reflections on teaching in Rome - and on reading eightball by elizabeth geoghegan

When I lived in Italy ten years ago, I taught writing at the American University of Rome.  It was a tiny college on the top of the Gianicolo, downhill from the American Academy and surrounded by umbrella pines. Across the road was a beautiful park and on the corner the Archi Bar where we always went for coffee in between classes.  My students were Americans and Europeans,  mostly Italians with American connections and Americans with Italian roots who wanted to reclaim their heritage whilst following an American curriculum.

What a beautiful place it was for me to land, as a writer and teacher and wife of an American diplomat.  We were posted in Rome for a four year tour, and had two sons in middle and high school, but I found at AUR  a place I could pursue my own professional life.   The campus with its graveled walks had small classrooms overlooked the city. I taught composition and literature there.  At one stage, I even taught business writing.  But what I taught didn't matter as much as my students mattered to me. I loved my students and all of us knew we were experiencing something amazing together, living here in Rome.

some of my students and me pretending to smoke chocolate finger biscuits.

Which brings me to Elizabeth Geoghegan,  treasured colleague and dear friend.  Like me, Elizabeth was a writer and dedicated teacher.  She was also a free spirit, living in Rome on her own terms.  When we first met, she looked at me a little skeptically standing there in a doorway at the college overlooking the courtyard. She was smoking and looking through me as I talked: who are you, she seemed to ask.

But yet we were a similar type.  In fact, people occasionally confused us with each other.  The provost frequently mistook me for Elizabeth.   Elizabeth, she'd say. No, I'd reply,  I'm Amanda.  Hmm.. Really?  As if I didn't know who I was.

I guess it was because we were both iconoclasts, writers and eccentrics.  As such, when we met together over  coffee, we found ourselves talking about what we both loved and connected on: books and writing, our students and the men in our lives, our struggles to get published and the difficulty of living as expats.

That was me and Elizabeth.  She was my literary touchstone for four years, while I was trying to get a book published, and she was trying to get her stories published.   Oh, my agent  in London was always sure my book was going to be a great big hit. Then she dropped that book like a hot potato and while I wrote another book, Elizabeth was there through it all.  I was also there for her, while she went through her own publication throes - submitting wonderful stories,  getting them rejected or just plain overlooked.  What we wanted to achieve in our writing seemed to be  at odds with the market,  even though we both had friends who had found themselves amongst the so called anointed.  Still, we lived on the fringes.

But oh, what fringes they were!

One semester, a colleague who was supposed to get tenure was shockingly denied it and then disappeared.  Suddenly Elizabeth and I were about the only writing teachers on campus to be trusted. So we decided to set up a Writing Center.   We took over the top floor of one of the buildings at AUR where there was a little terrace looking across Ancient Rome. In our tiny unheated office on the top of the Gianicolo I  remember saying, " Elizabeth - this is it!  We are actually doing it RIGHT NOW! It doesn't matter about our books or what we're being paid. Here we are actually DOING it, while no one is watching! LOOK WHERE WE ARE! We can shape the writing program at this college!

And we did.

A year or so later, both of us having been denied the opportunity of a full time job at AUR, we both moved on. I went back to the United States, taught at Northern Virginia Community College and ultimately ended up as a bookseller at Politics and Prose. One of my novels was published by an independent UK press.  Meanwhile Elizabeth stayed in Rome and her stories did the rounds, and then her extraordinary novella The Marco Chronicles was picked up by Shebooks  and published to great acclaim.

But what about her more literary stories?  They have now been published in this wonderful collection  eightball.  I have read these stories repeatedly. I read them ten years ago and I read them again this month, and still they resonate. They are lyrical, funny, heartbreaking and hip.  They are tragic even in their humor. In words she applies to her characters, they are "hipper than thou" and "caught between rancor and desolation."

Their settings span from Rome to Paris to South East Asia. On one level they are evocative beautifully written travelogues.  But really, it's Elizabeth's characters who breathe life into these places, even as they pass through.   Elizabeth's characters'  most heartfelt moments are often experienced alone, while their passionate connections with others, though intense, are short lived.  My favorite story of the collection is The Violet Hour - which I read in its earliest stages, and which affected me then as it affects me now, for its badass beauty,  its courage, its longing and ultimately its heartbreak.

Elizabeth Geoghegan has given us a memorable collection here.  These stories are Elizabeth  through and through,  and at her finest. The Marco Chronicles was fucking great.  Reading that book was like sitting with Elizabeth in a cafe and listening to her war stories, her wicked one liners  and intelligent take downs of men and the dating scene in Rome.  This collection goes deeper.  This is Elizabeth at her heartbreaking and lyrical best - full of insight into what it means to be a strong independent woman looking for connection and love in the world.  It will capture your heart.  It will make you laugh, it will make you cry and you will not forget it.

#elizabethgeogheganeightball  #eightballstories #greatshortstories #shortstoryrome