On Writing I’m History…but do I repeat myself? by Lee Knapp

By Lee Knapp

Somewhere on my old MacBook Pro that ran on Snow Leopard OS are dozens of files from around 2009 entitled “Tucker Book,” where I sketched out a vague idea about my old high school being a microcosm of America itself. With my marriage in turmoil, in 2003 I returned to teach history there.

I found that my once fairly homogenous bicentennial alma mater had undergone a huge demographic shift.  Like America itself; same real estate, different population. That was also true of me in that same time span. Then I was still married, still teaching, and still enjoying my upper arms in a tank top without the weird skin tessellations that seemed to appear on them in my sleep one night in March of 2015.  

In the same way that evidently we humans shed all of our cells in 80 to 100 days, thus creating an entirely new body about every three months, this book’s body morphed into something new about every three years, until it became frozen in time between two skins in June of 2024. As I changed, so did it. It began as a somewhat impersonal project that relied on historical research into the changes in my home state of Virginia, and how those changes caught up to my old, once nearly all-white high school. Like all writers know, rabbit holes beckoned.

As a history teacher, especially one who lived through much of Virginia’s racist past, I was intrigued and astonished at the machinations and quotations of its leaders beginning after the Civil War and lasting all the way through my high school years, especially around school desegregation. I read for hours and hours on the redoing of the state constitution in 1901; spent days on the multi-race Readjuster movement and its short-lived dominance; lost my entire fifties, seemingly, hanging around the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s editor James Kilpatrick and his contributions to the Massive Resistance movement and all things white and male and Southern. 

Then, after thirty-two years of marriage, I got divorced. 

It had been six or seven years after that when I realized that I had not told the reader—very important concept for a writer, yes, that someone might actually read this thing—why I needed to return to the classroom after a seventeen-year hiatus. That led to my personal rabbit hole. I retraced my entire marriage and wove its progression and demise into the four sections of the book, which became its through line.

Surprisingly, although maybe not to my muse, my personal history and its lessons began to parallel concepts and issues that applied to “big” history. It seemed a little awkward at first, to mix in my own marital narrative thread to the ones I established around specific themes like my faith, race in Richmond, and my earlier obsession with my Southern grandmother. Then I realized that I was hung up on chronology and a more on-the-nose, almost didactic style. I needed to trust my reader to make the connections between the seemingly disparate storylines—public and private—in a more subtle, atmospheric, and personal way. Based on the feedback, it seems to have worked.   

However, this led to dynamiting my entire finished product and starting over so I could weave in my personal history. This allowed me to explore how we are tempted to paint both our personal and collective pasts in either an overly sunny yellow or a deeply murky brown, all based on how chapters of it ended. We all struggle to look back with the proper historicity, viewing it as we did in real time, not later. And to not judge our past selves too harshly from the enlightenment of our current selves.

When the idealism that often abounds in the early days of a civilization— or a family— begins to confront an unpleasant and unsustainable current reality, disillusionment and anger and shame are hard to tame. This held true in recounting uncomfortable, unflattering moments in key past relationships. I struggled with how much to say and how to say it, examining my motive with each one, making sure it would answer the reader’s questions without trying to win my case, or something. With a spiritual background that promoted humility, and a familial role as an appeaser, it was difficult to walk that line. 

I sent this revised version to a very influential acquaintance who agreed to read it. She sent it right back saying it was way too long. I was embarrassed but took heed. I needed to kill my darlings. I promptly committed mass murder of about 45,00 of them, about a third of the manuscript. She was completely correct. I miss those little ones, but the reader won’t. 

Another situation that changed since I started this thing fifteen years ago, was the sudden suspicion and fear of what happens in an American classroom, particularly one that teaches US history. I have been up front in one of those rooms off and on since 1980, and despite the furor, there is nothing to fear. Nobody wants current politics in a memoir, and I avoided that. I just painted the picture with an authoritative and honest account of the sweetness of a truly diverse classroom.

—

Educator and entrepreneur Lee Knapp was born in 1957, the loudest reverberation of the Baby Boom. She was raised in suburban Richmond, Virginia where the symbols and legacy of the Civil War defined that city. After graduating from high school in America’s bicentennial year, she went on to study history at the historic College of William and Mary, where it was not uncommon to see Patrick Henry, George Wythe, or James Monroe throwing back beers at the Greenleaf Cafe before riding their mopeds off towards Jamestown Road. Despite a professor’s admonition that “there’s no future in history,” Knapp’s life has been unavoidably circumscribed by it.  

After graduating from college, Knapp began teaching history in her home county in 1980 and by 1986 had three sons. She took a seventeen year hiatus from education during which she began an art business, creating whimsical teapots, relief sculptures of area colleges, and precise architectural replicas of private homes out of clay. 

In early 2003, she published a book of fifteen essays through Baker Books called Grace in the First Person. In the fall of that year, she returned to a classroom at her alma mater to teach modern European and US history, and Theory of Knowledge, essentially epistemology, as part of the rigorous International Baccalaureate program. In 2008, she launched her second business, grammarRULES! (grammarstuff.com), a line of plates, mugs, and greeting cards that addresses grammatical pet peeves with a wry, slightly judgmental tone. 

Knapp retired from public education in 2021 and now lives in rural Virginia, reveling in the beauty of the horses and mountains across the street. She also revels in the beauty of the lives of her sons and their families, who still endlessly fascinate her.

I’m History…but do I repeat myself? Lee Knapp

I’m History…but do I repeat myself? New Social Studies at my old High School

“How quaint…or is this kind of lame?” thought artist Lee Knapp after she half-heartedly returned to teach history at her old public high school. Because her private history was in a state of upheaval, it seemed she had no choice.

In her entertaining memoir, I’m History…but do I repeat myself?, recently retired public school teacher Lee Knapp recounts the effects that the entirely new population on her old familiar campus had on her life. As a metaphor of America itself, her once nearly all-white alma mater—outside the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, no less—now boasted being one of the most diverse in the state, a state that led the Massive Resistance movement in the fifties to prevent this very thing from ever happening.

With deftness and humor, Knapp explores how her return expanded, if not exploded, the foundations of an identity that she had been constructing since graduating in America’s bicentennial: her evangelicalism, her Southern heritage, her suburban community. Into this reexamination, Knapp engagingly weaves in moments from big history that, as Twain reminds us, may not repeat, but certainly rhyme with our current moment.

Throughout these four sections, Knapp also traces the unexpected trajectory of her personal history. Beginning life as a devout, idealistic newlywed twenty-something, she ended up as a disoriented, backslidden newly divorced fifty-something. Disoriented, that is, until Knapp’s personal life was also reconstructed on that campus by a totally unforeseen, second-chance romance with a widowed colleague.

I’m History ponders the struggle between hope and fear, tradition and change, narrow and open perspectives in our collective, as well as our personal, histories.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing