When I moved to New York City after college many years ago, I hung out with many young artists working on refining their craft and getting discovered. I would go to tiny black box theatres around town and view performances people would quite rightly call their work. These performances were probably more work for the audience to sit through than for the actors to perform and this probably explained why the actors frequently outnumbered the audience.

However, these tedious evenings would sometimes pay off with unexpected beauty. One such moment was when a friend performed a monologue based on Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. The memory has come back to me recently in two different guises.

The actress spoke about having had a child and giving it up for adoption. She lived in the same town and spoke wrenchingly about seeing the child grow up and wanting to reach out, to tell her secret, to help the child. Now, instead of finding myself amongst tortured artists struggling with their craft, I find myself amongst tortured middle-aged men struggling with broken families and derailed careers.

One friend is struggling to get his career back on track and in his current poverty is fighting with his ex over child support and visitation issues. His daughter has just become a teenager and it has been ages since he has seen her. The other day he mentioned that he had found her ‘MySpace site’. In it, she spoke about how she missed her long walks with her father, even though she won’t currently speak with him on the phone.

The second memory is perhaps a little less obvious. Today, I received an email from Gina Coggio. I talk a lot about her class and recently went to visit them to talk about blogging. She has put up some of her students work on the web. Please, do yourself a favor and find some time to sit down and read some of the students work.

http://literatureatnha.blogspot.com

There is some beautiful writing there and I hope you stop by and comment on the students work. The blog has a little bit of a feel of the Spoon River Anthology. I believe that the actress that did the stirring monologue based on Spoon River Anthology went on to become a priest and uses her dramatic skills from the pulpit now. Whether or not any of the students will go on and become the next Edgar Lee Masters or perhaps the next Nikki Giovanni, the ability to write well is something that will be valuable to them, no matter what they end up doing.

More importantly, whether it is the performance of my friend years ago, or the writings of Gina’s students today, there is beauty in the representations of people’s struggle to bring meaning to difficult situations.

http://literatureatnha.blogspot.com