Recently, in a workshop I was leading in the southern United States, an affiliated workshop leader asked me to tell her how AWA began.  We had time, good glasses of iced tea, and I began with the earliest stories.  When I finished, she said, "Thank you, Pat.  We have a right to know, because we are so committed to the AWA method."  I have thought about the truth of that, and about having such a story-telling history among our archives, housed in the Jones Library, Amherst. Part One of the history appeared in the September 2009 newsletter. What follows is Part Two.

PART TWO: HISTORY OF AWA:  1940's - 1950's

Amherst Writers & Artists has, throughout its history, held two things in balance: the writer as an artist, and the use of writing as a methodology to empower the under-served. That balance is our unique genius.  And it has its deepest roots in the life of its founder.  With apology, then, I continue the story of my own origins.

My mother put me into an orphanage in 1945 when I was eleven years old.  At the time she said the reason was, "You will learn good table manners." As an adult I spent some years being angry when I remembered that - until I had lived long enough to understand that what she meant was, "You will learn how to cross class, from poverty to privilege."  She was right.  It was an essential education.  I learned not only what it was like to eat at a table set with a knife, fork and spoon, but what it was like to have my own clean bed, my own dresser, in a room with several other little girls.  She gave me a little five-year diary to take with me. I wrote my secrets there, some of them in code that I still remember when I read them.

I was thirteen, in the seventh grade, when I came out of the orphanage; that was the year of major trauma, because I could see how we lived.  Dorothy Dunn, my seventh-grade teacher, did the unthinkable when she walked the hot summer sidewalks and up the dirty stairs of our tenement and knocked on my door.  I couldn't open it; I was too ashamed.  I stood in the crack of the slight opening as she handed me a book.  "This is my book," she said.  "I want you to have it."  She typed a long story that I wrote and had it read aloud on a St. Louis radio station, KFUO, two years later when I was in high school.  "You can be a writer," she had told me in seventh grade, and she worked with me after I left her classroom to make it come true.

In 1950, thirty-one years before the formal establishment of Amherst Writers & Artists, I was fifteen years old.  In one sense, AWA began on a furiously hot night that year in St. Louis, in the third floor window of a tenement.  Let me set the scene.  Our "apartment" was two rooms.  That year, my grandmother, who was declining toward her death, and my brother, who most of the time was in foster homes, were both living with my mother and me.  There were four of us in two rooms, and there was no closet.  All of my grandmother Emma's belongings were in one dresser drawer.  My mother worked twelve-hour night-shifts seven nights a week and tried to sleep in one of our two rooms in the daytime. She made $1.00 per hour. A loaf of bread was 10 cents.  I remember searching through all the clothes piled behind the bed, littered on furniture, and on the floor mixed with all the other junk - for a dime.  I remember kneeling, praying.  Surely Jesus knew where there was a dime.  St. Louis lies in the crotch of two great rivers: the Mississippi and the Missouri.  In August, the city steams.  Our rooms had no screens on the windows, and our mother didn't know how to keep a space clean.  Maggots bred in dirty dishes when Grandma wasn't there.  When she was there, she was silent in the overwhelm, but she tried to keep some order.

Three of us slept in the one bed - Grandma and I at night; Mama in the daytime. One night I sat in the dark on the small army cot in the room that served as kitchen and Sam's bedroom, and looked out the window.  Three stories down the Olive Street streetcars, and the Delmar streetcars rattled by every few minutes.  The lights inside the streetcars made the people inside clearly visible.  Across town, the golden dome of the St. Louis cathedral was lighted - over there, people had nice homes, yards, trees.  The dome seemed a beacon.  I was in my second year of high school.  Miss Warner, my English teacher, told us that T.S. Eliot was the greatest poet.  "In the rooms the women move to and fro/ Talking of Michelangelo . . ."  I wanted to be T.S. Eliot.

I looked into the windows of a streetcar, and thought I saw women in fur coats going downtown to the opera.  I wanted to go to the opera.  I hated those women because I knew that looking out the streetcar windows, all they could see was their own reflections.  They could not see a girl on third floor behind a tenement window.  I swore a vow to the golden dome, to God, to myself: I will get out of here, and I will not forget.  That vow came back to haunt me in my adult life, and powered the necessity of going back across the tracks into the places where poverty breeds and destroys without most people who wear fur coats and go to the opera ever having to look at it up close and in the flesh. That vow was the first stone laid in the foundation of Amherst Writers & Artists.

What I did not know, of course, was that women wearing fur coats and going to the opera did not take the Olive Street or Delmar streetcars downtown.  They rode in cars over on Lindell Boulevard.  Another thing that I did not know was that it cost money to got to college.  My mother gave me gifts that made escape possible: in spite of her own despair, overwhelm, and incapacities, she pounded into me this truth: The only way to get out of here is to get an education.  She recited poetry to me that she had learned by heart as a girl.  She took me downtown to the St. Louis library, and to Forest Park to performances of light opera.  

But it was Gerald Harris, the minister of a small Methodist church a few blocks from where I lived who decided that the church should give me a scholarship to college.  I was attending by myself every Sunday; I was teaching Sunday School.  I had no idea that my world was about to crash.  I thought college was like high school - anyone could go, free.  He convinced the church, which was preparing to lift its middle-class skirts and move to more comfortable surroundings out in the suburbs, to allocate money that a woman had given in her will to a scholarship for me rather than to the building fund.  That man (or his wife, Lois, who may have had the idea,) saved my sanity, if not my life.

And again, a stone was laid in the foundation of Amherst Writers & Artists.  The first stone was, You can be a writer.  The second stone was, one person reached out across the tracks to one person.

Next Newsletter:  Part III: AWA's Origins: 1960's - 1970's.

Amherst Writers and Artists completed the second of two fall trainings in 2009 in Alamo, California with trainers Chris DeLorenzo and Jan Haag.


Training Schedule 2010

April 16 - 20  Amherst, Massachusetts  Pat Schneider's home;
non-residential: meals only.  Cost: $1,300

May 19 - 23  Greensboro, North Carolina  The Sanctuary;
non-residential: meals only.  Cost: $1,300

June 2 - 6  Corvallis, Oregon  The Frank home;
non-residential: meals only.  Cost $1,300

July 7 - 11  Alamo, California  Westminster Retreat;
all accommodations included.  Cost: $1,800

November 5- 7  Post-Certificate Retreat  Amherst, Massachusetts
Pat Schneider's home; non-residential: meals only.  Cost: $700

A Gift of Love