Q&A with author Garret Keizer

Garret Keizer is the author most recently of Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher, which recounts his experiences returning as a teacher to the Vermont high school where he had taught many years earlier. His seven other books include Privacy and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want. He is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.

Q: Why did you decide to write about your experiences returning to teach high school after many years?

A: I’ve often kept a journal during periods of intense experience in my life. I followed this practice during the year of teaching recounted in my book. When the year was over, I decided to use the journal as the basis for an essay that appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Responses from readers persuaded me that the essay might become the nucleus for a book. It did.

That’s the progression—though it doesn’t really address the “why” of your question. I believe that one of the best reasons for writing is to give people courage. The writers I cherish most have helped me to be a little braver than I’d have been without them. So, I wrote my book in part to give courage to others—not only to teachers, parents, and students, but also to anyone who faces the challenges of a hard job in the midst of social conditions that make it harder than it has to be.

I also wrote my book in defense of public education and in open antagonism to the specious notion that we can use “school reform” as a cheap substitute for the achievement of greater social and economic justice.

Q: What were some of the most significant changes at Lake Region Union High School, and what did you find that had remained more or less the same?

A: The major changes I noted were in the areas of positive morale, digital instruction, and one-to-one tutorial support for students.  There was more of all three. There was also a greater emphasis on teamwork among teachers and on staff-wide collaboration on behalf of individual students in academic or personal jeopardy. Finally, I found more evidence of “writing across the curriculum”; I had physical education teachers proudly sharing their students’ writing with me.   

I believe I encountered a greater resistance to reading than I had met in the past, though one teacher’s anecdotal comparisons should never be taken as norms. I also observed evidence of addiction to digital devices. “Smoking in the boys’ room” had become texting in the boys’ room—and just about everywhere else.

Among the factors that remained constant: the overall decency of the student population, the capacity of young people to be inspired by great literature, the devastating effects of family dysfunction, and the educational disadvantages that come of gross economic inequality.

Q: You write about a high school in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. What about your experiences is unique to that setting, and what is common to most high schools around the country?

A: I suspect my experience was unique to my setting mainly in the sense that every human experience is unique to the particulars of a given personality and a concrete location. The experience of a Somali housekeeper in room 213 of the Comfort Inn in Bangor, Maine, is unique to her, and if she happens to write a memoir about her work, that memoir will be one of a kind. Of course, the agrarian and ethnic characteristics of the community in which I taught imparted a specific flavoring to my experience that distinguishes it from the experiences of teachers in other settings. Few of my students, for example, were victims of racism, because most of them were white.

That said, there are a host of factors tipping my experience toward the general as opposed to the unique. The influences of global capitalism, technological fundamentalism, popular culture, celebrity fixation, consumerism, and educational standardization tend to erase many of the regional distinctions that formerly made teaching in one place vastly different from teaching in another. The most critical difference remains the one formulated by Billie Holiday between “them that’s got” and “them that’s not,” with a goodly number of my students falling on the latter side of the divide. 

Q: Did you leave your year of teaching feeling discouraged or encouraged?

A: Both. I was greatly encouraged by the dedication of the people with whom I’d worked and by the potential I saw in so many students. That kind of encouragement has political as well as emotional ramifications. If the raw material for building a better society is utterly deficient, then where is our hope—or even a reason—for trying to achieve one? I found an abundance of raw material in the school where I taught. 

At the same time, I was discouraged to recognize some of the ways in which our public schools are being used in the service of a cynical agenda. Poor kids are expected to perform at “acceptable levels” on standardized tests. This amounts to a very sweet deal for the privileged characters who devise and promote the tests. If the poor kids fail to perform, we can write off their schools. If they do perform, we can write off their poverty. After all, poverty must not be such a big deal if children can still master their math facts on an empty stomach! I forget the name of the Supreme Court justice who said he wasn’t sure how to define obscenity but he knew it when he saw it. I’m not sure the key players in our so-called education debate have that same ability.   

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Fiction and nonfiction, all of it set in New Jersey, where I was born and grew up.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Actually, I believe “we” already know it. The problem is finding the will and the wherewithal to act on it. My hope is that Getting Schooled will make some small contribution to bringing that action about in a meaningful way.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Sept. 4

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Sept. 4, 1908: Writer Richard Wright born.

Q&A with author Natalie Wexler

Natalie Wexler is the author of the new historical novel The Observer. She also has written the novels The Mother Daughter Show and A More Obedient Wife. She blogs about education for Greater Greater Washington, and she lives in Washington, D.C.

Q: How did you blend the fictional and historical elements in The Observer?

A: As with my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, I had a certain skeleton of historical fact to build my fiction on. In the first book, that skeleton was mostly formed of letters to, from, and about the two real women I was writing about. I put excerpts from those letters into the book and filled in the gaps in the historical narrative with my imagination.

For this book, I didn't have letters, but I did have a year of issues of the Observer, the weekly magazine edited by the real Eliza Anderson, who became one of the two main characters in the novel. (There are letters to and from Eliza that have survived, but none from the year the book focuses on, 1807.)

Eliza wrote much of the magazine herself, so what appears there—along with what appeared in various other Baltimore publications of the time—gave me some insight into what really happened during this extraordinary year in her life. And just as I had used letters in A More Obedient Wife, in The Observer I incorporated excerpts from these articles into my fictional narrative.

When you're working with real historical figures and events, it can be a challenge to construct a plot that both includes what's real and also has a narrative arc and tension and all those other things a plot needs.

Life generally doesn't hand you a good plot! You have to figure out what might have been happening that isn't reflected in the historical documents, and how the various characters might have been connected to one another, and give the whole thing some coherent shape.

I knew, for example, that Eliza had a nemesis, a man who started out as a columnist for the Observer but ended up as her arch-enemy (at least, in her view). I didn't know much else about him, but I realized that he needed to play a major role in the plot, so I had to give him a name (everyone wrote under pseudonyms) and imagine who he might have been.

I also invented an entirely fictional major character, Margaret McKenzie, who is Eliza's maid—and who gives a double meaning to the title, The Observer, since for most of the book she's actually observing Eliza closely and feeding information to Eliza's enemies. I decided to invent Margaret partly because I realized that Eliza had a trait many modern readers would find off-putting: she was an elitist.

I can understand why Eliza held the opinions she did, and I think she had other qualities that make her sympathetic. But I knew I needed to balance Eliza with a character who would both challenge some of her assumptions and perhaps appeal more to a 21st-century reader. So I came up with the idea of giving her a young maid who also serves as a kind of nanny to Eliza's daughter. As the story took shape, Margaret came to play a crucial role in the plot.

Q: Why did you decide to switch back and forth between Eliza's and Margaret's perspectives?

A: I enjoy writing from multiple perspectives and have done it in all three of my novels. I like having two (or three) views of essentially the same events, I guess because it underscores how we're all prisoners of our own points of view, and how important it is to try to see things from the vantage point of others when we can. It also puts the reader in the position of knowing more about what's going on than the point-of-view characters do, which adds an element of tension.

For example, in each of my novels, the story centers on women who appear to be very different and at odds with one another, but who (perhaps unbeknownst to them) have some important things in common. It seems to me that the best way of revealing what they have in common is to bring the reader inside each of their heads.

Switching back and forth was particularly important in this novel because Eliza is something of a problematic character. She certainly has some admirable qualities—she's witty and feisty and fiercely intelligent—and I enjoyed writing in her voice, but it's probably best to have a break from her once in a while.

Q: What more can you tell us about the kind of research you needed to do to write the novel?

A: I did an enormous amount of research—mostly at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore—much of which never made it into the book.

I first got the idea for the novel, or something like it, nine years ago, when I saw a portrait of a strikingly beautiful woman at an exhibit of Gilbert Stuart portraits at the National Gallery. That wasn't Eliza—it was a friend of hers, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. I originally intended to write about Betsy, as she's popularly known. She was a Baltimore heiress who married Napoleon's youngest brother.

I started by researching her life and going through the 20 boxes that contain her correspondence. But I found her to be a pretty unpleasant character, and her letters could be self-absorbed and tedious. Meanwhile, though, I stumbled across a few wonderful letters written to Betsy by a friend of hers, Eliza Anderson. Who was she, I wondered?

After some detective work, I decided Eliza was the more interesting figure. One of the things I discovered was that she had founded and edited this magazine, the Observer, in 1807. That seemed kind of unusual—a woman editing a magazine in 1807, and at the age of 26 no less.

So I did some research on the history of women editors, and I discovered that all the secondary sources identified someone else as the first woman to edit a magazine—someone who came AFTER Eliza. Not only that, but I found that virtually all 19th-century women editors edited magazines for women. Eliza clearly was aiming at, and reaching, a general audience.

At that point, I stopped working on the novel for a while and wrote an article about the real Eliza for a scholarly journal, because I thought it was important that the historical record be corrected to include her.

Most of the research I did on Eliza and the other historical characters focused on primary sources: letters, the Observer itself, other periodicals of the day. But for the fictional character of Margaret, I needed to rely on secondary sources. She is an ordinary working person, and we generally don't have letters or other documents that have preserved their voices. But I was lucky to find a wonderful book about working people in Baltimore in just the period I was writing about—Scraping By, by Seth Rockman.

Rockman did a lot of painstaking research into things like newspaper advertisements and almshouse records to reconstruct the lives of ordinary people, and I was able to draw on that research in creating Margaret's character and her life. I had to use my imagination to develop a voice for her, but one thing I relied on to some extent was a dictionary of slang from the period that I found online. I now have a fairly extensive vocabulary of earthy terms from the early 19th century.

Q: Do you prefer writing historical or contemporary novels?

A: Writing my second novel, The Mother Daughter Show, was in some ways more fun, because it was set in my own time and place. I didn't have to worry about whether I'd gotten the historical details right, or if I had accurately captured the voices of people who lived 200 years ago.

And I could include all sorts of random observations I had about contemporary life—for example, the way the supermarket checker always asks you if you need help carrying your groceries to your car, even if you're only buying a box of pasta and some chicken breasts.

But I actually find it easier, in a way, to enter into a fictional world when I'm writing about the past, perhaps because it IS so different from my own world. And writing historical fiction is probably the closest you can come to time travel, which is something I've always yearned to do.

The other advantage of writing historical fiction is that nobody you know thinks they recognize themselves in your fiction—even if, in some way, they're actually in there.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Not fiction! For the past year and a half I've been blogging about public education in D.C., which is a subject I find both fascinating and incredibly important. Right now I don't see myself writing any more novels. But you never know.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Although it may seem like there's no connection between what I'm doing now—writing about education—and this novel, I've come to realize there actually is. I found myself comparing Eliza to the two women who were the protagonists of my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, which is set about a decade earlier.

The two women in my first book—both named Hannah—could almost have been from a different planet than Eliza. Their letters were often poignant but rarely made any reference to literature or the larger world. And, as the title of the novel suggests, they basically accepted the subordinate role that society prescribed for them as women and as wives.

Eliza, on the other hand, was a true intellectual, peppering her letters with references to the "metaphysical" writers she treasured and taking on a variety of literary, philosophical, and historical topics in her magazine. And she seemed entirely unconcerned by the fact that women weren't supposed to do the kinds of things she was doing. When people criticized her behavior as un-ladylike, she lashed back at them.

What could account for the difference between the Hannahs and Eliza? Obviously, personality played a role. But I think education also had a lot to do with it. Eliza was extraordinarily well read, probably because her father had a large library and gave her free rein to explore it. But it was also a more general phenomenon: there was a huge increase in schools for girls in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Historians used to think that nothing much was going on in women's history in the early 19th century, but they now see that this educational explosion laid the groundwork for the women's rights movement that began mid-century. Once you give people a genuine education, of the kind Eliza received, it changes not only what they know but also their entire conception of themselves and what they're capable of accomplishing.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous Q&A with Natalie Wexler, please click here.

Sept. 3

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Sept. 3, 1849: Writer Sarah Orne Jewett born.

Q&A with author Randy Susan Meyers

Randy Susan Meyers is the author of the new novel Accidents of Marriage. She also has written the novels The Comfort of Lies and The Murderer's Daughters, and co-written the nonfiction guide What To Do Before Your Book Launch. She lives in Boston.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Accidents of Marriage?

A: It had a long genesis. I used to work with batterers, and when I would drive to do groups, I would go around a rotary, and would think about how they never blame themselves for the violence. I thought about rageful driving, and what would happen if they ran over someone they loved. That was the genesis.

People think of domestic violence as “them” or “us,” but it’s a continuum of actions, from the very worst to an outburst of crummy words.

Q: Why did you decide to write from the perspectives of three different characters?

A: I really enjoy reading and writing about families, or systems, from different perspectives. Everyone is the star of their own show, and believes in their own perspective—I try to see if everyone can come around and see others’ points of view.

Q: As you wrote from these different perspectives, did you feel different degrees of sympathy for the characters?

A: I seem to enter a very close third person [perspective] where I do feel that person’s point of view; the others go out of my head. Either I’m very crazy, or I like getting behind the eyes of different people!

I learned working with criminals that if you can’t be empathetic, you can’t help them. With my characters, I’ve got to be empathetic.

Q: What kind of research did you do to write this story, or did a lot of it come from the knowledge you’d gained from working with batterers?

A: I really knew [from my work] about walking on tiptoes. It’s a common experience; you take it and exaggerate it. I had done so much work with domestic violence that that part [of the writing] came easily.

It was harder to do research on what car to use. I spent an entire holiday having my family act out a car accident with my granddaughter’s little cars.

And I did a lot of research on brain damage. It feels like I read every single memoir out there; people with brain damage and caretakers. “Just the facts, ma’am” was easy, but getting the feeling of it—I thank about 30 memoirs.

Q: How did you pick the title?

A: The title always changes. The original title was A Thousand Suppers; it came from a line in the book. The title came to me by playing word games. I can spend a week playing with titles. I took words that were relevant, and played around with them.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A book that’s based on a couple where the wife is unaware of the man’s fiscal improprieties until it comes out as a huge deal. There are hints of the Madoff deal. What is it like to be the wife? I was going to do it from the point of view of the wife, and now I’m starting to explore the guy.

I’m enjoying this, but when you do research, you do 1000 percent more than what you put in the book. I’m reading about fiscal stuff—the register of brokers and dealers from 1965!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous Q&A with Randy Susan Meyers, please click here.

Sept. 2

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Sept. 2, 1918: Author Allen Drury born.

Sept. 1

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Sept. 1, 1875: Author Edgar Rice Burroughs born.