Compositions, A Life

Acknowledgments

Thanks, first, to Shirley Steinberg, my trusted friend and brilliant editor, who always brings worlds together, and keeps urging me to write the next book. To the production team at Peter Lang, especially Jackie, Alison, Joshua, and Denifa, for your tireless efforts to bring this book to life.

Thanks to my husband, Philip M. Anderson, wise man of the village, poet, musician, photographer, and scholar, who teaches me something new or old every day.

Thanks to my daughter, Lauren, and son-in-law, Avi, and granddaughters, Danielle, Naomi, and Gabriella. And to grandchildren, Matthew and Natalie, and their parents, Sean and Lyndsay.

To my sister, Janet, who made certain that what I told about our family passed the test. To Allan for being the best brother-in-law, and for your No Parking screen print that became the inspiriting cover of the book. And to Joe and Jess, Pearl and Rosie; Michael and Annette, Max and Talia.

To my friends, Bette Ann Moskowitz and Sylvia Moss, who read with a fine-tooth comb and urged me on, as did Carolyn Sacks and Eleanor Dreyfus, who read early drafts. Throughout Compositions, A Life, I pay tribute to those from whom I have learned, including students in the places I have taught. Thanks to the wonderful writing group in our town: Arlene Ratzabi, Andrea Boyar, Eleanor Dreyfus, Sylvia Moss, Marion Reichman, Walter Reichman, Solange Warmund, and Leba Weiss. You inspire me and encourage me to keep writing and teaching.

These friends and colleagues I especially want to acknowledge: Carolyn Sacks, Ann Andrejcak and Ellen Bartok, Jeffrey Segelman, Dorothy Rainier, Crystal Benedicks, Janice Cimberg, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, Jessica Yood, Martin Braun, Russell Hotzler, James Muyskens, Sue Henderson, Sue Goldhaber, Mindy Altman, Beverly Fenig Dolicat, Marco Navarro, and Ann Morgado.

In memory of:

Martin and Bessie Pearl

Sharon Myra Fishman

Geoffrey Summerfield

Valerie Beighley Anderson

Tobin Simon

Joe Kincheloe.

Who are we, who is each of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

Italo Calvino

Each time we tell a story, we make it new.

Barbara Hardy

How do we tell stories of our lives? And how do the worlds we come from––place and time, culture and history, family, class, gender, race, religion, the roles we play, and the languages we speak––shape our lives, the work we do, and the stories we tell?

Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography is a response to these questions. The book is a narrative, memoir, cultural study, and autoethnography, a story in history about my life in the times, places and worlds I have inhabited, a story of the multiple roles I have played and continue to play in my life, particularly as a teacher and a writer. Much of my work has centered on story, on the ways we tell stories in our lives and worlds, in narrative “compositions”.

My “compositions” of my life are drawn from a mix of sources, a “combinatoria of experiences,” as Calvino says, from my “library” of experiences, and the recurrent memories that I keep close, or that spring up now, as I write this story of my life. Some I borrow from what I have read or written, or been told, some from the talks I have given in various places over the years––a few years ago at my alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, where I was invited to talk with Writing Program faculty about the trajectories of my academic life, and then to the Division of Education, where, in 2018, I was named a Distinguished Alumni. Both of those events had me thinking about how I represent my life to others.

We know that there are always choices we make in how we tell the stories of our own and others’ lives, and of the histories we write, what we include, what we leave out. This telling, then, is a version of my life, of how I came to do and think the ways I do about teaching and writing. Along the way, I will take you, my reader, to meta-text, to how I’m thinking about what I am doing in telling the stories as I do. I will also offer you exercises to try. In a sense, Compositions, A Life, is also a textbook about composing, about creative processes.

For me, teaching and writing are intertwined. My need to write found its way early on in my life, in the stories I wrote as a child, in the journal/notebook I have been keeping for most of my life, and also in my unpublished stack of poetry, stories, novels, letters, research, and other experiments in writing. Many of my writings are in professional articles, grants, reports, and books that have been published over the years, including the most recent, my ninth book, A Man Comes from Someplace: Stories, History, Memory of a Lost Time (Summerfield, 2018).

A Man Comes from Someplace is a family story set within the history of the “old country,” in western Ukraine, where my father grew up, and from where he fled in 1919, during the Russian Revolution. He was sixteen. My father was a survivor, and a storyteller, who, early on in my life, turned my attention to story, to narrative, to asking the questions I do about why and how we tell the stories we do. And the attention to language, particularly to “grammar” and “usage,” to the ways we use and are expected to use words in varied settings, came from my mother, a first-generation American, and also a lover of stories (see the derivation of the word, “composition,” from the Latin, “to place together”).

My early life in the coal mining towns and cities in southwestern Pennsylvania during the middle of the last century set the stage, educated me to live in a democratic moment, where people from different places in the world could and did co-exist. I found myself a student and then a teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam War, the big upheavals of the Sixties. A few years later, I was in New York City, at the largest urban public university in the country, across the river from Manhattan, in the borough of Queens, where I met and taught students from all over the world. I learned in these early teaching experiences that I wanted to create a classroom where all students’ voices are heard, and where, together, we would learn to engage with the challenges of the day, “to repair the world,” in Hebrew: Tikkun olam.

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