Minneapolis' Jeannine Ouellette shares Five Things She's Learned about America.
View the next in our new series of messages, ideas, and inspiration – shared directly from Americans we admire.
Five Things I’ve Learned began with the aim of learning directly from people we long admired. Find out what they think most important to share, we believed, and we’d learn and be inspired by their example.
This summer, we’re doing something more: soliciting and sharing written pieces, short videos, and other bursts of ideas and inspiration from people whose ideas and experiences give shape to the issues that continue to shape America and November’s upcoming national election.
Today, Jeannine Ouellette shares Five Things She’s Learned About America.
Jeannine’s is a writer and teacher. She has published widely and her memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, with starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. She teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Writing in the Dark: The School, which she founded in 2012.
Five Things I’ve Learned About America
“I’m Jeannine Ouellette, author of the memoir, The Part That Burns, and a teacher of writing across many settings.”
Americans are more alike that we appear.
“I was in foster care. I ran away alone at age 16, from Minnesota to Mexico. I even helped steal a car when I was in high school.”
Americans are generous and kind, even if our systems are not.
“I’m not just talking about things like shoveling each others’ walks, pitching in after storms and floods. I’m talking about the kinds of kindness that makes a lot of us uncomfortable, because it involves looking after each other when things are bad behind closed doors.”
Americans love a good story.
“Like one where a young girl runs away on her sixteenth birthday, travels alone by bus and train almost 2500 miles from St. Paul, Minnesota to Cuernavaca, Mexico on an unsuccessful mission to find the former neighbors who had housed her before they had moved to Mexico, and she’s hoping they might take her in again.”
Americans can reclaim their voices – and it’s beautiful when they do.
“We understand ourselves and each other and the world through story.”
Americans can heal.
“I know this not just from my work at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health,… not just from my work in prisons….I also see this in my ordinary, everyday work teaching writing.”
MORE ABOUT JEANNINE
Jeannine Ouellette’s lyric memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature. Her essays and short fiction have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Narrative, North American Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Masters Review, and others. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a Millay Colony for the Arts fellow and past juror. Her bestselling Substack, Writing in the Dark, is a passionate creative community of people who “do language,” where writing is part of a deeper, vaster conversation about how attention, curiosity, playfulness, and surprise provide a portal to the profound on the path to becoming, because talking about “how to write better” without that larger context is kind of boring. In addition to teaching on Substack, Ouellette teaches in person at Writing in the Dark: The School, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and the University of Minnesota, where she also facilitates narrative health writing workshops. She is working on a craft book and a novel.
MORE ABOUT FIVE THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA
Five Things I’ve Learned about America presents live, personal conversations with leading thinkers, organizers, and advocates for our democracy. In tandem, we’re soliciting and sharing written pieces, short videos, and other bursts of ideas and inspiration from people whose ideas and experiences are equally inspiring and instructive.
We’ve been overwhelmed by the kind and enthusiastic response we’ve received to this new series. If you’ve just recently discovered us, please check out recent reflections about America from people we admire including Tony Alcaraz, Yvette Benavides, Tina Hedin, Megan Matson, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, and Oliver Wasow.
And check out our free conversation series presented in partnership with Resolute Square, featuring 90-minute sessions with Americans we admire including Alan Light, Jennifer Mercieca, Beto O'Rourke, Trygve Olson, and Stuart Stevens.
This was wonderful. These five things capture so much of what is important to me about America, too, that kindness we tend to forget in our polarized times--and it captures Jeannine's open-hearted, honest, vulnerable, generous way of being as a human and a teacher and is why I cherish being part of of her Writing in the Dark community.