Wake Up Laughing: A Spiritual Autobiography - Softcover

Pat Schneider

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9780941895194: Wake Up Laughing: A Spiritual Autobiography

Softcover

ISBN 10: 094189519X ISBN 13: 9780941895194

Publisher: Amherst Writers & Artists Pres, 2000

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New paperback edition! Memoir.

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About the Author:

Pat Schneider is the founder/director of Amherst Writers & Artists and editor of Amherst Writers & Artists Press, has published widely in literary journals and magazines, including Sewanee Review, minnesota review, Ms. Magazine, and Negative Capability. She has published three books of poetry, Olive Street Transfer, White River Junction and Long Way Home. In addition, she has published a book on writing, The Writer as an Artist: A New Approach to Writing Alone and With Others and has edited a collection of the writings of women in low-income housing projects, In Our Own Voices. Her book, Wake Up Laughing: A Spiritual Autobiography, was released in 1997 by Negative Capability Press, and her NEW book, Olive Street Transfer, was released in 1999 by Amherst Writers & Artists Press

Her libretti have been recorded by the Louisville Symphony and performed by Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony in Boston's Symphony Hall and in Carnegie Hall, New York City. Fourteen of her plays have been produced, nine published. There are more than 300 recorded productions of her plays in this country and in Europe. Pat is an alumnus of the Lehman Engel BMI Musical Theater Workshop. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts, and an MA in Religious Studies from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA. She has been recipient of literary prizes, and grants from the Danforth Foundation, the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Awards, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she is the Founder/Director of Amherst Writers & Artists and Amherst Writers & Artists Press, which has published twenty books of poetry and the national literary journal, Peregrine.

Pat is a member of the faculty of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, leading creative writing workshops in two sessions each year at Pacific School of Religion. She also leads annual workshops in Ireland, workshop leadership training seminars and several writing retreats. In 1993 Pat was keynote speaker and workshop leader at a women's retreat in Japan.

Pages 3-4

When I was thirteen years old, a knock came on my door. My door would open, if I opened it, onto a dark hallway in a tenement house in St. Louis. Behind me would be two small rooms.

The year was 1947; I had been told never, never to open the door when Mama was not at home. But the voice calling to me outside the door was familiar. As if a bolt of lightning had struck my heart, I recognized the voice: my school teacher, Miss Dunn, whom I adored.

It was unthinkable that a seventh grade teacher would visit one of her students. It was unbearable that Miss Dunn had come up the dirty stairs, that she had climbed three flights, that she might see the clutter, the dirt, the shame in the rooms behind me.

The school year was over. It was summer, hot and sticky in that Mississippi river-bottom air. I opened the door just the tiniest crack, with the chain lock still in place. Yes. It was true. Miss Dunn stood in the dim light of the hallway, and she was smiling at me.

I unlocked the chain, opened the door a fraction more, tried to hide the room behind me with my body. She held out a book. Gray, with blue letters. I felt faint. "Here," she said. "This is my book. I want you to have it."

I took the book, but could not speak. Her book. She was giving me her book. She had told me once, when I handed in a report, "You can be a writer."

I was unable to do anything but cling to the door to keep from falling, and to keep her from seeing inside. I read the words on the cover: DARK WAS THE WILDERNESS. BY DOROTHY DUNN. I looked up at her face. When I did not speak, she said, "I know what will happen to you when you grow up."

"What?" It was my first word, and my last.

"I won't tell you now, but come and find me when you are grown, and I will tell you if I was right."

And she turned, and went back down the stairs.

When I was in my thirties, and had a libretto performed by Phyllis Byrn Julson, Robert Shaw, and the Atlanta Symphony in Carnegie Hall, I wrote to the Saint Louis Board of Education and asked for the address of Dorothy Dunn. They said she died within five years of the day she had knocked on my apartment door.

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