One year.
It’s been one year since we
broke ground on the semicircle of sod and weeds surrounding a red brick wall in
the West Bloomfield High School courtyard. In May, 2015, I had some promised
literary plants and a couple of volunteers. By June I had picked up a second
grant, and donations were trickling into the school website, but it wasn’t
enough “seed” money to fund everything we needed to do over the summer.
I did not own a wheelbarrow. (Sorry,
William Carlos Williams, I just hadn’t quite caught on yet.) I was begging –
yes, begging – for dirt from the big box stores, from landscape supply
companies, on Facebook, from signs on the side of the road that promised “free
fill dirt.” The Mark Twain wisteria cuttings? They DIED. The Emily Dickinson
rosebush cuttings? They DIED.
I was starting to freak out.
How was I going to make this happen?
And then, on July 31, 2015
(a VERY important date in literary history; it is a birthday shared by Juliet
Capulet AND Harry Potter as well as Harry Potter’s creator, J.K. Rowling),
something magical happened. Amy Goldman wrote me an email at 9:17 P.M. that
night that changed the course of this project completely.
I know that you are working to fund this project and what a
difficult job that can be. My grandparents established a family foundation
prior to their passing in order to help organizations that our family felt were
meaningful. Upon hearing about this project, I presented a request to my family
to consider a donation.
I
am excited to tell you that the Garber Family Foundation will be donating to
the Literary Garden.
The donation was completely
unexpected (I did not know Amy, nor had I had her children in my classes), but
I could not have known that three weeks later Amy and I would be, with dozens
of other volunteers, hauling wheelbarrows full of pea gravel and dirt as we
began creating a home for the plants I did not yet have. National Public Radio came out to cover our fledgling efforts!
Also in August, I visited the
Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and met with founder Julia Whitehead, who agreed
to be our Literary Garden sponsor; more funding meant more essentials for the
garden. Even more exciting, Julia set up the opportunity for Melissa and I to
meet Edie Vonnegut to get the Vonnegut hydrangeas for the garden.
By September and October, the
plants came rolling in, by mail and by car, a plethora of perennials populating
the backseat of my Jeep, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s false indigo pods shaking in terror as we
made our way into Michigan. My students and I planted on a warm October
afternoon under the direction of master gardener Dani Connolly. We made it into
The Detroit Free Press, my
mustachioed mug plastered across the front of the Life section for the world to
see!
In November, tragedy struck
our West Bloomfield community for the third time when we lost another tenth
grade student to suicide. I had just learned about the Carton2Garden challenge
and wondered how we could use it as an opportunity to help the students process
their grief. Driving home one night, my playlist randomly shuffled to They
Might Be Giants – “Put a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul.” My mind immediately
flashed to Emily Dickinson:
What if we made the cartons
into BIRDHOUSES? Birdhouses that wouldn’t just house our feathered friends in
the courtyard, but birdhouses that would symbolically remind our struggling
students to keep room for hope to perch in their very souls, that things would
get better? I called on my dear friends Karen Matynowski (science) and Mimi
Hoffman (art) for help. I knew I could not do this alone, but I was so excited
about the idea, I had to share it immediately!
This was another aspect to
the garden entirely, but it was so very important. So important to acknowledge the
grief and pain and worry I saw in their writing. None of us could make sense of
these tragedies, but we could try to move forward, one inspirational quote at a
time, nudging each other towards brighter days.
I would stand at the window over
the winter and worry endlessly about the school, our students, the plants.
Would we survive the ice, the frost, the snow? It was so important that we try.
My dear friend Robin Tracey
and her team at Moonlink Studios / Ringside Creative donated their time and efforts
to create a video for us to submit to the Carton2 Garden contest in April, and
in May, we found out that we were one of 14 national award winners! Prairie
Farms Dairy rewarded our students with an ice cream social, and The Detroit Free Press covered our award in its Life section on June 11, 2016.
In May, the West Bloomfield
Public Library announced that they would be donating a deposit collection of
books to our WBHS iCenter to allow students to check out books for the authors they
find interesting in the garden. Media specialist Julie Abeska and I are working
on providing a special space in the iCenter to showcase this generous
collection.
Spring finally sprung, and
after a rash of late frost warnings, we finally had our official spring
planting on June 3, 2016. We have been approved to begin a WBHS Literary Garden
Club and have over 60 interested members signed up – as a matter of fact, they
have already begun working on cleaning the courtyard, and they helped with the spring
planting and with the decorating for the Literary Garden Grand Opening Gala.
On Friday, June 10, we opened
the doors of the courtyard to the West Bloomfield Central Administration,
School Board, Educational Foundation, donors, volunteers, students and parents
to give them a chance to see the garden in all of its glory.
None of this would have been
possible without the generosity of the organizations that have supported the garden
through generous grants, starting with the West Bloomfield Educational
Foundation, the Garber Family Foundation, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library,
the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Public Education Leadership
Community Grant, the Penguin
Random House Teacher Awards for Literacy, the Troy Garden Club, and the
Carton2Garden Middle/High School Award.
There
would not be a garden without the herculean efforts of the museums, homesteads,
families, scholars, and organizations of authors - and some of the authors
themselves! - from around the country. They include: Pearl S. Buck, Willa
Cather, Eugenia Collier, Emily Dickinson, Sharon Draper, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Nikki Giovanni, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Ken
Kesey, Thomas Lynch, Carson McCullers, N. Scott
Momaday, Flannery O’Connor, Holly Painter, Marge Piercy, Edgar Allan
Poe, Theodore Roethke, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stevens, Mark
Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Walt Whitman, and Jeff
Zaslow. I am so grateful that when I came knocking at your doors, you responded
so generously. I know that you don’t necessarily have the time and funding that
you need in your own organizations, and I am endlessly grateful that you took
the time to bring a swath of American literary history to the students of West
Bloomfield High School.
We have so much more
that we want to do! Here are just a few of the goals we have set for the next
year.
a.
Care and maintenance of the plants of the garden, year round
b.
Acquire new plants generated from student reading, interest, and discussion
c.
Read books and poetry not already in curriculum tied to the authors and poets
in the garden and explore the connections to the plants.
d.
Write “secret poetry” on the sidewalks in the courtyard that only shows up when
it rains.
e.
Plan poetry slams, yoga in the garden, and other events would showcase student
talent and provide opportunities for student community building.
g.
Provide West Bloomfield community opportunities to create literary-themed art
projects in the courtyard.
f.
Become the umbrella organization for courtyard improvement. We would work with
the Art Department on the Art Garden to help get them up and running. They will
apply for grant money this fall to revitalize their end of the courtyard.
If you would like to support
the garden, we have set up a way for you to do so that provides a more lasting
legacy. You can now purchase a tile to commemorate a special moment in a
student’s life, to cement a connection you have to the Literary Garden, or to note some other
seminal moment you have connected to an American author or with West Bloomfield
High School. See the brochure information here for more details.
Thank you, all of you, for
making the West Bloomfield Literary Garden a reality, and stay tuned for YEAR
TWO!