If they give you ruled paper

Write the other way

In the pantheon of adults who made a positive impact on my life as a young person, Ramona Drury looms large — and not just because she was over six feet tall and a leather-clad biker who rode her motorcycle to my high school — but also because she wielded authority with a gravitas and an ease I have rarely witnessed anywhere since I had the privilege of being her student.

Photo by Kirill Petropavlov on Unsplash

Mrs. Drury scared the shit out of me my first day of high school.

To be fair, my first day of public school was completely overwhelming in general. I was homeschooled through the sixth grade, and attended a small, college prep charter school for junior high. Attending the high school where my dad taught journalism and civics meant going from a class of 15 kids to being one of 500 freshmen. I was prepared for the work, but socially I was out of my depth.

My dad handpicked Mrs. Drury as my freshman English teacher — one of the perks of being a teacher’s kid. Her reputation was unassailable. She brought out the best from her students with her no-nonsense approach.

On that first day, she made it clear that if we wanted to be taken seriously by her, we would need to take ourselves seriously too. We weren’t eighth graders anymore — no, this was high school. We would learn to write in this class, I remember her telling us. And writing, she explained, takes work. We couldn’t expect to skate by on showing up (that was for the benefit of the kids who didn’t like school), nor to coast on past successes (that was for the teacher’s pets like yours truly). We would need to learn to receive and incorporate critique. She had a reputation for being tough, she explained, because she was honest. Really honest.

She gave us a writing assessment that very day, and while I don’t remember its details, I do remember struggling to hold back tears. After just one class, I was convinced my dad had made a terrible mistake.

“She’s mean,” I told my dad.

As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I was at an age where I was learning that I didn’t want to grow up just to be “nice” — but I also didn’t know how to respond to adults who treated teenagers as young adults, and not as kids. Mrs. Drury — or simply Drury, as I later came to call her — was thoroughly at home in herself as a human and as a writer. Her integrity challenged me to find my own. It wasn’t going to be enough for me to be likable (a quality I’ve relied upon to varying degrees throughout my life). She was asking me to find my voice, and I could only do that by being myself. This, to be precise, is what scared the shit out of me.

Fortunately for me, my dad didn’t cave to my demands for to be coddled. “Keep at it,” he told me. “A lot of students find that she is their favorite teacher. And they grow.”

Of course he was right.

That freshman English class gave me the tools I needed to land back in Drury’s classroom for junior Honors English. I knew by then that she liked me — which mattered, since my hunger to be liked was insatiable, and wasn’t going to simply disappear — but more importantly, I’d gained more confidence and clarity in my voice. One day, Drury started class with a quote written across the white board:

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

This line attributed to Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez was the epigraph to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. (451 degrees, of course, being the temperature at which paper — specifically books — burn. Can you say subversive summer 2023 reading list?)

Drury led us through a short discussion about the quote, focused on the importance of questioning the status quo in writing and life. Then we dove into other (seemingly unrelated) material, the quote erased and largely forgotten.

Finally, with only a few minutes of class remaining, Drury instructed us to get out a piece of paper (calm down, kids, this was in the days before Chromebooks). She gave us a writing prompt and we were on our way. Oh the joy of self-expression! I went at the task with great enthusiasm, flying through the first few lines of the page, when suddenly, Drury interrupted us mid-assignment.

“Set down your pencils.” I reluctantly did so, catching the eyes of my peers, who were just as confused as I was. “Who wrote the other way?” Drury asked, a smile threatening to turn up the corners of her lips.

One student, a close friend of mine, was the only one. (Whatever, Kealy, you think you’re so smart. It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.)

Drury reiterated her earlier point, about creative defiance of the way things are. She added that it’s not enough to just think outside the boxes in which society confines us. We need to act our way into a different way of being human.¹

I learned a couple of valuable lessons that day that have grown in me ever since.

1. When we know that we are supported in being our truest selves, we find the courage to do things in creative ways. We need revolutionary relationships, in order for our dissenting values/beliefs to be aligned with behaviors that subvert the status quo. We can’t do this work alone. We need mentors, peers, co-conspirators.

2. People have authority because we, collectively, give them authority by our participation in the social norms, compliance with the laws, and contribution to the institutions that exist. I’ve since learned in nonviolence education, where we talk about this as the “social view of power,” that there are hundreds of ways we can remove our consent to the powers that be. Writing the other way is just a start.

I’d love to hear from you! Who has supported you in defying the status quo? Do you remember the first time you realized you could “write the other way?”

1. My paraphrase — all creative license taken with appreciation for 15 years of life experience, and humility toward all I didn’t know then, and all I do not know yet.