{"id":1432,"date":"2011-09-10T13:38:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-10T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=1432"},"modified":"2025-02-27T10:52:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T18:52:32","slug":"claire-beams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/claire-beams\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 68: Clare Beams"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About Clare Beams<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Clare Beams and her husband live in Massachusetts, where she writes and teaches 9th-grade English. She received her MFA from Columbia in 2006. Her story \u201cWe Show What We Have Learned,\u201d originally published in Hayden\u2019s Ferry Review, will appear in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Her story \u201cMuch Peace,\u201d published in Inkwell, received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize 2011 volume. She has a story forthcoming in One Story and has just finished, she thinks, a novel called The Meditations of All Our Hearts. She\u2019s at work on more stories.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on \u201cHourglass\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I think \u201cHourglass\u201d began out of my fascination with a certain kind of lofty language that gets used sometimes in discussions about teaching. For the past five years I\u2019ve been a ninth-grade English teacher at a small private high school, a wonderful place. I love the work, and I\u2019m surrounded by colleagues who do, too. When people who love teaching talk about it, there\u2019s a tone that can color things, a grandness that strikes me as unusual (as grandness goes) because it\u2019s genuine. I think that for the most part we talk about teaching in lofty terms because we can\u2019t help it. The kids really do make it hard to use any others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In writing this story, I was interested in taking that kind of language in a darker direction. What if the idea of shaping others, which is at the heart of my understanding of a teacher\u2019s job, were more literal and sinister? What kind of tyrant could have that kind of vision, and what kind of student might be tempted by it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, all of this makes the whole process sound much more conscious and calculated than it was. All I really had to go on when I started writing was an image of this old streaked-stone school and the sound of Mr. Pax\u2019s voice. These elements combined to make the story feel somehow outside time in a way that was exciting to me. When I realized how Melody was going to have to transform, everything became much harder for a while\u2014I knew pretty much where I wanted things to go, but not how to take them there convincingly\u2014and the story and I are both indebted to Sam Ligon for his incredible insight and patience along the way. He helped \u201cHourglass\u201d to become a much better version of itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes on Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As a reader, I have an enthusiasm for old British things that I think has left its mark on \u201cHourglass.\u201d I love Keats and Tennyson and the thick, sprawling novels that have always reminded me of big houses with dark corners\u2014Our Mutual Friend and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations and Middlemarch. There\u2019s a kind of scope there, a feeling of entering a whole world, that I\u2019ve found and loved in some more modern books, too. Chris Adrian\u2019s The Children\u2019s Hospital blew me away, as did Geoffrey Eugenides\u2019 Middlesex and A.S. Byatt\u2019s The Children\u2019s Book, and I just finished reading Julie Orringer\u2019s wonderful The Invisible Bridge. Last summer I had a great time with Sarah Waters\u2019 The Little Stranger, a fabulously creepy and atmospheric ghost story. All of those books\u2014though in very different ways\u2014demand that a reader slow down and make space for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently I\u2019ve been reading short story collections, something I tend to do when I\u2019m revising stories of my own, as if I\u2019m going to find some magic key that will make the whole process easier. That never happens, but I have found some wonderful books: recent highlights are Robin Black\u2019s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Anthony Doerr\u2019s The Shell Collector, Kelly Link\u2019s Stranger Things Happen, and Kevin Wilson\u2019s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there are my longstanding loves, writers who fill me with feelings of inadequacy and admiration and most of all gratitude. I will never be able to read enough Alice Munro, who packs her worlds into small spaces in a way that amazes me. For pyrotechnic sentences, Nabokov and Woolf. And for the sheer beauty and density of what can be done with words, no one has anything on Shakespeare. Hamlet and King Lear are probably the most staggering to me, but
I teach Romeo and Juliet to my 9th-graders, and every year I find something new in it.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n

Hourglass by Clare Beams<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

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