CURLEW: HOME THE STORY GOES ON

On October 27, 2005, I received

an e-mail from Kim Davis at Brunner News Agency in Lima, Ohio, advising me that she needed 14 copies of my Iowa farm memoir, Curlew: Home. "They'll be for resale," she noted.

Intrigued, I wrote Kim back, asking how she found out about the book, and what the copies would be used for. "This is a relatively large order for the book," I said with a poet's glee.

Kim's response: "The book is for a local high school teacher. He'll be using it in his classroom."

Well, that's about half a story, so I asked her: "I don't suppose you can tell me how to contact the high school teacher? I'd love to hear what he's up to with the book."

Kim said that the teacher's name was Charlie Mescher and that he taught at Marion Local High School in Maria Stein, Ohio. So I wrote Charlie Mescher a quick letter: "I'm honored," I said. "And I'm pleased that country kids are going to be reading the book. I grew up thinking nobody wrote about the stuff I was doing every day. So thanks for sharing my work with your students." I also offered to help by answering questions for the class, or whatever might be useful.

The other day I got an e-mail from Charlie. He said:

I finally am getting around to responding to your letter and want to tell you that we finished with your book this week. My class of "ruralites" enjoyed reading it, and I really think it offered them an opportunity to see their life through a different lens. Not many of their families are actually engaged in full time farming, but most are removed from full-time farming by a only generation or two. And all live within spitting distance of a herd of holsteins. You can tell they are really farm families at heart because none of them ever complains about the smell!

However, I really had a hard time finding anyone who agreed with your description of shoveling corn. Maybe they are not removed enough from it to actually see it as a metaphysical experience. They all preferred having a younger brother do it for them... Oh well. Maybe they'll catch on later in life.

One question did come up though regularly in our discussion: What is the significance of the red [tail] hawks that kept showing up? Are they actually there, or are they something you make up? If so, why do you make them up?

The memoir of Iowa struck home for most of my students. We all marveled at the similarity between the farm life of Iowa in 1950's and the same life in Mercer County, Ohio at that time.  And the same changes seem to have occurred over the intervening 50 years....

My students enjoyed the book not only for the subject matter covered, but also for the emotional response your trip back to Curlew triggered.  We used the book as a springboard for them to write their own memoirs. Eighteen-year-olds don't realize they also have memories to write about until they start thinking about first communion disasters or driving a tractor for the first time or showing a hog at the fair. We haven't finished them yet, but using your book as a model they can easily see the impact a personal memoir can have.

Thank you for your personal attention to my class. When I read your letter to them, they were really excited about hearing from an "actual author, especially one we're reading about" (their words). And they want me to extend an invitation to you to continue to communicate (many have already checked out your websites, etc.) and if you do get to this area of the Midwest, to try to arrange a visit.  You will be warmly received - besides a visit from a famous author will probably get them out of their regular classwork.

You get an e-mail like this, of course you put everything else aside and respond to it. At least that's what I did:

About the shoveling corn. I always found it was less work to work hard than to appear as if you were working hard. I guess I was younger then. Perhaps your students should read that paragraph outloud, "the poetry of scooping corn," to hear what it sounds like.

The red-tail hawks. You know, I have always wondered what their significance was, too. In the book I call them the poet's good omen. When I was a youngster, you'd see red-tails fairly often. Then DDT (do you student know DDT? Have they read Silent Spring?) severely reduced their numbers and I think I went a couple of decades without seeing a red-tail. So my mentioning them is, perhaps, partly a way to celebrate that they're coming back. Maybe ultimately they become a "symbol" of possible resurrection, against the seeming decline of the Iowa countryside? Every red-tail hawk reported in the book was one I actually saw, and I saw them as described in the book. Everything in the book is as true as is humanly possible....

I was tickled that Curlew: Home was being used as a springboard for the students create memoirs of their own:

That's terrific that they are writing out of their own lives, their own backgrounds. The predominate message in popular culture is that our lives are so passe and out-of-date, that if it isn't on the coast, it's nowhere. WELL - look around you, I want to say, and you see that's not true. There is beauty in all these little stories of our lives.

And I upped the ante a bit:

I wonder if any of your students would be interested in letting me post their memoirs on my blog?? They'd have to be good pieces of writing, of course, and they'd have to send me electronic files for posting. And I might act like an "editor" and offer suggestions for improvement. Yet posting them might look like a renaissance of interest in the countryside... hooray for that!

If your students have any unanswered questions about Curlew: Home, they can feel free to e-mail me if they would like. I don't know if I have any "answers," but I'm at least interested in chewing on their questions.....

Oh, by the way, you never did answer my question re. how you found out about Curlew: Home and what made you choose it for the class. I'd love to know.

Charlie responded:

We DID read the shoveling corn paragraph out loud and I think that is why it made such an impression on my kids. They actually saw and heard the beauty of the description. It was just that the poetry of such a mundane action never occurred to them. And your langugae made them see it in a different light - but they would still rather read about it than do it.

In answer to your question about how I found/chose C:H to use in class: I wanted to do a nonfiction book dealing with memoir and after I searched on Amazon.com, yours seemed the best. Besides being nonfiction memoir writing, it dealt with the Midwest, rural life, and things my students could identify with. I read several possible books over the summer and yours really stood out for me. Plus your language was so poetic that I felt it offered the students another dimension missing in many other writings of the genre. In other words, I went in search of a book and found a gem - that fit my needs exactly.  I'll use it in the future as well.

I'll run the idea of posting the students' memoirs [at The Middlewesterner] past them. They will probably be excited until they realize how many revisions they will have to do. But it's a great idea and I think they will go for it.

As you might imagine this exchange of e-mails made me ecstatic and then some. I was always sorry there never had been a book like Curlew: Home for me when I was in high school - a book that dealt respectfully and realistically with things I recognized from my life. But, no, it seemed that literature was always somewhere else, in a place that looked very different than the place I lived.

Well, I'm here to tell you: the stuff of poetry is all around us - here in Fairwater, Wisconsin; there in Maria Stein, Ohio. I hope those students do send me their memoir assignments for posting here; their writing, I'll bet, will be further evidence that we can make literature right where we are. And that's a terrific thing to learn early on.

Comments

[Dave]

That's terrific, Tom! I'm glad those kids got into your book. Must be about the toughest critics you could ask for. I hope some of them follow through with memoir submissions; I look forward to reading them.

[Tom Montag]

Thanks, Dave. Perhaps seventh graders would be tougher, if seventh grade is the year you sneer at everything.... In any case, it's toughest to write for people who KNOW whether you've got it right, or got it wrong.

I will be pleased to share those good memoirs should any of the students agree to send them.

Hey, you students at Marion Local, come on, come on.... We're waiting patiently....