The entrance to St. Paul Academy and Summit School, a handsome brick building in St. Paul, features a two story open foyer with top-to-bottom windows that face Davern Street to the east. That is where we hung several Kinship of Rivers banners during our recent visit. The sky outside the windows was overcast but the flags in multi colors, each with a unique design, brightened the space and made people stop and smile.
Ping had been invited to speak and sign books as a featured author for the annual school book fest (Wednesday, November 9). She spent the morning autographing books and chatting with students, parents and staff about her work. She was interviewed for the school newspaper, The Rubicon.
After a delicious lunch in the cafeteria, Ping and I met with Kathryn Campbell’s poetry class to conduct a Kinship of Rivers workshop. It included a talk by Ping about her life as an author. She told how she received very little formal schooling during the Cultural Revolution and how she taught herself many things by breaking the rules and reading forbidden books. She has continued to teach herself new things by learning the rules first—like with poetry—and then breaking them.
Nothing could have inspired a class of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds more than an invitation to break the rules. We brought out the colored cloth and the paints for the students and they worked steadily until we had a new banner’s worth of beautiful river flags filled with words and images dedicated to the rivers.
