Tomorrow I’ll be visiting with 10th graders talking about the “writer’s life.” I make a lot of visits like this these days. The pandemic and the virtual reality it put us in, has made school visits easy. Or at least, it has made it easy to visit a school that is in another state/time zone without taking off a day of work. So I suppose that’s easier. I’m not going to say it’s the part of the job I enjoy the most. Because writing takes the top spot, but these visits with young people is a close second. Even though I know that I don’t have any magic answers to hand out like trick-or-treat candy. (Side note: did you ever imagine a time when Halloween would be cancelled?)
Often times I go to schools that aren’t very diverse and I can see the questions that a bunch of students want to ask (but don’t) rising in their eyes, flitting off their shoulders, creeping down their chins. “What does this have to do with us?” “Why should we care whether Black stories get told?”
In almost every visit I do I share this Walter Dean Myers quote: “If we continue to make Black children nonpersons by excluding them from books and by degrading the Black experience, and if we continue to neglect white children by not exposing them to any aspect of other racial and ethnic experiences in a meaningful way, we will have a next racial crisis.” Think about that, I tell students. It’s not enough for only Black kids to read stories about them. (Although that is lovely, and rich, and a blessed thing.) But reading about each other is a magic key toward understanding. Maybe with more understanding we can get to a better place.
But I started this post to say something about the writer’s life. These days I’m a writer who’s doing very little writing except for business emails. But I’m creating stories in my head all the time. Trying out phrases. Putting little scenes together. Wondering where something might go if I give it a long enough leash. The truth is you’re a writer whether you’re physically writing or not. That my friends is the writer’s life.