Miss Mary Lynch, a new lay teacher in the small Catholic high school I attended, acquainted us with the Western “greats.” I read novels and poetry voraciously—George Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Wharton. I loved Miss Lynch’s enthusiasm and the way she treated us as adults, capable of grasping the vastness of literature.
Later in life I realized I hadn’t identified much with the stories and novels I read in high school. Because of class, I had much more in common with books like Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, the story of Caribbean immigrants in New York. As bell hooks explains so well in Teaching to Transgress, “Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.”
Miss Lynch also taught us speech, with the air of a queen. She wanted to help us lose those Bronx accents. The word “sound” became round, drawn out, and deeper than the nasal, back-of the-throat, New Yorkese equivalent. It was a beautiful peach, she helped us imagine. I was becoming more sensitive to the beauty of English! I learned what the uvula was, that small punching-bag piece of flesh hanging down from the roof of the mouth above the back of the tongue.
I made the school play in the last two years of high school, using my English onstage. My English vocabulary grew, but my Serbo-Croatian remained the same. I began to write poetry. Sometimes I loved just sitting in my room alone, reading poetry aloud. It was exciting to pronounce these words, which seemed so clean and simple and uplifting next to Serbo-Croatian.
I mulled over stories I wanted to write. Offstage, it still felt intimidating to speak much. I felt shame about my family’s difference. I also felt besieged by my parents’ arguments and the escalating violence at home. I began to express my innermost feelings and dreams on paper. Writing down my pain and confusion soothed me, but I kept these writings to myself. In fiction, I would write an old woman’s thoughts as she walked slowly down the street or a girl’s as she floated in the ocean. My first poem was about the rosary. I wrote about God or how I wanted to help people and build a better future. Writing helped pacify my worries.
My family noticed my interests and my introspection. Dad took me downstairs one day and surprised me. He had been refinishing the basement. A pair of doors separated the furnace from the rec room. He opened the doors. It was toasty inside, the stone walls gray, unlike the clean, pale, wood-paneled basement. My eyes darted to the right side next to the furnace. Something new—a desk, a small typewriter, two empty bookshelves above the desk, and a dark blue painting of a restless, stormy sea. I was curious. Dad smiled: “You can ‘stedy’ here.” I could hardly believe it! It was a dream come true! I hugged him as tears came to my eyes.
At the time, I worked as a checker in a supermarket after school, but when I came home I went right to that “room of my own.” There I nurtured myself. Writing kept me alive and helped me grow. I wrote through tears and anger. I wrote poetry in vague, gushy rhythms, and it was all my own. Even my best friend didn’t know how serious I was about writing. With the furnace switching on and off regularly and the sea swirling in the painting and pen and paper before me, I created my own safe world.
Another dilemma nudged at me during high school days. As I became sexually aware of myself, I found I was drawn to other girls. I knew this was wrong. I had heard others make fun of “lezzies.” Of course I wasn’t one, but I felt so drawn and attached to my best friend. Here was yet another thing about myself I feared saying, another difference.
I had another high school girlfriend, who later came out as a lesbian, as I did. Our relationship was the closest I had ever come to admitting this dreadful feeling:
In college I found teachers who encouraged me to write. I became more open about sharing my work when my freshman English teacher asked to see students’ creative writing. He was tactful and encouraging.
“Why don’t you read William Carlos Williams,” he suggested, “or Richard Eberhart? I think you’d like their styles.” He urged me to use form and meter to take control of my words. I learned a little about craft and how to study other poets. Miss Greenberg, my French teacher, was also intrigued with the prose poem I wrote in French for an assignment.
I found fellow students who were captivated by writing. I was still reading aloud to myself in the basement, but felt I shy about opening my mouth in class. The condescending attitudes of some professors didn’t help; they had the power to get the entire class to laugh at something a student said. I knew that I spoke slowly and not in a refined way. One instructor suggested speech lessons.
Later in life, reading Ursula Le Guin’s speech to women students at Bryn Mawr about the learning experience, I smiled at her wise words: “You came here to college to learn the language of power—to be empowered. If you want to succeed in business, government, law, engineering, science, education, the media, if you want to succeed, you have to be fluent in the language in which ‘success’ is a meaningful word.”
When I moved away from my family to marry a physics professor, my marriage allowed me the leisure to continue my education. I didn’t have to work. The opportunity to study another Slavic language beckoned. Russian literature seemed so much closer to me than English and American literature—Gogol’s “Overcoat,” Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. And the poetry, ah yes, I wanted to learn Russian well enough to understand the poetry. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexander Pushkin opened up an entire world of feelings and rhythms, irony and passion. With encouragement from the department chair, I went on for my master’s degree in Russian literature at New York University. I began to appreciate the translation process. I translated poems by Anna Akhmatova.