You Wonder How These Things Begin by Susan Van Kirk

Most readers assume I’ve always been a mystery writer. I have two mystery series—the Endurance Mysteries and the Art Center Mysteries—and a standalone called A Death at Tippitt Pond. I’ve written these nine books since 2012. However, I didn’t begin my late-in-life writing career as a mystery writer. I backed into it through some unexpected experiences.

At age fifty, I went back to school over three summers and finished a master’s degree while I was teaching at a small high school in Monmouth, Illinois. Once I obtained the degree, I thought I might be able to get freelance work as a textbook consultant. Optimistically, I sent out fifty resumes, but the only company to answer me was a small business in Nebraska that published CliffsNotes.

 

Now this was a problem. I’d spent a great deal of time trying to get my students NOT to use CliffsNotes. The publisher needed an English teacher with an advanced degree to update and rewrite the CN of their bestseller, The Scarlet Letter. I thought about it and figured I should turn them down. But when they told me what they’d pay me for a few months of research and writing, I rushed to sign on the dotted line. I had two kids in college at the time, was a single parent, and had just finished a degree myself. Money was helpful.

Writing these study guides made me realize how much I enjoyed research and writing.

 

I also learned about techniques and programs I’d later use as a mystery author. I learned to use tracking software, collaborate with multiple editors of every persuasion, and realize that any disputes about my writing were not personal. Writing was a business. I calmed my conscience by telling myself that if my students took advantage of my CliffsNotes in writing book reports, I’d recognize my writing style, right? Later, my job as a CN writer gave me a bit of street cred with my college students. That was helpful.

 

The CN work came around the year 2000. I wrote several over the next three or four years. They helped put my children through college.

 

Then I began working on my own book. Not a mystery. Steadily, since 2004, I’d drafted stories from my decades of teaching high school English. Little by little, word by word, sentence by sentence, these memories trickled onto the page and out of my head. Eventually, they numbered fifteen and were funny, nostalgic, sad, and amazing. The creative nonfiction collection was about students who had come into my life and taught me how to be a teacher. They weren’t about lesson plans or state testing or ordinary days over those thirty-five years. They were about extraordinary experiences, and they turned into a theme: the human side of teaching. I called the book The Education of a Teacher (Including Dirty Books and Pointed Looks).

 

One of the stories was about a friend of mine who had died in Vietnam, and his death, in an unusual way, influenced a high school student I had at the time. But I didn’t know it until twenty years later. I used the story in my college class to inspire pre-teachers about how they could help change students’ lives for the better. One of my college students suggested I write the story and try to get it published. Eventually I did. The magazine that published it had me create an audio file. They put it on their website and readers could hear my voice reading my story.

 

The magic began. So many of my former students, as well as perfect strangers and teachers from all over the country, saw or heard the story and contacted me. It brought many former students back into my life through the internet and via email. One, teaching in Saudi Arabia, emailed me saying, “I heard your voice, and it was just like coming home.” After that, how could I not publish these stories?

 

Rarely are we offered a glimpse of what our lives have meant—unless we are Jimmy Stewart—but sometimes we do get to see through a tiny crack in a door to the past. I am humbled and grateful for the many comments by those readers and their reflective, interesting, funny stories I didn’t know. To be able to recreate a time and place with people who shared them is a special blessing.

 

The collection of stories for the book is varied. One is about a student who had a strange problem: when she had to give speeches she’d sneeze, sometimes a hundred times. How to help her? Another was about a young man who died young and tragically shortly after graduation. Yet another was about a book challenge in my class to Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. I have the precious letter Mr. Vonnegut wrote to me framed and hanging on my living room wall. One of the funniest stories is about a former student who asked, “You know what I remember the most about your class?” His answer was very unexpected. 

The final postscript is a story about the night I played electric guitar in a college fraternity band at age sixty-five. Word by word, those memories of unusual days and memorable people left my fingers and slid onto the page. I finished the book in 2010.

In those days, memoirs were often published by vanity publishers, and that’s what I used. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak about my book at a National Council of Teachers of English convention, an American Library Association conference, and at a conference of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. I also presented at several colleges and universities to groups of education students. A few universities have used my book as a textbook in education classes. It sold thousands of copies. I was thrilled that it meant something to people, especially young people.

 

So where is it now? I had the rights reverted a couple of years ago. It’s no longer available except as a used book online. However, this winter I plan to go back through the chapters, update them, write a new foreword, and republish the book myself. Isn’t it nice how publishing has changed? While my mysteries contain a great deal of my "teacher thinking" in the character of Grace Kimball, I know this memoir is about the life of a teacher, and it may still have something to say currently to teachers or young people who are considering teaching. We’ll see.

 

But then it was on to mysteries.