I’m very excited to report that I am going to revive my Writing Workshop at Bishop Maginn High school and help my students publish a book about their shattering experience of having their lives shockingly and frighteningly interrupted and upended by the coronavirus.

One week they were in their safe and beloved school, the next they were in isolation at home, cut off from their classes and activities.

Sue Silverstein called me today and asked if I would consider starting up the class again on the school’s remote Google Classroom to help my writing class tell their stories of losing their school, their friends, their graduation, their prom, possibly their expectations for college in the Fall.

Seven students have been approached about joining the class: Katie, Grace, Mike, Thang, Gabe, Melak, Isabella. All have accepted.

There are lots of stories about what is happening to the many students sidelined into isolation and confusion in America, but hardly any from the student’s point of view. I’ve talked to several of them and it is a painful and disorienting experience.

They so miss their teachers and classmates, the school was such an important structure and center for their already disrupted lives.

We want to get their stories in their own voices. I want to push them gently but firmly to look inward and be authentic.

“This has just been a nightmare for us,” one of my students told me earlier, “it feels like we just lost everything that mattered except our families. And they are hurting too.” She acknowledged that without the structure of the school, her life just feels like an old well she has fallen into.

I’m going to ask her to write that. Another also lost the two jobs she was working to help her parents, and her mother and father lost their jobs as well. The family is in trouble.

Sue and I have talked about her sense that her students are suffering a great deal, and there is not enough thought given to their plight.

I said I would be honored and delighted to teach this class. These children sit helplessly, isolated in their homes while faraway politicians decide what is going to happen to their lives without ever talking to them.

I’ve felt helpless also, my therapy work at the school is not possible and I can’t get to meet and talk with these students I have come to admire and love. I realize that Zinnia and I are missed.

Many of the refugees have already been traumatized and dislocated enough in their lives, but this Spring, they lost almost everything that is familiar to them. They have never been more alone or uncertain about where they are going. The native-born students at Bishop Maginn are in the same boat.

They depended on their teachers to help guide them through the complex eco-system that is life in America. They miss them.

I’m going to meet with them regularly online and each one of the students will tell their story from the other side. I will be registered as a teacher there and will have the capacity for video one-on-ones and also to exchange e-mails and edits.

I can also, of course, talk on the phone.

Sue and I talked about the class today. The idea, she said, is for the online writing workshop to continue. The idea is to give them a place and a way to tell their story, entirely from their point of view. To write about what it is to have a life so shockingly and suddenly interrupted, a place to talk and raise their voices.

I want to make sure their voices are preserved.

She said they are desperate to talk about what has happened to them.  I am almost desperate to find a way to help them. She sounded out the kids, about the book idea,  and they loved it. So do I. This is a way for me to love my writing and the good it can do, and stay connected to my work with the refugee children.

I’ll edit and collect the stories and we will self-publish their book on Amazon.

So much of their lives are unknown and on hold. They aren’t sure if they will ever see their friends or school or teachers again, or be together with their class again, and many colleges are warning that they may not be prepared to open up this fall.

They’ve lost their work on sports, and competitive brain competitions with other schools so many of them loved.

Many of the students were deep in the new curriculum starting up at the school again: the choir, cheerleading, the computer lab, the new science program. Hopefully, all of these programs will start up again by the Fall, but this year’s class has been thrown out into the whirlwind, cut off from their world.

They almost certainly won’t get to graduate or have their prom.

Some of the recent graduates are stranded in their apartments without classes to go to, no jobs and no money. Sue Silverstein has been distributing some of the gift cards we have been receiving and distributing them to the graduates. Some are going hungry, they can’t pay their rent.

“These kids are really struggling with their interrupted lives,” Sue told me. “It was an awesome thing, and we are not really there to help them get through it. They need to talk, to tell their stories.”

I know these students well from my writing class, and we also help train Zinnia together. I am very comfortable working with them and helping them to pull their stories together and shape them into a book we can publish ourselves.

So it’s a big step for me, and a wonderful way to stay connected with these wonderful people and continuing my work with the refugees these past four years.

We can’t be together in a classroom now, possibly for months, possibly for longer. But we can still good good by one another.