For the past five years I’ve been talking about writing a book about my experiences teaching theater in the South Bronx. Again and again over the years, life circumstances have intervened and pulled my focus off the project. With a home full of three young children and a teaching career I can’t seem to fully hit pause on, there is always a reason not to write.
Still, the dream of the book has not died. And so, slowly and painstakingly over the last six months—sometimes in fifteen-minute chunks as I nurse a baby, or in a waking dream state after getting up with a sick kid, or on my now only once-weekly commute up to school on the D train—I’ve started writing it.
Mostly, the experience has been exciting and alleviating. What a relief, at long last, to be getting out of my own way and flexing a new set of creative muscles. What a joy to bear witness on the page to the lessons I’ve learned in the presence of my extraordinary students.
But there’s been a shadow side, too.
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