Nostalgia is not a cure for what ails us, Scott Galloway said recently in an episode of his podcast with Kara Swisher. On this point, I agree with him.
Nostalgia can be, however, a harmless coping strategy when your country feels bleak and so awfully disappointing. In the chaos and uncertainty of these last few years, exacerbated by all the digital noise and enshittification, my husband and I have routinely reminisced about the relative success and simplicity of the eighties, nineties, and early aughts.
This year especially, I’ve ached with nostalgia. I even wrote a short piece of speculative fiction, forthcoming in an anthology, rooted deeply in this emotion. It’s set in the fall of 1992 and features a ten-year-old protagonist who’s just moved to a new neighborhood (I shared a little about this story back in March). That was my own age and circumstance that same year, which was such a strange, anxious period. I worried about my new school and bought my first YM magazines, wondering vaguely if I could ever look like Nikki Taylor. I was also still playing with dolls and stuffed animals, and I remember asking my mom if that was okay.
But memory has a rosy filter. While working on my submission, I realized I wasn’t only nostalgic for Walkmans, Christopher Pike, and Nick at Nite (my story mentions all of these). I was also nostalgic for the years when I first fell in love with language itself.
In primary school, I developed a fixation with words on the wall. I was lucky enough to attend a richly multicultural, first-rate public elementary in the Houston area, one that for a while had one of the strongest English Second Language (ESL) programs in the state. That meant we enjoyed a print-rich environment—letters and words everywhere, and not just in English. They were all over whiteboards and bulletin boards, in the learning centers set up in the open-concept classrooms, and covering the walls of the library, hallways, and cafeteria. During instruction, my teachers wrote down single words first, then phrases, mostly on the overhead but also on the whiteboards or chart paper. As they asked questions, our classes discussed answers or brainstormed as best as first, second, and third graders could, and our teachers wrote, wrote, wrote, recording our ideas. Their scripts, and the way their voices melded into these lovely symbols that became increasingly recognizable as I learned to decode more and more words—to read!—hypnotized me.
The best part of all this, though, was when we were given blank sentence strips on which to write our own thoughts, usually during an interactive or group activity. Forming those big, wobbly letters with a fat Sharpie, and getting to hold that crisp rectangular paper before it was stapled or taped on a wall somewhere, allowing me to leave my mark, translated the visual appeal of language into something that became wonderfully tactile too. I couldn’t get enough of it. I suppose that was my first experience with publication, in the broadest sense.
At home, my last years of playing pretend evolved into games of school, where I instructed a dozen plushie pupils. I collected all kinds of materials for my “classroom”—my own little chalkboard and notepads, a cork board, stickers, a pad of blank achievement certificates, whimsical markers, pens, and pencils, and various kinds of paper. When I discovered the local office supply sold overheads, I begged my mom for one, but she always responded with a swift, bemused “No.” What playing school really meant, though, was another opportunity to write stuff down: imaginary rosters, lists, and lots of sentences, even paragraphs (never numbers or math problems, ha), supplemented by read-alouds from my chapter books while mimicking the chastisements my teachers called out mid-lesson, usually to the squirmy boys in class.
Around this time, I also began writing my own little stories, usually in blank journals and occasionally on my parents’ typewriter. I don’t think I ever finished any of these, but I do remember trying to imitate the voices of several middle-grade first person narrators—Tallahassee Higgins from the novel of the same name, or Zoe from Stonewords by Pam Conrad. These attempts fostered feelings of unlimited possibility and power. This must be why people write books, I thought. Wow, I could make up anything and become anyone I wanted to (oh, the power of first person POV). Was this what it meant to be godlike?
I also purchased my first craft book, What’s Your Story? by children’s author Marion Dane Bauer, which I still have. I distinctly remember two points from that guide: A story is “about someone struggling,” and there is magic in the number three. Both these points continue to serve me well.
Fast-forward to high school: I was seventeen, a junior taking my first Advanced Placement classes, including AP English III with Mrs. Guest, an older Southern lady if ever there was one. That first day she didn’t smile as she brusquely reviewed the strict policies and expectations of the course. A bit of a dragon, I thought. She sat us in rows, her table at the front, the chalkboard (which she rarely used) behind her. On the first real day of instruction, highlighters and pencils in hand, we all opened our personal copies of The Scarlet Letter. Mrs. Guest had her own too, proudly telling us this was her annotated text from her American Lit course at the University of Texas (where I now imagine she was well schooled in old fashioned New Criticism). Suddenly, she was a little more human.
After Mrs. Guest read that short first chapter, “The Prison Door,” out loud, she proceeded to verbalize from beginning to end what Hawthorne was doing. She began by pointing out the Puritans’ “sad-coloured,” “grey” clothing, asking us to highlight those words and note their “dismal connotations” (connotationwas a new term for a lot of us). We also highlighted the description of the men’s hats as “steeple-crowned,” suggestive of their theocracy, and Mrs. Guest pointed out how, though this was supposed to be a new “Utopia” (a perfect society, she explained—“Let’s highlight that too, y’all.”), the cemetery and prison were erected first on the colony’s “virgin soil.”
“Why ‘virgin?’” she asked us, turning the tables. “Why would Hawthorne use that word, and not something else like ‘new’ or ‘uncharted’ or ‘wild’? What does ‘virgin’ suggest?”
A few kids snickered. Dare we think what she was getting at?
“Because, before they got there the land was untouched, and what they did was, like, … a violation?” some brave soul ventured.
“Exactly,” she replied, before elaborating on the comment. If I remember correctly, she even got someone to offer how, through “virgin,” Hawthorne feminized the natural world, while the settlement was associated more closely with men. She then connected, as further evidence, that particular idea back to the subordinate placement of the phrase “mixed with women” in an earlier sentence (though we wouldn’t start analyzing sentence structure in earnest until the winter quarter).
And we were off.
Years later, after I’d completed my own teaching certification, I realized that Mrs. Guest was employing a basic instructional strategy called a think-aloud to model her own thought process so we could understand and use that process ourselves. She used think-alouds and guided annotation on and off all year, and in doing so, she ingrained in us a technical vocabulary and a method. We learned to consider how diction, imagery, figurative language, detail, syntax, and irony created tone, mood, and meaning for a specific audience and purpose. That alone, practiced repeatedly, was enough to demystify the bugaboo called Literary Analysis. I personally came to think of it as, what is the author suggesting, and how is s/he suggesting it? From that day forward, those two questions guided all my close reading.
In the end, Mrs. Guest gave us a rock-solid foundation in college-level textual analysis, which worked for both fiction and nonfiction. Over time, she taught us how to write academic arguments about these texts, too. As high schoolers of the late 90s, we could handle her approach, which was always slow and thorough. We didn’t have Smartphones or social media. Our cell phones (for those of us who had one) weren’t part of our hands; we weren’t endlessly scrolling. We could deal with long, dense 19th century texts if we were guided by a good facilitator. It certainly felt like a simpler time.
More to the point, Mrs. Guest’s instruction blew my young mind. I’d always enjoyed books and stories, but what we were learning in her class was much deeper. Writers had intent! They made choices! When those choices were better than other writers’ choices, the authors were artists–you could feel their genius on the page. This was art!
I thought this love for the power of the written word meant I was supposed to be a teacher. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d forgotten all about creative writing. All I wanted to do was impart knowledge, skills, and, ideally, appreciation to eager students the way my best teachers had given them to me. I completed an English major and history and education minors and began teaching high school, starting as a newb with AP English III of all things.
Those first two years were an absolute crucible—I spent most of them covered in stress hives. I’m stubborn, though, and I stuck out that deathly steep learning curve, going on in subsequent years to become a team leader, a supervising teacher for University of Houston teacher candidates, a Building Teacher of the Year, and even an instructional specialist. But the work never felt entirely natural—teaching real school was nothing like playing at it. When the pandemic hit, and my family made the radical choice to move across the country and change almost everything about our lives, I gladly left the profession behind.
And the result is, I’ve gotten back to writing words. What I have now is a solid, consistent writing practice, one that, more than anything else, has proven most satisfying to all my natural inclinations, especially my love for language. My practice is, first and foremost, nourishment for my mind and heart, and I cherish the joy I find in creative striving through the medium of the written word. I compose my fiction, essays, and even a little poetry with an appreciation and care that I owe, in large part, to the wonderful schools and teachers like Mrs. Guest, and it’s comforting to remember these inspirations as some of the best gifts of my life.
Musing over such things might be impractical, even a little silly, but it’s an indulgence I find harmless, affirming, and even grounding. I’m always curious, too, about what has inspired other creatives: What odd or weirdly specific things compelled or motivated you, especially when you were little? What are you nostalgic about now? Feel free to indulge with me in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
XOXO,
Jenn
Jennifer Shaw 