“From the day I was born, I was a dreamer. I once dreamed of being the president,” writes Adam Day, one of the authors featured in “If I Put My Mind to It,” an anthology of short memoirs written by students in workshops held by The Literacy Project at its five sites in Amherst, Northampton, Greenfield, Athol, Ware and Orange.
Loyce Taylor, who received her GED last year, just four days before her 80th birthday, writes of running off in her Sunday best and being discovered riding on a pig.
Tsultrim Dolma, despite her fears, tells of the persecution of Tibetans by Chinese occupiers in her village in eastern Tibet. “When I was growing up, there weren’t many old men in the village,” Dolma writes. “They had died fighting the Chinese or were in prison. Some young boys had to dress as girls so the Chinese would not kill them.”
“Everybody was hungry,” Dolma writes. “I could see it in their faces that were so swollen from eating grain that you couldn’t see their eyes. I remember kids lying on the road because they were too weak to move.”
Dolma’s family didn’t starve because they had a little barley and a yak that gave milk, she writes. But her parents fed her at night and then took her outside “to get the smell of food off so the town officials wouldn’t come and take the food away.”
In short prose pieces, men and women write of their dreams, their home, their childhood, their own children and families, their education, and the challenges they’ve had to overcome.
A grant from the Mass Humanities Foundations helped to fund workshop teachers Julie Britton, Tzivia Gover, Celia Jeffries and Peggy Woods. Other funding sources, including the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, are listed in the front of the anthology. Editor Ann McNelly and graphic designer Peter Chilton offered their services as volunteers, Roberts says.
She says that The Literacy Project aims to improve the literacy, numeracy and computer skills of its students so that they can pass the high school equivalency, or HiSET, test. But beyond these skill-based classes, the project also offers creative writing workshops and outings to museums and theater performances.
“In the Pioneer Valley we have very rich resources (at various schools and colleges) that are free. The Literacy Project aims to make sure everyone has access to those resources,” Roberts says.
Literacy and exposure to the arts improves broader skills such as communication and critical thinking, Roberts says.
“And it builds bridges. It connects us to others, it connects us to the world,” she explains. Her observations of the workshops provide compelling examples.
“One thing I observed is at the start on the first day, students were sitting in isolated groups, separated by ethnicity and race and other kinds of separations,” Roberts said. “As the workshops went on, even starting from the second week, people started to join together.”
For example, the shared joy of remembering a mother’s cooking brought students together, she said.
“It might have been different foods for an African refugee, or someone from Puerto Rico, or someone who grew up in Ware but it was a shared joy and a shared remembering, and it bonded the students.”
In one section of the anthology, titled “Home,” a student identified as R.C. writes with obvious love about the Sunday dinners his mother would cook, including barbecued chicken, sweet potato pies and hot macaroni and cheese.
“The first bite was like a party in my mouth,” R.C. writes.
Roberts says that, for many, crafting their memoir was not easy.
“We call ourselves ‘The Literacy Project,’” Roberts said, “all of our students who come to us are able to read and write but they are at low-literacy levels or below a high-school equivalency. They may not be able to fill out a job application or read a bus schedule … Writing prose was quite a challenge for a lot of students.”
Even over the phone, I can hear her smiling as she recalls that during one workshop, a student, an immigrant from Senegal, danced his memoir. He began with a verbal introduction about how he learned to dance traditional Senegalese dances from him mother then told the story again through dance.
There’s a reason that the arts are called “the humanities,” Roberts says. “I think the gift of reading and writing, which many of us take for granted, gives us an opportunity to express our humanity.”
“The gift of literacy invites us to experience our shared humanity,” she continues. “It’s a beautiful thing. It’s also the thing that underscores our democracy. The ability to read critically and to understand — that ensures the continuation of our democracy. Tyrants, universally, the first thing they do is to destroy books.”
The anthology is not technically for sale but Roberts says, “We are happy to give it to anyone who’s really interested. We’d love to give it in exchange for a donation but we also don’t want to deny anyone the chance to see it.”
To obtain a copy of the anthology, or to inquire about volunteering, contact Judith Roberts at The Literary Project
offices in Greenfield at 413-774-3934, ext. 17; or by email at: jroberts@literacyproject.org
Roberts says that The Literacy Project is always looking for volunteers. She likens the project’s method to a two-room schoolhouse — one room for students starting from zero to 6th grade level skills, another for students in a sixth- through 12th-grade level.