EPIPHANY
by Roberta Jean Bryant
I struggle now with GRAVITY
My son he mutters “entropy;”
my doctor mentions “atrophy.”
My fear shrieks out “infirmity!”
and, can I stand indignity?
Yet nothing’s worse than apathy …
… unless it be false sympathy.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
SEVENTY-SEVEN JOURNALS
I first began writing a personal journal on June 23rd, 1963. I was twenty-seven, had been married almost seven years, and my full time job was taking care of our three preschoolers. I was angry and had scared myself with that anger.
I’ve recently reread my shelf and a half of raggedy eight by ten spiral notebooks -- seventy-seven in total. The biggest challenge was trying to decipher the faded pages as well as my often-illegible handwriting. Another twenty-four smaller travel notebooks await my curiosity and patience.
So, I’ve been keeping company with my journal for fifty-seven years off and on. I’ve thought of it as a portable friend – ready to listen at any time of the day or night. Some entries are as brief as a sentence; others (especially in the divorce years between 1973 and 1983) go on and on and on for dozens of pages.
I was struck by the dizzying emotional roller coaster they chronicle. Almost fifty years of off the wall mania and staggering bouts of depression before I was diagnosed as bipolar II and began to receive treatment a few years ago.
And I was amazed by the distortion of memory that summarizes and twists facts to fit. I found how often I lie to myself, and tell others the same lies. For instance I’ve often said, “I didn’t talk to grownups until I was over forty.” I love the drama in that statement, especially when contrasted with my current proclivity to talk too much (just like my mother by the way!). What’s true is I didn’t feel comfortable talking to grownups until I was over forty. What’s true is that I’m an uncomfortable amalgam of my father’s taciturnity and my mother’s excessive verbosity.
I didn’t talk much at home because every time I did I got into trouble. Home meaning the dozen or more places my mother found to live. Every time we moved my brother and I had to leave important things behind. Around my mother I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And, in retrospect, I think when I did speak up or express my opinion I shocked her in some way. Home meaning the five different houses that witnessed the best and the worst of my nineteen year marriage. In my marriage verbal abuse was slung back and forth, much of it in the guise of humor. I see now how often I collaborated to make myself an easy target.
My raggedy journals have captured raw emotion, quiet introspection, and way too many Dr.-Phil-like analyses and self-improvement programs. Nevertheless I see clearly the advantages of journal keeping; although I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of leaving them behind to bewilder and shock my children. That consideration aside, my journal is a primary form of self-expression, a safety valve, an emotional catharsis. Most of all it functions as a reality check; a place to recognize the disconnections between what I say and what I actually do; a repository of lies and half-truths; a halfway house for unacceptable feelings.
A terrific fringe benefit has been that the more I was willing to learn about myself the more I seemed to know about other people which went a long ways toward closing the gap between myself as a self-styled loner and many of those others.
I first began writing a personal journal on June 23rd, 1963. I was twenty-seven, had been married almost seven years, and my full time job was taking care of our three preschoolers. I was angry and had scared myself with that anger.
I’ve recently reread my shelf and a half of raggedy eight by ten spiral notebooks -- seventy-seven in total. The biggest challenge was trying to decipher the faded pages as well as my often-illegible handwriting. Another twenty-four smaller travel notebooks await my curiosity and patience.
So, I’ve been keeping company with my journal for fifty-seven years off and on. I’ve thought of it as a portable friend – ready to listen at any time of the day or night. Some entries are as brief as a sentence; others (especially in the divorce years between 1973 and 1983) go on and on and on for dozens of pages.
I was struck by the dizzying emotional roller coaster they chronicle. Almost fifty years of off the wall mania and staggering bouts of depression before I was diagnosed as bipolar II and began to receive treatment a few years ago.
And I was amazed by the distortion of memory that summarizes and twists facts to fit. I found how often I lie to myself, and tell others the same lies. For instance I’ve often said, “I didn’t talk to grownups until I was over forty.” I love the drama in that statement, especially when contrasted with my current proclivity to talk too much (just like my mother by the way!). What’s true is I didn’t feel comfortable talking to grownups until I was over forty. What’s true is that I’m an uncomfortable amalgam of my father’s taciturnity and my mother’s excessive verbosity.
I didn’t talk much at home because every time I did I got into trouble. Home meaning the dozen or more places my mother found to live. Every time we moved my brother and I had to leave important things behind. Around my mother I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And, in retrospect, I think when I did speak up or express my opinion I shocked her in some way. Home meaning the five different houses that witnessed the best and the worst of my nineteen year marriage. In my marriage verbal abuse was slung back and forth, much of it in the guise of humor. I see now how often I collaborated to make myself an easy target.
My raggedy journals have captured raw emotion, quiet introspection, and way too many Dr.-Phil-like analyses and self-improvement programs. Nevertheless I see clearly the advantages of journal keeping; although I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of leaving them behind to bewilder and shock my children. That consideration aside, my journal is a primary form of self-expression, a safety valve, an emotional catharsis. Most of all it functions as a reality check; a place to recognize the disconnections between what I say and what I actually do; a repository of lies and half-truths; a halfway house for unacceptable feelings.
A terrific fringe benefit has been that the more I was willing to learn about myself the more I seemed to know about other people which went a long ways toward closing the gap between myself as a self-styled loner and many of those others.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
CONFESSIONS OF AN AUTODIDACT
I’d been engaged to teach a one-day workshop in journal writing. The group, an organization that served mostly therapists, had asked me for a course description and an instructor biography. Two days after I mailed it off I received a phone call. “We need to know your degree level,” a cultured voice requested, emphasizing “degree level”. “It’s necessary to provide credibility for our members.”
I resisted a temptation to apologize for my inadequacy, my lack of any degree level at all. It had taken me years of experience as an adult education teacher to overcome a self-esteem problem and break myself of the habit of automatically volunteering apologies, but I faced a dilemma.
Although I thought the biography I’d sent her was adequate, it was clear she needed something more or different. I promised to send a rewritten biography, of course, but I couldn’t tell her I graduated from an unaccredited religious high school and had completed only four quarters in a backwater teacher’s college in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I wouldn’t award myself a mythical degree in whatever. I couldn’t flippantly tell her I was an autodidact -- self-taught – even if it was true. Especially if it was true!
What to do? I picked up the most recent catalog of events and workshops the group sponsored and read over all the biographical paragraphs. They reeked of PhD this and M.A. that. Also the language was more formal than what I’d sent her. So I rewrote my biography using formal language and added three specific references to experts I’d “studied with.” I concluded with, “R. Jean Bryant was educated in the libraries of the West.”
I knew she wouldn’t like it, and probably would fail to appreciate my honesty. I knew she wouldn’t call me again, but that I’d be on probation of a sort and would have to prove my expertise in the lecture that would precede the workshop. I also knew I would do a good job despite my lack of a formal education. And so I did.
I had gotten into teaching through the back door maybe ten years earlier. Although I had taken one “Introduction to Education” class in college before I got married, the teacher had been so boring I thought maybe he had already died and no one had bothered to inform him. Before I took that class I had thought that teaching was potentially the most exciting job in the world.
Four children in quick succession and a career as a fulltime mother absorbed my time and energy. I was an avid and eclectic reader and dreamed of being a writer. I finally began taking an evening class in creative writing. The teacher was wonderful. Somehow she believed, in me and continued believing in me, until I believed in myself.
Writing was excruciatingly difficult for me. The blank page terrorized me; it seemed to shout, “You’re bore-ing! You’re not creative. You’ve never even done anything interesting.” But I desperately wanted to be a writer, so I persevered. Writing was so difficult I thought there was no point in doing it unless I could get published, often quoting Samuel Johnson who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Perseverance paid off. Within two years I had begun to sell humorous essays to “Charmed Land,” The Seattle Times Sunday magazine section, and other local markets. My self-esteem grew. My attitude in class was, “Hey, you guys, if I can do this, anybody can do it.”
I took that attitude with me when I joined a second writing class at the downtown Seattle YWCA. At the end of that session the instructor asked me if I was interested in teaching that class the following year. She had noticed how helpful I was with my fellow students. I jumped at the chance and, despite my lifelong shyness, I went and interviewed for the job.
I had found my true vocation. After several weeks where I tried to inflict a lesson plan on the students, I began to realize that writing can’t be taught. It can only be learned, and each writer must teach his/her self through the application of words onto paper. My job was to encourage that struggle; my job was to facilitate the would-be writers in class; my job was to help them get from where they were to where they wanted to go with their writing. I learned to listen to my students and trust my intuition. My reputation for doing just that spread by word of mouth and my class filled up ironically enough with multi-degreed professionals -- teachers and therapists.
I was terrified they would find out that I was uneducated and therefore unqualified. Maybe I was selling smoke. One day I was whining again about my fears to a close friend. She stopped me and asked, “Do you respect your students?”
“Yes, of course I do. I’m in awe of them. It’s a privilege to be part of their creative process.”
“If that’s true,” she said, “then you have to respect their choice of you as their teacher.” What a concept!
I eventually learned to appreciate that what set me apart from every other writing workshop teacher in the Greater Seattle area was my lack of a degree. I didn’t know how writing was supposed to be in a formal sense. I just knew when a writer told the truth, when a writer spoke in an authentic voice. I could listen for and encourage that.
My background for being a good teacher consisted of many learning experiences, including my first peak experience. When I was almost six years old in the early fall something happened at school in Tacoma that unlocked the secret of reading for me. I was so excited that I ran home, banged on the screen door, and the minute my mother unlocked it I demanded that she sit down so I could read to her. I turned out to be a natural speed-reader. I attended nine schools in four states in twelve years. By the end of the first week in any new school I had read all my textbooks. After that I always took a stash of my own books to school; my teachers learned to leave me alone as I was always ready to recite, and they learned it kept me from making trouble in class due to boredom.
Home was wherever I had a library card. I haunted the libraries of the West and did battle with librarians. In the summertime in Santa Fe I was allowed to check out only two books a day, so I did -- two books every day. Some of my choices were not age-appropriate (I was nine), and I often had to do a verbal book report to assure the power-hungry librarian I had actually read the books or convince her I had my parent’s permission. My avid and eclectic reading habit provided the unorthodox foundation for my true education, and continues to do so.
Writing was a different kind of education for me, especially journal writing which was overtly therapeutic. I ultimately came to believe that most writing was therapeutic -- not only poetry and fiction – novels and short stories, but biography and autobiography and creative non-fiction. We write out of who we are. We bring who we are to the page, and to the myriad of decisions that any piece of writing entails.
I’d been engaged to teach a one-day workshop in journal writing. The group, an organization that served mostly therapists, had asked me for a course description and an instructor biography. Two days after I mailed it off I received a phone call. “We need to know your degree level,” a cultured voice requested, emphasizing “degree level”. “It’s necessary to provide credibility for our members.”
I resisted a temptation to apologize for my inadequacy, my lack of any degree level at all. It had taken me years of experience as an adult education teacher to overcome a self-esteem problem and break myself of the habit of automatically volunteering apologies, but I faced a dilemma.
Although I thought the biography I’d sent her was adequate, it was clear she needed something more or different. I promised to send a rewritten biography, of course, but I couldn’t tell her I graduated from an unaccredited religious high school and had completed only four quarters in a backwater teacher’s college in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I wouldn’t award myself a mythical degree in whatever. I couldn’t flippantly tell her I was an autodidact -- self-taught – even if it was true. Especially if it was true!
What to do? I picked up the most recent catalog of events and workshops the group sponsored and read over all the biographical paragraphs. They reeked of PhD this and M.A. that. Also the language was more formal than what I’d sent her. So I rewrote my biography using formal language and added three specific references to experts I’d “studied with.” I concluded with, “R. Jean Bryant was educated in the libraries of the West.”
I knew she wouldn’t like it, and probably would fail to appreciate my honesty. I knew she wouldn’t call me again, but that I’d be on probation of a sort and would have to prove my expertise in the lecture that would precede the workshop. I also knew I would do a good job despite my lack of a formal education. And so I did.
I had gotten into teaching through the back door maybe ten years earlier. Although I had taken one “Introduction to Education” class in college before I got married, the teacher had been so boring I thought maybe he had already died and no one had bothered to inform him. Before I took that class I had thought that teaching was potentially the most exciting job in the world.
Four children in quick succession and a career as a fulltime mother absorbed my time and energy. I was an avid and eclectic reader and dreamed of being a writer. I finally began taking an evening class in creative writing. The teacher was wonderful. Somehow she believed, in me and continued believing in me, until I believed in myself.
Writing was excruciatingly difficult for me. The blank page terrorized me; it seemed to shout, “You’re bore-ing! You’re not creative. You’ve never even done anything interesting.” But I desperately wanted to be a writer, so I persevered. Writing was so difficult I thought there was no point in doing it unless I could get published, often quoting Samuel Johnson who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Perseverance paid off. Within two years I had begun to sell humorous essays to “Charmed Land,” The Seattle Times Sunday magazine section, and other local markets. My self-esteem grew. My attitude in class was, “Hey, you guys, if I can do this, anybody can do it.”
I took that attitude with me when I joined a second writing class at the downtown Seattle YWCA. At the end of that session the instructor asked me if I was interested in teaching that class the following year. She had noticed how helpful I was with my fellow students. I jumped at the chance and, despite my lifelong shyness, I went and interviewed for the job.
I had found my true vocation. After several weeks where I tried to inflict a lesson plan on the students, I began to realize that writing can’t be taught. It can only be learned, and each writer must teach his/her self through the application of words onto paper. My job was to encourage that struggle; my job was to facilitate the would-be writers in class; my job was to help them get from where they were to where they wanted to go with their writing. I learned to listen to my students and trust my intuition. My reputation for doing just that spread by word of mouth and my class filled up ironically enough with multi-degreed professionals -- teachers and therapists.
I was terrified they would find out that I was uneducated and therefore unqualified. Maybe I was selling smoke. One day I was whining again about my fears to a close friend. She stopped me and asked, “Do you respect your students?”
“Yes, of course I do. I’m in awe of them. It’s a privilege to be part of their creative process.”
“If that’s true,” she said, “then you have to respect their choice of you as their teacher.” What a concept!
I eventually learned to appreciate that what set me apart from every other writing workshop teacher in the Greater Seattle area was my lack of a degree. I didn’t know how writing was supposed to be in a formal sense. I just knew when a writer told the truth, when a writer spoke in an authentic voice. I could listen for and encourage that.
My background for being a good teacher consisted of many learning experiences, including my first peak experience. When I was almost six years old in the early fall something happened at school in Tacoma that unlocked the secret of reading for me. I was so excited that I ran home, banged on the screen door, and the minute my mother unlocked it I demanded that she sit down so I could read to her. I turned out to be a natural speed-reader. I attended nine schools in four states in twelve years. By the end of the first week in any new school I had read all my textbooks. After that I always took a stash of my own books to school; my teachers learned to leave me alone as I was always ready to recite, and they learned it kept me from making trouble in class due to boredom.
Home was wherever I had a library card. I haunted the libraries of the West and did battle with librarians. In the summertime in Santa Fe I was allowed to check out only two books a day, so I did -- two books every day. Some of my choices were not age-appropriate (I was nine), and I often had to do a verbal book report to assure the power-hungry librarian I had actually read the books or convince her I had my parent’s permission. My avid and eclectic reading habit provided the unorthodox foundation for my true education, and continues to do so.
Writing was a different kind of education for me, especially journal writing which was overtly therapeutic. I ultimately came to believe that most writing was therapeutic -- not only poetry and fiction – novels and short stories, but biography and autobiography and creative non-fiction. We write out of who we are. We bring who we are to the page, and to the myriad of decisions that any piece of writing entails.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The Virgin Blogger
I've been obsessing about trying to do too much with this blog. Drunk with the satisfaction of having got it up and running, but seduced by ambitious possibilities. Head banging for weeks now with little to show for it. So, I've decided to update this blog weekly for starters. Then play around with other possibilities at my leisure. I'll keep you posted on my progress.
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