Back To School... And Lit Mags!

My seven-year-old brother has been rocking his chair in iambic pentameter, but instead of “Duh DUH Duh DUH”, it sounds like, “BAM! BAM! BAM!” We discovered that the sentence “Do not forget to write” was three iambic feet, and thus the sentence “Do not forget to write at night my dear” was a line of a sonnet. We think. This was the whole of our dinner table conversation. Well, except for the bit where I got in trouble for sneezing on the potatoes.

I have a cold, and sometimes when I try to say things I sneeze, like Wednesday, the first day of school, when my name was roll-called.

I'm starting at a new school and the thing I've been wanting to know, of course, is whether anyone likes lit mags.

Hallelujah! They do!

At lunch, while I was writing, a teacher came up to me and asked if I was writing. I said yes. She asked me whether I was writing creatively or taking notes.

“Sort of both.” I said. “I, um, I'm writing a funny story about... here?”

She laughed. Really, my new school is a funny place. The dialogue I collected included such gems as,

“X had back surgery, and if you hold a metal detector up to him, it beeps!”

I asked her if she liked to write. She does. I asked her who her favorite author was, even though this question always has an equal and opposite reaction (and I can never decide!). She said David Foster Wallace. She was pleased that I'd heard of him. I said I'd read one or two of his essays. This is true. I have read one of his essays. I read The Depressed Person, because Becky Tuch uses it on her Grub Street students and I figured if I read the same essay as Grub Street students I would become a Real Author. It took me three sittings. It was fun when I stopped trying to make it make sense.

Sometime in the conversation I mentioned lit mags. She likes lit mags. I took the issue of Gulf Coast I had been rubbing and praying to out of my backpack and said, “This is a lit mag?” because I'm better at writing than I am at talking. Then I read part of a poem out loud, except I skipped some words and I got mixed up pronouncing “fete”. I thought it was “feh-tay”, like feta and pate.

She wants to see some of my writing! And she'll show me some of her writing! And she went to college at Emerson, home of Ploughshares!

I am currently crossing all of my body parts up to and including my arteries that she will be my English teacher. (I'm not exactly sure what the schedules are yet. We seem to be feeling it out.) I am hoping this even though I hear she gives a lot of homework, because I also hear her homework involves writing. In my old school there was just spelling, and the teachers really didn't appreciate my points about the merits of reading as homework.

And there is another teacher who likes lit mags! She came to talk to me as soon as this teacher had finished talking to me and I had started writing again! I said, “Do you like lit mags?”

She said, “Do they have words in them?”

I handed her Gulf Coast. She said, “You should talk to (name of teacher I had been talking to before her).”

She was the science teacher, actually. One of the rules they made really clear at the beginning of school assembly is that she's the only one who's allowed to drink out of beakers, probably because she's the only one who can tell which beakers have chemicals in them.

I think I'm going to like this place.

P.S. Gulf Coast is awesome. Odd. Arty. Gripping. Stock up on back issues! It's what I'm doing!