A writer and a teacher

Holbrook’s life has given her much to write about. “By the time I reached my mid-teens, I was mad at the world, determined to do the opposite of anything my parents wanted me to do,” she writes. At 16, she was single, pregnant and incarcerated for driving the getaway car for a boyfriend in an attempted robbery. Years later, she left an abusive marriage and as a single mother of five children grew determined to not only become financially independent, but to do so through writing what she had harbored in her soul.

Holbrook went to work as a secretary and typist to support herself and her children. She began writing for her neighborhood newspaper. She took creative writing classes and with fellow writers founded the Whittier Writing Workshop and its mentoring program for Black writers. For that effort, she received the 1985 Leader Lunch Award for Neighborhood Impact from the YWCA, as related in her essay “The Award.”

In another essay, “Coming Clean,” Holbrook writes about her experiences teaching a creative writing class through the Mother Infant Care Education Program. Her students were initially uninterested in writing. Then she told them her story. “I definitely had the young parents’ attention then,” she writes. “Questions flowed one after the other, most centering on why I had stayed in an abusive relationship for so long, how I dug myself out of poverty, and how I got where I am now.”

Serving as a teacher and mentor has been a large part of Holbrook’s life. She was the first person of color to serve on the staff of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. In 1993, to make the literary arts accessible to a wider audience, she created SASE: The Write Place and served as its leader until 2006.

Now an adjunct professor of creative writing at Hamline University where she has taught since 1997, Holbrook is a staunch believer in writing as a source of well-being. “I try to demonstrate that to my students through assignments and readings,” she said. Writing about pain can help one grieve, she said. “You cannot just get over things. No one should be told to ‘just get over it.’ You need to work it out. And that’s what writing can do.”

Holbrook reflects on her own experiences as a student in the Minneapolis Public Schools in the 1950s and ’60s in the essay “Expectations and Assumptions.” As she often does in her book, she begins the essay with a quote from another writer. In this instance, it is from Sally Rudel, a former assistant principal at Minneapolis South High School: “Low expectations are the worst form of racism.”

Holbrook recalls how she and fellow Black students were treated differently than white students at her school and maintains how important it is for teachers to respect all young people equally. “I urge teachers to have a sense of humor and to be flexible enough to understand that if a student’s learning style is different from what you are comfortable with, they should not be rendered unteachable,” she writes. “I am constantly surprised by the number of students in my college freshman composition class who are convinced that they do not have the ability to write well. On closer investigation, it becomes clear that their fear of writing is based on the discouragement they experienced from a teacher.”

In 2015 Holbrook founded the organization More Than a Single Story, where people of color can discuss and write about issues of importance to them. In her book’s final essay, “Sticks and Stones,” she writes: “For Black women, loving ourselves and passing that self-love down to our daughters and our granddaughters is a difficult task. Centuries of negation often make us feel like we need to adopt a hard, protective shell, which is either praised as strength or dismissed as hostility. In short, we turn ourselves into stone.”