Stories of stories

It's difficult to do anything but reminisce when you get old, in large part because there's ever so much behind you and not a whole lot to look forward to. So, having been suitably employed right here before a keyboard for a half-century or more, it's hard not to look back: there's just more to see. 

Right now I'm working on two books, two collections of things I've done over the years. One of them, something I'm calling Stories and their Stories, examines a dozen or so stories of mine and adds commentary that often explains those stories' origins. There will be at least two of my voices between the covers--the writer and the teacher. 

Will anyone care enough to buy it? I don't know, but selling books isn't necessarily my objective. For my birthday last February, my daughter gave me one of those books full of questions sons and daughters give to their parents, a book full of questions that asks their parents to describe their lives. The truth is, answering those kinds of questions is something I've been doing for a half-century, so I'm thinking Stories and their Stories should answer lots of my daughter's questions. 

The gloss of the book--the material that explains stories' origins--is almost entirely biographical. This morning I thought I'd run just such an example, in part because it so happens that I ran the entire story in this blog twice.

So here's the kind of thing this old buck is working on right now.

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The teaching life is anything but sedentary. I looked forward to retirement, especially after a difficult last year in our department; but one incident in the last few weeks of my teaching life gave me a heartache. Some campus group, celebrating something in the Rec Center, had set up a whole number of inflated playthings, including a long racetrack of sorts---great fun, I assumed, but not for someone old enough to be retired.

“Dr. Schaap,” some student said. “Come on—I’ll race you.”

Oh, my, I wanted to. I knew this dare was the last one I would ever likely get. The way students keep you young was, painfully, coming to an end and would soon be gone altogether. I couldn’t have said yes, even had I wanted to.

There was a time in my life when I was just five years older than my students. At the time, I remember thinking that someday we’d all be old and there would be no appreciable difference between us.

A couple years ago, a librarian in the district of the school where I taught back then, Blackhawk High (WI), asked me to come to her library and talk about writing. I did—and I didn’t. I went, but I didn’t talk about writing because the place was full of my old students fifty years later, the guys as pot-bellied as their teacher.

We had a great time, a memorable night of my life. I loved it.

One story got told, a story everyone remembered, even me, even though I had not seen exactly what happened, as many of them had. I simply caught their shock.

I left a piece of my heart there in Lafayette County, Wisconsin, but only once did I dig back into those two years for a story I never did—or ever would—forget.

Sometimes the delicate narratives of a story are drawn surgically from everyday life. Sometimes, I knew, those plot lines originated in the storyteller. “The Whiz” is a narrative that still lives in the memories of all those students who were there, as well as their first or second-year teacher.

In writing classes, I used to talk about writing as “a way of knowing,” meaning that spending words and ideas on a blank page was itself an exercise in discovery. A thousand writers have said how it is that they really didn’t know what they thought about something —a character, a setting, or a conflict—until they wrote about it. Writing is a way of learning, a way of knowing.

The givens of “The Whiz” are drawn straight out of my earliest teaching experience, a series of events no kid from BHHS, class of 1972, would ever forget.

The story wasn’t difficult to write. My part in what happened that afternoon was, however, something I would say I’m still discovering.

The “I” of this story, the narrator, is not me—the lines on the page are still spoken by a fictional narrator. That having been said, there’s not much difference between the two of us. Sometimes the likeness is embarrassingly close.

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"The Whiz" appeared twice here, if you're interested. It began March 15, 2019, and then again on June 14, 2023.