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Sunday, February 9, 2025
HomewritingBeyond Grammar

Beyond Grammar

For E.

When the department chair emails to ask if I can call (call soon), I know: someone we cherished is gone. Someone who wrote for us. Someone who wrote with us. Someone who turned the pages we were turning.

I dial. I wait. The student is named. Grief is a slow slide, is a plummet. It is the past tense she had, she was. She had dark eyes, slender bones, capacity, sentences rooted in explanation that turned back upon themselves with bright perception. She was the open curve of a single parenthesis. She lacked pretension; she sparked.

She was one of mine, a my. One of my spring-semester sixteen on an urban campus, where she stood out as wanting more from the words on the page, stood out for being more. More principled. More honorable. More surprised than anyone when her stories silenced us. Then, a few years later, she was my honors thesis one. I charted her course with syllabi, peremptory prompts, exhortations, praise. What I wanted from her is what I wanted for her: to find and accept the best in herself. Her soul as her plot. Her pulse as her pace. Her curiosity as her question on the page.

To teach memoir is to step inside the rooms where others live. It is to ask how the water sounds in the pot where it boils while a father dries the tomato knife on his rumpled cotton sleeve. It is to say, How tall was the grass in the yard where you lay? And Who is the girl with the bouquet of fat balloons? And What happens to the dust in the beam of sun that is smashing with a vengeance against the mirror?

Only to be there. Only to step near. Only to confess, unabashed, that you are listening.

Once a student disappeared, lanced, it seemed to me, by the bright edge of my questions. But when he returned he most remarkably returned with a story that harrowed deeper than any seed I’ve ever planted.

Once a student lashed out in rage across the Zoom through which we were speaking. But when she returned she returned with joy: There’d been a storm, she said, an exhilarating soaking. There’d been a storm and she’d heard her own self laughing.

Once there was a girl who wrote sly and curved, phrases unadorned and somehow piercing. A girl who framed her family’s immigration story as a subdued heroics tale, who pulsed her pace with gratitude, who wanted to say, who tried so hard to say, that she would carry the multitudes of her family’s goodness forward; she called that goodness sacrifice. But love seeps and spills and won’t be contained. The page is flat. Love is dimensions. When the girl disappeared after three long months of trying, she did not return.

Come back.

The grief first. Then the plummet.

To write memoir is to accumulate the facts and then write past them. It is to search through the briefcase of tattered documents because there is poetry in a passport stamp. It is to summon essence and heed the whisper and cast your gaze across a past you cannot see but somehow remember according to the stories you’ve grown up with. It is to honor, which is a word construed with adjacencies. It is to hold yourself up with the sylph-like letter I. To throw yourself against it. To trust it, finally.

To not write memoir is to believe you’ve failed. Or she believed she had failed. And nothing that I said, no invitation I extended, no praise I brought toward her would ease her from this conclusion.

It’s always hard.

Let’s try this another way.

There’s beauty already in your pages.

Come back.

I believed in her, and she slipped away. No memoir. No thesis. No closed parenthesis. The last time I saw her, she stood at the campus edge. She was sylphlike. She was pale. She noticed me and glanced away.

That was May two years ago. This is the first day of September. She lies newly within the earth—missed beyond repair, beyond all grammar. I hold the fragments of her story in my hands. The best of who she was, still speaking.

***

Our friends at Corporeal Writing are reinventing the writing workshop one body at a time.

Check out their current online labs, and tell them we sent you!

***

Silence is not an option

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Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books and a paper artist. Her first novel for adults, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday's News is due out in April 2025 from Tursulowe Press. She can be found on Substack at The Hush and the Howl.
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3 COMMENTS

  1. Beth, I am so sorry for your loss. I taught college writing and lit for 22 years and I know how devastated I would be to lose a student. Have lost a couple to illness. Too soon. Too sad. Memoir class, SO MUCH HAPPENS. You were good to her, a bright spot in her challenging life.

  2. Beth, how wonderful to find you on The Manifest Station where one of my memoir essays will soon be published. Watch for it: “Welcome to the Unhome” by Jill Quist. I’m sorry for your loss of a student. I’ve not experienced that but it must be terribly poignant to hold part of their story, privately, in your teaching relationship. It was a joy to read your words honoring the student and the art of memoir.

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