I’m thrilled to share a wonderful
guest post today by Melanie McFarlane, author of THERE ONCE WERE STARS.
When I mention my love for
dystopian began with Ray Bradbury, people say, He’s an obvious pick, who else do you like? Well there are many
others, such as Orwell, Ellison, and Collins—my list can go on and on, adding
both established and debut authors as this is one of my favorite genres. But no
one will ever have the impact that Ray Bradbury had on my life, and it is
because he was presented to me through the mind of one of the greatest English
teacher’s I’ve ever had the pleasure to learn from: Gary Hyland.
A poet by trade, Mr. Hyland
was a legend before I ever stepped foot in his classroom. There were stories
that if you were caught talking he’d toss a chalk brush at your head to get
your attention, and once he’d even heaved a desk across the room. Though the desk
tossing was likely an exaggeration, whenever I saw an empty seat in the front
row, my heart would race from the possibilities.
We lived in a small city in
the middle of the prairies, where opportunities seemed few and far between, but
inside that classroom he introduced us to the wonders of the world in the
confines of our four cement walls. We were flanked to the south by a self-made
library of Mr. Hyland’s creation, of which we were encouraged to borrow from
and indulge in books we wouldn’t know were available until college, such as
Dante’s Inferno and Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. To the west were posters of some
of Canada’s great poets, like Lorna Crozier, and others who made personal
sacrifices to become the masters of their craft. To the north was a wall of
windows, revealing a grain elevator, an element of Saskatchewan’s landscape,
keeping us rooted in reality.
But to the east Mr. Hyland
stood, perched at the front of the class, ready to break through our clouded
minds with treasures like CBC radio recordings, and props like unsmoked Turkish
cigarettes hidden in the depths of his desk, offering us glimpses of the arts
like sunrise on the horizon.
We waited at the edge of our
seats, listening for some glimpse of an escape from the monotony of the norm.
And when he held up a paperback copy of Fahrenheit
451, I fell in love with a genre I didn’t know existed. I devoured that
story within days, allowing it to imprint my mind in ways like no other—for
what was a world without books, without knowledge, without the arts—and its
influence never left me in the decades that followed after opening that first
page.
So yes, when I say my love
for dystopian began with Ray Bradbury, it has roots much deeper than the
popularity of this icon. My love for dystopian began in a tiny classroom in the
middle of the Canadian prairies, where every year students were taught to see
the world beyond the wall of windows, and learned why things like books,
education, and the arts are worth fighting for.
Thank you for hosting me!
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ReplyDeleteI truly loved the post. It made me think of teacher in my past and the books they introduced me to.
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