Buy All Of Our Lives

Sarah Shapiro just edited a wonderful book called All Of Our Lives. As usual, her own writing provides a highlight (despite the reality that she generously shares the limelight, and most of the book is the writing of others). In a wonderful piece about a tree pruned during Shmitah in her neighborhood she cites Emily Dickinson and how she has helped her in her daily life.

She writes in her introduction about the word I and how in school she was discouraged from using it in writing. She gets it and yet feels that much is lost when we write we take out our I. This reminded me of an exchange I had with the great Professor Elizabeth Couch. She wanted our papers to be first person. I hadn’t realized that. I wrote in the sanitized way that was encouraged by other teachers. She critiqued that I wrote the way I did, that I’d taken out my I. I went to her to plead my case explaining that other Social Work professionals said that we should write in an objective rather than personal way. She replied, “I know and it’s killing our profession.”