Barbara Presnell: ‘Tis a gift
‘Tis a gift
I was walking the mulched path through the woods from the dining hall to the Little House at the John Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, a small, eclectic community deep in the mountains near Murphy. It was after breakfast, not quite nine o’clock on a Tuesday in April. Morning fog was just beginning to burn off the trees, sun sneaking in.
To my left, I caught a flash of red. I stopped, looked. What I saw was not like anything I’d ever seen before, but I knew exactly what it was from pictures and a lifetime of hoping: a pileated woodpecker. He was as big as I always imagined, his crew-cut red top rising from his head like brilliant flames, the black and white of his body stark and beautiful. He settled on a log not far from the path, inviting me closer. I did. I crept so close I could see his eyes, his beak, that tall tuft of red. He didn’t seem to mind my presence, until finally I stepped too close, and he lifted up on those magnificent wings and sailed to a nearby tree.
I was stunned, exhilarated, wide awake. That moment, that day, changed everything. I was one day into teaching an advanced memoir writing class, and until that moment, I had very little notion that what I’d planned for this week would work. I had a gut-wrenching fear, in fact, that I was going to fail this class. I don’t mean my students would fail. I mean I would fail. They were too advanced. They were too novice. I was too tired before I’d begun. I had planned each day carefully, but I realized the first night that I’d have to start over with my planning.
Five students had enrolled, but on Sunday afternoon one emailed: he’d fallen on Saturday, ended up in the emergency room, and he wasn’t going to make it. That dropped enrollment to four. And at our first class on Sunday evening, one student was absent. We were down to three.
But those three were good. When they read short pieces from an intro prompt, I was so impressed that I went back to my room that night and redesigned the next day’s class. I didn’t think they needed the review of the basic elements of memoir writing that I’d planned. They were ready for the hard stuff.
On Monday morning, the fourth student arrived. A retired Presbyterian minister with 38 years of sermons under his belt, he admitted that he did not like writing but had been challenged by a grandson to write his life story. I knew he wasn’t ready for the hard stuff.
As it turned out, nor were the two other men in the class, both men over 70 with good stories to tell. When I saw their eyes glaze over during my lesson on perspective and point of view, I knew I’d lost them. The remaining student was Liz, a 22-year-old work study student at the folk school, a recent college grad who had taken a gap year after college to travel alone across the country to work on a farm in Washington state. She kept up on that Monday but, I sensed, like the others, she was on slippery footing.
I learned quickly, though, that Liz was a poet and a skillful writer. The words she used to describe making an unplanned detour to Devil’s Lake in Baraboo, Wisconsin—and jumping in—were vivid. What in the world could I offer Liz, could this class offer to Liz, that might help her?
On that Tuesday morning, the morning I saw the woodpecker, I threw out my revised plans and gave each student an assignment. The retired minister needed to loosen up, so I gave him simple sentences to jog his memory and help him figure out what he wanted to write; the other two men were eager to work on their projects—one, a self-professed atheist, was writing about hitchhiking, and the other was attempting a difficult recollection about a racial incident in high school. Liz set to work on completing the Devil’s Lake essay.
I believe that sightings are gifts. I believe when I see a bluebird—not a regular occurrence in my neighborhood full of cats—it is meant just for me.
The pileated woodpecker is rich with symbolism, I learned. A woodpecker sighting suggests new opportunities are ahead. It invites creativity, optimism, courage. It inspires us to “seize our desire and never give up on our dreams,” according to one website.
Creativity, optimism, and courage were palpable at the folk school that week, especially in my little writing class. Starting that Tuesday, everything turned. The minister found his voice, his direction. The hitchhiker learned about detail and quit making such an effort to convince us of his atheism. “You are one of the most spiritual men I’ve ever known,” the minister told him. The third writer relived difficult memories and emotions about race, lost opportunity, and regret that we all had felt.
And, Liz—Liz who hummed as she breathed all day, Liz who, when the temperature hit 80 degrees, shed her flannel shirt and boots to walk barefoot to the dining hall for lunch—relived in poetic prose both her decision to take such an unconventional post-grad excursion across the country and the moment at
Devil’s Lake when her life took a turn.
Several times a day, when I passed the fallen tree trunk where I’d first seen the woodpecker, I’d pause, but I never saw it again. Later in the week, a bluebird flew from a tree just outside our classroom to the already occupied birdhouse in the back.
There is often magic in a writing class, when it goes well, when the writers are willing to go deep and let their words tell their story. “Memoir writing is about transformation,” I said every morning when we
began. “How did this change you? Who are you now after this incident, after this person came into your life?”
The atheist and the minister became close friends, sharing meals and spending much class time talking over philosophies and life experience. The writer struggling through a high school incident engaged us with vivid detail and raw emotion that touched us all. And Liz. When she finished her Devil’s Lake story and read it to us and to the larger folk school community, there was total silence. This 22-year-old memoirist with limited life experience rendered us completely and utterly spellbound.
Completely and utterly spellbound. A gift, like that red crew-cut topnotch. Like those blue, blue wings.
