A sixth-grader wearing a yellow floral dress waved me down, then sidled up to my car window in Albany, Texas. I was pulling out of her school parking lot for the last time.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “I always knew there had to be another poemist out there somewhere.”
In 1974, my fiction writing professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Robert Flynn, had casually mentioned a fledgling program being sponsored by the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA). Called Artists in Education or Artists in the Schools, this program sent practicing artists in various disciplines into classrooms around the state (and many other states, such as New York, California, and Hawai’i) for short residencies, to encourage kids of all ages. I was about to graduate and had few plans for the future aside from paying back my college loan and writing.
Like a true professional, I traveled to Austin for my interview without a CV or single sample of my poetry. My dad drove me. I had lots of enthusiasm, though, and got the job on the spot. Into the schools of Texas!
Did I have any experience? Working for
