Christopher Isherwood

Shortly after returning to the States from Berlin, I read The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, which had been highly recommended to me. At the end of August I began teaching Advanced Composition once a week to high school juniors and seniors in a homeschooling co-op. For our first class meeting we talked about the act of writing and the many right ways to begin an essay or story. To illustrate my point I cut photos out of my 2009 calendar called "The Writer's Desk" by Jill Krementz (I suppose she compiled the author photos and their quotes?). I cut out several pictures from the calendar and placed one at each students' desk before their arrival. After they arrived and we'd gotten the syllabus discussion out of the way, we talked about them in the context of writing being a mostly solitary act. I didn't realize until class started that one of the photos was of Isherwood. In it he's sitting at his desk and the caption reads "Santa Monica, CA, March 31, 1972." I love when writers follow me around like this.