Poems and © Linguistic Reanimator textbooks
If 10 years ago they told me that someday I would become a writer, I couldn’t stop laughing for a long time, and I would never have believed it. But it happened to me, oddly enough. As they say — you can’t fight fate, run away or hightail it. It will track you down anyway, rein in, showing its sly tail, smiling sarcastically, and bring you in line.
The first time I wrote something I was about five years old, and I began to compose poetry the moment I began to speak. These are the memories of my mother, but personally I remember little about it.
All my childhood and youth I wrote poetry almost daily, the poems just poured from somewhere in heaven, I wrote and wrote everything, and could not stop. Sometimes because of this, I did not sleep at night, as they often started pouring on me at this time of day.
These youth poems have never been published — they disappeared during a renovation. My husband accidentally threw them along together with demolition waste in the trash. I was offended, but soon it was forgotten, a new series of poems began, which I later published.
My first textbooks were written in urgent need in the early nineties of the last century. In the summer, the students of elite Moscow universities began to come to me in droves, after failing to pass exams in English or Spanish.
They were sent for an autumn retake of the exams, and I needed to teach them a one-year, or sometimes a two-year course, in two or three summer months.
They came with zero level knowledge, unable to read or write without clue words in brackets at all. Without the hint words in the textbook, they could not have studied in principle. At first, I allowed them to spoil the textbooks of other authors, inscribing translation or transcription over the foreign words.
Then I realized that the program of those textbooks could not be laid out in two or three months, and decided to write my English and Spanish textbooks while teaching those students.
I had been writing series of exercises for them all the summer, testing their effectiveness in practice, after it I improved them from lesson to lesson, from student to student. Finally, two very strong, powerful textbooks in the series of © Linguistic Reanimator were written.
A miracle happened right in front of my eyes. The textbooks literally saved the students from getting out of the elite university, rescued from backpacking in the army.
It was difficult and painstaking to write those textbooks, I was incredibly tired for the day, but there was nowhere to go. I understood very well that if I stopped halfway then, my students would fail the retake. Of course, I could not let that happen, and I worked hard like a demon, like a field hand, there’s no other word.
But after the textbooks had been written, I promised myself that I would never mess around with writing again. However, the ways of the Lord are inscrutable. A certain amount of time passed, six months, perhaps, and they again began to come to me, the students with serious knowledge gaps.
They also needed the textbooks to solve their particular problems. And I had to write again. That process went on forever and endlessly, it has been going so far, for all my life, since 1991, when I began to teach foreign languages.
It’s like some hideous trick of fate — at first, I wrote textbooks through the motions and laziness, daily going over myself and making me work. Then I got so used to the process, I got involved in it, and could no longer exist without writing.
Poems and textbooks smoothly turned into prose. It also began to pour from heaven, like poetry. But it was easier to negotiate with it. Prose was more humane to me, it let me sleep. All that flew in was left in my head, not being forgotten as long as circumstances and lack of time required.
