It happened, in that random stumbling-over-an-idea way that things seem to happen when you’ve got your nose down, busy with life. My friend Bonnie posted a link to Roger Rosenblatt’s new book on writing, Unless It Moves the Human Heart, on her Facebook page. I clicked, read the summary, and purchased. Three chapters in I feel the way I did in Mrs. Wilson’s Creative Writing class my Sophomore year in high school. Given permission. Understood. And somehow validated that I’m not, in fact, certifiably insane for choosing this career.
Rosenblatt is the acclaimed, best-selling author of Making Toast, and the Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University. His essays have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and the Emmy. Add to that his six Off-Broadway plays and fourteen books, and I’m convinced that he knows his stuff.
Given the four ankle-biters that run around our house in their Scooby-Doo underwear, this is the closest I’m going to get to an MFA program for a while. So I’ve been going slow, absorbing the book a few pages at a time. After reading the following excerpt this morning, I am convinced that this is the best sort of impulse purchase. Here he discusses his role as teacher:
“The stories they discover in themselves will not depend on their adventures or lack of them, but on more hidden things, like the fear of loud noises and their capacities for viciousness and betrayal and yearnings for nobility and feelings about justice – all the generally human things that define us. They may not make their self-discoveries during the time they work with me, but it is my business to spot the revelatory moments in their writing, and to pause and say, “Here you are.” When I find something essential in their work, I am helping them get a glimpse of themselves. and when they learn to spot these things on their own, they will string the moments together sentence after sentence, and will begin to feel the shaky exhilaration of being a writer.”
“Here you are.” That’s what every writer longs to hear.
