Boston in Books

By Suzanne Westhues

It’s been almost eighteen years since we moved back to Boston from Finland. We were a young family back then. We painted the shutters, replaced the windows and filled the drafty walls with insulation. We built raised vegetable beds in the backyard, painted the walls terracotta and gently washed out the moonshine jars left at the foundation from the original builders. 

The Boston house where I live went up in 1928, months before the big Wall Street crash. Four children grew up here in the 1930s. In the 2000s, two more children took up those bedrooms and played in forts in the snowy backyard. 

I missed a lot of other places when we moved here. The decades passed anyway.

I collect the scenes from the life of an unpublished writer living in Boston. 

Shooting stars and candlelight. Small overcrowded rock and folk clubs to get through the overcast winter days. My own city is more a foreign country than anywhere else I’ve lived. 

Among other things, Boston is known as the “spirit of America.” Home to the Park Street Church, the Old State House, and the Granary Burial Grounds. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I pass character actors dressed as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams offering pay-what-you-can tours, while repurposed amphibious vehicles take tourists around town and down the Charles River. Although our streets and neighborhoods still have Native American names, there is little trace of the origins of these lands.

Nevertheless, I am grounded here, and like anyone else, I invent the city for myself. 

Last fall I got to teach a literature elective called “Boston in Books” to first year college students.

Oftentimes when you see “Boston” classes offered in university courses, it tends to only show the Revolutionary War stories, transcendentalist seat of higher education; yet there are many visions of Boston from books, movies, song lyrics, poetry, and films. The Boston that we see in our own lives is subject to whether you grew up here or are studying and working here, all of us have slightly different pictures. Boston is a complicated city with different neighborhoods and communities. The greater Boston area is divided by race, class, ethnicity and politics. 

To some, Boston is nostalgic with landscapes of beaches, neighborhoods and restaurants. 

To others, it’s a college town with a healthy artistic community. 

For still more, it’s just a place to leave.

The three required books were Caucasia by Danzy Senna, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri and On Beauty by Zadie Smith. 

I choose the books out of a shared passion for triple-deckers and the desire to have discussions about this complicated city. It’s a last minute add to the college classes, and I only have about ten students.

We talk busing, segregated neighborhoods, Harvard and MIT and Southie.

At the end of the class, each of them gives a student-led presentation of their own texts that have something to do with Boston. I tell them (and I mean it) that I want to collect future texts for next year’s class. 

They are a diverse group of students themselves, some live downtown and others commute in. 

One student lives with his ninety-year-old grandmother in Weymouth Landing, the South Shore, the geographic region stretching south and east of Boston toward Cape Cod—sometimes called the “Irish Riviera.” He gives his presentation on three songs, two by the Dropkick Murphys “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” and “4-15-13” and one “MTA” by the Kingston Trio. These are familiar songs, if you follow local sports. 

Some of the presentations are romantic, others critical. 

Another girl chooses “Dirty Water” by the Standells, a song played after every local team’s victory, “For Boston” by the Hold Steady and “Lost in Boston” by the Standells. 

Another chooses “Ladies of Cambridge” by Vampire Weekend and “Fenway Lights” by the Digbees, Beacon Street” by Nancy Griffiths. 

One more chooses Manchester by the Sea, and two more choose Patriots’ Day. Another chooses Good Will Hunting and one more chooses Miracles from Heaven, a Christian movie with Queen Latifah and Jennifer Garner,

The final student to present is a quiet, serious young woman who also lives locally and commutes. She sits at the far end of the conference table, barely making eye contact with me. She always arrives on time, masked and is well-prepared, but she doesn’t always volunteer in class discussions. She chooses three poems: “Boston Ode” by Porsha Olayiwola, “boston (an unlikely love poem)” by Regie Gibson, and “617” by Alondra Bobadilla. The poems are critical of the transplants and the college students who come here to study. For the most part, my students have gotten along with each other really well, enjoyed each other’s presentations, and it’s only on the last day, that suddenly the divisions in the room, something we haven’t discussed in a personal way, become more obvious in Alondra Bobadilla’s poem, “617.”

It’s this line that gets the attention of my class: “a college student that doesn’t know this city like they [the locals] do, living in a luxury apartment that they only dream to move into with the five children that they can barely feed and the children’s lips only know one word: hungry.” 

The poems are powerful and passionate, but they call attention to social class, something we have discussed abstractly in the books but not recognized in one another.    

There is a silence in the room that I haven’t noticed before and then someone volunteers: “I don’t know how to express this exactly right but I don’t really like that line.” She looks at me. “I think the college students  add a lot to everything. It’s kind of not fair.” 

The  quiet student is a peacemaker, always ready to agree with a peer, even if sometimes I sense that she doesn’t. “Yeah, I mean. That’s one person’s perspective, right? I agree with you.”

This is how all my first year students communicate with one another with phrases like “I agree” or “you’re right,” yet all the presentations show the differences in their mindsets, origins and obsessions.

“Are you able to share how you discovered these three poems?” I ask, teacherly.

“Yeah. I was youth poet laureate for my town. I have met all of these people, and they’re all just as cool as they seem in these videos.” She stands in front of the white board. 

I meant what I said when I told my students that I wanted their choices of Boston texts, rather than only mine; yet after watching them, I realize that we all create the cities we live in based on where we’re also coming from and what obsesses us. Everyone still kind of stayed in their own world in the presentations. 

At the end of the class, I wonder if they realize that also. 

Boston isn’t Boston. Boston is the eyes from where you see it.

Suzanne Westhues (she/her) has been writing all her life, and she has had the lucky circumstances to be able to teach English literature and writing since 1995. She has taught and lived in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic, Helsinki, Finland and Boston. She has run preschool story hours and taught American literature in Finland. In Boston she has taught first year students from all over the world. She is one of the hosts of Waywards Drop-In on Thursday nights.