Becoming a Voice, the Novel

“I opened the envelope and was momentarily puzzled by its contents. But your red-hot publication soon made me whoop with delight. I think those whoops mark me as one of you minus most of your courage. The whoops, however strong, may not be memorable, coming as they were from a teachers’ lounge, but the little dance I tapped out certainly will stick in the minds of coworkers. At this point in paranoia, I refuse to be identified further, even among you. You understand the feeling, of course. It’s the big one that bonds so many teachers but also holds us down together. I expect that there will soon be those who claim you should be ignored because you write/publish undercover. ‘No credibility without identification,’ they may scream. Please, ignore them. I would hope that you just go on writing, publishing, raising hell. Don’t play their game; play your own. Remain underground. Just lie low and keep hurling those cannonballs.”

This is an actual letter from one of the many teachers who responded to The Emperor’s New Clothes, our underground newsletter. This letter’s theme became our mission statement, an invitation, it seemed to us, to go beyond our newsletter: Write a novel that dramatizes the reality of a school work environment.

We didn’t work from an outline. Instead, we wrote vignettes involving good teachers just trying to teach. We packed as many distractions and impediments into each school day as we could think of. Then we wove the vignettes into the time frame of one school year. Our fictional characters are not superteachers or teacher-magicians. (Robin Williams would not star in a movie version of our book.) Instead, these are the people who just show up every day to do their jobs.

We invented a principal, Robert D. Aneyh, and made him a protector of a school’s image rather than a promoter of quality education. The integrity of the teachers stands out in bold relief against their antagonist, Aneyh, whose paramount ambition is to further his own career. (Not all administrators in our book are evil.) The end of the book shows that, because he has the power, Aneyh prevails.

Despite all the good advice in Writer’s Marketplace and similar guides, finding an agent (and a publisher) is not easy—impossible, in fact—especially if the authors are from Iowa and have no connections. After many versions of the manuscript and years of frustration, we’d as much as given up. Then Kathy Myers, our friend and a former teacher, announced that she would become a publisher—Myers House—in order to make the story available to others.

We pooled our money and printed 500 copies. Charles said we should only order 50 and that we would probably be stuck with 25 of those after we’d given books to all our relatives. That was 5 printings and 16,000 books ago!

Watch for our next posting: Becoming a Voice, How the Book Took Off.