Speaking Through the Veil

by Deborah Wiles

January 2001. I flew to Burlington in the snowy dark and rode the Vermont College bus from the airport to Montpelier. Norma sat two seats ahead of me, chatting with some students. The passing streetlamps highlighted her braids, her wool hat, and a smile that crinkled her face and showcased her teeth.

She was tired, she said, and she’d left her nightgown in New York. She would ask Harry to send it to her—expedited mail!—first thing in the morning. Students (adults ranging in age from their late twenties to their sixties) laughed with delight and surrounded Norma with their… what? Need? Desire to be near her?  They were groupies, and Norma was Vermont’s rock star.  As an observer on the bus that night, I could tell she was also, as she had said, very tired. And yet she was giving those students everything she had.

She was always like that.

I could not imagine being so familiar with the author of When She Was Good, a book whose first sentence grabbed me in 1997 and wouldn’t let me go: “I didn’t believe Pamela would ever die.” The book left me breathless. I wanted to write like that. 

Norma Mazer was known as the structure queen in Vermont, a stern taskmaster, and an exacting teacher. Her reputation intimidated me and I barely spoke to her that first semester. Then, in asking her to be my second-semester advisor, I stumbled all over Montpelier trying to tell her about my work in progress. She gave me a cool, uninterested look and said, “That’s not the kind of book I like working on. I don’t think I’d be much use to you.” I was stung. She was honest.

The next semester I was either foolish or incredibly brave. I asked again. “I know it will be hard,” I said. “Hard for both of us,” she said. “I really want to learn whatever you can teach me,” I said. She smiled with her eyes. “That may not be much,” she said, and I knew… she’d heard about me and my stubborn nature. She saw right through me. 

Thus began a collaboration that was fierce, personal, professional, funny, and sometimes overwhelming. Once, sitting in the back of the dining hall long after lunch was over, tears in our eyes, we allowed as to how we had stumbled into great holes in our lives that we were trying, in some weird-but-okay way, to fill with one another. As the year rolled on and I portioned out my personal story, she countered with assurances that not even my mother had showered me with.  In watching her publicly grieve the loss of her daughter Sue, she taught me how to grieve the deaths of my marriage and my parents and begin to heal.

She pulled me through my last two semesters in Vermont with letter after loving letter that mercilessly pointed out all the holes in my plot and all the blessings in my life. “I have no doubt,” she wrote me, “that you have the capacity for a career that is extraordinary, if you would just get out of your own way.” When I got sick a week before graduation, she sat in the front row at Noble, taking notes, nodding vigorously, and hoisting a bag of Ricola cough drops as a question, while I croaked out my graduate lecture.

When I returned to Vermont a year later to speak, and two years later to join the faculty and teach, she and Harry opened their home and took me in. When I brought my daughter to New York for a weekend, Norma and Harry had us to dinner at their place in the Village. This they did for countless students who became friends. Norma understood that life was about relationships. And the work… always the work.

I wrote her about my challenges—and delights—with the new novel. In May she wrote me back: “You always did have more material than could be shoehorned into a book. Let’s talk story.” The novel I will publish next year with Scholastic has Norma Mazer’s teaching woven through its heart. This is how I know she lives on.    

She lives in the work of her many students, in the stories we tell about her, and in the books she left us. I hear her voice now, speaking to us collectively across the miles and through the veil:  You have the capacity for extraordinary work. Get out of your own way. Get back to the page.