Veteran teachers will tell you that year 2 and 3 are so much better than year 1 because once you have a rhythm down, it becomes much easier – less planning, less last minute scrounging, etc. Though this is true to some degree, it is not always the case. I found that each year brought a different class of students with different needs and perspectives, and sometimes, one needed to adjust. Yet, in that adjustment – joy could still be found – as long as you are willing to go with it.

Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite stories. I love the book, the movies, the song. Every time I hear Catherine state “I am Heathcliff,” I am brought to my knees. My heart aches.

Teaching it would then be a great experience. Well, yes and no.

My first group of students was right there with me on their experience of Wuthering Heights, – it was ill-fated circumstance and classism that drove these two soul mates to ultimately destroy each other and everyone around them, all in the desperate need to try and be together despite the odds. Kate Bush became a regular on my students’ play lists and we thought Tom Hardy played the cruel and cruelly treated Heathcliff wonderfully.

My second group, not so much. At first, I was taken aback but listened as they too understood the text as it was written. Catherine was selfish and Heathcliff, well… One of my most memorable student moments so far came out of our discussion of Heathcliff in this class. The conversation went as followed with one of my students:
She, “I don’t like him.”
Me, “Oh yes, why?”
She, “He’s an asshole.”
Me: raucous laughter, recovery, and a quote from Stephen Fry “Heathcliff is a queer moody brute, but there is rich soil there if you care to dig.”
She, “I do not care to dig.”
Me: more raucous laughter.

What a beautiful response. Her frank and fearless response to a teacher who loved what she did not, allowed me to not only hear but also gave me the room to agree. Together we could discuss the silliness of both the characters, their unwillingness to speak the truth to each other, the inability to mourn or stand up for themselves or each other. And at what price? Death and depression in their wakes.

And from there, we discussed the outlying factors of why this might be the case. What was it about the setting, the windy, cruel moors, the North, the role of women in the age, the role of entitlement?

And in the end, it only added to my love of the novel. I was okay that they didn’t like the characters because feeling evoked by art is what connects us to it after all.
I once walked into an Art show when I was in my late teens. And there was nothing very explicit about the art, it was abstract, but I was overwhelmed with a feeling of disgust and nausea. I wish I could remember the artist or even the art itself, but that feeling, that experience, I won’t forget. That was an authentic art experience. And to become so involved in a novel that every time you see the teacher who exposed you to it, you remind her how much you dislike that fella, is too, perhaps an authentic art experience.
So the form this go round isn’t really a traditional form, but perhaps it is the most traditional of all. Write a poem like you normally write a poem. No set structure, unless you have one, no set rhyme unless you have one. Write like you write, and if you think Heathcliff is an asshole, just come out and say it.

 

My Artistic Style

I am learning
No, wait, that’s not it
I am drawing again
I say again
But that’s not right either
Well, it is but it isn’t
Let me start over…

I have found myself drawn to drawing lately
A little closer to the truth of it.
I haven’t drawn much in my life
I like bodies –
Can do a fairly decent lying down woman
Without hands or feet…
But I have her curves down.
Now, mind you I say fairly decent,
Not for showing to the public fairly decent,
But fairly decent for me.

I still draw with the same techniques
I was shown as a child.
In one of my only art classes –
taught by a nun who loved expression.
She taught me how to draw a tree
One line at a time.
And every mistake became a new limb.

But then we moved,
And I didn’t have art again.

I am, trying out perspective
And I find myself
Staring into the upper corners
of the rooms I am in
Trying to figure out
How to translate
The point where the three lines meet
Onto paper.

Straight line down,
Got that,
Straight line to the left,
Yep,
Now the line to the right,
That’s where it gets tricky for me.
Slightly up or out or down or in
Or…
Hey look!
A tree with two, three,
Four limbs!

I flip through my sketches
And they are heavy leaded,
Awkward, clumsy, smudged,
Childlike,
mine.