Honoring Our Teachers: Mrs. Minot

Many thanks to Tricia Springstubb, who lives and writes in Cleveland, Ohio, for sharing this memory of her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Minot, who inspired her to think of herself as a writer for the first time.

I guess I'm about as close to "self-taught" a writer as possible. I've never taken a writing class, and my first publications came when I was living in the middle of Nowhere U.S.A., with only my husband for a sounding board and critic. Recently, I spoke to a class of kids about how I became a writer, and found myself evoking that old science fair favorite, the stalk of celery in the glass of blue food coloring. I learned to write by osmosis, I told them--I read and read and read, and all those words, sentences and paragraphs became part of me till one day I was ready to tell my own stories.

One teacher did have a lasting impact on me. Mrs. Minot taught fourth grade at St. Hugh of Lincoln School. She was one of the few lay teachers among the nuns, and I was fascinated by her high heels and cloud of frizzy hair. Those were the days of big classes, forty kids or more, and by 2:30 even Mrs. Minot was done in. She let us play Seven-Up, or let Rosemary O'Brien stand in front of the room and belt out "Goody Goody," a real crowd-pleaser. Sometimes we were allowed to just sit there and draw or read. That was the year I began my first novel, "Ballet for Julia." You could say it was loosely based on a book I'd loved, called "Ballet for Sarah." In fact, only the names of the characters were changed. Rabid reader that I was, I wanted to feel what it was like to have a story emerge from under my own hand. I remember I wrote in pencil, on loose-leaf, and used a red pencil for the names of the chapters. One afternoon as I worked, Mrs. Minot bent over my desk. Her breath smelled of coffee, and for the first time I realized she had dandruff, which made me sad.

But when she handed back my paper, she was beaming.

"This is wonderful!" she said. "Do you want to be a writer when you grow up?"

"Oh yes," I said, though the idea had never occurred to me until that minute.

Heart racing, I turned back to my work. My teacher's smile, her coffee-breath, the way my hand tingled with new power--Mrs. Minot was like the ultimate fairy godmother, granting a wish I'd yet to make. Me, a writer? I felt the tap of the wand.

Springstubb has worked as a teacher and a children's librarian and now writes full time. Her middle grade novel, What Happened On Fox Street, came out in Fall, 2010, and its sequel, Mo Wren, Lost and Found, is scheduled for release in August, 2011.

In addition to her work for children, she's published adult fiction in journals like The Iowa Review, and she's a regular book critic for The Cleveland Plain Dealer. She has three grown daughters and lives in Cleveland with her husband, Paul.

For more information about Springstubb and her work, visit her website: www.triciaspringstubb.com

Honoring Our Teachers: Mrs. Glassco and Leslie Davis Guccione

Many thanks to Augusta Scattergood, who reads, writes and blogs from St. Petersburg, Florida and Madison, New Jersey, for sharing her thoughts on two teachers who inspired her to write:

The first real flesh-and-blood author who took me under her wing and red-penciled my verbs was my senior English teacher at Cleveland (MS) High School. Mrs. Effie Glassco, the most frighteningly challenging teacher I ever encountered, wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper’s Society page. Using a tricky pen name, “I.C. All,” she reported on travels--her own and others--weddings, baptisms, parties, all with a flair.

Tiny, black-eyed, full of fury by the time my class rose to senior status, Mrs. Glassco was a fierce defender of strong verbs and of choosing just the right word. She disdained weak writing: “Wonderful?” she’d shout, waving a classmate’s essay in the air. “Why write the word wonderful? Wonderful is not specific. That wastebasket is wonderful, the chalk board! Wonderful tells me nothing!”

Even today, if my fingers dare to begin typing W-O-N…, I can’t get past the N.

Mrs. Glassco introduced our class to the English Romantics and to the great Mississippi writers. One fall Friday, after she’d begrudgingly dismissed the football players early from homeroom, she called me to her desk. She wanted to share her copy of Lanterns on the Levee. She’d lived through the Great Flood of 1917, was a friend of William Alexander Percy, and had scribbled her personal reflections in the margins of that book.

“Miss Effie,” as she became known to me, was quite possibly the first real writer who sat by my side, crossing out large sections of my prose. After I left her tutelage and eventually realized her bark was much fiercer than her actual bite, we became friends. From Effie Glassco, I learned to be attentive to words and to love great literature.

From my most recent writing mentor, novelist and teacher Leslie Davis Guccione, I learned to dig deep into writing specifics.

When she invited me to join her writing group, Leslie was already a friend. She and another member, Lee Stokes Hilton, welcomed me and my critique partner into their living rooms. Each Tuesday morning, Leslie put on her editor’s cap and (nicely, always) showed us how to improve. She encouraged us to polish our writing and get it out into the world, all while making us laugh.

Leslie taught me to spurn floating body parts. Before I joined the group, I don’t know that I’d worried about FBPs. Possibly, I wasn’t even aware of this horrible writing phenomenon. But now, you’ll never catch me (intentionally) floating a head in the wrong part of a sentence.

No more of these sorts of sentences:

1.She retrieved the arm that she'd wrapped around Annabelle and reached toward her son.

2. She pulled her body out of his arms.

3. MacFarland's eyes roamed the hillside.

4.The nurse's head peeked out from the door and smiled at her.

5. His eyes traveled to the bathroom.

No longer will eyes travel to the bathroom or any other place in my writing.

Another of the many lessons Leslie gently taught our group (and me specifically) was the importance of choosing the right names for characters. Of course, I already had huge lists of great names from old high school yearbooks, notebooks sprinkled with Bubbas and Lynettes, Miss Sister, Lady Margaret, Big Mama.

Leslie, however, showed me how just the right name can influence a character’s personality. You can write to type or write against type, purposely call up stereotypes or not, really manipulate the reader. She brainstormed one of my characters whose name surprisingly appeared in a different middle-grade novel set in Mississippi, just as I was getting to know her. When we came up with Gloriana as a new name, the character and the story took on a new, better life.

And Leslie believes in paying it forward. Early in her career, she helped another writer mentee of hers get started. That writer became a friend and advisor to me. I hope some day I can pass this gift along. This is what Leslie does for her students in Seton Hill University’s MFA in Popular Fiction program. Her fans are many, her advice priceless.

Thank you, Leslie Guccione. Thank you, Mrs. Glassco.

Augusta Scattergood, a former librarian, now writes middle-grade fiction and reviews books for The Christian Science Monitor and Delta Magazine. With the assistance of her "amazing" agent, she's in the process of finalizing the sale of her first novel, historical fiction set in Mississippi.

You can follow Augusta Scattergood's blog at http://ascattergood.blogspot.com/ and can read more of her work at A Good Blog Is Hard To Find http://southernauthors.blogspot.com/ where this piece first appeared in slightly different form. It’s reprinted here with permission of the author.