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Over the course of my thirty years of writing professionally, I have worked with many wonderful editors, in New York City. Never have I encountered editing more demanding and enlightening than what took place in my family living room, when my mother or my father took out a red pen. They could be ruthless with a manuscript. (I can hear my mother smiling ruefully, over an unsuccessful attempt at simile. "Let's think again, Sam, about these eyes you say twinkled like Christmas tree lights. Do you mean that every bulb on the string had burned out, but two? Or that the person you describe had an above-average number of eyes?" And my father: "My god, man. What were you thinking?")
Looking over those long ago afternoons in our living room, I am struck by the brilliance and acuity of my parents' feeling for language, but also, the frequency with which their words must have devastated some young writer or other, munching on his cookie, and suddenly (I bet) losing his appetite completely. My parents never meant to hurt anyone, I am sure. They simply revered the English language, held themselves to a high standard of precision and grace, in their own speach and writing, and had little tolerance for what my father called, witheringly, "mediocrity" in others. They were not snobs about money, or clothes, or cars (we drove a series of ancient Buicks), but when it came to the efforts of hapless students, submitting their efforts at a short story or a paper on William Blake, they could be ruthless and hugely opinionated. It was highly entertaining, watching my mother, in particular, slicing her way through a student paper, excising one unsuccessful phrase after another -- and because of that, I tried never to miss one of her sessions with a class, in our living room. But thinking it over now, I can also guess that many times, after, someone might have gone home weeping. (One who survived, by the way, was John Irving, who attended seminars at our home, way back in the sixties, as a young undergraduate at UNH.) Of course, my parents applied the same tough methods with my sister and me, when we wrote -- as we did, from a very young age, and it is surely in large part because of their training that I was able to publish my work as young as I did -- around age fourteen. Even now, all of these years after their deaths, I can still hear my parents' voices speaking to me, as I sit at my computer, working on an essay or a story. They are that much with me.
For many years, in adult life, I resented the oppressiveness of my parents' early education in the living room. I wished I'd grown up in a family where sports were played, (and rigor was evidenced in tennis, or games of catch), and where the parents engaged in activities like bowling, or having neighborhood cookouts, instead of reciting eighteenth century poetry to each other and quoting appropriate lines from Shakespeare that seemed to offer insight into whatever situation might have been going on at school that day. Among the many burdens of having grown up as I did, I felt that my voice, when I wrote, belonged not solely to myself, but to my mother and father as well. I could never freely and happily sit down to simply express myself on the page. I had to consider, always, what my mother might say, about how I'd done it. And so I did not raise my own three children, as I was raised -- in that hothouse school of correct English usage. My children got to read comic books (banned, in our home) and say things like "anyways" without getting corrected. We went bowling, regularly. (I even bought bowling shoes, and a shirt.) But as the years have passed, and my own voice has slowly found its way out from under the long shadow left by those of my parents, I have come to appreciate (more, all the time) the great and rare gift they bestowed on my sister and me, on those long-ago afternoons in the living room, when they took out their yellow legal pads and went to work on their students' manuscripts, or our own. The lessons learned in those early years serve me still, every day of my life. They gave me a source of livelihood I love, and (on a good day) the tools that make possible the indescribable joy of telling a story in such a way that someone -- maybe you -- will feel moved by it.
In recent years, I've been taking on more teaching: short term workshops, mostly -- some for adults, some with teenage writers, with whom I particularly love to work . For five years in a row, now, I've made the annual trip (just completed, once more) to the shores of Lake Walloon in Northern Michigan, for three deeply inspiring days of working with writers from all over Michigan and beyond. (This year we were lucky enough to be joined by Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the U.S., and Craig Holden, a friend and fine fiction writer, and a writer I have long admired, Jane Hamilton, author of one of my favorite novels of recent years, A Map of the World. And, as always, by our old friend Michael Moore, just as he set off on his cross country travels for his wonderfully funny new book, Dude, Where's My Country?) In the months ahead, I'll be doing more teaching than ever before: in New York City and Los Angeles and in my home in Mill Valley, California (just north of San Francisco). I'll be focusing primarily on the personal essay in my short workshops, but also looking at memoir, and at the challenge of starting a novel, and -- something I've learned from years of working as a writer -- the challenge of what I call "A Writing Life". I'll also be working with several groups of young people, here in California, and in New York, Philadelphia and Massachusetts, for now. And other places, I hope, in the future.
My plan, through The Usual Rules Young Readers Project, is to visit both private and public schools, and to work with as many young people as I can. (In particular, I'd love to see students in grades 7, 8 and 9 introduced to The Usual Rules, since I've learned it speaks particularly strongly to that age group.) And if you want to know more about The Usual Rules, I hope you'll check out the excerpts from the novel posted here, too (Chapter 1 - Chapter 29), and read the comments from some of my favorite writers, about the book. I've added links, this month, to two letters from the Usual Rules School Packet: a letter to educators and librarians, about the kinds of enrichment I'd like to offer, on a visit to their school, and a letter to young writers that may be helpful, I hope, in their own work. The advice contained in that letter represents the very best of what my parents taught me, in our living room, and a little other knowledge I've acquired in the years, since. I hope you find something in the letter that may be helpful.
Joyce
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One
of my clearest memories of growing up in our big old house in Durham,
New Hampshire, is of students in our living room, talking about words.
Both of my parents were teachers of English, and they loved to teach.
(Which is not at all the same as loving academia.) All through my growing-up
years, their students came and went through our living room, come to talk
about literature, writing, religion, politics, their boyfriends. They
came one by one, but my favorite times were nights when whole groups of
students would gather -- sometimes the high school English classes my
mother taught, sometimes my father's humanities students -- and, over
good food, gathered around the fire, they'd read their manuscripts out
loud for discussion and critique.
Out
of my increasing recognition of what it meant to my own writing, to encounter
good teachers, a few years back I found myself beginning to work with
other writers, with the aim of helping them communicate better what they
wanted to say. At first just occasionally -- and often informally (when
a friend's teenager was struggling with his personal essay for college,
or when an elderly woman sent me a very beautiful manuscript, about the
death of a child, fifty years earlier), I'd find myself taking out my
pen and working to locate the muscle and bone of a piece of writing, excise
what was not essential. And then talking about it, with the writer of
the piece. Like my mother, with her students, I never wrote a line of
anybody else's story. But I came to feel that I knew how to help another
writer locate her own best work -- and I discovered the tremendous satisfaction
that lay in teaching. (I have to add here that among the people on whom
my instruction and advice were the least valuable, I'd name my own three
children. Pick up a copy of my memoir, 
Finally,
just to remind you, I'll be hosting another of the 