Writing Means HOPE
Zerfas, Janice,writing teacher (2009-03-28)
>>INTERVIEWER: Then you can start talking whenever you would like. Tell your name. Say my name is " " and say "here is my literacy story".  
>>JANICE ZERFAS: Okay. I probably won't look at you.
>>INTERVIEWER: That's fine. You can be busy over here. 
>>JANICE ZERFAS: Okay. If I look at you I will cry. 
>>INTERVIEWER: Okay. Okay. 
>>JANICE ZERFAS: If you would like to tell me what to do. I am so sorry. 
>>INTERVIEWER: Say my name is --
>>JANICE ZERFAS: You want me to start right now? 
>>INTERVIEWER: Yes, please. 
>>JANICE ZERFAS: Oh, okay. My name is Janice Zerfas and I am a composition teacher. I want to tell my story but I didn't want to cry. For me, writing was a way of escaping the most negative circumstances but who would believe that? Who would believe that a white female of seeming privilege would find writing to be a way to find beauty and hope, especially hope? My mother had a wonderful education but she wasn't really allowed to use it. My father had an eighth grade education and when he came home from the farm one day they told him he could no longer go to school. To not go to school was the most horrible, unbelievable, unimaginable circumstance I could ever imagine. To be able to write and to just sit down and write when my mother had so much work to do with six kids and no choices whatsoever. I helped her with everything; I canned food, I canned food every year. You would never believe the work that I did to help my mother. 
>>JANICE ZERFAS: I was white, I came from a good school, I was supposedly, allegedly a person of privilege, but who would imagine, who would imagine, the pain, the censorship, the inability, the unability, the way people did not writing. How I became a writer in these circumstances is unbelievable to me. I feel so lucky, I feel so fortunate. Writing is an act that heals. As Adrienne Rich says-- and I won't get this quote right today --"Writing is a way to heal our wounds and we must write no matter what the circumstances are,." I tell my writing students about my stories, about how writing, for me, was a way of discovering my real, authentic self. Writing created for me connections and imaginative communities I didn't know existed, all through words. It didn't matter that the words weren't right. It didn't matter how many times someone told me that I couldn't write.
>>JANICE ZERFAS: I used to take articles that I found that my grandmother had and I would take a pencil and I would cut out words that I thought didn't fit. Out of those pages I would make a poem. I would make a poem out of somebody else's language and I would make it mine. To me, to be able to write in the incredible circumstances, the incredible workload that my mother had, the incredible censorship and the incredible retaliation that I went through just to write. My father read my first research paper I got an A on during the Vietnam War. It was about Agent Orange and it was about pollution. I was thoroughly beaten late at night. There was always retaliation for writing. 
>>JANICE ZERFAS: One has to be willing to persevere through that. Now, no matter where I am at, writing is my hope. I tell my writing students that writing is my hope. I tell my writing students that writing is their hope also. It doesn't matter whether the language is right, that the sentences are right; the fact that you got there, that's all that matters. That is all that matters. Thank you [unintelligible] for listening to my story. That's really wonderful. 
>>INTERVIEWER: Just hit the stop button.
>>JANICE ZERFAS: Oh, I am so sorry. 
>>INTERVIEWER: No, no!