You Are No Longer in Trouble

by Nicole Stellon O'Donnell

Overview

Part memoir and part investigation into the educational system, this collection of linked shorts is a compelling portrait of one teacher’s family history, her experience of being a student, and the persona she has to wear in the classroom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945680243
Publisher:	White Pine Press
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. A recipient of a Fulbright Distinguished Award in teaching, she teaches students in a juvenile detention facility. Her writing has received support from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation.

Read an Excerpt

Passengers in aisle seats lean toward the middle to watch the kneeling doctor’s shoe bottoms facing us. It has been too long. His arms mark a rhythm we have seen on screen, felt in our chests, a rhythm that tracks the plane’s arc into Juneau where we are not supposed to land. Not-supposed-to began with the call: Is there a doctor or an EMT on board? Please ring your call button. Call buttons glowed, punctuated by chimes. Passengers strained to see, peered between seats, leaned into the aisle. Someone pulled a man from the window seat in row 11, dragged dead weight into first class. Metal hissed on curtain rod. It has been too long. So long that screens flicker to life as some un-press pause. So long the flight attendant runs back twice for charged portable defibrillators. So long that we all know the answer without asking. At touchdown, with phones back on, murmurs and beeps incoming, a woman three rows in front of me calls out: Those who believe, pray for the one that is hurt. The woman sitting next to me calls back: I’m praying, sister, and flips through a magazine full of recipes. Fingernails gleam over the glossy pages. Clatter of definitive pageturn. Amen. My English-teacher self gets bothered by her word choice. Hurt? Use dead, suffering. Hurt: an accident soothed by apology. Dead: definitive, done. If this is a prayer, it’s going to go unanswered, so at least ask with precision. At least name it what it is: Witness, not bystander. Death, not medical emergency. In Juneau, one boy chirps and sings as his mother walks behind him, providing narration. Now we will step forward to get back on the plane. Now you should look in front of you. Her hands, a steady pressure on his shoulders. Her legs follow his lead in a stiff dance, holding him to this moment, down the jetway, down the aisle, back into his seat among his siblings, a few rows away from where the body once sat. She tells him everything is still real, how it is to go back. In flight again, we become the dream-blurb of the body now stashed below. The doctor, arms tired from pumping, leans against the window. The man’s wife takes her seat next to an empty seat and closes her eyes. The flight attendant dabs her eyes with tissue as she swings through the cabin, garbage bag sagging between her hands. In Anchorage at two a.m., after we waited hours in Juneau, after we missed our connecting flight to Fairbanks, a chemo-ravaged woman stands quiet as her husband demands to talk to a person who can explain what we’re going to get in return for our time. The customer service agent, exhausted, replies, There is no person, sir. Only the website. I go to the customer service website. I write that I watched a man die on a floor with my headphones in and a comedy on pause. But I don’t tell them the woman in the seat in front of me needed to get home that night because the dogsitter left that morning, and that she said, I don’t need to spend my one day of rest before going back to work cleaning up dog shit. I don’t tell them the Make-a-Wish Foundation girl with the prosthetic leg was on her way to see the aurora, or that I was flying back from trying to say goodbye to my father, who was dying himself. Grading papers my first night home, I think of the flight attendant. How when she began the speech that batters itself daily against travel-dulled minds, her voice broke as she swallowed tears while her co-workers stood in the aisle buckling and unbuckling emptiness into circles of seatbelt. And how I listened to every word.

Table of Contents

I Equal and Opposite

Each One, Every One 15

Afternoon 16

In the Winter in Fairbanks, Even the Light. Comes Late to Class 17

Excuses for the Principal 18

False Lisp 19

The Fourth Person 20

Marriage 21

What Everyone from This Place Already Knows 22

Other Duties as Assigned: Go Tell That Girl to Change Her Shirt 23

Excuses for the Principal 24

In School, We Learn How Our Bodies Work 25

The Bossy e Meets His Match 26

Staff Meeting Announcing Cuts 27

Excuses for the Principal 28

In Gratitude to the Dream Sequence 30

Teaching Newton's Third Law in Juvenile Jail 31

Lines Composed upon Finding a Note Crumpled in the Corner at the End of the Day 32

Math Instruction in Late Seventies Suburban America 33

Excuses for the Principal 34

On Being a Pregnant Faculty Advisor 35

At Least Name It What It Is 36

Excuses for the Principal 38

Broken Arm 39

II Each Time You Ask

Honestly 43

Excuses for the Principal 44

Proof 46

Excerpt 47

Labyrinth 48

Decisions Are Made 49

Nothing to Do but Listen 50

Dear John Hughes 51

Excuses for the Principal 52

What Not to Say to Your Students in the Juvenile Detention Center 53

Four Poems My Incarcerated Students Assigned Me 54

Excuses for the Principal 58

Punishment 59

An Incident at a Staff Meeting at Togiak School 60

Landscape with Playground Equipment, Pigtails, and Hypodermic Syringes 61

Writing a Clear Rubric for Class Discussion 62

Parent-Teacher Conference 63

Excuses for the Principal 64

Projector 65

III Ignore All Alarms

Drills 69

Morning Announcements 76

I Remember That Girl in Third Grade, with the Perfect Blonde Hair 77

Contract Language 78

The Principal Can Go Fuck Herself 79

Excuses for the Principal 80

On a Field Trip to View the Tourists at the Museum 81

Requiem for High Stakes Testing 83

First Day of School at the Juvenile Detention Center 84

Excuses for the Principal 85

Second Grade Pain 87

Idle Hands 88

On Envy 89

Excuses for the Principal 90

The Pile 91

The Proper Use of Frost 92

I See His Ghost during the Passing Period 93

A Teacher Playing a Movie Star Playing a Teacher 94

No One Takes Attendance at Commencement 96

Excuses for the Principal 97

You Are No Longer in Trouble 99

On Tuesday before Third Period They Are All Beautiful 100

Notes on the Poems 101

The Author 103

Editorial Reviews

You Are No Longer In Trouble is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s for anyone who has ever been in school, as student or teacher, administrator or aide. It’s for every being working so hard to be good or do better in this mysterious world. It’s for people with excellent memories and people who forget too much. An extremely evocative, superbly written, deep dive into classrooms, hallways, and the precious human heart.” —Naomi Shihab Nye  “Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s startling and capacious collection, You Are No Longer in Trouble, telescopes between late-seventies suburban Chicago and contemporary Alaska. Student becomes teacher; daughter becomes mother. These shifting identities organically engage issues of place, the gendered body, and the economy of labor. . . . Deft with the prose poem form, O’Donnell’s lines can be a choppy, roiling surf, or become inviting and even languorous, but always with a potent undertow. This book gives me a new understanding of the attentions and estrangements prescribed by America’s approach to schooling. More importantly, this book has a rich, complicated heart.” —Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves

From the Publisher