{"id":49,"date":"2015-01-19T18:33:13","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T00:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/?p=49"},"modified":"2015-02-05T15:47:37","modified_gmt":"2015-02-05T21:47:37","slug":"in-remembrance-english-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/in-remembrance-english-teachers\/","title":{"rendered":"In Remembrance: English teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several\u00a0nights ago, exhausted from a day of intense editing, I was in that foggy chasm between wakefulness and sleep when I was struck so powerfully by an idea that I\u00a0forced myself awake, grabbed my journal from the nightstand, and sat in the dark, scratching\u00a0out the words buzzing in my head. Satisfied that I had gotten the gist of the story down, I collapsed in a heap and slept almost ten hours.<\/p>\n

A few days later, I sat down with my journal once again (this time there was plenty of light, thank goodness!) and tried fill in voids of my chicken scratches to create the story that had been haunting me. I wrote for several pages without stopping, just letting the words flow. When I finally took a breath and went back to see what I had written, I was disheartened. These words, although meaningful in their own right,\u00a0were\u00a0not the story I wanted to tell. [Tweet “These words, although meaningful in their own right,\u00a0were\u00a0not the story I wanted to tell”]<\/p>\n

Frustrated, I walked away. I looked for other things to keep me busy—anything but the story that called to me. I doubted everything\u00a0about the\u00a0story\u00a0and my writing skills because it was a story I was desperate to understand while knowing that I never could. It was the story of how one of my students, a fourteen-year-old far too clever for his own good, grew into a young man who drowned just as the world opened up to him. I learned of his death more than a decade later (he was one of my students while I was in Peace Corps) and continue to be saddened by the loss of this young man. Any story that I write simply must do him justice.<\/p>\n

Today, I decided, was the day I would write his story.<\/p>\n

But the right words wouldn’t come, no matter how hard I worked to tease them out of hiding. In an effort to trick my brain into writing and spark the flow of words, I looked for a flash fiction challenge that spoke to me. A quick, simple story, a few\u00a0hundred words that I could whip out in about an hour. I visited Charli Mills’ Carrot Ranch<\/a>, which I\u00a0discovered last week, and read the prompt:<\/p>\n

January 14, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a life span.<\/strong> It can a life of a person as if flashing by or the life of a honey bee. What key elements would show a lifetime in brevity? Does it add to a character\u2019s development or create tension? What is the emotion or is it void?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I then proceeded to bang my head against the keyboard until one of my writing partners told me to snap out of it. I promised I would, said I would spend the next two hours writing *no matter what* and then sneaked over to Facebook. (I know, I know.) Scrolling through the posts, I stopped on one that made my heart break: My high school English teacher passed away this weekend. She was ninety-two. She taught in our school district for more than four decades, retiring just two years after I had her for senior English (during which time she publicly admonished me for my continued use of the split infinitive\u00a0while\u00a0whispering\u00a0to me not to change it if the writer in me said to keep it).<\/p>\n

I became\u00a0determined to write the story of my student’s death, out of respect for my own teacher, who supported me in ways for which\u00a0I could never thank her. I opened a new document, called forth my muse, and banged out a story…about my English teacher. Yes, my muse has a wicked streak in her that is a mile long. So now that I have given you this long introduction, here is my response to the Carrot Ranch prompt this week:<\/p>\n

Beehive hairdos and saddle shoes recite conjugations on demand. The restless seniors do not intimidate my new arch supports, knee-length polyester skirts, and freshly printed diploma. I chaperone juniors through Romeo and Juliet<\/em> but fail to eradicate the split infinitive from the incoming army of bell bottoms. My determination carries me forth, diagramming compound sentences across verdant walls as neon miniskirts and bouffant bangs stare back at me. Still, I am mortal. As my shoulders hunch and my skin puckers, I cannot withstand the text-message jargon invasion, until one day I am no more, erased like a superfluous comma.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

RIP Miss Jenkins<\/p>\n

[Tweet “My muse has a wicked streak in her that is a mile long”]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several\u00a0nights ago, exhausted from a day of intense editing, I was in that foggy chasm between wakefulness and sleep when I was struck so powerfully by an idea that I\u00a0forced myself awake, grabbed my journal from the nightstand, and sat in the dark, scratching\u00a0out the words buzzing in my head. Satisfied that I had gotten […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[15,14,16],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-carrot-ranch","tag-death","tag-flash-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WVQN-N","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}