“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods those places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.”
–Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory
This month, like the Mississippi River, I’ve been remembering where I used to be, through my annual pilgrimage home to the UK. Between the customary mini-vacation with my daughter at the start of the trip and the events that summon me there—last year a wedding, this year a baptism—I catch up with friends. By “catch up with friends”, I mean careening wildly between sending them my travel dates six months in advance and texting them on a random Tuesday saying, “I’m here. Coffee?” The latter is preceded by weeks or months of frantic overthinking and self-doubt over my place and value in their life. I assure them repeatedly–it’s never a reflection on our relationship, it’s a kind of amnesia, no longer knowing if my presence can flow back into the repurposed grounds where we used to coexist. Like the river, I’m reliving my life before it was altered, reshaped, and poured into a new space. Before I moved some 5000 miles away.
Rereading as reliving
If writing is breathing out, reading is breathing in. I don’t know where I read that. But I am realizing, this visit, the importance of reading, of rereading, of repetition. Last Wednesday, in the warm upper room of a neighbourhood pub in Carrington, Nottingham, somewhere in the middle of England, it was my turn to sing to a half-full room of mostly strangers. A local weekly folk club session, usually busier, but the warm summer evening had inclined most regular attendees to stay home and tend their gardens, or enjoy the long, precious hours of a northern hemisphere summer’s day in a nearby park full of the sounds of playing children and clinking glasses, accompanied by the percussion of sneakers against soccer balls, red leather cricket balls against willow bats. Upstairs in the Gladstone, where Michael and I hadn’t performed together in more than a decade, he picked the opening chords on his acoustic guitar. As I sang our contemporary folk song, I Have a Name*, based on the true stories of trafficking victims, it was no longer that I was remembering these words that I had written. It was more that the words had been there all along, dormant, and were simply being reawakened. And, like the river, as my lungs and my voice flooded the room where I used to sing every month, I found my old pathways; I saw Amina, Linh, and the others who had inspired the song, I retold their stories.**
There’s a feeling I get, I don’t know if you get it too, but there’s a sense when I feel I’m, for once in my life, doing the right thing in the right place at the right time, a calmness intertwined with determination, like a delicate passiflora incarnata vine around and between an iron criss-cross trellis. Like the maypole ribbons at the end of a complicated dance. The return to singing, the repetition of the stories I had written into song, the memories of past open mic; it was like reading part of my autobiography that I hadn’t even realized I’d written.
It seems no coincidence that this summer I’ve had Oasis, the band of my teenage years, on repeat, met up with friends I haven’t seen in three, six, and 25 years, and finally returned to singing. Because these were, are, essential to my identity. Just as, for eight years, teaching shaped me into new paths.
Remembering Our Where and Why
Our schools can be places of hard knocks for teachers. We’re often unwillingly molded by the confected need for excessive standardized testing. It’s a common theme in Fellows’ application letters to reflect on what originally attracted them to teaching.
Some reminisce about teachers who inspired them, some mention their long-held dreams for their own writing while many express their frustrations and desire for a return to the freshness of their early teaching years. They, too, are rivers redirected from their original goals: to become the teachers that inspire others, to be reflective educators and writers.
In our SoFlo Summer Institute, we don’t invent the wheel or turn water into wine. We don’t create what’s not already present. We do, however, work alongside and mentor teachers to help them renew their identities as writers, as educators. Like Morrison’s understanding of the Mississippi River’s long-held memory, we help them remember why they started.
Our 2024 Fellows tell us that SoFlo reignited the spark for their joy and purpose in teaching. And we can’t wait to see how 2025 renews each of our new Fellows as they retrace their journey through teaching and reclaim their own paths.
*From our Evening Memory EP, recorded in 2014: https://soundcloud.com/skymaps
** Names changed to protect identities