Writing, teaching and loving it all

Ellen Gilchrist — mother, author, speaker and motivator — was also a master teacher at the University of Arkansas.

Among other things.

Just to type the names of the great plays makes me shiver. Every Sunday afternoon when Paul and Henry and Carolyn and Margaret and Patti and Enid and Molly and Kathleen and I gather around my table to begin reading, a hush falls on the room. This is greatness and when we open the books and begin to read we are part of that greatness and partake of it.

If you want an entry into this treasure it would be good to read a book called “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” by Harold Bloom. Or just call up some friends and sit down and open a play and begin to read. It’s magic. You will not be sorry that you tried it.

Gilchrist compiled 50 of her essays into one volume, “The Writing Life” (2005), when she was 70 years old, after she had already had a fruitful writing and teaching career. Her successful two books of poetry and 18 books of fiction (novels and collections of stories) informed her teaching.

Gilchrist one: Rules are made to be broken. I tell my students to read great literature. If you want to be television producers, watch television. If you want to be writers, read.

Gilchrist two: Write what you know. The reward has to be within yourself. Tell the truth about what you know and what you feel. Find out things. Read great literature. Then write. It’s only typing. Stop talking about it and do it.

Gilchrist three: My students think they have to travel to remote parts of the world to have material to write about. The male students think they are missing out if they never got to go to a war. I am glad they want to go out and see the world but many writers never traveled far from where they were born. Shakespeare, Turgenev, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, the list goes on and on.

There’s more.

Gilchrist’s zest for teaching shines throughout the book:

Teaching is fun! It’s exciting and challenging and full of surprises. … I’m stuck and I love it. I don’t even want to get away.

You will find her encouragement and enthusiasm bubbling like a dreamer’s cauldron throughout “The Writing Life” (University Press of Mississippi, 211 pp., $35).

I’ve seen this road she describes. For us, writing and teaching are callings, not jobs.