Maryfrances Wagner Writer

Backstories

The “backstory” of this book's title for me chronicles teachers who stayed, who came back each day, did not give up on sophomores who “Crunch ice, suck candies, / smack, blow bubbles,” or those who ask, “How will I use this in real life?”  Here, roaming hands of sweethearts go with new retainers.  Eric drove off a cliff into that good night; but if you are left hopeless, don't read this book of hope.  It's coming for you, infused with the teacher who sews up a rip in a student's sweater, like a meditation: “Perfect imperfection. / Lives held still in our hands.”  Observe poems floating in the rarified globe of detention, where students talk; a teacher listens: Holly, whose “mother said even a perfect child can burn / down a house whatever that means.”  Those lives—the high achiever, the boy clicking his tongue stud against his teeth, the girl out a year to have her baby—each suddenly, in the poems of Maryfrances Wagner, made beautiful.

     —Robert Stewart, Higher and Working Class poems.

Maryfrances Wagner's Backstories might be called a short story collection in verse. Individually, these unforgettable poems pack the power of the best short fiction, and as a whole they tell the story of so many of today's American high school classrooms, the keen intelligence nestled in the most disadvantaged students, the circumstances that cause students to prefer detention so they might have a quiet place to do homework rather than the family motel room of 6 siblings, or so they might find a place to sleep between before-and-after-school jobs. Wagner's students' backstories include a teenage mother dropping out to care for an unplanned daughter, a bullied student beaten unconscious in the bathroom, another gaining attention by driving his prom date and himself to a fast and fiery death. And all the time in the background if not the front of the classroom is the patient yet demanding teacher with the strength of character to ask for the best from each student, fielding the questions: Why do we have to study grammar? We already know//how to speak and understand each other...We never stop learning in here do we?//Is it too late to drop this class? Although the individual backstories are drawn with a fiction writer's gifts for character development, setting, etc., the writer is also a poet who can speak of young blue jays with more stomach than wing, and A dozen trapped backstories//fly[ing] from an attic trunk//like moths//finished with wool. Who can ask, [W]hat would you do in my situation? This is a book of courage.

                              Trish Reeves – author of The Receipt

Maryfrances Wagner has never been a “content” provider in her life.  What she has been, is a teacher who truly sees her students—which explains why they were so open with her--and I'm betting that not one of the survivors whose stories, usually in their own words, she's offered here has ever forgotten her.  Nor will anyone who knew the ones whose stories Ms. Wagner has had to tell for them.  All that and, like nurses in ERs, she knows how to make us laugh.  More power to her, I say, and to all the kids who were lucky enough to know her.

                              Lola Haskins,   Homelight

Maryfrances Wagner's poems resonate with authenticity, some comedic, some tragic, all vibrant. In Backstories Wagner unveils the complexity of her students' lives, knowing as career teachers do that the key to reaching a student is in understanding as much of their story as possible. The teacher, like the poet, must see below the surface of what she is shown.

      I collect student journals. Kastavas presses so hard

     in his that he leaves a ghost copy on the page behind it.

     In afternoon light I read it like a watermark.

Luckily, there are teachers who have proven their worth in the classroom. However, few of them are poets like Maryfrances Wagner. The poems in Backstories are perfectly vivid and insightful. Each word belongs where it is placed. Wagner's poems are as real as the students in the front row.

                                                      —Al Ortolani, Controlled Burn and the Bull in the Ring

Maryfrances Wagner pulls no punches in her brilliant book of poems BACKSTORIES, where she presents the joy, the fulfillment, and the fraught nature of classroom teaching, where students are learning to live and sometimes just let live. From the mischief of the teacher locked inside a classroom closet and finally released by a student at the end of class, to the painful results of simply allowing a student to use the restroom where he beats another student senseless, these poems reveal how students survive, or not. Of course, there are tranquil times, but in the gritty moments, teachers  and students often hold onto each other with hope.The book is a tour-de-force of authenticity where empathy and kindness await their moment while facing the harsh realities of human behavior. But amid the abundance of personal tragedy, I could not stop laughing while reading Sophomores Study Grammar when a student asks, “ We never stop learning in here, do we? Is it too late to drop this class?” BACKSTORIES should be required reading for all of us – teachers, parents, students, and school administrators. And what's left after a lifetime of teaching? Attending a centennial, alumni gathering, Maryfrances writes, “I raise someone's pom-poms and sing.”

                    Walter Bargen, First Missouri Poet Laureate, Orwell at the Kremlin

The beauty of these poems—and the tragedy—is their truth. The experiential, first-hand detail from lives at risk in our world. Teaching is the least appreciated of essential professions, but Wagner's dedication to her students, to witnessing, gives us fierce, empathetic, and important anthems, a poetry that saves their lives, and ours.

                              Christopher Buckley – author of Sprezzatura

Pulling no punches, Maryfrances Wagner has written a book from the trenches of American education. It's all here, every problem, every frustration. Each poem a desk: each desk a portrait. You could weep.          

                - Alice Friman, author of On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems

Master poet Maryfrances Wagner turns her pen to storytelling, one of her fortes, in Backstories. She narrates poignant dramas of daily interactions between teacher and students. These poems pull on heartstrings as they inform, like a moment when a teacher mends a student's torn shirt. This collection is an essential resource for students, teachers, and parents.

                    ~ Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate (2007-09)

Some years ago, I was helping edit New Wine, a poetry magazine for Missouri high school students. Had we based our acceptances solely on excellence, our next issue would have consisted entirely of poems by students of the poet Maryfrances Wagner. Backstories reveals that, in and sometimes outside the classroom, she has helped young students cope as well as learn, even when they'd rather pop gum, fidget, doze, glare, or disrupt. Maryfrances is among the exceptional teachers who can permanently enrich students' lives. That requires intelligence, dedication, insight, backbone, and— most important—a good heart. The compelling  poems in this collection provide ample evidence of all, especially the heart.

                                                                        William Trowbridge

Maryfrances Wagner, poet, teacher, and beloved community leader, reminds us that poetry moves, literally—it is active; it transcends the page's boundaries; it creates real change for real people. In her latest collection, Backstories, Wagner pays tribute to the transformative power of teaching, filled with its traumas, tensions, self-discoveries, and complicated victories. “Hold your hand up for silence,” she writes: these poems have keen ears, and they embody listening as an action. Backstories is an essential collection for those who teach and those who have felt the profound influence of a compassionate teacher.

Jenny Molberg