Thank You, Jack Kerouac

Eric Marshall is a graduate student of Professional Writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He writes poetry and is currently working on his first novel, tentatively titled The Sleep Season.

When I turned nineteen in July of 2003, my mother gave me a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It was a paperback, the cover illustration was of a slick nineteen forties Cadillac limousine surging down a dark blue midnight highway. Having just completed an honors colloquium on the artists of the Beat movement, my interest in the work of writers like Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac was piqued. I had no way of knowing, however, the dramatic affect that the famous novel would have on my young life.

My first reading of On the Road didn’t begin as the eye-opening, spellbinding experience it would come to be. I struggled with the early chapters, the litany of names, my own ignorance as to which characters aligned with which key figures of the Beat movement. But by the time that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty made their fateful passage over the border to Mexico, I was enrapt.

What I had discovered was an affirmation of life, a defense against darkness, a resonant cry of rebel freedom that pulsates through American life. You could drop everything and hitchhike to San Francisco if you wanted; you could find God in the beady, sweating eyes of a tortured blues tenor; you could live life at the speed of light, and it could all blow up in your face, but that could also be okay.

Most importantly, though, I learned that I could write wild, untamed things that would set the world on fire for my readers the way that Jack Kerouac did for me.

I made a pact with myself that I would read On the Road once a year, every July, for the rest of my life. My earliest re-reads were attempts to rekindle the burning fire of my first reading, to rediscover the overwhelming sense of possibility opened up to me by reading Kerouac’s work at age nineteen. At first, I was disappointed, discouraged, even. Just like anything else in life, the book just wasn’t the same the second time around.

The World of Learning, Imagination, and Entertainment

Bob Schilling is a defense lawyer and former assistant district attorney who lives in New Bedford.  His practice is now in the New Bedford District Court and in the Juvenile Court handling delinquencies and ‘youthful offender’ cases.  He has a daughter in New York City and a son at UMass Amherst.

A former colleague (an assistant district attorney) recently asked me if I was still involved with Judge Kane’s “bleeding heart book club.”  We both laughed. In a more serious vein, he went on to ask whether I thought he might enjoy it, because he is approaching retirement and may have some time to – and it sounds like a cliché but really isn’t – “give back to the community.”

 

I first heard of Changing Lives Through Literature from Judge Robert Kane, a brilliant, experienced, tough judge in the Superior Court; I heard him gently query convicted felons about whether they had ever taken any interest in the written world of learning, imagination and entertainment.

 

He spoke to these hard men of the life of the mind and encouraged exploration of the world of letters. He offered them the possibility of this program. Some, who think toughness and compassion are mutually exclusive, would roll their eyes.

 

Three years ago, when I retired from service to the Commonwealth, I had the occasion to do a good deal of work in the New Bedford Juvenile Court as a defense attorney. Lo and behold, I heard again of CLTL through Stella Ribeiro, a dedicated probation officer who I worked with in the “Second Chance Drug Court.” I told her that I would love to participate, finally, in the program.

Continuing Conversations: One Year of Changing Lives, Changing Minds

Jenni Baker is the communications specialist for Goodwill Industries International in Rockville, MD.  Beth  Ayer is a second-year graduate student in the Professional Writing program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the current marketing and media advisor for  Changing Lives Through Literature.

November 5^th marks the one-year anniversary of Changing Lives, Changing Minds. In honor of this landmark, founding editor Jenni Baker and current editor Beth Ayer came together to talk about the blog’s progress and where it’s headed.

Jenni: We’ve come a long way from one year ago and the blog is picking up speed. Readership and interest in CLTL has really taken off in the past few months.

 

Beth: Absolutely – it has been great to hear from a lot of new people. Picking up where you left off was almost deceptively simple. The blog was founded on an endlessly positive and intriguing idea: the conversation from the CLTL classroom can carry over to the Internet to spread positive change. Still, I say “deceptively simple” because we still need to maintain a concerted effort to reach out to readers.

 

Jenni: In the beginning, the task was to get CLTL’s core supporters on board with the blog, both by contributing essays and coming back to comment on what others had to say. These individuals formed a strong foundation to build our external readership. Now, the task is to continue to reach out to new audiences. The potential to spread information about CLTL is exponential — new readers interested in the blog may share program information to their friends, who may continue to pass the word along.

 

Beth: One of the major challenges has been continuing to build on the great progress we’ve already made by maintaining reader interest with new content, and by attracting new readers through the strength of the CLTL concept. But, as you say, the existing foundation has positioned the blog very well for continued growth. I think it helps to keep focused on the blog’s role and purpose within CLTL.

 

Jenni: Certainly. And it’s important to recognize the important role the blog does play in raising awareness about the organization. In the past, CLTL relied mostly on grassroots, word-of-mouth efforts to raise awareness about the program.  Blogs and social media have made it possible to take this grassroots movement online and get the word out to many more people. We’re seeing that more than ever recently.

Voices from the Table: Veronica

Allan McDougall is a graduate student from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Allan is a staunch believer in language as social action, with a focus on reading and writing. Allan is currently writing his MA thesis on Changing Lives Through Literature, and writes about professional and academic issues on his blog: allanmcdougall.wordpress.com.

This essay is the final in a series of three posts written by Allan McDougall based on interviews he conducted with CLTL program participants.

The West Roxbury courthouse women’s CLTL program is specialized for women suffering from mental illness, drug addiction or both. Veronica, a single mother, was more reserved than my previous interview subjects, Ken and Sheila. Yet Veronica’s shyness is nothing compared to her crippling inability to communicate before taking CLTL. Veronica told me, “I would never talk to nobody before; I never got along with nobody.” She continued:

 

In front of the class everyone would get a chance to talk about their problems. I have never opened up to people like I did with Adita, the people in my class, and Leigh, the teacher. I got to learn a lot and become closer with people. Now I’m very open.

The opportunity to share her thoughts and feelings in a reading/writing group environment changed Veronica’s ability to communicate with others. But she also told me about some other positive benefits of CLTL, specifically benefits for her daughter:

 

I never used to read before, now I read, I have a library card for the first time ever. I write more, read more, talk more. Reading keeps you out of trouble. I even read more to my daughter now. She loves animal books!

Volunteers like Adita Velasquez, Veronica’s probation officer, and Leigh, the Boston English professor who facilitates Veronica’s course, used a structured program of reading and writing to effect the positive changes for students in the West Roxbury program. But, as Veronica puts it, “we’re finished but we’re still not finished.” Each year, Leigh collects and publishes the best writings from the CLTL group. As in the men’s Dorchester programs, this is the first time Veronica has ever seen her writing in print.

How does CLTL Change Lives? An Interview with Dr. Robert P. Waxler

Brooke Joseph is a graduate student in education at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She has a bachelor’s degree in Humanities and Social Sciences with a concentration in Sociology and Elementary Education.

In a recent interview with Professor Robert P. Waxler, co-founder of the Changing Lives through Literature (CLTL) program, I focused on finding out how CLTL changes lives.  Three themes emerged from this interview: Putting Yourself in the Story, Becoming Friends with Characters, and Breaking Down Stereotypes.

Putting Yourself in the Story

Reading and writing can change people’s lives by helping individuals to focus and increase their awareness through self-reflection.  Waxler explained that when you are reading a good piece of literature, you often put yourself in the story and empathize with characters.  Even though during the CLTL sessions everyone is reading the same story, each individual will read the story in a different manner.  Therefore, when the story is discussed, the characters are seen from opposing angles and people “begin to understand that stories, like our lives, are richly textured possibilities.”

Although stories do not offer definitive solutions to people, they do “raise profound questions about our lives.  And as long as we continue to ask important questions, we are doing something worthwhile with our lives.” Waxler says reading the right stories helps us to “pursue our identity as if we are on a journey through life;” by “expanding our perceptions, offering new experiences and deepening our thinking, stories move us and they make us self-reflective. They offer us questions, and then the stories give us the opportunity to pursue answers to those questions.”

Becoming Friends with Characters

Dr. Waxler also gave an example of how a particular character can change people’s lives. When people are reading they allow the characters to become a part of their lives; characters in the stories “become our friends.  Their voices are embedded in our hearts.”  For example, take Santiago from Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea novel. Even though Santiago does not catch a fish for weeks, he continues to wake up every morning to “fight the good fight; his endurance is admirable.”

My Stories, My Identities: Reflections on Experiences as a Reader of Robert Cormier’s Novels

Robert LeBlanc is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Rhode Island. His dissertation research focuses on notions of publicness and subjectivity in Christian leftist texts. He has taught writing and literature courses at the college level.

I suppose I became an active reader at a fairly young age, and I remember looking out for interesting books at school or at the local public library. During my first few years as a reader, my interests were normal ones for a young boy in the 1980s: dinosaurs, baseball, cars. I would read or leaf through a few children’s reference books about cars or the American Revolution or the Red Sox, and then after a few weeks it was onto another topic to read about.

At a certain point this habit of reading took a turn toward stories. I began to realize that I liked some stories for themselves, independently of what topics and settings were featured in their pages. If the story was told with a certain rawness or intensity, if the words really leapt off the page and begged me to read on toward the conclusion, then I could enjoy reading a story just for its own sake.

In the fifth grade, I began to devour a wide range of young adult novels and short stories. I was enjoying—in a secondhand, readerly way—the experiences that different narratives brought to life, and I also started to develop a real appreciation for writers with a daring style. Some writers avoided the typical plots and worn-out phrases and went right for those moments of odd insight that would bring me back to certain passages again and again.

Even after I had raced through certain books, I would turn back to my favorite descriptions and stylistic flourishes within their chapters to marvel at the way the words reached out across the gap of communication to strike me with an almost physical force.

Readers who grew up as part of my generation will remember that the young adult market was at a saturation point in the late 80s and early 90s. Many classic YA novels that had defined the genre in the 60s and 70s were still in print or at least sitting on the classroom bookshelves, and new writers were churning out novels at a rapid pace.

I began to drift toward the novels of a particularly daring writer, one whose works (according to my teachers) even challenged their labeling as young adult fiction in their increasing experimentation with postmodernist form and controversial content. This writer, Robert Cormier, also fascinated me because I learned that he was born in my hometown: Leominster, Massachusetts.

Transformations

Erin Royston Battat is a Lecturer in the History & Literature program at Harvard University.  She taught the CLTL women’s class in Dorchester in Spring 2009.

When reading literature, we expect change to happen.  Change is what drives the plot.  Literary terms we learn in high school teach us to look for change, and to appreciate its aesthetic value: a “dynamic” character, the “turning point,” an “epiphany.”  As teachers, however, only rarely do we witness a student’s dramatic intellectual or spiritual awakening in our classroom, before our very eyes.

Instead, we must trust that the seeds we plant today will bear fruit sometime in the future, coaxed and nurtured by other teachers, different texts, and new experiences.  Accustomed to seeing teaching this way, I was awestruck by the profound transformations experienced by several of my students in the Changing Lives class in Dorchester last spring.

One student came to the first class consumed by fear and anxiety, deeply ashamed of her poor literacy skills.  “When I first came to class I was nervous, and scared to read out loud,” she remembers.  “After the first class, I said, ‘I am not going back’…I cried and I cried.”  This student did come back, however, and she had the courage to ask for help. In doing so, she provided the first bit of gel that would bind the students into a community.

In her simple way, she describes this process of writing and community-building: “I felt shy when I read my poem out loud, but people laughed and I liked it.  I liked listening to the other women.  Sometimes I learned something from them.”

A dramatic moment on the last day of class—a moment that seems more the stuff of literature than real life—testifies to this student’s growth.  We were visited by the Chancellor of the University, whose imposing figure is surpassed only by his booming voice and larger-than-life personality.  He filled the room.  All of us held our collective breath as this woman, who refused to read aloud from the syllabus two months before, read an original poem to the highest ranking official at UMASS Boston.

Great Stories Make Us Ask the Hard Questions

Allyson Sonne is a senior at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
She is currently working towards a bachelors degree in English with
concentration in writing and communications, as well as a masters degree
in Education. She is focused on becoming a middle school English teacher post graduation.

T.C. Boyle’s short story “Greasy Lake” (1979) is a fast-paced telling of a night in the lives of three boys: Jeff, Digby and the unidentified narrator. Looking for a dangerous thrill to feed their “bad boy” images, they head to Greasy Lake. The night quickly goes from wanting to be “bad” to a situation where even the most “wanna be bad boy” would want to trade his leather jacket and cigarettes for a suit and tie. Mistaking a strange man in a car for their friend, the boys honk and pester the car until the man gets out. The narrator gives a devastating blow to the man’s head with a tire iron. The “tough guy” character emerges again within the boys as they feel accomplished; they decide to see what they can get away with by the girl in the car.

As the story goes on and the night goes on, the boys’ positions are shattered by the realization of what was actually happening. Reading this I envisioned the boys resembling John Travolta and the T-Birds in the movie Grease. Although this image is clear-cut, I feel that Boyle made the characters universal at the same time. No matter where you are from, what you look like or how old you are, the characters and the situation can be identifiable with something in your life.

Of course, I’m sure not many have smashed someone with a tire iron, ran for their life, hid in a mucky lake, or stumbled upon a dead body and a couple of stray women. At least I hope not. The point is, somewhere, sometime we have all been in a situation that just didn’t turn out how we expected. Good or bad, regretful or lesson learned, there is a well-remembered turning point on the road to maturity in all of us.

Alicia’s Story

While studying for the ministry, David G. Sarles began substitute teaching in the New Haven public schools.  He began running also then, up and down East Rock, and has been running more or less since then. But his running pales in comparison to those inmates who circle prison yards thousands of times to compete in marathons.

When a young friend of mine got pregnant, she knew that in her situation as a single parent, she was not going to be able to provide for the child.  Massachusetts’ forward looking laws helped her determine to give up her new, yet to be born baby for adoption to a Massachusetts family.  The laws require the birth mother to stay with an in-state Massachusetts family different from the adopting family for the last few weeks of her pregnancy.  There was no cost to the birth mother.

Just before the birth, while living with her Massachusetts host family, my young friend wanted to find an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting to continue her dedication to remain dry.  She had wisely given up alcohol as soon as she became pregnant.  The meeting nearest her host family was at a Massachusetts prison, and included so-called hardened criminals.  It was, though, an open meeting, meaning the public was invited.  Not unlike a CLTL class, which is guided by a probation officer, judge and facilitator, the prison AA setting was supervised by prison staff and included a few outside AA facilitators and members like my friend.

When my dedicated young friend attended the meeting, she was ready for anything.  She had endured threatening city streets and had honed her survival skills.  She was not afraid.  As she entered, nine months pregnant and the sole woman, the inmates (all males) rose and one, “Tiny”, 300 some pounds, came to the door and took her hand.  He led her to a chair in the reception room.  He reassured her that she was safe with them.

One of Those English Teachers

Zinovia Canale is the English Department Chair at Rogers High School, Newport RI, and has been teaching for thirty years.  She is currently enrolled in the Masters Program in English at the University of Rhode Island.

I’m one of those teachers with whom high school kids like to hang around. They like to tell me about their problems and they like to listen to my stories, especially when I share my human side of being a parent who yells at her kids to get up, to get off the “machines,” and to get their work done.  When they hear stories about my love for The Grateful Dead and the fact that I still go to concerts with my deadhead husband to catch Bob Weir and Phil Lesh they nod in approval.

I’ve also been able to amuse my students with my dance of the “chicken noodle soup,” appreciation of the art of the rap (writing one is more difficult than one imagines), and my enjoyment of Beyonce, and Rihanna. I’m great at picking up new dance steps and am always open to learning new moves. I have a good time listening to my students’ jokes, learning their language, and trying to understand the dilemmas of their world, especially those kids of the “down-trodden,” I say with trepidation.

In fact, forgive me for labeling a group as the “down-trodden” which sounds so snobbish and evokes such an attitude of superiority. Yet, to ignore the truths about the conditions with which some of these kids live is to ignore the truth about their hearts, minds, and souls and as an English teacher there is where I want to reach.  I can’t bring them into a more expansive world of literature if I do not meet them where they reside-emotionally, physically, and socially.