“Red Rose Motel” Reads Like a Love Letter to Teachers https://ift.tt/IMagfHT
Susan Beckham Zurenda taught literature for over thirty years before writing her own book, the debut novel, Bells for Eli. Now, in her second novel, The Girl from the Red Rose Motel, she tackles forbidden love across class and race in a small Southern town, as well as the realities and dynamics of the teaching profession in an age when teachers are overworked and vilified by many parents. Lauded by Southern authors like Ron Rash, Patti Callahan Henry and Karen White, this new book pits high school English teacher, Angela Wilmore, against the town’s loudmouth preacher; a wealthy Sterling Lovell against his parents; and the hardworking, yet homeless, Hazel Smalls against the perils of poverty.
Zurenda’s fiction has won numerous regional awards, including, the South Carolina Fiction Prize, and Bells for Eli received honors from SIBA (Southern Independent Book Awards), IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), Shelf Unbound and the American Book Fest. Her first book came out just as the pandemic hit, so she’s determined to book as many events as possible for this second book. Despite her busy schedule, she took some time to chat with me over email about The Girl from the Red Rose Motel, her teaching career and her writing process.
The Girl from the Red Rose Motelis told from the perspective of a high school English teacher, Angela Wilmore, and two of her students, Hazel Smalls and Sterling Lovell. How did you settle on these three voices as the best way to tell this story? And more specifically, what does each voice add to the larger story you’re trying to tell?
In the last ten years of my teaching career, after being on the English faculty at my local community college in Spartanburg, SC, for 20 years, I accepted a position at Spartanburg High School where I taught four classes of the highest achieving students and one class of students reading far below grade level who needed to pass the SC Exit Exam to graduate. The wide disparity among my students and my desire to succeed in teaching both extremes was the inspiration for creating Sterling Lovell and Hazel Smalls, characters from opposite socioeconomic backgrounds who meet when they are sent to in-school suspension and form an unlikely relationship. I developed the voice of their English teacher and gave her a story arc to emphasize the caring influence of teachers who are human, too. I hope the voices of these very different characters highlight both how people from different backgrounds have much to learn about and from one another, and also show us the power of kindness and connection in the human condition.
Which character’s story came to you first and how did the other storylines fall into place?
Sterling’s character came to me first. He is an amalgam of eight brilliant but miscreant male students I taught one year at Spartanburg High School. These high school seniors were out to prove they were smarter than their teachers. They had banded together at some point in their middle grades and had terrorized their classrooms ever since. Even two of them in the same class could wreak havoc from time to time. Sterling’s first chapter in the novel is inspired by a real-life incident the boys created that made me stop teaching class that afternoon. Their punishment in real life and in the novel is a day of in-school suspension. I wanted Sterling to become aware that the world was not centered around him, so I created Hazel, a disadvantaged girl he meets in ISS who captures his heart. I didn’t know initially that she would become the protagonist of the novel. As I became more attached to and interested in Hazel, I decided she needed a mentor who could help guide her through her abysmal home life at the Red Rose Motel. Thus, Hazel’s English teacher Angela Wilmore emerged and as Angela’s character took shape, she called out for a story arc of her own.
Angela Wilmore is a caring, firm and dedicated teacher committed to broadening her students’ minds and hearts with the stories they read along with teaching the AP curriculum she’s required to cover. In many ways, this book reads like a love letter to teachers at a time when the profession is bombarded with a lack of support from administration, increasingly unrealistic expectations, the pressure of high stakes testing, harassment from parents and low pay, among other challenges. Can you talk a little about the teachers and your own experiences in the classroom that may have inspired some of the events in the novel?
Whenever I meet a young person who has entered the public school teaching profession, I am grateful but unsettled, too, because I know the challenges teachers face. My character Angela Wilmore is a dedicated teacher who is fortunate to teach in a high school that treats her professionally. The same was true for me. Even so, every day of the years I taught in public high school after a twenty-year career at my local community college was full of unexpected situations too numerous to mention and exhausting obligations. For example, each year I taught an average of 75 AP students who wrote approximately 13-15 essays during the school year, each essay requiring 15-20 minutes of my time. If my math is anywhere near correct (remember I was an English, not math, teacher), annually I graded essays for 270 hours or so at home with no financial compensation. I did it because this is what English teachers do in order for their students to succeed in writing. Still, I was fortunate to work for a supportive administration. This is not the case for many teachers, my own daughter included. She taught for seven years in middle school before she burned out, unable to deal with the lack of discipline, enormous classes, and red tape. Many public school teachers today must manage a too-large classroom load, government micromanaging, lack of administrative support, testing pressure, and salaries that don’t pay enough to afford even a respectable two-bedroom apartment. In spite of the difficulties, my own truth is I loved teaching because of my students and my love for literature and language, though I don’t know if I could do it again.
In your book, Angela Wilmore is challenged by a father who is offended by a Margaret Atwood story she assigns to his daughter’s class. Margaret Atwood is now banned in numerous Florida school districts. Currently, amid stringent rules for teachers and librarians in Florida, teaching the wrong books in class can be punishable by up to five years in prison. Were the events in the book surrounding this particular issue from personal experience, inspired by recent events, or a little of both?
There are two specific situations in The Girl from the Red Rose Motel based on my life as a high school English teacher. One that I already mentioned is the group of eight male students who tried to usurp my and other teachers’ authority. The second is a horrific meeting I endured (along with my principal and the head of the English Department) with a set of parents determined to “oversee” the material I taught in AP English for the “protection” of their daughter. No one had ever challenged my curriculum as these parents did. I was blindsided by their narrow-mindedness and their condescension. Fortunately, the school administration had my back, and I went forward teaching my curriculum as I always had. But the confrontation has stayed with me all these years, I think because this couple challenged my competence. Unfortunately, since I began writing The Girl from the Red Rose Motel, outsiders’ desire to censor books in classrooms and libraries has only intensified, to the point, as you mention, teachers and librarians can face legal consequences. I hope my novel brings awareness to the truth that teachers are educated in their disciplines and have the expertise to choose the material that best suits their students to make them mindful of the breadth of the human condition.
The two romantic relationships in this novel are in some ways forbidden by class constraints and workplace politics. Your epigraph, too, from Romeo and Juliet, calls attention to the theme of forbidden love. Your first novel, Bells for Eli, also involves a taboo love story. What is it about these relationship dynamics that so ignites your imagination?
Wow, until you asked this question, I hadn’t realized the connection of the “forbidden” love theme in both my novels. What would a psychologist say about me? I don’t think I want to know. On a conscious level, at least, I believe I have created these unusual love stories because at heart I’m a romantic who believes in the power of love to supersede seemingly insurmountable difficulties.
It seems like every time Hazel’s family climbs out of a crisis, something happens to pull them back into their circle of poverty. In the acknowledgements for the book, you mention several organizations that helped you more fully understand the challenges that families experiencing homelessness face, especially those living in motels. How did these insights inform the events in the novel?
While I taught the smartest and generally most advantaged high school students, I also taught a class of Reading Strategies students who were far below grade level. Many of these students were impoverished, their families placing little value on education in the face of daily survival. Working with these students gave me tremendous insight about their lives. Also, a guidance counselor in my school district became attuned to students living in motels and started a nonprofit organization called CAST (Care, Accept, Share, Teach) to assist these families. This organization has been going strong in my community for many years, and I have served meals at Christmas to CAST families and shopped for shoes with the children in some of these families. I met hard-working mothers whose salary wasn’t enough to save for a deposit to move out of the rundown motel that charged an exorbitant nightly rate. I met adults, who because they had been evicted from an apartment in the past, couldn’t find a landlord to rent to them. These experiences helped me to formulate Hazel’s life in The Girl from the Red Rose Motel.
As a teacher myself, I’m fascinated by the relationship between teaching and writing. I find there are similarities between classroom instruction and the writing process, especially as it relates to trusting instinct and spontaneity. How do teaching and writing connect in your experience?
Even in my earliest years of teaching, starting way back in 1978, I taught not only academic writing such as “how to develop an essay,” and “how to structure an argument,” but encouraged students to write for the purpose of exploring themselves and their minds. Because I learned by writing as a student myself, whether taking notes in a class lecture, free writing to figure out meaning, or revising a draft, I believed that my students could benefit in the same way. Of course, the computer is now an important tool for writing in classrooms, but I think nothing is better than a spiral-bound notebook for all of the annotations and musings that flesh out our learning process. When I was teaching and preparing a new piece of literature for classroom discussion, I often found that writing out all my thoughts longhand was how I best learned to analyze in order to teach others.
You’re in the middle of a book publicity blitz upon publication of this book. In your spare time, what are you reading or writing about?
Mostly, what I’m writing at present is material related to the book, such as talks to present on my book tour and a writing workshop related to structural elements in the novel. Spare time or not, I’m always reading. I’ll forgo sleep to read. Currently, I’m enjoying my friend Jeffrey Blount’s upcoming novel, Mr. Jimmy From Around the Way, and listening to The Knitting Circle by Ann Hood. I’ve recently finished Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, a deeply affecting story, and Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark, a novel I also enjoyed.
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