Remembering Jo Allen Bradham: Writer, Professor, Character

Author and teacher Jo Allen Bradham has died. A distinguished professor at Kennesaw State University, she taught two of the graduate-level seminars I took for the Masters of Professional Writing program. But my most precious memory of Jo Allen is the magic she worked when I was in distress.
 
Back in January 2000, I'd been transferred from a hospital bed to a rehabilitation center. A teenager speeding in his new car had rammed the driver's side door of my car, smashing his headlight, fracturing my pelvis and several ribs. Before I could go home, I had to learn how to get around a kitchen and a bathroom in a wheelchair.

I was pretty miserable. I'd missed a long-planned Christmas trip to see shows in New York; my seventh grade classes were going on without me; I hadn't seen my dogs Cleo and Bo in weeks (though my neighbor Kathay visited them every day - read about Kathay 04/2007). I'd missed the last few class meetings of Dr. Bradham's playwriting seminar.

The dining hall was not a happy place. Elderly men and women in wheelchairs hunched over cafeteria trays and picked at their food, if they were able. Staff spooned food into patients' mouths. The only sounds were coughs, drips, and clatter of serving ware.

Then, in swept Jo Allen Bradham, bundled in a London Fog trenchcoat cinched at the waist, long scarf trailing, hat at a jaunty angle, waving a hand in leather glove. From across the room, she called my name. All around us, heads lifted and eyes gaped. She stood by my wheelchair, presenting me with encouragement and a souvenir from the class's end - of - semester celebration.

Had she swooped from the sky under an open umbrella, her visit would not have been more magical.

Lessons from her classes have stayed with me. In fact, I've replicated them with my own writing students.

• She wanted us to be resourceful writers. She assigned stories to read and plays to see, and had us write about what we could use.That's how I teach literature, now: What's your way into this? What can you use in a story or poem of your own?
  
• Dr. Bradham gave everyone in the class some Play-Do to shape into something. After we'd played awhile, she made her point: first, you need clay. Generate ideas first; begin to shape them, after.
  
• Dr. Bradham directed us to analyze one page of our plays-in-progress, line by line, to justify every single bit of dialogue and stage direction: What does this do to move the action forward? to set up a joke? to divulge important information? to build tension? I repeat those questions with my student playwrights.
  
• When a fellow student in our seminar fell hopelessly behind, we all knew her idea for a play had been lame from the start. For her, Jo Allen relaxed requirements, allowing her to write short dramatic sketches on a theme instead of one full-length play. The result was best in class, a series of hilarious scenes relating to one neighborhood's Home Owners' Association.
  
• Jo Allen introduced me to the technique of writing a story in modules, a trick that has helped my students transform mediocre ideas into pieces they were proud to have written.
  
• She modeled what she taught, bringing in drafts of plays, a novel, a memoir. I remember one title "Shoe Show," and a freakish scene of a religious cult, described through the eye-holes of a feathered bird mask.
  
• She wanted us to be disciplined and fearless. Her last class was a demonstration of how to submit pieces to a variety of publications, and she shared with us some of her favorite rejections, including, "Dear Miss Bradham, your work has failed to interest even one person on our staff."
  

Always supportive, she came to see my drama club perform the play I'd written in her class, and she attended a church Mystery Dinner Theatre production that I fashioned from actors' ideas. I reciprocated, enjoying her performance for KSU as the hilarious harridan in that comedy hit of 1777, She Stoops to Conquer.

When her doctor told her last summer that she was already too late for treatment, Jo Allen kept her condition secret. I wish she'd given me the chance to tell her what she meant to me.