The Community
By Mark Nepper
“After more than an hour on the phone I finally realized the guy I was talking to was running a scam on me. He was good, and he almost got me,” I told members of my writing workshop. I used the story as a way to get the participants in my Writing Your Life workshop to consider writing about the trauma and scars in their life.
Ending the phone call with a furious flood of bad words, I rushed to the bank to close all my accounts, a necessity since the fraudster almost took me for $5,000.
“Whenever I hear someone has been the target of a scam, I experience that bitter adrenaline taste, my hands get clammy, I start to sweat. I know I suffer PTSD from that event.”
After that statement I ran my hand across my sweating forehead. My class of senior citizens immediately started offering me meaningful suggestions on how I might get past this event. We have been a writing community for the past year, and the “last day of school” fast approached. Each of their suggestions showed their concern about me.
The class consists of 12 senior citizens who gather each week to learn some writing strategies and then take a shot at writing a memoir piece. I call these workshops “Writing Your Life,” and help them capture life moments to hold on to and share with family and friends. “Writing can be cathartic,” I said. “Let it heal you.”
After the class ended I chatted with my brother, John, who joins the workshop virtually. Also a retired teacher John knows what made this moment significant.
“You know what just happened, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do, but tell me what you think.”
“The class was trying to cure you.”
“Yup. And it was a beautiful moment.“
That moment crystallized something I had been relishing for quite some time. Whenever this moment would occur in my high school English classrooms over 30 years of teaching, I would pause, reflect and embrace the significance.
Moments like this show that a real community has developed. Something special has happened that has allowed this group to connect on different levels. We stop functioning as a group of names on a roster and begin existing as a community. When my time with a class would come to an end naturally at the end of a semester, I would tell students that they helped create something really special. Many students acknowledged that this experience differed from their other classes.
As the end of the school year approaches, teachers everywhere spend time thinking about how their classes morphed into something bigger. Every classroom becomes a community of some kind. Many of them become truly special entities. When the school year ends, so does that special community.
With my senior citizens I knew this moment was coming. They showed how much they enjoyed being together, how much they appreciated the writing others completed, how much they trust each other and are willing to share their happy moments and their own traumas.
Some workshop participants arrive early to sit and visit with each other and me. Others linger after the class to discuss their writing, or books they are reading or special moments of the past week or expectations for the weekend. They don’t want the connection from that day to dissolve. People walk out of class together talking about what they wrote that day, or ideas that started percolating. They get together for coffee. Friendships form. And the community grows even stronger.
My practice with these workshops involves sharing stories from my everyday life. It creates another pathway for connection. It also seems necessary for me to share stories from my life because our purpose together is memoir writing. Recently, I opened the workshop by moaning about technology and how I had spent two hours the previous night trying to get my printer to work. I stopped before I flung it against the wall. Technology became one of the prompts for the day.
Afterward a man approached and said, “You know, I spent my life working in the tech world. Let me poke around and find out some things about your printer. Then I will come over to your place this afternoon and help you get it to connect to your computer.”
His offer left me speechless, but it didn’t surprise me. This is how a community thrives. People help each other because they care about classmates. My experiences with these Writing Your Life workshops mirror my classroom teaching experiences in many ways.
As I noted that we only had two more sessions before this workshop series would end for the year and resume in the fall, a woman asked if I would offer the workshops during the summer.
One participant, a lifelong educator jumped in. “Mark needs a little break. All teachers need some time to recharge.”
“That is a big part of it; scheduling is another part of it. But let’s do this again in the fall,” I said.
That day as people filed out many of them said, “See you in September!”
You bet!
