Apple to Apple

For me, writing has been a steady, slow lesson in humility. Rejection letters, blank pages that won’t fill with words. and pages that are full but with dead words—all these deflate me. Other times, I like my words. The message seems strong and the language clear and alive. And I send these words to other writers.

“What do you think?” I ask.

Often in the first minutes of their answers, I wish I hadn’t asked. Critiques sting. I should have seen that, I think. Or worse, I can’t understand what they mean . . . or how to fix it.

In just a few days, I’m heading for an intensive writing conference. At this conference, I won’t attend classes on how to write. This is a critiquing conference—a handful of writers with an editor who is known for giving the kind of ruthless feedback that might make you good if you can take it, or put you under if you can’t.

I’m taking a manuscript for critique. And I’m hoping I’ll remember some things I’ve learned about taking feedback while writing Yoder School. Here are my reminders for myself.

• Swallow the word but. When I argue with a critiquer, I lose an opportunity to learn.
• Wait out emotion. After the hurt subsides, my mind will begin to work again.
• Forget about myself and concentrate on my work. This is humility—caring more about my readers than about my ego.
• Keep a balance. Humility means seeing my work as it is—the strengths and the weaknesses. If I think too highly of my work, I won’t learn. But if I see only flaws, I give up.

And I hope I remember what Winston Churchill said:

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

I’m sounding brave now, but . . . we’ll see.

Yoder School, the memoir I wrote about my learning, is the backstory to my teaching. I didn’t go around talking with students about my teacher Alvina or how I felt when Mr. Pollard understood about me being so different in Flint. I didn’t tell my students that I listened, actually listened, to their excuses about homework because Mr. Cline at the community college hadn’t believed that I missed his quiz because my car was stolen from our driveway. So though I didn’t explain all this to students, these memories traveled with me into the classes I taught at the middle school and the prison and in parent education.

It was Alvina, my first teacher, who set in me the pattern to reflect, to take what I had seen and heard and to hold it up for examination. She’d take us to a chicken house or send us to the woods. And then she’d ask us, “What did you see? What did you hear? And we’d write our daily diaries.

A butterfly came out of our cocoon, I wrote on Wednesday, February 7, 1963. Its wings were crippled.

And the next day I wrote, Our butterfly was dead.

Life, I could see, wasn’t always right.

Later, though, I wrote about a different butterfly, one that unfurled its wings and flew away.

Life, I could then see, was sometimes beautiful.

Alvina taught me to collect stories and to carry them with me. And to use one story to inform another. How could my bad citizenship mark in first grade and my parent’s solution of a bird workbook help me when I felt restless in Mrs. Lott’s room in Flint? And later, what could I do when a student felt restless in my classroom?

All through grade school and high school and college, I did what Alvina taught me. I collected the stories that informed much of my three decades of teaching. And these stories became Yoder School.

During my junior high years I biked to the branch library on Bristol Road once a week. Dodging potholes in the road, I balanced the bike basket full of books and a sack of books hanging from each handle bar. Finally, back in my room and sprawled across my bed, I’d open To Kill a Mockingbird and find Atticus Finch saying, “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.”

Or I’d burrow into The Diary of a Young Girl and think about what Anne Frank said: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because despite everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

I laughed through Cheaper by the Dozen because Mr. Gilbreth and my dad were the same person. The only real difference was that my dad went to church.

When I read the formulaic books—Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, and Cherry Ames, I found comfort in their organization, their predictability, and their happy endings.

Mennonite books from the church library, books like Mattie Mae and The Miller Five and Betsy Buttonwood and The Crying Heart helped me remember that other plain people like me were alive somewhere. They helped me go back to Yoder School for an hour.

All these books took me away, which is where I wanted to be. I read during class with my book hidden on my lap. I read during study hall and lunch. I read at home while I dried dishes with the book propped up on the window sill above the kitchen sink. I read while I rocked my little brother to sleep. I read as I walked home from school. When I’m a teacher, I thought, I just might let my class read for a whole day.

“There’s a dark side to your book,” my mom told me yesterday. “It’s messing up your dad’s naps. He can’t stop reading to sleep.”

It’s no wonder. He’s all through the story.

I took my parents a copy of Yoder School the other day. Inside the front cover I wrote them a note:

To Mom and Dad,
You formed so much of this story.
With my love,
Phyllis

Here you can see a photo of my parents and me in the beautiful mountains of Western Maryland before we moved away to the city.

And here we are on the day I gave them my memoir, all of us looking as if the decades have aged us.

 

 

 

When I was writing a curriculum about peace, Titus Peachey reached out to me. For decades, Titus had been the director of peace education for Mennonite Central Committee, a relief, service, and peace agency that works in more than 50 countries. He shared resources with me, and we talked about how people learn.

Titus, too, comes from Western Maryland. He also grew up with the taste of maple syrup and sounds of Pennsylvania Dutch and the panorama of autumn color on the mountain sides. And like me, Titus left those childhood scenes to pursue his callings.

This is why I was grateful when Titus agreed to read Yoder School. And I appreciate his comments.

“Phyllis Swartz reached out and drew me in with her warm and thoughtful memoir. Her journey out of the comfortable cocoon of her childhood to encounter the wider world stirred my own reflections on identity, belonging, and faith.”

—Titus Peachey, Peace Advocate

 

I’m the baby in this picture, the first in my generation to be born into this family. My dad is holding me and standing next to my mother. You can see my grandparents, my many aunts, and my Uncle Philip, who was just a few years older than I was.  And this is only one part of the family we left when we moved from Grantsville, Maryland, to Flint Michigan. The Benders—my mother’s family—was even larger, more than 70 people . . . and growing.

When this picture was taken, none of us knew my parents and I and my coming brothers and sisters would move away from the mountains, away from a Mennonite community, and away the country to live in the city of Flint, Michigan.

 

I’m the baby in this picture, the first in my generation to be born into this family. My dad is holding me and standing next to my mother. You can see my grandparents, my many aunts, and my Uncle Philip, who was just a few years older than I was.  And this is only one part of the family we left when we moved from Grantsville, Maryland, to Flint Michigan. The Benders—my mother’s family—was even larger, more than 70 people . . . and growing.

When this picture was taken, none of us knew my parents and I and my coming brothers and sisters would move away from the mountains, away from a Mennonite community, and away the country to live in the city of Flint, Michigan.