Transcription of Susan Conley for the show Chartering Education, #112
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast Show #112, “Chartering Education” airing for the first time on Sunday, November 3, 2013. Today’s guests include Susan Conley, author of “Paris was the Place,” and contributor to Maine Magazine, Glenn Cummings, President and Executive Director of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences at Good Will-Hinckley, and John D’Anieri, Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy.
Today’s “Chartering Education” Show was inspired by the article written by Susan Conley for the November issue of Maine Magazine. We know that kids learn differently and that no matter how kids learn, education is of paramount importance when it comes to health and wellness. Maine is working to find ways to educate our kids in new ways to programs such as Charter Schools. We hope you enjoy our thought provoking conversations with Susan Conley, Glenn Cummings, and John D’Anieri. Thank you for joining us today.
I always enjoy being on the air with people who have spent time with me in earlier episodes of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour & Podcast because it reminds me of the journey that we’ve been on. Sometimes somewhat of a rough journey. It reminds me where we’ve come from and where we are now.
The en-visual who is across the microphone from me today is Susan Conley. She is one of the individuals who has been on the show before, when we were talking about her earlier book, “The Foremost Good Fortune.” Today she has written another book called, “Paris was the Place.” She is going to talk to us about that and she is also going to talk to us about her Charter School article for Maine Magazine, a magazine for which she is a writer. Thanks for coming in.
Susan: It’s a treat to be back.
Dr. Lisa: Susan, you have been very busy and you’re in a very different place then when we last saw you. “The Foremost Good Fortune” for people, who I know are going to go back and listen to the prior interview, but just to give them a little bit of a teaser is really more about your own personal experience with being in China, dealing with breast cancer, raising two small children, and it’s very much a memoir. This book is a novel. Two very different books for two different places in your life. Talk to me about that process.
Susan: Well I’ve been on a book tour these last few months talking about this territory I’m calling the middle place or the middle ground coming out of memoir moving into novel. Memoir is preordained. You know what happened in the story and then the challenge I think is to find the story hidden inside the story. We all know the outer casing of our lives, but what’s sort of the beating heart inside.
The novel for me was of infinite possibility, but if you look at the sort of facts of that novel, “Paris was the Place,” a lot of it does line up with my life. You know it’s set in Paris in 1989. I lived in Paris in 1988. The narrator teaches refugee kids. Well I’ve done that here in Portland. It’s not an autobiographical novel which was a great relief. I didn’t want to write an autobiographical novel, but what I do is I pull and I think we all do this in many different walks of our lives. We pull from different sort of parts to weave stories.
Dr. Lisa: So you didn’t when you were in Paris fall in love with a good looking French lawyer.
Susan: I wish, but I was in love in Paris so I knew what it was like to be in love in Paris. Again, that was real life being woven into fiction and I do that a lot. People have been asking me how did you recreate Paris in ’89. You know I’ve been back subsequently, but I haven’t lived there since then, and you know that it’s all there for me in my memory. I hold on. I’m just one of those people. I did a whole lot of research on getting the street names right. Let’s make sure we know every metro stop. Let’s take the readers to Paris in such a way that they feel they’re on the street, but the emotional truth of it was still in my mind.
Dr. Lisa: It does make one want to travel. As I was reading it over the weekend I kept thinking to myself that I’ve never been to Paris. I’ve never been to France, and you describe the scene where Willie the main character is going with her French lawyer boyfriend Macon. That’s how you pronounce it right?
Susan: Yeah Macon.
Dr. Lisa: Named after the city in Georgia, interestingly enough. They’re going out to the beach and they’re sleeping on the beach under the stars. I was thinking to myself why am I not doing that. I need to book a plane ticket, so I think you do a really nice job evoking that sense of place and really enticing people to live this sort of adventure.
Susan: Oh well thank you. That’s exactly what I was trying to do. I have this longing, this need to place characters in far off locations, I guess including myself and then see what happens. What is it like to be the outsider looking in? I like to get people out of their comfort zones. I think the minute you get people on the road in transit, you know, I get Willie in a truck with her new lover going to the beach in France and every-thing’s up for grabs. What are they going to talk about? What are they going to learn? I can’t stop doing that I don’t think.
Dr. Lisa: Well it does seem as though in “The Foremost Good Fortune” you really were the outsider. You were living this life and you describe it in the memoir and not only where you living the outsider life as somebody who is in China as an American, but you were also living an outsider life with somebody who had breast cancer with people who didn’t have breast cancer as a young woman. Now you’re back in Portland and you’re living kind of an insider life. You’re living a life that’s really more one you’ve always lived, but you’re still writing about living the outsider life. Why is that so interesting to you?
Susan: Oh that’s a great question. Maybe I’m terrified of stasis. Maine is my home. It’s been my home my whole life, but I’ve lived away from it so often maybe almost more than I’ve lived here. For many people I think Maine has that. It’s like the compass, but you have to keep orbiting. You have to keep stretching. I’m lucky because I married a man who has the travel lust as much as I do, if not more, so he thinks nothing of hopping on planes to go to remote locations that would take two day bus rides and then maybe a camel and a horse. It’s great to put yourself in sort of dynamics where other people are also sort of forcing you to shake up your comfort zone.
Dr. Lisa: Even within the story in “Paris was the Place” Willie travels from Paris. Now Willie is an American. She’s in Paris, and then she travels to India. So you really do like to keep people moving around and keep pushing them outside of their comfort zone so there’s always one more level, one more layer.
Susan: Yeah the India section of the novel is an interesting one because for me it was a lesson in editing. I love travel so much and I also love locale and flavor so I could have made the India section much longer. In fact, it was much longer and then I had to ask, and I’m always asking this of narratives and I’ve asked this of my students. I teach it a great deal. The question is how much can a narrative hold.
So we go to Paris. We’re also in California a lot in my novel. Can we go to India? Can the novel hold in India? It turned out it could, but it had to be a very kind of stealth, very focused trip. For a while it was going to be this sprawling kind of adventure and then I made her have a very clear mission for why she was going. Willie was doing some research on this crazy obscure Indian poet. And then the surprise in writing is you land on characters you didn’t know you would meet, so she meets the granddaughter of the Indian poet and this granddaughter is wildly charismatic and sort of curmudgeonly and also wonderful and I kind of fell in love with her and I didn’t expect to. So then I had to keep India in because I got so attached to the character.
Dr. Lisa: And simultaneously while Willie is going on this external journey she is also dealing with things herself internally and dealing with things interpersonally. She is dealing with one of her students, Gita, who is being held in asylum in France. They’re waiting to see whether they can enable her to stay in France or whether she will be sent back to India. So we have Willie struggling with that. We have Willie struggling with her new love. We have struggling with her brother Luke who falls ill. It’s a lot. Is that also part of the question can the narrative hold … ?
Susan: Yeah and when the novel presented itself to me it was all laid out like that. I had an image of a women on a train in France. She was about 30 years old. She was Willie and I didn’t know her, but I really wanted to know her. I wanted to capture a woman who had yet to have the big love of her life and who would yet to have children who was really still searching and everything was still unfolding for her and how exciting is that.
I think I was nostalgic for that time as well in my own life. She very much had a brother who she was so close to. This is where real life mirrors the fiction again because I had lost someone very dear to me to AIDS in the early ’90’s. He was really kind of part of our family. I needed to write about him. I needed to honor him and celebrate him in the book. There’s a character that’s very much based on him. It’s not him. I mean it moves so far away from him and yet there’s something at the core that is my friend and that was really wonderfully satisfying to get to do.
Dr. Lisa: It is very interesting for me because I’ve now read enough books written by people that I either know well or know somewhat. It’s very interesting to read novels written by people that I’m acquainted with because when I’m sitting here thinking this feels like something that actually happened in this person’s life or this is something that really rings true. I felt that a lot as I was reading this book. I absolutely had the sense that much of this was stuff that you had some connection to personally.
Susan: That’s great. That’s just what I wanted. I wanted that emotional tether. I wanted that emotional urgency, if you will. I mean in some ways I wanted it to read like a memoir which was interesting because I had just written a memoir. You have to be careful with that. Novel is not memoir.
My dear friend Keith who died of AIDS did not live in Paris. It’s again how we borrow, but as a writer I carry these searing emotional scenes that I know I have to try to render and that was on them. Particularly there is a scene near the end of the book that I really needed to render. So how much can narrative hold? I call it weaving or like pulling threads. How many threads can you pull? I think I tested the limits.
Dr. Lisa: Well I enjoyed it. I think it was definitely something that kept me reading and it wasn’t just because I knew I was going to be talking to you. So I think you were very successful of that.
Susan: Thank you so much.
Dr. Lisa: I also know that it caused me to really think about the work that you do as a teacher. I know that you are co-founder of The Telling Room here in Portland. There’s a lot of work being done with The Telling Room and people from other countries that have children with stories to tell. This really was not only in your book, but also kind of was a theme that was picked up in the “Chartered School” article that you have written for Maine Magazine. Talk to me about education and why education has become so important to you?
Susan: Well I think it’s distilled back to story. It’s storytelling for and for me it was having incredible English teachers, who were really writing teachers for me, who turned the light on. I have been doing readings in the state and my sixth grade English teacher has showed up, my seventh grade English teacher showed up, and it’s so amazing. These people are the one’s that handed me “The Bridge to Terabithia,” which was a book that changed my life and here they are. Now I can say I’ve written stories because I was inspired by you. I think not to sentimentalize it I really needed to say this relationship between the teacher and the student can be life changing. It’s really important.
So often we hear that a child was saved. Like they were on the edge and they were saved because one teacher reached out and did a little bit more. And that’s where I put Willie. I put her in a refugee center. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s really doing in Paris at this center. A friend has talked her into it. How much will she help and to tie it back to sort of the landscape here in Maine. I was asked to go do a little tour of Charter Schools for Maine Magazine. That was an incredible opportunity to sort of take a peek and say okay what are you trying to do here on a teacher level. I talked to a ton of kids at three of our Charter Schools and the refrain was all the same and it’s really simple. They want teachers to listen to them. They want to be heard. They would love a little less testing. They’d like to go outside more. It was very poignant.
That’s the most poignant piece of all and this goes for all our students across Maine. I need to say that we’re looking closer at Charters because they’re the newest to the table, but boy there’s amazing teaching going on in all of our public schools and teachers that are so passionate and innovative. All of these kids talked about this very essential need to fit in. That really was very moving to me. John D’Anieri who is the Head of School at the Harpswell Coastal Academy, a brand new Charter School that I looked at hard for the piece. He used the word comfortable. Students have to be comfortable before they’ll start to actually learn. You can call it what you want, fitting in, feeling nurtured, feeling comfortable. I think that’s something that the Charter Schools are looking hard at.
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Dr. Lisa: Susan, where did you go to school?
Susan: I went to rural school in Woolwich, Maine from kindergarten to 8th grade. We were all in a one sort of building school and then we went to the big city of Bath across the river. That was very exciting. I went there for two years and then my parents and I looked around and realized that I was stagnating and that I had this huge appetite particularly for stories. Then I did go out of the state. I went to boarding school for two years at Andover which wasn’t so far away and that was the perfect time for me. It was a perfect mix. I knew where I’d come from and then I sort of saw this huge landscape of learning that was out there and then I kind of never looked back in terms of my appetite for learning.
Dr. Lisa: Did you at any time ever feel this outsider thing that you describe in your novel, in your memoir, and even in this Charter School piece that you’ve written?
Susan: Have I felt like the outsider in my life? Well I think going through education absolutely. I mean that’s what’s so poignant about the kids I talked to is I remember feeling like the biggest outsider in the world when I drove across the Kennebec River to go the Bath Junior High. I was from Woolwich and so how would I ever fit in because the social parameters are so delicate and nuanced in 9th grade and we forget that as adults and I was seeing that so clearly in these conversations I was having with girls in the Charter Schools and frankly a lot of them were trying Charter because the social piece wasn’t working in the other schools so they were taking a risk in my opinion. They were really trying something new and they didn’t know how it was going to go.
Dr. Lisa: Well I think going through your education.
Susan: Absolutely. I mean that’s what’s so poignant about the kids I talked to. I remember feeling like the biggest outsider in the world when I drove across the Kennebec River to go to the Bath Junior High because I was from Woolwich and so how would I ever fit in. Because the social parameters are so delicate and nuanced in 9th grade and we forget that as adults. I was seeing that so clearly in these conversations I was having with girls in the Charter Schools. Frankly a lot of them were trying Charter because the social piece wasn’t working in the other schools so they were taking a risk in my opinion. They were really trying something new and they didn’t know how it was going to go.
Dr. Lisa: As I’m reading this article on the Charter Schools I like the fact that we’re looking at different areas of interest for kids. You talked to individuals from the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences. I love the fact that we’re here in Maine and there’s a school that’s actually called the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences because there is so much of this that we live in, but we don’t always have a chance to actually observe it.
Susan: We forget what a rural state we are and how much agriculture is the backbone of our state. What they’re doing up in Fairfield at the Maine Academy is saying, here’s how you grow a sustainable garden. Here’s how you fix a tractor. Here’s how you build vegetable beds in the greenhouse that they just built. I think the missions of these Charter Schools that I looked at were very distilled. They’re trying to cut a very narrow path. They’re very honest about it at the Maine Academy. Not everyone there as their wonderful principal. Emanuel Pariser said, “Not everyone here wants to grow carrots,” so they have to figure that out and they do. I think they’re very, very nimble up there and they’re very clear. They’re working with disengaged kids. How do they win them back? I think one of the most moving lines in the whole piece for me was when Emanuel Pariser says, “It’s up to us to spark their imagination again and help them grow their confidence. How do we do that?” because he doesn’t want to lose any kids.
Dr. Lisa: You also spoke with individuals at the Harpswell Coastal Academy. How is their focus different?
Susan: It’s an entirely different world there down the Harpswell neck. Very rural, small, an old elementary school that was sitting vacated in the community said, okay you want to put a Charter School here. We’d love something in this building. The mission of that school is intrinsically tied to Harpswell at the town. It sounds like a wonderful premise. Let’s have a school that looks at the watershed and the marine industry that lives in Harpswell. Let’s look at the working waterfront. Let’s have the students mapping coves for data on seaweed and snails. Again, the goals are really exciting. I caught them all in day six so a lot of things had yet to shake out. Every time I left these schools I thought hats off to the teachers because there’s a lot of work to be done.
Dr. Lisa: At the same time you have in past articles written profiles for Maine Magazine. There was one you did on a painter, who one would say is at the other end of her life. She’s in her 90’s I believe. She’s very well known internationally and yet early on her family and she had to make a decision to not swim with the rest of the fishes, but go in a different direction and it did give her great success. Is it interesting for you to be able to say okay kids if we can spark your interest in a way that’s different than what you’re already getting? We really could be setting you up for some interesting success that we can’t even define at this point.
Susan: Yeah absolutely, I spoke with Adam Burke at the Baxter Academy. The idea is let’s shake things up and let’s look at Playspace learning. Let’s look at very individualized learning and let’s see what happens when we divorce ourselves from pinning all these expectations on standardized tests. Let’s free the children up. It means they’re wonderfully articulate about their skepticism about standardized tests. They’re not working for a lot of our kids and yet a lot of our kids are incredibly capable. That’s the beauty of what’s happening, you get all this excitement. You can sense that the kids have liberated from all the downsides of standardized testing. Now if you test well that’s a walk in the park you’ll all set, but what happens to the kids who are extremely bright and don’t test well at all.
Dr. Lisa: Well I agree with you on the one hand and on the other hand I’ve had lots of standardized tests in my life as a doctor. I’m actually studying for another standardized test even now. Every 10 years we have to get Board Certified again and just because we can take tests well I think sometimes we still feel like the education doesn’t quite fit us. I think that’s the other piece of it is are there kids also out there who might test well, but still don’t really quite feel like the educational system fits them in some way.
Susan: Absolutely and I agree with you completely. In fact, what I heard was that some of the kids who test well just surf.
Dr. Lisa: I think that’s very common actually.
Susan: Right and they’re equally disengaged. You know at The Telling Room I’ve always said that we are only as good as our latest teacher. I felt that over and over doing this Charter School piece for Maine Magazine which was who do we have in the classroom today. How are you interacting with these kids? The kids want to be heard. They want dialog. Every single kid I talked to used the word one-on-one. One-on-one conversation with teacher, you know, want more please.
Dr. Lisa: Nowhere in this article did I hear public schools are less than ideal. We don’t like public schools. Public schools are doing the wrong thing. I never heard that. What I heard was really what the Charter School Champions have been saying consistently which is, here’s another option and maybe in exploring this other option we can make education better for everyone, public schools, kids are disenchanted with public schools, with teachers. So I think it’s an interesting line to walk. My mother is a public school teacher, has been for many years, and I know she has thoughts about Charter Schools, but maybe if we can look at it as okay this could make it better for all involved and how can we build on that.
Susan: It’s interesting you say that because I also did a profile for Alan Lishness from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute for this same education issue for Maine Magazine and I put it to him. He said in the piece, I thought rather compellingly, “the jury is out,” he said. But what’s the risk of sitting back and watching and seeing what happens when we do more individualized lines of learning. We don’t have anything to lose by seeing if that works because then we could all benefit from that data. Let’s wait and see, but at the same time we can’t be naive about this. There’s a really small piece of education money out there and that’s the controversy. That’s what I call the Maine hot potato in the piece and we’re not done talking about that.
Dr. Lisa: Well that will be very interesting to see how all that all plays out. Maybe we’ll have you back again over a few years more into The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and we can talk about that and probably your next book, but we’ve been really honored to have you in here talking to us today about “Paris was the Place,” your new novel, and also about the articles that you’ve written for Maine Magazine. Thanks for coming in Susan Conley.
Susan: Thanks it was a great pleasure.