Wind & Children:
An Interview with Linda Scheller
by Gary Thomas

Congratulations on the publication of Wind and Children, Linda.  This is a vital, vibrant, and revelatory book, in which the relationships between children and teachers, children and adults, and the capacity for discovery and wonder are splendidly explored.  Also, the doubts and delights, losses and liberations we adults who were children experience as aching and alleviation are evinced here in narratives of bigotry, empathy, sensuality, ancestral communiqués, and nature expressing her essential, exquisite, harsh truths.

What was the impetus and inspiration for this collection?

The 36 years I devoted to teaching 5th and 6th graders inspired this poetry collection. During that time and afterwards in retirement, I wrote as a necessary response to distressing or epiphanic situations and magical or shocking events. I loved teaching and witnessing my students’ satisfaction in their accomplishments, the excitement of discovery, and the creativity that flourished in the classroom. At the same time, I was acutely aware that many students suffered from overwhelming physical, social, and emotional needs. I went into teaching as a naïve 24-year-old and quickly learned that our national resources and political will are cruelly inadequate when it comes to meeting the needs of children and families. It’s no secret that America has an appalling number of children living in extreme poverty who come to school suffering from hunger, trauma, homelessness, and lack of health care. What people may not understand is how profoundly poverty affects children’s lives and in tandem, their learning outcomes. Test scores don’t tell the whole story. The impetus for this collection is my ardent desire to facilitate a more compassionate perspective and catalyze readers to participate in the enactment of policies, practices, and resources that strengthen families and support children.

Your two section divider epigraphs are from “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley.  Can you say more about how these relate to your title and theme?

The wind is a powerful archetype for both unstoppable force and creative inspiration, as in Shelly’s words “Destroyer and preserver.” Shelly contrasts the sweeping away of old, dead leaves with the soft breath of spring, and that dichotomy led me to divide Wind and Children into two sections, autumn/winter and summer/spring. It’s important to note that summer was not so much a vacation for many of my students as it was a windless, searing spell of two months without air conditioning or the school breakfasts and lunches on which many poor families depend. In this poetry collection, summer manifests as cabin fever experienced by a teacher trapped by the awareness of student suffering that she can do little if anything to mitigate.

“Olivero Road” is a powerful opening poem, with lines like

                        the boy
                        carries a rifle
                        beside his flowering pride
                        slight shoulders squared over thin hips

                        swinging his weaponry before him
           and
                        the sunset
                        a raw throat
                        screaming

Such particularity and evocation of a larger world within the children’s realm of individual fears, wonders, and promise carries through the whole book.  In “Ramon,” you write

                        A yellow #2 pencil waits
                        in the hand of the teacher beside his desk.
                        You can write anything, she says,
                        anything at all.

Can you speak to your own experience as a teacher in your intense observation skills and empathy?  I am thinking of the lines in “Look Back in Wonder:”

                        It was my art and atonement, my debt
                        to the world repaid in service and hope.
                        For every note placed on my desk,
                        for every poem shared, for every smile
                        of comprehension, I was doubly blessed,
                        for I was their teacher and this, my joy.

For me, teaching was much more than a profession. I’m profoundly grateful to my students and their families for teaching me to be a better person. Despite the challenges they faced in their lives, challenges unimaginable to me prior to becoming a teacher, my students were paragons of strength, and I was frequently awed by the selfless dedication of their families to their children’s well-being. During the school day, our class felt like another family—a family with 32 kids! Giving them not just knowledge but a sense of belonging and hope for a better future was my imperative.

The children in your book witness and experience brutalities, bewilderments, and beauties.  There are other lessons learned than those in textbooks or Power Points.  In “Midweek”—that halfway hump day tipping point known by any teacher—these lines resonate:

                       Cisco chokes his friend in line
                        but tells me he was only playing.

                        It’s only Thursday.
                        Even the oldest teachers
                        no longer blame the wind.

In “Mother of Thousands,” you reflect on the contributions a teacher makes:

                        we shared cafeteria food,
                        a few good laughs, fear,
                        and our diminishing innocence.

At the graveyard of a former student, loved ones and possible former classmates (“those who were left”) move toward the teacher—

                        For the first time then
                        I held them in my arms
                        as they wept and trembled
                        and asked the teacher
                        why
                        and I could only say
                        I’m sorry,
                        I don’t know.

In “Weathered,” these simple but charming images etch themselves into the reader’s consciousness:

                        Wind and children, wet paint, a flight of birds.

and

                        The clouds arrange themselves, a chorus against a blue
                        drop. Yellow chrysanthemums nod. A family of ten
                        sits around a grave as if at table, giving thanks.

What are the lessons you have learned from teaching that you hope your readers can relate to?

From teaching I learned the universality of love and the importance of community. Many of my students came from different countries and often spoken a language other than English at home. I was very fortunate to learn a little about their different cultures but saw clearly there are more commonalities than differences between us all. Some of the parents had never attended school as children or were only able to do so for a few years, and they were extraordinarily supportive of their children’s education. I hope my readers can relate to what these parents taught me about the power and value of education.

In these lines from “Make of This Day What You Will:”

                        The almond trees preen in pinkish white silk
                        and drop small handkerchiefs. Flirtations flutter
                        and settle in soft drifts, tingeing the evening air
                        with honey and lust. Two hawks swirl overhead.

there is a sense of both presence and anticipation.  What is your connection to the natural world, and
how does it inform your style of writing?

When I was a child, my father worked for the Schenectady YMCA which gave us access to camps in the Adirondack Mountains. Those summers and weekends spent in the woods instilled in me a deep reverence and appreciation for nature. Trees, animals, streams, birds, snow, rain, and wind will always delight and inspire me, offering a way to experience and contemplate the wonders of life. At the same time, I’m painfully aware of the devastation caused by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, pollution, and species annihilation. My grief and frustration at human disregard for nature and our planet is given voice in poems such as “Colloquium of Fossils,” “Escape: No Reservations,” and “Parse the Sky.”

In several poems—e. g., “Harvest,” “Pods of Rain and Darkness,” “This Is How”—you address the ethical and moral injustices faced by those who are “The Others” to too many of us:   immigrants and their families, minorities, creatures of the sea and sky, etc.  What is your philosophy of justice and compassion?

Justice and compassion are predicated on understanding. Knowledge of history and its ongoing ramifications as well as the development of imagination lead to that understanding. We must be able to imagine the plight of others and comprehend the underlying causes that contribute to their suffering in order to empathize and act on their behalf. I believe we should listen with a sincere desire to understand and commit ourselves fully to the struggle for justice.

There are so many images, characters, and energies in this book that haunt me and that I would love to discuss with you; for example, this from “New Year’s Day:”

                                                                 Wind,

                        when you stop stripping shingles
                        and toppling barns, speak to me,
                        teach me to fly.

What is there in the concept of wind as an agent of change that still speaks to you after writing this book?  To what other change agents should we be paying attention and acting upon?

There is one line in “Ode to the West Wind” where Shelly most perfectly and beautifully expresses my conception of wind: “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.” For me, wind is the voice of time reminding me of our human frailty and mortality. As the breath of our planet, wind speaks to our need to care for the earth and one another. Kindness, compassion, and determination are the change agents we need to strip away prejudice, apathy, and ignorance. We can and must create and sustain a more understanding and responsive existence.


Thank you, Linda, for this testament to the human capacity to hurt and heal, witness and avoid, and feel, as Alan Watts once opined, “Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.”  Thank you for reminding us of the wind and children in our lives.

Linda Scheller is the author of the poetry collection Fierce Light (FutureCycle Press) and a chapbook, Halcyon. A widely published poet, playwright, and book reviewer, she is a founding board member of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and a member of the National League of American Pen Women. Honors include the Catherine Cushman Leach Poetry Award, first place prizes in the California Federation of Chaparral Poets Contest, finalist for the Washington Prize and Quercus Review Book Prize, and a Best of the Net nomination.

Gary Thomas grew up on a peach farm outside Empire, California. Prior to retirement, he taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years and junior college English for seven, sharing and discussing at least one poem every day with his students. He has presented poetry workshops for statewide organizations, festivals, and conferences. He has had poems published in In the Grove, Time of Singing, and The Comstock Review, among others, and in the anthologies More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. He is currently vice president of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. He has a full-length collection, All the Connecting Lights, forthcoming in July 2022, published by Finishing Line Press.