It’s the second month of grade eleven, and my life totally sucks. I blew my savings on a car that now rests in pieces in the Faireville Wrecking Yard, and I am stuck riding the school bus with geeky grade nines and tens. I am helplessly in love with Zoe Perry, who acts as if I don’t exist. My annoying sister is in grade nine, and she’s doing better on the romantic front than I am. I might as well put myself out of my misery by joining a monastery.
The only small ray of sunshine in my otherwise dark world is that I did not get stuck in my father’s grade eleven English composition class. Instead, I’ve got the new guy, Quentin Alvinstock. As high school teachers go, he’s a pretty good guy, other than being in desperate need of effective underarm deodorant. Mr. Alvinstock prefers to teach books like Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Catcher in the Rye, unlike my father, who feeds his students a strict diet of Shakespeare and Robertson Davies. Dad is now the head of the English Department at Faireville High. He calls the ex-hippie Mr. Alvinstock a slacker and a pinko, and is desperate to find a reason to rid his English Department of such a menace. So naturally, I’ve decided to give Quentin Alvinstock a chance.
At first, I hold it against him that he is making all of us write a poetry mini-collection for part of our term mark. Asking an average grade eleven guy to write at least four meaningful poems is, as school assignments go, nearly equivalent to asking my sister to have a telephone conversation with one of her giggly little friends in fifty words or less.
“Oh, man,” I moan, “not poetry! Anything but poetry!”
This is a comment that would get me thrown out of my own father’s writing class, but Mr. Alvinstock just chuckles and says, “Well, Dak — and any of you other gentlemen who feel the same way — poetry is often an effective means of communicating our feelings to members of the opposite sex.” We interpret this to mean that poetry will get us laid. And, of course, we are all okay with that!
“Write from your heart!” Mr. Alvinstock sings out. “Write what you know! Write what you feel! Write about the tiniest, most beautiful details you’ve noticed! Write about the biggest things you’ve experienced in life! Write, write, write!”
So, I write, write, write. There doesn’t seem to be much choice about it, really, considering Mr. Alvinstock is basing a hefty chunk of our term mark on it. Besides, it isn’t too difficult to peg down my biggest experience as of late. I only have to look as far back as the end of summer, just before school started.