Confession is good
for the soul, and good for the blog—perhaps! I have nothing to confess
personally about J.D. Salinger. I know he’s not doing a lot of writing right
now, but I have been waiting for some new stories by him—stories that he agreed
could be published after his death. I wish the lawyers involved would get
their acts together. I am looking forward to those stories.
But I do
want to take some time here to applaud Salinger for what he did for me when I
was 16-years-old. It changed my life.
I confess
that I wasn’t always a book lover. The book that changed my life was Catcher in
the Rye. I couldn’t believe how authentic J. D. Salinger was as a writer. And I
read Catcher at the perfect age, the
same age as Holden. I wanted to be like Salinger as a writer, and never be a
phony. He really turned me on to reading and writing.
Now that
I enjoyed literature I also wanted to teach. I did happily teach for
thirty-three years. And, now and then, I actually dream at night about finding
my class and teaching again. Then I wake up sad in the morning with no class
and no official teaching responsibilities.
Nevertheless,
I try to get into classes and do poetry performances as much as I can. But it’s
challenging to work around the I-got-to-teach-for-the-test teachers. They need
to realize that teaching about “Egypt” isn’t as important as making poetry
connections and establishing rapport with kids that are hungry for words that
shed life on their own existence on Planet Earth.
At the
end of my “Tribute” section on my Web site, I have a poem written by a former
student, Jay Perrin, that is priceless. What a superb gift from a student on
the last day of school! You will find the poem by following this site…
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