A lesson from the 'Freak'
A journey of imagination from bullied girl to published novelist
If Carlisle middle school teacher Marcella Pixley could tell her students just one thing all year, she says it would be this: "Being made to feel freakish is a universal experience, especially in adolescence. Every human being has had the experience of being an outsider. I think young people often see themselves as isolated and don't realize that every other person has felt the same thing at some point."
Pixley devotes a lot of time to communicating this sense of empathy to her students, whether in her eighth-grade language arts classes, during the extracurricular writers' group she leads, or before homeroom when they stop by to confide their troubles to her. And now her students will have yet another way of realizing how well she understands them. Pixley's first work of fiction, a young adult novel called "Freak," was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
As an adolescent growing up in Newton who loved writing fantasy stories, Pixley always envisioned herself becoming a writer. In college and graduate school, her focus shifted to poetry. Twelve years ago she had just finished earning her master's at the University of Tennessee and was beginning to make her way as a published poet, with her work appearing in Prairie Schooner, Feminist Studies, and Poet Lore. She was even nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
But just as she planned to embark on a PhD program, fate took a different course when she accepted a teaching position at a private school in Connecticut. "I started working with seventh- and eighth-graders, and I immediately fell in love with that age group," she said. "Since then - throughout the time I spent at that school along with the past four years in Carlisle - I have never had a single thought about anything else being the right career path for me."
Around the same time her teaching career began, Pixley started crafting a short story about a seventh-grade girl who reads the dictionary, writes poetry, and confronts daily torment from bullying peers - in other words, a girl much like the one Pixley once was. Two agents, one bidding war between publishing houses, and many rewrites later, the story has grown into a novel and will finally have a chance to reach its intended audience.
Pixley has used the entire experience as a teaching moment. She works with many budding writers in her eighth-grade classes and in the extracurricular groups she leads, and throughout the decade-long revision process for "Freak," she has shared her progress. "I've read many drafts of my novel in class, and I've also read students my rejection letters from editors," Pixley said. "I know how it feels to work very hard on something and have it still not be done. I actually find that that gives me a little bit more credibility when I do give my students criticism. They know that as a writer, I've been in their shoes."
Meanwhile, Pixley has learned plenty from her students. "As a teacher, I have kids in front of me all the time; I didn't have to rely on my memory for what middle school was like. I've been very lucky over the years in that a lot of kids have trusted me. They have come to share dilemmas about social groups and power dramas that go on in their lives. So this book grew out of a mixture of my own experiences as a young person and what I witness in my classroom."
Pixley also finds herself continually impressed by the ability of her young students to process their experiences. "Middle school students have minds that are on the cusp of being grown up enough to make incredible connections between themselves and the world," she said. "They are honest. They are not afraid to challenge ideas or teachers. It is such an exciting community of learners to be among."
The quality of writing she sees from her students has not changed over the years, Pixley said. And neither have the troubles kids that age face. "It's always difficult to be a kid who doesn't fit the mold in some way," she said. "Those things don't change over the generations. What has changed, in my view, is that the world of middle school students is infinitely more complicated now due to the technology they have. The layer of complexity that instant messaging and e-mail and the Internet brings into their lives essentially takes the drama to a whole new level. When I was a kid in the early 1980s, you might worry about whether or not a friend would call you once you got home. Now, kids carry cellphones, which means that you have to worry about whether that certain person is going to call you 24 hours a day."
The idea of exposing her most personal experiences through her novel was never a deterrent, Pixley said. To the contrary, she is thrilled by the idea of her current and former students reading "Freak." "My students have been hearing the anecdotes that appear in this book for years," she said. "And they've also been hearing about all the editing I've undergone and all the rejections I've experienced. Now they will be able to see what it looks like when something that has gone through all of that gets finished."
Ultimately, though, Pixley - who is now the mother of two young boys and lives in Westford - cares far more that her students understand the emotional travails she once went through than that they understand the challenges of getting published.
"I want every kid who has ever come into my classroom in tears because they've been teased or had problems with friends to read this book and realize they're not the only one this has happened to. It happens to my character, and it happened to me. And just like my character, I found the strength to overcome it." 