Alice Cary

"Get out of my face, China woman.” That’s just one of the greetings Harvard graduate Michelle Kuo received during her two years in the Teach for America program. She was working in Helena, Arkansas, an impoverished town in the Mississippi Delta, where most of her students had never seen a person of Asian ethnicity.

“Students will say anything to see if they can get under your skin,” Kuo says. She is calling me from Berlin, Germany, where her historian husband is doing research (both now teach at the American University of Paris). “They called a teacher next to me fat,” she remembers. “They called the teacher across from me a cracker. But teachers know that once you let students know it bothers you, you’re done for, so I had to pretend it didn’t bother me.”

Kuo had arrived in Arkansas in 2004 with lofty goals, eager to share readings she cherished from Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Ralph Ellison at an alternative school for kids who had been expelled from other schools. She was particularly fond of Patrick Browning, a quiet, reflective young man giving eighth grade a third try. He ended up completing the year with the “Most Improved” award. Kuo tells his story in her moving chronicle, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship.

Despite the challenges of teaching in Helena, the rewards were great, and when Kuo left to attend Harvard Law School, she felt seriously conflicted, wanting to stay longer. Not only did she and her students grow fond of each other, the adult townspeople welcomed her with open arms.

Little did she know she’d be back two years later, after being notified that high school dropout Patrick was in jail, charged with murder two days before his 19th birthday. She visited him while she was in law school, and again a year later, after her graduation in 2009. Patrick was still in jail awaiting trial. This time she made a bold decision: to put her life on hold for seven months, postponing a fellowship in California. As she writes: “Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. . . . You wonder if you failed them.”

Kuo visited Patrick in jail every day, resuming their reading and writing lessons, and also taught Spanish part-time at a charter school (her old school had closed). “I initially just went to visit him and see how his case was going,” she recalls. “And then I realized he felt alone. I was devastated to see him like that. The last time I’d seen him was the last day of school, and he had been so excited about going to high school. So the news was a shock.”

There have been any number of books about teaching challenging students (think Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide), and numerous others about reading with prisoners (including Mikita Brottman’s 2016 book, The Maximum Security Book Club). Few, however, share Kuo’s unique vantage point of having taught someone both before and during incarceration. It’s this singular relationship, combined with Kuo’s heartfelt, introspective prose, that makes Reading with Patrick so memorable.

“Those seven months changed my life,” Kuo freely admits. “They were so extraordinary. When do we feel most loved? It’s when people show up. I guess Patrick changed me in that way: my belief in that kind of love as being so important.”

“When do we feel most loved? It's when people show up.”

In the county jail, Patrick’s first words to his teacher were, “Mrs. Kuo, I didn’t mean to.” His 16-year-old special needs sister had been returning home from a date with a 25-year-old man whom Patrick judged to be drunk and high. The man refused to leave when asked, so Patrick picked up a knife left on the porch from a stroller repair. Patrick claims he simply intended to scare the man, but they ended up fighting, and tragically, his sister’s date ended up dead.

Patrick was charged with first-degree murder. Had he been a white male in the suburbs, Kuo surmises, the charge might have been manslaughter due to mitigating factors such as the “castle doctrine,” giving people a right to defend their homes.

During Kuo’s hours with Patrick in jail, they read poetry and the works of Frederick Douglass, C.S. Lewis, Marilynne Robinson, W.S. Merwin and more. Patrick wrote heartbreakingly lyrical poems, as well as letters to the mother of his victim, his own family and the young daughter he had fathered. “He had come so far,” Kuo writes, “. . . and it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.”

Patrick agreed to a plea deal, which saddened Kuo, who notes that “so little investigation was done into what happened during that evening that traumatized so many.” While in prison, he went on to proudly earn his GED—with notably high scores in reading and writing—and was released on parole after two and a half years for good behavior.

After her months with Patrick, Kuo returned to her Oakland, California, fellowship, working as an immigrants’ rights lawyer and later as a law clerk. Patrick, meanwhile, worked various part-time jobs in Helena, including laying tombstones at cemeteries. More recently, he left for Texas in search of better opportunities. “I hope he’ll have a better shot at finding permanent work there,” Kuo says.

Kuo wishes she were a clone so that she could still be “pushing [Patrick], encouraging him, lecturing him and sometimes haranguing him.” She continues to cherish their friendship and treasure his letters.

“Every time I hear about somebody getting arrested,” Kuo adds, “or a felon getting out of jail, I think about how they were all once students in a classroom.”

(Author photo © Kathy Huang.)

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, “It all seemed very normal to me.”

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Westover, 31, describes her life’s improbable trajectory that led to her startling memoir, Educated. It was so unusual, in fact, that a bidding war erupted over the sale of her book, which is now being published in more than 20 countries and has inspired comparisons to Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club.

When her survivalist father recounted the story of the 11-day siege of Randy Weaver in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, its vivid details became young Westover’s strongest memory. It was as though the Feds had invaded her own house with deadly gunfire. Striving to become fully independent and off the grid, the Westovers stockpiled food, gasoline, guns and a bullet-making machine in preparation for the End of Days.

“I was kind of looking forward to it in a lot of ways,” she recalls. “We were totally prepared. It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty because we were going to have food and gasoline―all the things that people needed.”

The younger children in Westover’s family didn’t have birth certificates or exact birthdates. She wasn’t allowed to go to school, and there was little homeschooling. “By the time I was 10, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it,” she writes. Doctors and hospitals were forbidden as well; the family relied on her mother’s herbs and essential oils, even after car accidents, concussions and severe burns. An older brother taught Westover to read, using Little Bear Goes to the Moon as her primer. A few books lay around the house, but lessons and tests were nonexistent.

She grew up studying the Book of Mormon, the Bible and essays by 19th-century Mormon prophets. Westover emphasizes that her story is not about Mormonism. She believes that mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, led to her father’s extremism.

“There is a caricature of Mormonism that people have,” she explains. “I don’t want to contribute to that. These aren’t Mormon attributes. Mormons send their kids to school.”

Nor does Westover want her father to come across as a caricature. “Sure, his views are interesting,” she notes. “What’s also interesting is the fact that he sincerely believes them and that he is trying to look after his kids.”

Educated is the remarkable story of Westover’s education. She taught herself math so she could take the ACT, and at age 17 she first set foot in a classroom after enrolling in Brigham Young University. Fellow students laughed at her for having never heard of the Holocaust. Despite failing her first exam and fearing she would flunk out, she graduated in 2008 and later earned a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Despite the gaping holes in their early education, three of the seven Westover children ended up earning Ph.D.s. “We seriously overcompensated.”

In many ways, Westover says, she had a positive childhood. “I grew up on a beautiful mountain that was like an amazing cathedral. The scrap yard at times was kind of like an exotic playground. And those are real parts of my childhood.”

“It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty.”

However, a giant cloud overshadowed everything. Her father’s actions often endangered his children, and her childhood was complicated by years of physical and emotional abuse by an older brother. Her brother and parents deny this assertion, which has resulted in her estrangement from them and certain siblings.

Westover says leaving home and becoming educated “made me see my brother’s violence for what it was. . . . Suddenly, I could not accept it. And so once I started writing, I realized it’s really not possible for me to tell the story of my education in any kind of meaningful way without telling the family story.”

At first, the ongoing estrangement posed a problem in searching for an ending to her story. Westover admits, “In the end, I decided that maybe not having a neat ending would be what this book was about.” Perhaps, she adds, “people would see bits of their messy lives in my messy life.”

Her unique history presents hurdles when it comes to how she relates to her family in the present. “Most of the time I am no longer angry with them,” she says, “and the reason is that I am no longer afraid of them. I am no longer under their power.”

Anger did, however, color her outlook for years. “I became someone who had no beautiful memories,” she recalls. Writing helped her reconcile the contradictory truths of her past. “I could keep all of them because they’re mine, and no one can take from me the good, but also no one can obscure for me the bad.”

To prepare to write a book-length narrative, Westover read widely. And then, someone mentioned something called the short story. “I’d never heard of that before.” After listening to favorite episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast 40 to 50 times, she modeled each chapter like a short story. The strategy makes her memoir particularly readable and compelling. “For me it was the greatest curriculum,” she says.

Westover concludes, “You only get the life that you get. I’m glad that I was pushed in that way because now I know what I’m able to do. . . . But I wouldn’t go back and go through that again. Not for anything.”

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Paul Stuart.

In her memoir Old in Art School, Nell Painter surprises everyone by returning to college in her 60s to earn degrees in one of her passions: painting.

How did you make your decision to leave a chaired professorship at Princeton to go to art school?
My decision to retire from Princeton a little early came in several steps, beginning with my mother’s turn to book writing when she retired back in the 1980s. I was always close to my mother, close to both my parents, actually, feeling my family as a bulwark against a basically hostile—well, if not hostile, at least not trustworthy—society. It took her 10 years to write and publish her first book and 10 years for the second. She was just that disciplined over the long haul, with discipline and persistence her gifts to me. My mother showed me you could change vocations, even though the payoff might not come immediately. The point was to do what you wanted to do. Looking at her, I figured, hell, I could do that, too. It just so happened that what I left was a chaired professorship at Princeton.

My friends were amazed, even dazzled by the possibility of walking away. Looking back, I realize I didn’t see things this way at the time: It might have seemed to some of them that an Ivy League chaired professorship was life’s apogee, as though imagination stretched that far and no farther. But I didn’t identify myself that closely with my job. I heard their curiosity, as they wondered what it would be like to start something entirely new. They asked me to send back a report. Which I am now doing—in utter candor.

Your father taught you to draw, and your mother taught you the art of reinvention by starting over at age 65 and becoming an author. Your mother died during your art school years, leaving your father deeply saddened before his death. You write, "My early years as a painter . . . felt as much about family and loss as about art making." How has the loss of your parents affected your art?
The short answer is I don’t know how my parents’ deaths affected my art, as I didn’t make art about their dying. In fact, I reproached myself for not being able to draw my mother as she lay dying, even though her dying made a riveting visual spectacle. I simply could not take what felt like a step away from her to turn her into art. Art-making did not come automatically to me then.

But as I ponder your question, I think the answer, maybe even the answers, lie first in my chapter “A Bad Decision” and in my inability to dedicate myself single-mindedly, whole-heartedly, full-timedly to making art. My decision to go to graduate school before completing four years of undergraduate art study was not the right thing to do. I should have stayed at Mason Gross for another year. But I felt time pressing down on me urgently as something in short supply. Only as I was writing my memoir did I relate that feeling of time’s limitation to my mother’s impending death and my attachment to her. My time felt like her time.

Throughout the whole of my five years of art school, my parents stayed on my mind. They were hardly ever off my mind or out of my worries. There were daily phone calls and frequent transcontinental trips. Sometimes I could combine art with parental care, as in “Bedside Collages.” But art-time always felt distracted, though graduate school normally offers undistracted time to work flat out and full time, to experiment in depth and find the way to make art your very own way. I felt that sometimes and cherished the sensation. But often as not, my attention was divided. I still miss the opportunity to make art intensely over a relatively long period of time. What a gift that would be!

As for my parents, rather than the import of their loss, I appreciate the gifts they gave me during their lives. They assured me I was a wonderful person who could do whatever I wanted, the basis for the ego strength to take chances. They were hardly wealthy people, but, something of supreme importance, they made sure I never had to make decisions based on fear of running out of money. People don’t talk about that very much, but financial stability is crucially important when you’re making decisions about what you can or can’t do, especially regarding something as expensive and unlikely to pay off as art school. If you’re African-American, freedom from money worries is even less to be taken for granted.

Bette Davis once said that old age is no place for sissies. And neither is art school, it seems, especially when your age made you feel like “a creature from another planet.” Of course, things weren’t helped when your teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) declared that you would never be an artist. Did you ever feel you had made a mistake leaving such a successful career to go to art school?
Oh, boy, did I ever question my sanity for leaving the life I knew how to live for one I felt lost in! The hard part about art for me—one of the hard parts—was my sense of not knowing what was good and not good. Not knowing why my art was not good. One great thing about scholarship is the existence of established criteria of judgment. People don’t always respect those criteria, and there’s plenty of room for old-boy networks and the workings of privilege. Still, the rules of the game are pretty apparent. Not so with art.

I still sometimes feel like the worst painter in the world, but I don’t care anymore. There are awful painters who have their followings; there are more excellent painters in the world than can receive their due.

I love your response to that teacher: “Henry, that’s bullshit.” Although at first you enjoyed a sense of contentment and euphoria at RISD, you ultimately concluded, “this was not my place, and these were not my people.” Looking back, would you do things differently?
As for “not my place, not my people,” the fundamental problems were my age and myself, neither of which I could change. The thing I would do differently would be staying another year at Mason Gross. But that would have just made me a year older, and I’d still be myself: black, academic, female. A fundamental matter was black-in-America. Yes, yes, yes, I know nonblack people often find it difficult to feel at home or find their own people. Missing home may be a basic American or basic human condition. But on top of basic American, you have to add being black in America. Even if you don’t run into discrimination, there are the everyday interactions with nonblack Americans that are exhausting, that remind you that you seem not to belong. This is not anything I can change. And that’s not to add in the matter of working across generations.

Your professors were astounded by the progress you made during the summer between your first and second year of grad school. Did you surprise yourself as well?
During that summer, my growth pleased me enormously. I suppose I took for granted that the work I was enjoying would be good work. But I can’t say I was surprised. My progress didn’t surprise me, but I was amazed by my teachers’ surprise at the beginning of the second fall semester. I have never gotten over how little some people can expect of me.

You note that “the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it.” Are things improving?
Everybody always wants to think things are “improving,” so I’ll say they are: Yes. Things are improving. The work of women artists, old women artists, black artists, black women artists, old black women artists is being seen as never before. But basically, as my more experienced art mentors told me, the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it. The Art World is part of the U.S., which, if you read the papers you know, is still racist as hell. The improvement is that some Americans are starting to see that and to take steps to address longstanding discriminatory practices. There’s still a long way to go before I will say there’s been fundamental improvement.

When it came time to write your thesis, your first draft was full of anger about injustices in the art world. You, an award-winning historian and author, ended up going to the RISD writing center for help purging that anger. How did that go? Was the person helping you intimidated?
As you can see from my answer to the previous question, my “anger” hasn’t been purged. But I had the sense to see my shortcoming as the author of an MFA thesis and to get the instruction I needed. I don’t think Teacher Jen in the writing center was intimidated. She had seen my problem before and told me of other instances in which MFA students had had to find means of tamping down indignation and to focus on the visual aspects of their work within the context of art.

You’ve written numerous books, but none so personal as Old in Art School. How tough was that?
Writing personally was hard as hell and took several years. I had to dig out experiences and sensations that lay under my consciousness’s surface, and I had to see other people around me, fellow students especially, but also teachers, in situations where I was intensely self-centered. As I wrote through my sufferings, I came to see that maybe they weren’t as awful as I had made them out to be. I still say that earning a Ph.D. in history at Harvard was a piece of cake compared to earning an MFA at RISD. But now I’m wondering if the comparison is shaped by the decades separating the two experiences. Maybe in 33 years, RISD will seem like a piece of cake compared to—what, assisted living?

Near the end of your book you write, “Like artists the world over, my bayoneted, hand-to-hand struggle between insecurity and self-confidence never ends.” Did you have to endure such a constant battle with insecurity as a historian? Are you keeping your artistic struggle in check?
I never had to wage such an anti-insecurity battle as a historian because I loved research and writing, and I knew what I needed to do to succeed. I did it. I hit all the marks (publication, promotion, tenure, fellowships) and received sufficient honors.

I love making art—the process, I mean. And I have enough of a sense of what is my own art to feel good about that. At the same time, I know I’m the world’s uncoolest artist, and I’m OK with that. If what I make is not good enough, that’s its nature. That’s what I make and who I am: the world’s uncoolest artist.

You’ve incorporated both history and text (including pages from your own books) into your artwork, bringing your career into a glorious, unified circle. Would you say that you've found your voice? How would you summarize your artistic style and goals?
Thanks for “a glorious, unified circle,” which sounds really good! I hadn’t thought of my work in so assured a way. I saw more a long work-in-progress, a documentation of how one person’s work changes and grows over time as she starts over. I wanted to show some dumb early stuff and some pieces growing out of one another as closer and farther relations. I do feel I’ve found my manual + digital process, which you may call a “voice” or “style,” often related to history and sometimes embracing text. That sense of finding myself visually occurred with “Art History by Nell Painter,” which is why I pretty much end there. I don’t know that I have a “goal,” because I don’t feel myself going anywhere with an end or objective other than making art. Making the art that gratifies and interests me. Freedom attracted me to art making. Still does.

What are you working on now?
I just made four digital collages for the Three Hole Press publication of Daaimah Mubashshir’s plays, The Immeasurable Want of Light. Otherwise, tasks related to the publication and promotion of Old in Art School have taken up virtually all my time this year and precluded immersion on art. I have started something I call “Book Book” that will embody the experience of talking about my memoir over this year. It begins with two photos of me reading my Blackstone audiobook in a tiny studio on 9th Avenue in New York City last month.

I think about two or three artists’ books that will take time to envision and to make, as I have only fragments in mind right now. I will need to carve out time to work on them concentratedly.

How do you feel when you’re in that artistic “zone”?
I feel like I will never stop. Every image demands elaboration—into another shape or another color or another piece. This concentration, this play, makes me feel contented, even when I see I need more time to get to another place or a different image. When I have to stop, I’m usually among images I couldn’t have imagined when I started.

What advice do you have for other “old” people who might be contemplating reinventing themselves?
Advice?! As I say at the end of Old in Art School, people don’t usually want advice; they want to be listened to. So I’d say find someone who will listen to you and who knows something about what you’re thinking about doing. I’d say try it out for a little while. Take a class at your local community college. But my biggest, most important piece of advice, especially for old black women, for black women, for old women, for all women, for black people, for people young and old, for nonblack people is: Don’t see yourself through other people’s eyes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Old in Art School.

A portion of this article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by John Emerson.