On Thursday October 3, my course, The Personal Essay, began; and students read a short piece, “Asthma,” by Seneca. Imagine this Stoic philosopher’s voice resonating from Rome, more than twenty-one centuries later.
In class the other day, Seneca’s piece and another by the late Russell Baker, made me recall the first “personal” essay I ever wrote. (I’m not talking about essays in high school and papers in college.) The essay I wrote was for a class at U.C. Berkeley in the late 1970s during the decade I lived in the Napa Valley.
A requirement in Overcoming the Fear of Writing was to mail an essay to the professor weeks earlier. I assumed the class would be small if the teacher wanted an essay from everyone. But what to write? When to write it? My life was the “full catastrophe”: High school English teacher, lesson plans, papers to grade, two children under five, house & garden, my mate a U.S.A.F. pilot. Yet when I saw this class in the U.C. Extension catalogue, a voice said, “Write for your Life, Gail.”
That Saturday in Cal Berkeley’s Sproul Hall were 100 students, if not more. Had the professor read an essay from each of us? She arrived a bit late, wiry, wild-haired, and ready to get our pens moving. And move they did until she said we would have an hour for lunch to recharge our batteries. Before dismissal, she asked to see two students. My first thought when I heard my name, “What did I do wrong?” The other student was a dapper looking older man. I had typed my essay on erasable bond paper, which the professor held in her hands. I could see that print had begun to disappear. I must have thought I would be told to use different paper. She talked to the gentleman first. He turned out to be a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The teacher had wanted to meet him. He had taken the class because he was “blocked” writing a book under contract, one on Emperor Norton of San Francisco fame. Then she turned to me and said my essay should be published. What’s more she was willing to help me. I looked again at “Yellow Shoes.” Above the title in huge letters, she had written, RESONANCE. I recognized the word but did not understand what it meant related to my essay. (I had to wait until I returned home that day and checked an unabridged dictionary.) That day in Sproul Hall the journalist kidded me about being special and said he would buy my lunch. I did not return home and say to Mike, babysitter for the day, that I ate lunch with a journalist from The Chronicle. But because of that day, I became a writer.
What was my first personal essay about? An extended metaphor about shoes and what they revealed about the direction my life had taken. Humorous, heart-felt, and resonant. “Yellow Shoes” was not published. But two years later, Redbook Magazine selected my “Young Mother’s Story” from hundreds of submissions. All because of that one day in Sproul Hall in the 1970s.
What resonates through time?
Your voice, my voice, the written voice, the human voice.
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