Contributor Spotlight: Sue Granzella

The child who called me a shithead was one of my two most challenging students in thirty-two years of teaching. Violence and big-time stress flavored each day, and when—after weeks of wildly outrageous interactions—the child deemed me a “shithead,” something in me shifted. Writing about it with humor gave me a release-valve for some stress, and when I decided to ask my colleagues to share their own shithead moments, thinking about the “shithead” note became fun instead of anger-inducing. Ah, the transformative power of writing!

The same thing that is ALWAYS the most difficult part of writing for me: deciding what the piece is really about at its core. Telling the vignettes was fun and easy, but when the funny stories were done and I knew they needed to be steering me toward a bigger idea, I just couldn’t see what the bigger idea was. I let it sit for maybe five months, trying not to give up hope that I’d figure it out. Then, in class,  I snapped at the kid with the stutter. My subsequent public apology and his acknowledgement of forgiveness helped me see the shape of the piece. I got back to work on it that night, and from then on, things slipped into place.

Know My Name: A Memoir, by Chanel Miller. It was breathtaking. She was sexually assaulted on the Stanford campus, and when the assault happened, she was unconscious. In all the news articles about it, she was anonymous. Locally, the public swell of sympathy for the wealthy young white man was all over the news outlets, including things like It will end his promising swimming career and His life of possibility shouldn’t be ruined for a 20-minute mistake. Entirely missing from the narrative was Chanel Miller’s voice, until she shattered her anonymity with this stunning book. He had no idea that the woman he’d attacked was a writer. It’s a gorgeous, vulnerable, fierce, powerful book, one that has stayed with me. WOW.

Louise Erdrich. When I’m deeply moved by a movie, a book, or some event in my life, the power of community is often at the heart of why it affected me so. Louise Erdrich’s books are rooted in community, in the tangled, unbreakable bonds between people. She reveals a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and she faces head-on the tragedies that affect an entire community. She also provides a window into Native communities and settings that would otherwise be unknown to me, which I love. I imagine her as complex, intense, and strong. I’d love to hear her loosen up and tell me some stories.

In the summer, I started a pandemic blog called The Extrovert Chair, though since school started back up in August, I’ve only been able to write a couple of posts. Teaching young children during a pandemic is fertile ground for a writer, but for many months, everything felt too broken and raw for me to begin writing about it. All along, I’ve been taking lots of notes, though, and in the last month, I’ve surprised myself by writing a couple of short pieces about my pandemic teaching experiences. I think I’m almost strong enough to write more about teaching low-income children of color during the time of COVID-19.

Our thanks to Sue for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Sue’s essay, “Shithead,” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/nonfiction-shithead.

 

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