Mrs. Rasmussen was my seventh-grade English teacher at Evergreen Elementary in Plainfield, New Jersey, who taught me some essentials of writing. When she stood in front of our class, she had a way about her. You wanted to hear what she had to say. She had short, blond hair and wore white, button-down shirts and pretty, colorfully patterned skirts. She was a graduate of Cornell University, which seemed like a special place of learning to me because at that time my brother was planning on soon attending Cornell.
Mrs. Rasmussen had us write one theme each week. How many teachers do that now? Back then no other teacher did that. For that reason just being in her class felt special to me. We were being asked to do something very special. Without thinking about it, I inculcated the first and most essential writing lesson: If you want to write, write often. Write every day, if possible.
She had us fold our theme papers in half along the vertical axis so that when we handed them in they appeared tall and skinny with our name, class period and Mrs. Rasmussen's name in the upper-right hand corner. This folding thing was obviously superficial, but I remember at the time believing it was important. Also special. Did she say that this was the way students folded their papers at Cornell University? I have a vague recollection of that. Perhaps I made it up. To this day I don't know for sure.
I became very caught up with how foreign yet special the weekly writing and the folding were, and somehow that led me to daydreaming that Mrs. Rasmussen's seventh-grade English class was in fact an undercover university class that only we were being allowed to take. There's a lesson there: Always go into a writing session, if possible, feeling that what you're about to write is special. Very special. This is called "setting your intention." Doing so improves the likelihood that what you'll wind up with will also be special. One can certainly hope for that outcome. After all, it's good to hope. In a way, Mrs. Rasmussen taught me that it's good to hope. I'll always be grateful to her for that.
One day Mrs. Rasmussen taught us how to write a description. She had us make a list of four or five things, bullet points that we wanted to include in the description. Then she wrote out in her beautiful handwriting on the blackboard (it was a blackboard in those days) the description based on the bullet points. She taught me this programmatic approach to creativity: First come up with the bullet points. Then turn them into nicely crafted sentences. That was the technique I used when composing the description of Mrs. Rasmussen in the first paragraph. Today as I remember Mrs. Rasmussen I also remember the beginnings of my desire to be a writer. All I knew for sure at the time was that when I was writing for Mrs. Rasmussen it felt as special as the way I folded my papers. No wonder my memory of her is so special to me.
