Writing Toward Home

In my junior year of college, I took one of my favorite classes ever. It was a composition class for students of education, and it was taught by one of the kindest and best professors I have ever known. 

Near the end of the course, we each had to meet with him during office hours, ostensibly to discuss our writing, but really to think about who we were as people and as future teachers. At the end, he would suggest a book on writing to read and to use for the presentation project in the class. I remember being delighted at his kind and focused listening, the way he paid attention in a slow and unhurried way, as if talking to you was the only important thing on his agenda for this absolutely wonderful day. 

He pulled out Georgia Heard’s Writing Toward Home for me, and I wish so much that I could remember what he told me about why he thought this book fit my writing needs and inclinations at that moment in my life. With his typical insight, he was exactly right. Heard’s book, with tiny essays and exercises to move a writer back toward her most essential self, was just what I needed, and after I returned his copy, I bought my own, which is here beside me now as I write. The blue tassled bookmark is still in it, which I moved from the start to the end and back to the start again as I read the book over and over, and worked through many of the exercises or just enjoyed the loveliness of the essays. Little pink tabs stick out from the tops of different pages I marked to use in my classroom. I believe it was the first book on writing I ever chose to buy for myself, and it led to quite a collection.

These days, I don’t read it that much. I just look at it--the smooth green cover, the faded red barn peeking out behind shrubbery, the slender weight in my hand. These days, it’s more important to me because of the professor who had the humility and the grace to take seriously a self-important college kid chock full of dreams, and to help her find the pen that let her write the person she wanted to be.

Every year in the classroom, both when I used the book for teaching writing and I didn’t, I carried the way he taught with me. I carried the way he listened. And when I sat down with students to look at a piece of writing, I wanted to make them feel seen, to make them feel like talking to them was the only important thing on my agenda for this absolutely wonderful day.

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