about

Me, above: I did a class visit with the creative writing students at my old high school. It was strange and good. There were also homemade scones and a sign with my name on it with a flourish. It felt a bit odd, as if I were getting humored by someone, my mother perhaps.

Me, today: I teach at a Montessori elementary school and am currently mid-way through my AMI certificate training. I adore my students fiercely, and I love that the school in which I teach focuses on creating a community, and not in that falsely declared community, but actual feels-like-a-second-home community.

What led me here: I don't know how many generations teaching goes back in my family, but I can say that both of my parents are teachers, my paternal grandparents, my favorite aunt--all teachers. And I married into teachers. My father-in-law was a principal at an elementary school, and this is how he met his wife, who was once an elementary teacher too. It is, in some forms, a family business. You can imagine how holiday dinner conversation can go.

Me, just before: I adjuncted college composition online; before that, I was a TA at the University of Minnesota, where I taught introduction to and intermediate poetry workshops, composition, and Introduction to Contemporary Literature; before that, I taught high school English in town, and in the Twin Cities suburbs. I also did my practicum in a middle school and have taught at a Gifted & Talented camp. It's a haphazard path I made to get where I am, and in the duration, I collected a few advanced degrees: an M.Ed in English and an MFA in poetry.

I also run a press called Tinderbox Editions, which sprang from a journal I founded, Tinderbox Poetry Journal. I've written books, and write essays, as well as poems. I try to utilize this part of me, the part that is passionately ensconced in the contemporary literary world, who believes in literary citizenship. I volunteer as a mentor for the Minnesota Prison Writer's Workshop. I've also mentored for the AWP Mentor program. And I've been lucky enough to be a mentee: through Intermedia Arts, Split Rock Arts, and most recently, the Loft Literary Center. I believe in paying it forward, and sideways, and all around. I hope my students end up deciding they believe in this too.

Speaking of the Loft, here's me and Claudia Rankine at her overflow-room reading in Minneapolis a few years back. Had to add it because I deeply admire her, not just as a writer, but as a thinker, and a participant in dialogs I have been a part of and have appreciated being able to listen to and learn from:

And my personal life: I grew up in Chattanooga, where I fell in love with language and literature early on. My sixth grade year was one of the best for books; I remember gazing at my English teacher's cupboards and asking her if the photograph on one door was Walden Pond. The summer before, you see, my family had gone to Massachusetts, where my mother grew up, and we did the Alcott House, Walden, Salem. This was my childhood. Touring houses that became museums of author's lives. I went to middle and high school in Wisconsin (my father earned his Ph.D and got a new job as head of composition at the U of Wisc-Green Bay), and I adored my AP Language teacher. Guess who she was? None other than my own mother. We were tumultuous at home, but I remember her class as my favorite in all of my high school years, and I had a lot of fantastic courses: orchestra, Russian History, every other English course.

Today, I live on a three acres in the woods, which was very purposeful. My children attend a school in which woods and fields are a part of everyday life; I knew we had to do the same. I admire the hermit lifestyle and was deeply disappointed when I learned how mythical Walden was.

In this not-mythical home I am a woman married to a science-nerd with whom I have had a daughter (age six, loves animals and nature and knows an eerie lot about them) and a son (age four, whose favorite color is green and he's lately been impressing us with a range of interpretive dances) as well as two dogs, a bearded dragon, a guinea pig, the class rabbit for the summer, and eight chicks, three of whom are silkies and still only puffs you can hold in your palm.

I'm not sure I deserve this life. I also could tell you, if someone snuck back in time and told 18-year-old Molly that she was about to meet her husband with whom she would live in a town whose population is a walloping 282, on acreage, and teach elementary school, well, I'm not sure if I would have whacked the messenger with the nearest book or just let my jaw drop. The path here makes complete sense, but I had intended to live in a city and have a Ph.D and be a professor publishing books, and I got to dabble in some of those things and figure out what made me happiest. This. This is it.

-- 18 June 2017, Minnesota