It is a rainy Monday morning and I’m sitting in a high school classroom at the New Haven Academy. I look at the red folding chairs sitting on a blue carpet. I look up at the ceiling tiles, the kind I’ve counted too often in various waiting rooms. Why am I here?

On the simplest level, I am here to see a performance of the 9th Grade Literature classes based on the book, The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Yet I don’t know any of the students in the performance. I don’t live in New Haven. What has really brought me here?

The performance is being done by Gina Coggio’s students. Gina writes a wonderful column for the New Haven Independent. She talks about what it is like being a literature teacher in the New Haven school system. I’ve read stories of her students getting into fights, getting arrested, having a mother die of cancer and becoming pregnant with a frequent sub-theme of the role of gangs in the lives of the students.

She has warned me ahead of time to not expect a Broadway production. I’ve been to enough student plays to know not to expect that. Yet the room doesn’t have any apparent theatrical equipment. I wonder what the students will be like.

They troop in. The same sort of good-natured nervous energy you would expect from a bunch of ninth graders anywhere who are putting on a play for their teacher, for each other, and for whomever else has been rounded up. A few students ask who I am and why I am there.

I talk a little bit about ‘blogging’, which none of them seems ever to have heard of. But that doesn’t get to why I’m really there.

The performance begins. There are moments that I have to strain my ears to hear what students are saying. There are other moments of magic where the students capture and bring alive the story.

For those of you who don’t know the story of the Hot Zone, it is about an Ebola virus outbreak in the suburbs of Washington DC. I’m watching this in greater New Haven, not far from the facilities of pharmaceutical giants.

Slowly, the real story dawns on me. It isn’t about the horrible virus. Ebola is a metaphor. I have gone to see this performance because of the writing of Gina. Her writing is contagious. The students have done a great job because of Richard Preston’s writing. His writing is contagious as well.

Now, I’m a carrier as well. I am a carrier of the belief that good writing can change people’s lives. I hope that that Gina manages to infect some of her students with this belief. I hope that I can share in the transmission of this belief.

Will someone read this blog entry and come away with a stronger sense of the importance of literature? Will someone come away with a deepened commitment to bring literature alive to students? Will my presence at the performance add to Gina’s efforts to infect some of her students with a love of literature, or even better, a love of writing?

I can only hope, and write.