|
 Benaroya
Hall, 7:30 p.m.
Tuesday,
November 21, 2006
Underwritten
by Teutsch Partners, LLC
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Lecture
Preview
Biography
Frank McCourt's quiet life as a retired schoolteacher was transformed
by the thunderous success of his first memoir, Angela's Ashes (1996),
the heart-wrenching yet uplifting story of his beggar-poor childhood in
Limerick, Ireland. The book sold millions of copies worldwide and won
the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for biography. In recounting his family's desperate
poverty, McCourt "redeems the pain of his early years with wit and
compassion and grace" (New York Times). Wit illuminates McCourt's
subsequent memoirs as well. 'Tis (1999) and Teacher Man
(2005) trace McCourt's arrival in New York as a penniless young man and
his travails and triumphs in high school classrooms. With humor and heart
McCourt recounts his twenty-year tenure teaching creative writing at the
progressive Stuyvesant High School, after learning classroom survival
skills at a tough vocational school. While beguiling defiant students
at McKee Technical High School with storytelling and unconventional assignments—including
an excuse note from Adam to God—McCourt strove to impart a larger
lesson. Writing is less about putting words on paper and more about observing
and imagining: "Every moment of your life, you're writing. Even in
your dreams you're writing."
In addition
to winning the Pulitzer Prize and being made into a major film, Angela's
Ashes was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. McCourt
lives in Connecticut.
"McCourt
is a genius of the particular."—Commonweal
Excerpt
From
Teacher Man
[pp. 190-91]
In 1974,
my third year at Stuyvesant High School, I am invited to be the new Creative
Writing instructor. Roger Goodman says, You can do it.
I know nothing about writing or the teaching of it. Roger says don't worry.
Across this country there are hundreds of teachers and professors teaching
writing and most have never published a word.
And look at you, says Bill Ince, Roger's successor. You've had pieces
published here and there. I tell him a few pieces in the The Village
Voice, Newsday and a defunct magazine in Dublin hardly qualifies
me to teach writing. It will be common knowledge soon that in the matter
of teaching writing I don't know my arse from my elbow. But I remember
a remark of my mother's: God help us, but sometimes you have to chance
your arm.
I can never bring myself to say I teach creative writing or poetry or
literature, especially since I am always learning myself. Instead I say
I conduct a course, or I run a class.
I have the usual five classes a day, three "regular" English,
two Creative Writing. I have a homeroom of thirty-seven students, with
the clerical work that entails. Each term I am given a different Building
Assignment: patrolling hallways and stairwells; checking boys' lavatories
for smoking; substituting for absent teachers; watching for drug traffic;
discouraging high jinks of any kind; supervising student cafeterias; supervising
the school lobby to ensure that everyone, coming or going, has an official
pass. Where three thousand bright teenagers are gathered under one roof
you can't be too careful. They are always up to something. It's their
job.
Selected
Works
Angela's
Ashes (1996)
'Tis (1999)
Teacher Man (2005)
Web
Site Links
Simon
& Schuster Author Page
Academy
of Achievement Interview
New
York State Writers Institute
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