Issue link: https://trevordayschool.uberflip.com/i/915972
Tony Pontone. And Peg Summers, a remarkable English teacher, taught me how to read literature and choose my own words carefully. Ms. Summers assigned Yeats and Joyce and the sisters Brontë, handed out a thick collection of Irish poetry, invited a poet friend to address our class. She instilled in me such a love of Irish literature that I ended up writing my senior thesis at Yale on Joyce's Ulysses, and recently did a joint reading with the Irish novelist Tom O'Neill. But perhaps most important to me was the great value Ms. Summers placed on creative writing assignments, treating our original work with such seriousness that it was impossible not to draw the conclusion that literature could be a two-way street. Ms. Summers saw something in me as a child, which made it hard for me not to see it, too. She was good pals with the playwright Israel Horovitz, whose short play, Line, was then just a couple of years into a four-decade run that would make it Off- Off-Broadway's longest- running show. Believing that I might benefit from meeting a professional author, she took me to the play at the 13th Street Repertory Company, and introduced me to Horovitz afterward. ree decades later, when the theatre was battling for its life with a hostile landlord, I interviewed Horovitz about the repertory company for the New York Times. When I reminded him of our earlier encounter and told him that Ms. Summers had been my favorite teacher, he replied with a laugh, "Well, of course she was!" e intimate chaos of e Day School— and the prevailing progressive vibe of New York in the '70s—certainly allowed for plenty of creative ferment. After Star Wars came out in 1977, we borrowed the school's single audio-video camera and shot a spoof in which an upright piano performed the role of R2-D2 and Mary Stuart Masterson played Princess Leia, cinnamon buns pinned to either side of her head to mimic Carrie Fisher's hairdo. Tasked with dramatizing the John Gardner novel Grendel for an English class, we cadged a batch of envelopes from the office and taped them to our dragon slayer's clothes as a "suit of mail." Later, for a classroom performance of Macbeth, two friends and I dragooned Sebastian Heath into our cast, solely so we could make an unforgivable pun on his surname: After intoning the lines of the ree Witches, "When shall we three meet again?"…/ "Where the place?"/ "Upon the heath," the three of us appeared in the next scene standing on top of a bemused Sebastian. Some of our creations were sustained efforts. Under the spell of James urber's e Owl in the Attic, I penned "Ask King Moo," an ongoing humorous advice column, for the school newspaper. (When I didn't like the readers' questions, I made up my own.) Influenced by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, I wrote an absurdist one-act play for the talent show. And channeling both Superman and Monty Python, James Drosnes and I shot a ridiculous video series called Cowman ("You'll Believe a Man Can Moo!"), in which our bovine superhero did battle with the nefarious Mimples the Malicious. Overall, the school reared me with a deep conviction that storytelling was not merely an extracurricular sideline but rather a valuable endeavor in its own right. For this reason, e Day School is unmistakably present in e Gargoyle Hunters. On an elemental level, the pages of the book would be empty had I not carried with me all these decades the conviction that stories and words matter. But in the most literal sense, my years at e Day School remain so vividly alive in my mind that I couldn't resist sending my novel's protagonist to school there. In the course of the book, Griffin cuts a gym class taught by Mr. Cavar, ditches Above, right: John at summer camp at age 12. e protagonist of e Gargoyle Hunters, who attends a fictionalized version of e Day School, is a year and a half older. Above, left: In a lecture at the Skyscraper Museum last spring that the author described as "an oddball combination of fact and fiction," John described his method of blending research and imagination in the writing of his novel. 4 6 T R E V O R D AY S C H O O L n FA L L 2 0 1 7 – 2 0 1 8 " Marvelously evocative ... exuberant ... eye-opening ... [an] urban Indiana Jones- like escapade." Excerpts from the New York Times review