An Educator

My parents were natural educators. I didn’t know that until I got to watch them in action with my children. When John and Grace were still arm babies, my dad would carry them around his place showing them trees and plants and animals, both domesticated and wild. I doubt they remember learning which is a box elder. Or not to touch poison ivy. Or that goats don’t like the rain. As far as they know, they’ve always known.

My mother helped teach them to read, first because she read. Then because there was comfort reading side-by-side with her. She taught them the joy of watching young ones grow and learn. Baby goats, baby chickens, baby flowers and vegetables.

“Plants?” you ask.

“Yes. Plants,” I say. The yellow rose, climbing on a trellis. The peach tree, espaliered against the barn’s north wall. The strange little bonsai lemon tree.

I guess the plants were more trained than educated, since they did not learn how to grow. Learning does require a certain amount of choice and the plants had none.

So maybe the babies were not learning, either. Since they were too young to choose. Have I written myself into a thought quagmire? Make an assertion then in the next few paragraphs prove myself wrong?

Where was I?

Ah, yes. An Educator.

We all learn in different ways. As an anarchist by nature, I don’t take well to training. Rules turn me to rebellion. Maybe that’s why English suits me so well.

“But English is full of rules,” you might say. “I before E. No double negatives. Do not end a sentence with a preposition. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

And you would be absolutely right. But the joy in English – and rules, in general – is that they are so easily broken.

The way I learn best is to be given a question rather than an answer.

Now you know why I rail at postulates in geometry and self-improvement and how-to books in the library.

So what have I done to learn how to write creative nonfiction? I bought how-to books. There are so many. You can make a steadier living writing how-to-write books than you can by writing. Kind of like a lawyer getting steadier checks if he’s elected judge.

There are probably how-to books out there that could educate even me. The ones I got are not them. These, instead, make me want to go back to fiction and stay there.

Then I found Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone. This is not a how-to. It’s a they-did. It has creative nonfiction from David Sedaris and Amy Tan and Barbara Kingsolver and so many others. The stories remind me of Bailey White and Baxter Black. And my friend Daniel Alexander (who writes fiction so real I know those folks.)

Their creative nonfiction is not journalism. It is not vignettes about famous people. It’s not memoir too much about themselves. It’s about regular people they know. Characters they love, maybe not like you love your children, or your spouse, or your favorite teacher. But characters you’ve run across in your own real life whom you remember. Maybe with a touch of anger, or a tear, or a laugh.

They were someone you learned something from because they made you ask yourself a question about you. They were an educator.