Learning by heart

When Paulette Whitehurst was six years old, she went on a cross-country journey from Virginia to Colorado with her mother and new stepfather.

But the marriage turned out to be another of her mother's poor choices, and they were soon on their own in Denver. Her mother found work in a drug store, and began going out with a new man.

Just as little Paulette was beginning to wonder if this man would be her next daddy, her mother came home upset one day, and abruptly told her to pack her bags. She had found out the new man was married, and they were heading back to Virginia.

On the bus trip home, Paulette accidentally left her cherished doll Susie in a diner in Missouri when they raced to catch the bus -- one of many losses she would suffer in a childhood marked by loneliness, disruption and uncertainty.

Decades later, as a teacher at Donahoe Elementary School in Henrico, Whitehurst joined her fifth-graders in a writing exercise and found herself describing that 1953 trip from her six-year-old perspective.

During the read-aloud session afterwards, when the teacher and students shared their writing, one of Whitehurst's students reacted to her story in a way that stuck with her long afterwards.

"That sounds," the fifth-grader exclaimed, "like a chapter out of a book."

This year, that book became a reality.

'Like a magic ticket to keep writing'
The memoir, A Child Is a Poem You Learn by Heart, describes Whitehurst's upbringing by a mother who married three times and struggled to care for her daughter through a series of moves, jobs, and mostly-unhealthy relationships.

Written in verse, the book depicts the four years Whitehurst lived with a family of strangers, seeing her mother for only occasional visits. It describes the time Whitehurst's stepfather set her on a hot stove and burned her bottom.

"It's okay," she was told, "because he said 'Sorry.'"

The book follows Whitehurst through her years in Charleston, S.C., where they moved after her mother married a third time, and where the 11-year-old girl was expected to care for her younger siblings and keep up with a full load of chores.

Eventually they returned to Portsmouth, and Whitehurst attended Cradock H.S. It was here that she encountered the teachers who were to encourage and inspire her.

Until she was 16, she had never read a book from beginning to end. At home, she had never had books around, and no one talked about books. She had faked all her school book reports.

Then her tenth-grade English took an interest in her, and Whitehurst suddenly discovered the school library and the thrill of reading a novel from cover to cover.

At the end of the year, the teacher signed her yearbook with the words, "I'll miss reading your essays."

"That was like a magic ticket to keep writing," recalls Whitehurst. "Words are so powerful."

Another teacher turned her on to American history, challenging his students with lively discussions and thoughtful questions designed to keep them engaged.

"He admonished us," Whitehurst writes of his tests, "to back up our opinions with evidence [and] facts." And he made sure that Whitehurst was placed in his senior government class.

"Perhaps [he] saw something in me," she writes, "that he wanted to encourage."

Forgotten memories surface
Buoyed by mentoring experiences like these, Whitehurst went on to college and a career in teaching herself, retiring after 28 years in Henrico County schools and additional years at John Tyler Community College.

With retirement, the book that had been at the back of her mind for so long began clamoring to be written, and she joined writing groups and took workshops. While she wasn't quite sure how to proceed with writing it, she knew what the book's topic would be: the same childhood memories that kept surfacing whenever she worked on writing exercises with her students. "I was teaching them to write sensory details," she recalls of the writing prompts, "and more and more of the things I was writing about were about that [childhood] time.

"It's funny," she says, "because a lot of those memories I hadn't thought about in years."

One memory seemed to generate another, and at first the book came together quickly. But she tinkered for quite awhile with her story's descriptive details before she realized that writing in prose wasn't working, and she could better weave the sensory elements into a book using verse.

Switching to verse – a popular format in the young adult books she often read and recommended to her students – made all the difference, she explains.

"The book wanted to be in verse."

Tribute to teachers
Once A Child is a Poem was in print, it quickly found a fan club.

Whitehurst is still in touch with a number of former students, parents, and colleagues on Facebook, and said that many have contacted her to say they've enjoyed the book.

"Some of them," she says, "have posted their pictures with the book, or told me they wanted signed copies or to take me to lunch."
Because the book included discussion questions at the end, it became a popular selection for book groups as well. Whitehurst has met on Zoom with groups in Florida and other states up and down the East Coast, which – considering the growing appeal of book clubs these days – could well lead to increased demand for Zoom appearances.

Meanwhile, Whitehurst is already at work on her next writing project, a collection of memories from her classroom teaching experiences. Like her first book, it will be a memoir in verse, but focusing on her adult years.

Now that she has experience with finishing a book and getting it into print, she expects the task to be easier.

Still, it's doubtful any future books will be as therapeutic to write as this one was.

"At first I really thought, 'I'm writing this for family,'" Whitehurst says of A Child is a Poem. "I wanted my grandchildren to know my story."

But the feeling she got from putting it all down told her otherwise, and she eventually realized that "I was writing it for me."

She hopes readers will consider the book a tribute, as well – "to the teachers who helped me change my life."

Readers might also view the book as a tribute to her students – in particular, one Donahoe fifth-grader whose comment played such a significant role in the memoir's creation.

According to Whitehurst, it's only fitting that a child was the inspiration for her first published work.

After all, she says, "Teachers learn as much from their students as students learn from them."

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A Child is a Poem You Learn by Heart is available on Amazon.com.