Quote Post

In my classroom there is a wall. Before this room was mine, back when it was a rough faux wood door, a stretch of threadbare carpet, and a desk with tricky metal shards sticking out from time-warped legs, this wall was an anemic shade of white.

This was yet another time I proved to myself that any blank stretch of white translates to my brain as something that must be written or painted on. I did both.

I, along with the help of my art school drop out best friend, painted quotes about writing from the ceiling to the floor. I bled color all over what was now my wall. And at the very bottom, removed enough from the words of great authors so as not to be the presumptuous interloper at the party, I carefully dabbed my own quote onto the wall. Maybe we'll come back to that one someday.

But for now, there's one quote that has been on my mind the last few hours. It was the first one I knew I had to put on that wall and has remained the one most students ask me about. It goes a little something like this--actually it goes a exactly like this because I copied and pasted it:

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

- Willa Cather

These words are painted in a gut-punch teal shade and outlined in hot, hot pink. It swoops from one corner to the other like a high-tide wave. It is underscored and illustrated.

It is an extremely empowering thought for my kids. It gives them presence, validation, and ownership of their work.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. Damn.

See, here's what I think. The most grab-you-by-the-throat-and-make-you-think assertions are those that are succinctly deep. These quotes are the ones that use the fewest words to open the greatest number of thought paths. Great quotes take seconds to read, days to fully assimilate, and a lifetime to truly "get."

That's what I think, anyway. Don't quote me on it though.

The reason this quote had such an impact on me--on the surface level anyway--is simple. I teach students of this age. I see hundreds every day. And now I look at them and think God, they're there. Everything I try to put in my writing is fresh and tangible to them at this very moment. Right now. They have depths of what YA writers thrive on and it hasn't even been tapped yet. And I'm simultaneously awe-struck and inspired by them.

I learn as much from these kids as they are ever going to learn from me. I'm that teacher they come hang out with between classes, ask to come to ballgames, take pictures with at graduation. I am, in a way, reliving that distant point in my life vicariously and getting a hell of a lot more from it this time around than I could have the first time.

Young adults have so much room for raw, uncensored feeling. I'm breaking down the walls I've built up through adulthood. Walls that steal that freedom to feel and experience and just be. I'm getting back to when things were just experienced and not studied, analyzed, and pigeonholed to the point the richness of the thing is squeezed dry.

And my writing, I can attest, has benefited from this.

At the end of the year, when it's time for my students to leave me and move on, I find myself watching each of them and wondering what's inside them. What they know that I've forgotten. Somehow, knowing they have such limitless abilities to do anything they want makes it a little easier to let them go.