actually assigned us compositions. One I recall was a short story that we had to read in front of the class. He assigned us two or three compositions before he realized how much work he was heaping on himself. He stopped. But before he stopped, I discovered another treasure—audience. As I nervously read parts of my story to my classmates, they listened, and they laughed in the right places. They liked it! I had discovered the joy of audience reaction—a distinct sound even above a pounding heart.

I had little writing experience in school beyond that. I did, however, begin to appreciate some of the classics in high school—Shakespeare and Chaucer, without the sexy stuff, of course. I can't remember reading a single novel as a literature assignment. But I was lucky. As you know, when the student is ready, a teacher appears. My next teacher came in the form of a friend's older brother who was in college. He gave me books to read—required reading for his freshman and sophomore English courses—the kind of reading you use with your high school classes today.

During the summer between my junior and senior year, I read Catcher in the Rye and was blown away. So this was in books, not an adventure story, not a mystery, but a teenager with a sense of humor and sadness and awkward desire to "get it right"—a real teenager whose adventure was life itself. I read Animal Farm and discovered the power of allegory. I read Brave New World and discovered irony and social criticism. I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles and found the dark landscape of Hardy's moors and mind, and I came to understand how "not ending right" is sometimes the only right ending.

I spent the summer of my sixteenth year sprawled out on my twin bed in the room with high ceiling and pale blue walls—chewing Juicy Fruit gum and turning pages. and waking up to the power of the written word.

A few years later I was an English teacher, but I didn't really begin to understand the depth and width of that power of the written word until I began to teach it. Because, as you may have discovered, if you were like me, you don't really know a subject until you teach it. and to teach it with any kind of joy and enthusiasm, you have to care about the subject. It's a given that you have to care about the student to be an effective teacher. But embracing the subject is certainly the other half of the salvation in teaching, a treasure in itself.

Learning about writing through teaching allowed me to give form to my own memories and observations. and reading authors and poets with a strong sense of place gave me the confidence and freedom to write from the ground beneath my feet.

Unlike Kurt Vonnegut, I did choose a title that I know a little something about. It comes from a T. S. Eliot poem, "Little Gidding," and it refers to a sense of place as well as a sense of life, and, best of all, it uses the metaphor of writing:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning
The end is where we start from. and every phrase
And every sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others . . .
An easy commerce of the old and new . . .
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning.