The Miss Dennis School of Writing

Alice Steinbach (b. 1933) is ~ freelance writer whose essays and travel sketches often deal with what she calls "lessons from a woman's life." As a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1985, Steinbach wrote a column about her ninth-grade creative writing teacher. Revised as an essay-essays are "much more complete" than columns, says Steinbach-it became the title piece in a collection of personal essays, The Miss Dennis School of Writing (1996). Here the "lesson" is both a writing lesson and a life lesson. Miss Dennis taught that good descriptive writing (her specialty) makes the reader see what the writer sees. 'She also taught her students to find their unique personal voices. Steinbach's distinctive voice can be heard in her vivid descriptions of her old teacher. It is a voice, she says, that "tends to look at people with a child's eye."