PEN/Faulkner Award winner and critically acclaimed author Benjamin Alire Saenz visited our island as part of the Nantucket Book Foundation's work with our Nantucket students and our community. The continuing work--and mission--of the Foundation under which the Nantucket Book Festival falls, is to enlarge our world through the power of words, Work that is made possible with the support of generous grants from the Community Foundation for Nantucket and the Nantucket Golf Club. In a new partnership with the Dreamland, Tuesday night brought a conversation with Ben and Nantucket's own, Rob Cocuzzo, editor of N Magazine and author of Tracking the Wild Coomba.
Looking out at the audience at the Dreamland, Ben said, "I believe in the power of words. Your words have the power to break someone's heart. But your words also have the power to heal someone's heart." A message that was continued the next morning in the visits to three 9th grade English classes.
Hewing to the PEN/Faulkner Writers In Schools program, every student in the class had been given the gift of the book being studied, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. A curriculum guide had been created and given to High School English teacher, Elizabeth Reinemo, to serve as a guide in teaching the book. The book was read, studied, discussed, then followed by the visit to the classroom by the author.
As Liz Reinemo reflected, "Aristotle and Dante allowed students to look inside themselves and engage in honest discussions about identity, and what it means to be a teenager. Using this book as a vehicle to have these conversations inside the classroom was an amazing opportunity. Students rose to the challenge and explored topics that were real to them. Having to meet the author who created two influential characters in their lives was such a fantastic reward."
Ms. Reinemo and her classes took Aristotle and Dante into their own universe, creating the most extraordinary projects that made real the world created in the book.
Great writing and great books take us on a journey to places known and unknown. Lines and lives blur; there are no boundaries within the pages of a book. Within that world, we are not alone. No one has chartered the human heart, with its shared humanity more than Benjamin Alire Saenz. His writing distills larger themes of belonging and displacement and identity and pulls them into our understanding of the commonality of what it is to be human. What it is to love.
In response to one student's question as to what advice he might give them, he answered: "Learn to forgive yourself. Learn to forgive others. Own your mistakes. Don't live in them. It makes you human. Say you're sorry and mean it. Learn to have fun. Learn to breathe. Teach yourself to love and to be kind." And pausing, he left the students with this last thought: "The world needs to be changed and you can change it. It is up to you to change the world. Step up to the plate."
- by Mary Haft, Nantucket Book Foundation co-founder
from an article originally published in Mahon About Town