The Miss Dennis School of Writing: and Other Lessons from A Woman's Life

The Miss Dennis School of Writing

and Other Lessons from A Woman’s Life

Alice Steinbach

The Bancroft Press Baltimore, MD

Copyright 1996 by The Bancroft Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

Published by The Bancroft Press, P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209. (410) 358-0658.

ISBN 0-9631246-2-5

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 96-85002

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Melinda Russell Design, Baltimore, MD

Distributed to the trade by National Book Network, Lanham, MD

This book is for my mother, in memory

And for my sons, Andrew and Samuel

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Baltimore Sun for permission to reprint the following pieces, in whose pages they originally appeared from 1985 to 1995.

I would also like to thank my publisher, Bruce Bortz, and my editor, Connie Knox, for their counsel and support.

Above all, I am grateful to my family and friends without whom the life described in these pages would have been less complete. My heartfelt thanks go to my brother and sister-in-law, Shelby and Patricia Carter, who many times have come to my rescue, providing love and support. And, of course, words cannot convey what I owe to my sons, Andy and Sam, who continue to grace my life with their presence.

Contents

Introduction

The Miss Dennis School of Writing

Women and Men

An Old Flame

Fathers

He Said, She Said

My Funny Valentine

Crossing the Gender Gap

Romance

Women and Confusion

All About Eve

A Matter of Appearance

Youth and Beauty

Fashion: Sense and Non-Sense

Charm School

Losing It

Hair Problems

Fashion: More Sense and Non-Sense

Raising Children

Mother’s Day

Thanksgiving at the Holiday Inn

Philosophers

The World on a String

Lost and Found

Letters from Camp

Land of Adolescence

Parents are Forever

The Solo Life

To Wait or Not to Wait

To Share or Not to Share

At the Beauty Spa

One of Us

In the Garden

Unpacking a Life

The Working Life

Having It All

The Opera Singer

Rejection

Success and Failure

Second Acts

Still Betty After All These Years

On Assignment

Growing Up

Counter Culture

Camp Baltimore

Sibling Rivalry

Christmas

Prom Night

Piano Lessons

Girls to Women

The Mocking Birds

Daily Pleasures

One Moment in Time

Camelot

Mail Chauvinist

News of the World

Friends and Recipes

Daily Afflictions

Deconstructive Criticism

Worrying

Cats

Now and Then

Canceled Checks

Perfectionists

A Pain in the Back

Martha Stewart and Me

Role Models

Lessons from a Wise Fox

Well, Here We Are

The Real Me

Taught by Children

Two Unusual People

17 Years, 11 Months, and 13 Days

Pioneer Women

Anne Frank

A Sense of Place

Home

Familiar Strangers

Fifth Grade

My Neighborhood

Beyond Words

The Geography of Hope

As Time Goes By

September Song

Stars

Spending Time

Scents and Sensibility

Signs of Life

The Middle Ages

Before Air Conditioning

Better-Late-Than-Never Mail

Departures

The Girl Who Loved Cats and Flowers

Homer: A Dog’s Odyssey

Elegy for Max

Empty Nest

Remembering E.B. White

The Girl Who Loved the Wind

About the Author

Introduction

From a shoebox of old postcards I lift one out — a view of Colette’s grave in the famous Paris cemetery Pere Lachaise — and read the following message:

Dear Alice,

Traveling here on the Metro, I sat next to a young Frenchwoman holding a huge spray of flowers — pink roses, baby’s breath, yellow lilies, all wrapped in clear, florist’s paper that made crackling sounds each time the train leaned into a turn. By the time we reached Pere Lachaise, the entire metro car was filled with the scent of roses and lilies. It followed me all day and was waiting for me that evening when I returned to my hotel room. Falling asleep, I thought of my mother, of the Shalimar perfume she wore, of the way her clothes always seemed, at least to a small child, to smell of roses. You must try to remember this day, Alice: the day the scent of your childhood accompanied you, like a happy companion, through the winding paths of Pere Lachaise.

The postcard, dated June 1993, is signed: Love, Alice.

I first began sending postcards to myself about 15 years ago while on a trip to Bornholm, a small island in the Baltic Sea. I was traveling alone, tired and still reeling from the loss of an important figure in my life, when suddenly I succumbed to acute feelings of homesickness. By the second day of my stay, I found myself searching, like a sailor lost at sea, for something familiar, something to assuage my loneliness, and yearning for home.

Then one day, while walking along a road lined with fir trees, I came to an opening and found what I was looking for. There before me, bending to the wind, was a vast field of purple heather. Something inside me lifted and suddenly I was seeing the heather my Scottish grandmother lovingly described to me in the bedtime stories she wove about her life in Kirriemuir. I have seen this before, I thought, standing there in the heather of Bornholm, watching as the unfamiliar slipped off its strangeness and took on the guise of an old friend.

That night I wrote my first postcard to myself, describing what I had seen that afternoon and what I had felt. When I returned to Baltimore, the postcard was waiting for me. I turned it over, read through it and came to the last line: Try to remember this day: the heather, the wind, the peace that comes with knowing the familiar is everywhere.

In this book, I write about the familiar. It’s taken a lifetime of learning to see that what has shaped me are not the lessons taught by the occasional encounter with the exotic moment. I take my form, instead, from the long, steady observation of the familiar; this is the force that has allowed me to see life whole and to make personal sense of it. It is this view that accounts for the recurring themes to be found in this book: family, friends, children, men, women, youth, aging, nature, home and, of course, cats.

What the reader will not find in these pages is the journalist’s stance of distanced objectivity. Here, the third person gives way to the first. I learned early in my life, from reading the incomparable E. B. White, that a private experience, if deeply examined, can have universal value. As a writing man, Mr. White observed in one of his essays, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.

In these pages, I have tried to rescue from insignificance some of the small events that make up a life. My hope is that such a recounting will evoke in the reader a personal response, one that causes a nod of the head in recognition or a sudden laugh at the familiarity of what’s being described.

Finally, there is a ghost who haunts this book: Miss Dennis. It was she who helped shape my writing self, so much so that I have devoted the entire opening essay to her. Even now, I can’t think of her without remembering her favorite words: prairie and silver. She liked the sound of them, she said. It comes as no surprise that I’ve managed to work both words into these pages. Miss Dennis, I think, would have wanted it that way.

Baltimore

June 1996

The Miss Dennis School of Writing

What kind of writing do you do?" asked the novelist sitting to my left at a writer’s luncheon.

I work for a newspaper in Baltimore, he was told.

Oh, did you go to journalism school?

Well, yes.

Columbia? he asked, invoking the name of the most prestigious journalism school in the country.

Actually, no, I heard myself telling him. I’m one of the lucky ones. I am a graduate of the Miss Dennis School of Writing.

Unimpressed, the novelist turned away. Clearly it was a credential that did not measure up to his standards. But why should it? He was not one of the lucky ones. He had never met Miss Dennis, my ninth-grade creative writing teacher, or had the good fortune to be her student. Which meant he had never experienced the sight of Miss Dennis chasing Dorothy Singer around the classroom, threatening her with a yardstick because Dorothy hadn’t paid attention and her writing showed it.

You want to be a writer? Miss Dennis would yell, out of breath from all the running and yardstick-brandishing. Then pay attention to what’s going on around you. Connect! You are not Switzerland — neutral, aloof, uninvolved. Think Italy!

Miss Dennis said things like that. If you had any sense, you wrote them down.

I can’t teach you how to write, but I can tell you how to look at things, how to pay attention, she would bark out at us, like a drill sergeant confronting a group of undisciplined, wet-behind-the-ears Marine recruits. To drive home her point, she had us take turns writing a description of what we saw on the way to school in the morning. Of course, you never knew which morning would be your turn, so — just to be on the safe side — you got into the habit of looking things over carefully every morning and making notes: Saw a pot of red geraniums sitting in the sunlight on a white stucco porch; an orange-striped cat curled like a comma beneath a black van; a dark gray cloud scudding across a silver morning sky.

It’s a lesson that I have returned to again and again throughout my writing career. To this day, I think of Miss Dennis whenever I write a certain kind of sentence. Or to be more precise, whenever I write a sentence that actually creates in words the picture I want readers to see.

Take, for instance, this sentence: Miss Dennis was a small, compact woman, about albatross height — or so it seemed to her students — with short, straight hair the color of apricots and huge eyeglasses that were always slipping down her nose.

Or this one: Miss Dennis always wore a variation of one outfit — a dark-colored, flared woolen skirt, a tailored white blouse, and a cardigan sweater, usually black, thrown over her shoulders and held together by a little pearl chain.

Can you see her? I can. And the image of her makes me smile. Still.

But it was not Miss Dennis’ appearance or her unusual teaching method — which had a lot in common with an out-of-control terrier — that made her special. What set her apart was her deep commitment to liberating the individual writer in each student.

What lies at the heart of good writing, she told us over and over again, is the writer’s ability to find his own unique voice. And then to use it to tell an interesting story. Somehow she made it clear that we were interesting people with interesting stories to tell. Most of us, of course, had never even known we had a story to tell, much less an interesting one. But soon the stories just started bubbling up from some inner wellspring.

Finding the material, however, was one thing; finding the individual voice was another.

Take me, for instance. I arrived in Miss Dennis’s class trailing all sorts of literary baggage. My usual routine was to write like Colette on Monday, one of the Bronte sisters on Wednesday, and Mark Twain on Friday.

Right away, Miss Dennis knocked me off my high horse.

Why are you telling other people’s stories? she challenged me, peering up into my face. (At 14, I was already four inches taller than Miss Dennis.) You have your own stories to tell.

I was tremendously relieved to hear this and immediately proceeded to write like my idol, E. B. White. Miss Dennis, however, wasn’t buying.

How will you ever find out what you have to say if you keep trying to say what other people have already said? was the way she dispensed with my E. B. White impersonation. By the third week of class, Miss Dennis knew my secret. She knew I was afraid — afraid to pay attention to my own inner voice for fear that when I finally heard it, it would have nothing to say.

What Miss Dennis told me — and I have carefully preserved these words because they were then, and are now, so very important to me — was this: Don’t be afraid to discover what you’re saying in the act of saying it. Then, in her inimitably breezy and endearing way, she added: Trust me on this one.

From the beginning, she made it clear to us that it was not right or wrong answers she was after. It was thinking.

Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb, she’d tell some poor kid struggling to reason his way through an essay on friendship or courage. And eventually — once we stopped being afraid that we’d be chopped off out there on that limb — we needed no encouragement to say what we thought. In fact, after the first month, I can’t remember ever feeling afraid of failing in her class. Passing or failing didn’t seem to be the point of what she was teaching.

Miss Dennis spent as much time, maybe more, pointing out what was right with our work as she did pointing out what was wrong. I can still hear her critiquing my best friend’s incredibly florid essay on nature. You are a very good observer of nature, she told the budding writer. And if you just write what you see without thinking so much about adjectives and comparisons, we will see it through your attentive eyes.

By Thanksgiving vacation, I think we were all a little infatuated with Miss Dennis. And beyond that, infatuated with the way she made us feel about ourselves — that we were interesting people worth listening to.

I, of course, fancied having a special relationship with her. It was certainly special to me. And, to tell the truth, I knew she felt the same way.

The first time we acknowledged this was one day after class when I stayed behind to talk to her. I often did that and it seemed we talked about everything — from the latest films to the last issue of the New Yorker. The one thing we did not talk about was the sadness I still felt about my father’s death. He had died a few years before and, although I did not know it then, I was still grieving his absence. Without knowing the details, Miss Dennis somehow picked up on my sadness. Maybe it was there in my writing. Looking back, I see now that, without my writing about it directly, my father’s death hovered at the edges of all my stories.

But on this particular day, I found myself talking not about the movies or writing, but instead pouring out my feelings about the loss of my father. I shall never forget that late fall afternoon: the sound of the vanilla-colored blinds flap, flap, flapping in the still classroom; the sun falling in shafts through the windows, each ray illuminating tiny galaxies of chalk dust in the air; the smell of wet blackboards; the teacher, small with apricot-colored hair, listening intently to a young girl blurting out her grief. These memories are stored like vintage photographs in my memory.

The words that passed between the young girl and the attentive teacher are harder to recall. With this exception. One day, Miss Dennis told me, "you will write about this. Maybe not directly. But you will write about it. And you will find that all this has made you a better writer and a stronger person."

After that day, it was like Miss Dennis and I shared something. We never talked again about my father, but spent most of our time discussing our mutual interests. We both loved poetry and discovered one afternoon that each of us regarded Emily Dickinson with something approaching idolatry. Right then and there, Miss Dennis gave me a crash course in why Emily Dickinson’s poems worked. I can still hear her talking about the spare, slanted beauty in Dickinson’s unique choice of words. She also told me that, despite the rather cloistered life led by this New England spinster, Emily Dickinson knew the world as few others did. She found her world within the word is the way I remember Miss Dennis putting it. Of course, I could be making that part up.

That night, propped up in bed reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry, I wondered if Miss Dennis, a spinster herself, identified in some way with the woman who wrote:

"Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!"

It seems strange, I know, but I never really knew anything about Miss Dennis’s life outside of the classroom. Oh, once she confided in me that the initial M in her name stood for Mildred. And I was surprised when I passed by the teachers’ lounge one day and saw her smoking a cigarette, one placed in a long, silver cigarette holder. It seemed an exceedingly sophisticated thing to do and it struck me then that she might be more worldly than I had previously thought.

But I didn’t know how she spent her time or what she wanted from life or anything like that. And I never really wondered about it. Once I remember talking to some friends about her age. We guessed somewhere around 50 — which seemed really old to us. In reality, Miss Dennis was around 40.

It was Miss Dennis, by the way, who encouraged me to enter some writing contests. To my surprise, I took first place in a couple of them. Of course, taking first place is easy. What’s hard is being rejected. But Miss Dennis helped me with that, too, citing all the examples of famous writers who’d been rejected time and time again. Do you know what they told George Orwell when they rejected ‘Animal Farm’? she would ask me. Then without waiting for a reply, she’d answer her own question: The publisher told him, ‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.’

When I left her class at the end of the year, Miss Dennis gave me a present: a book of poems by Emily Dickinson. I have it still. The spine is cracked and the front cover almost gone, but the inscription remains. On the inside flyleaf, in her perfect Palmer Method handwriting, she had written: Say what you see. Yours in Emily Dickinson, Miss Dennis.

She had also placed little checks next to two or three poems. I took this to mean she thought they contained a special message for me. One of those checked began this way:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul. . .

I can remember carefully copying out these lines onto a sheet of paper, one which I carried around in my handbag for almost a year. But time passed, the handbag fell apart, and who knows what happened to the yellowing piece of paper with the words about hope.

The years went by. Other schools and other teachers came and went in my life. But one thing remained constant: My struggle to pay attention to my own inner life; to hear a voice that I would recognize finally as my own. Not only in my writing but in my life.

Only recently, I learned that Miss Dennis had died at the age of 50. When I heard this, it occurred to me that her life was close to being over when I met her. Neither of us knew this, of course. Or at least I didn’t. But lately I’ve wondered if she knew something that day we talked about sadness and my father’s death. Write about it, she said. It will help you.

And now, reading over these few observations, I think of Miss Dennis. But not with sadness. Actually, thinking of Miss Dennis makes me smile. I think of her and see, with marked clarity, a small, compact woman with apricot-colored hair. She is with a young girl and she is saying something.

She is saying: Pay attention.

Women and Men

When I was a teenager, most of what I knew about women and men I learned from three sources: Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and my Aunt Claire.

From Hemingway, I learned that men are brave and fine and good and true. And that two of their main pleasures in life are bullfighting and drinking wine out of goatskins while speaking in terse sentences.

From Parker, I learned that women live their lives waiting for men: waiting for them to come home or waiting for them to telephone or waiting for them to propose marriage or to jump ship.

And from my Aunt Claire, I learned my most important lesson: to regard all such generalizations about women and men with a healthy dose of skepticism.

My Aunt Claire, who was the first truly independent woman I ever met, died a few decades before the arrival of such Wild Men and New Women as Robert Bly and Camille Paglia and the ensuing glut of books and television talk shows devoted to the unbearable oddness of the opposite sex.

Still, it seems to me, most men and women are willing to attempt crossing the sometimes stormy waters of the gender gulf, knowing that on the other side lies something worth reaching: a shared humanity.

My Old Flame

We met for dinner, the two of us, in a small, Italian restaurant near his hotel. It was a reunion of sorts. Once, we had come close to marriage; he had proposed and I had accepted. That part I remember quite clearly. What has become less clear to me over the years is why our plans fell apart.

Since then, we’ve lived separate lives in different cities. But over the years, news filtered back to me: He was married; he was successful; he was divorced. Then one day the phone rang. He was coming to town. Could we have dinner?

I hesitated. In my head I quickly ran through all the reasons for avoiding a reunion with an old flame — not the least of which is disappointment; you with him, or worse yet, the other way around. But the simple fact is that all such reasoning gives way when that most demanding of all human needs kicks in: curiosity.

You find yourself wondering: What does he look like? How has life changed him? Will I see in him what I saw in him? Will I still find him attractive? And, more important, will he still find me attractive?

I agreed to meet him.

I dressed carefully for the occasion — which is to say I went out of my way to look good. Driving to the restaurant, I worked at retrieving the relationship, summoning up a kind of Cliffs Notes of memories: I tried to recall key feelings and events which outlined the way we were. It proved difficult.

It reminded me of a woman in one of Alice Munro’s short stories: Thinking about a past and passionate romance, the woman realizes how distant and exotic the relationship now