Words

September 24, 2026 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Words

By Leo Racicot

“Expert use of language is to me a perpetual joy.” Noel Coward

Ever since when in first grade I intuited the Beatrix Potter sentence Mrs. Hare printed on the blackboard, I’ve felt words are pearls of great value. There are writers whose belief is the opposite. The renowned author, Edmund White told me he thought words are a dime a dozen. When working a draft, he thought nothing of slashing beautifully wrought paragraphs if he decided they didn’t contribute to the final product. But that was Ed.

I’ve always felt grateful that I am able to express myself, my feelings, my life stories with words. Words have been there for me when friends weren’t, when health wasn’t, when faith wasn’t.

Words have led me to work with some of the men and women of the Golden Age of Publishing: William Shawn at The New Yorker, the wonderful Stewart Brand and Art Kleiner at Coevolution Quarterly, wise Jean Burden at Yankee Magazine, gentle Winston Leyland at Gay Sunshine Journal. For a young man, it was a thrill seeing my work appear alongside the work of Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harold Norse, E.B. White. And working with and being befriended by writers like Edmund White and M.F.K. Fisher was an unexpected dream come true.

And when at Franco American school, principal Sister Gilberte Durette asked me to design and implement the school’s middle school Advanced Reading class, I jumped at the chance. My belief has been that if a student wants to become a good writer, she/he should read, read, read. Read the masters of the form but also

read anything they can get their hands on. I had a student, Chris Vavra, not too keen on traditional books but loved comic books, as what red-blooded American boy didn’t in those days? My encouragement of this passion was looked down upon by school higher-ups but in his high school entrance exams, Chris scored highest in reading.

For our advanced group, we were given our own classroom, a cubby tucked away between the first and second floors, a reading aerie of sorts; the kids thought of it as a special place and I came to think so, too. On the walls, I hung photos of world-famous authors and encouraged members of the class to bring in pictures of their favorites so we could add them to our writers wall. I hoped to convey to students that words are a boundless frontier. As with music, words can be sculpted into infinite arrangements. There is no end to the pleasures they bring.

The first thing I wrote was a poem about the assassination of John Kennedy. I, along with others of my generation, was shattered by the public murder of that beloved man, sought ways to assuage my deep sorrow. I composed a poem in commemoration, the stanzas of which, to my surprise, rhymed nicely. I was ten years old in fifth grade and Mrs. Dalton put the poem in the class newspaper. From then on, I wanted to be a writer and work with words.

It wasn’t until the early 1980s that I made any headway; the editors of Coevolution Quarterly liked my essay about a high school/college chum titled, Rachelann: A Remembrance. I actually got paid for it, a real thrill that encouraged me to keep going. I’m still able to see the looks of sheer delight on the faces of a small group of Saint Patrick’s third graders I was tutoring in reading as the rhyming words hearing their first poems struck their ears with a joy so innocent, so new, they giggled in unison.

_____________________