The importance of models in the artist's life

"...in my own work I write not only what I want to read--understanding fully and indelibly that if I don't do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction--I write all the things I should have been able to read. Consulting, as belatedly discovered models, those writers--most of whom, not surprisingly, are women--who understood that their experience as ordinary human beings was also valuable, and in danger of being misrepresented, distorted, or lost:

Zora Hurston--novelist, essayist, anthropologist, autobiographer;

Jean Toomer--novelist, poet, philosopher, visionary, a man who cared what women felt;

Colette--whose crinkly hair enhances her French, part-black face; novelist, playwright, dancer, essayist, newspaperwoman, lover of women, men, small dogs; fortunate not to have been born in America;

Anais Nin--recorder of everything, no matter how minute;

Tillie Olson--a writer of such generosity and honesty, she literally saves lives;

Virginia Woolf--who has saved so many of us.

It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are "minority" writers or "majority" writers. It is simply in our power to do this.

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own."

--from Alice Walker's piece, Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life

I'm not just an ESL teacher. There was a time when I studied literature and thought more about genre and perspective than "get" phrasal verbs and past perfect continuous. Alice Walker reminded me. In a class of thirteen-year-olds this morning, I was happy to know that eventually the bell would ring, and I could go home to her book.