High school English teacher and former student reflect on mentorship and a new memoir

[MUSIC PLAYING] HOST: Many teachers will tell you that teaching is like planting seeds, even if you don't always get to see those seeds bloom. Mike Bazzett is a poet and translator who teaches high school English at The Blake School in Minneapolis. Now, recently, he reconnected with a student he had 18 years ago, who has just published a memoir, as part of a new Minnesota Now series celebrating the mentors in our lives.

I'm going to pass the mic to them. The former student's name is John West. His book, Lessons and Carols, comes out today. Teacher and former student will give a reading together at Magers & Quinn next week. But first, they connected over Zoom with Bazzett still in the same classroom to talk about the act of writing and what we pass on to others.

Here's John West.

JOHN WEST: I was very nervous to send it to you, in part because I did not take English classes in college. I was less concerned about the personal stuff that it reveals because I'm sharing that with the world, kind of, by memoir. And I had to grapple with that. But I was concerned, nervous that you might see it and say, wow, he's misreading [INAUDIBLE], after we had that whole class on him. And I think that it's been interesting to send this to people who have taught me a lot. That was a nerve-wracking experience. But it seems like you like it, so, whew.

MIKE BAZZETT: [LAUGHS] That's very beautiful. I didn't feel nerves as much as, I would say, in curiosity. Teaching is so much about sometimes planting seeds that-- it's like putting cicadas in the ground. It might be-- well, I guess it is. Aren't they on 17-year cycles, or 18-year cycles, something like that?

JOHN WEST: [LAUGHS]

MIKE BAZZETT: So you just don't know what's going to emerge fully. And of course, because we haven't been in touch, it was kind of-- there was something about it. I have tons of questions for you. Your book is beautiful, and heartbreaking, and full of loss, but full of so much hope and lyricism too. And it's really something to read a book from a former student who is so now very much a colleague.

But one thing I was sort of wondering about, it's quite a magic trick to write an entire memoir in the present tense. You cue the reader very nicely I think early on about-- and I remember when I moved to Mexico, did a sabbatical with my family, maybe 2 years after you graduated and was trying to learn Spanish when I was 41 or 42. And it's funny, my brain was much slower learning a language at that age.

So I kind of lived in the present tense for about three or four months. It was like becoming an accidental Buddhist. Everything was just now. And there was no past and there was no future. But then later, you mentioned something about how then and suddenly are lying words. And would you say that you-- I mean, do you mistrust linear narrative? Because I just have to think that the challenges of trying to write a memoir in present tense must have been fairly prodigious.

JOHN WEST: Yeah. It's really-- you're in a knife fight, but you've broken your knife before you get there, it feels like, when you only have one tense and it's the present. I mean, I think, ideologically, I'm opposed to understanding my own life through a lens of neat causality.

And I think this is-- I don't want to cast dispersions on other memoirs. I just think that you can't keep writing after you've died. You finish the book, and then all this stuff happens to you after you finish a book. And all that stuff that happens to you is going to change how you understand what happened in the past.

So there's always a truer version of what you could've written. And I think that the present tense was a way for me to kind of get around that problem of like, I understand my own past so differently now than I did when I was doing it, living it.

[CHUCKLING]

And I think that by doing everything in the present. I was forced into this spot of having to confront both the past on its own terms, what was actually happening to me in that moment, but also, I hope, signaling to the reader that, like, I am a work in progress, we are all works in progress. And a memoir is this conceit of, like, I have this authority now. And I don't have that authority, I don't think. I don't think I get that.

MIKE BAZZETT: Yeah, that 2020 hindsight is a lie. And if you use that to go back and revisit, I think the temptation to retool and become inadvertently and accidentally wise in the moment probably is pretty seductive. Yeah. So I know I felt very much there. The loss and the recovery both feel pretty visceral in the book as a result.

It's lyrically beautiful. And even in the moments when it gets incredibly sort of philosophically seeking, it always has an etched clarity. I just feel like I'm looking through clean glass. C

JOHN WEST: So I'd love to read just the very opening of the book. And it's very short. The book is written in fragments. So most of them are really short. They are, like, a sentence long up to a couple pages long. So it's pretty short little fragments. And here's the first one.

"Caring for this baby has taught me new ways to resent. Other people tell me things, absurd things, things about seeing with babies eyes, et cetera. And I resent that I do, in fact, sometimes see with babies eyes. Like in the morning, when a blue [INAUDIBLE] bird, whose name I don't know, preens on my white picket fence. When there are [INAUDIBLE] I've never noticed before from the swallows in the oak, when, once, Galen and I spy a morning dove in the cemetery near our house. I mean, honestly.

I often say that summer is the most desirable season. But I confess, I wish it were winter. I wish the moon weren't an abstract expressionist hurling silver onto my neighbor's oak, watching his handiwork drip down onto my short-cut grass. I wish the baby were older. I wish I were older, were not resentful, re and sent feeling again all the time. But I am resentful. And she is still a baby on the moon. Yes, hello moon is just as annoyingly beautiful as ever."

MIKE BAZZETT: I love that idea of resentment being sent again, and in a way, getting a chance to revisit. Because it is a part of pattern and order. And memoir has so many re words in it, recovery, repair, recollecting, remembering, reminding. I love when you think of reminding as one of the re words--

JOHN WEST: [LAUGHS]

MIKE BAZZETT: I don't mind. And then you put a new one in there. I was reminded by this.

JOHN WEST: I'm so curious. There's that old saying about, like, teachers learn from students. I'm not a teacher, so I don't know if that's actually true or not. But I wonder, how does teaching-- and how do your students-- do they get into your poetry? Do they-- maybe not as characters, but does what you learn in the classroom, does that come back in your own writing, in your own work?

MIKE BAZZETT: Absolutely, in the sense that I-- I was not someone who got an MFA. I learned through reading and rereading. And I think the kind of deep reading and rereading that you have to do as a teacher was really my practice, my craft. That was the workshop.

Saul Bellow has a quote. It was hanging on the wall. I don't know if you would remember this. But it goes all the way back, that said, "The writer is merely the reader moved to emulation." It's like a tidal estuary, when it's just flowing out all day long into the sea. And then there's that one moment when the tide comes in and suddenly you'll actually see the current of the river start impossibly flowing upstream.

That's how I think of it. It's just reading, reading, reading, and then occasionally something will flow back out. Can I just ask you, if it'll will be fair to ask, at one point in the book, when you're talking about being and doing, you say, "This is true, I don't want to be. This is also true, I don't want to die." I do remember you playing Hamlet. Would that be a fair thing to bring up, because I'm so--

[INAUDIBLE]

Well, what was it for you to inhabit that monologue, given the head space that you were in? And of course, I wasn't privy to this. I saw the John West, the outward-facing John West to the world. And I sort of feel like I'm being granted a very different, more fully dimensional aspect of the man and the boy, the young man.

JOHN WEST: I'm happy to talk about being Hamlet in Hamlet. it was a high point of my theater career. But also, I mean, it was a hard experience, I think.

MIKE BAZZETT: I would imagine, yeah.

JOHN WEST: I was not in a good spot mentally during the rehearsals and even the performance of it. And I think watching Shakespeare have his characters go through these, and Hamlet in particular, go through this terrible depression, while I was having the same, it was comforting, in a way, to see that this is an age-old Shakespearean, even, problem that we get to confront still, or have to confront still.

And so there was something nice about doing it, even as it was very difficult. And I think, in some ways, this book is also an exercise in what sources can I pull on to make sense of this condition that I find myself in now? And isn't there something beautiful and lovely, even as it is heartbreaking, that we have been making beautiful meaning out of these horrible experiences since time has been-- since time has happened. So, yeah.

MIKE BAZZETT: Well, I was going to ask you if you had any advice for my current students. But I think it just kind of landed.

[LAUGHTER]

This was an absolute pleasure, John. I look forward to our conversation at Magers & Quinn. And I'm just so delighted to get to reconnect this way.

JOHN WEST: This is a total dream. And thank you, thank you so much for reading and for all of the things I learned in high school. So thank you.

MIKE BAZZETT: Well, thanks for writing the book.

HOST: Mike Bazzett, Mike Bazzett has written four books of poetry. He teaches English at The Blake School in Minneapolis. John West is now a New York-based reporter and the author of the new memoir, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery. Both student and teacher will be in conversation together, as you heard, at Magers & Quinn-- that's in Minneapolis-- this coming Monday, May the 8th at 7:00 PM.