Margins

      This book, not really a novel, really isn't not a novel. It's not really a treatise on education either, but it's not really not a treatise. This book, the kind traditional publishing houses rank as deformed, is the sort that ends writing careers rather than starts them. Ends lucrative careers, that is.
      Is.
      Do you like the word "is"? Or would you call it a flat tire?
      The English language apparently can't get along without is. My writing career, rich and famous that it has made me, can't get along without Margins. I could call Margins an antinovel. Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's Waves, and Beckett's Molloy and Murphy: not really novels. Ionesco's Bald Soprano: an antiplay. Matter/antimatter; hydrogen/antihydrogen; electron/positron; proton/antiproton; neutron/antineutron. Matter + antimatter, physicists tell us, produces energy. Trekkies tell us that too. I could call this work an antinovel, but, really, it's part novel, part not. I hope the part + part not unite in the reader's mind to produce thought energy. Lots of thought energy.
      At any rate, this book is the end of my career.

Prologue

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Book I

Chapter 1

            "They're safe," one aunt says,
            But the boy only watches
            Them eat those mushrooms.

      Our class in the abandoned girl's bathroom with a pink door had begun. A shortage of space existed district wide. A grade-eight student who apparently had no friends whatsoever had set the curtains in the library at Central High ablaze last year, turning the entire wooden structure into a pile of smoky ashes. Twin-engine planes bombed it repeatedly with orange powder, but the flames rose like Alexander the Great. They climaxed in a refractive heat swell that people felt for a block all around the school; then they retreated quickly into benign bits of fire that firemen with hoses easily conquered.
      The pink-doored cuboid looked better than the room without windows in the basement of my small school. In that sub-room, the building's main sewer pipe ran from ceiling to floor, like a crooked, rusty pillar. I could have chosen that rectangular place for my classroom, but it looked like a tomb.
      For a time, my students and I shared the "pink" room with three toilets, but after four requisitions to the maintenance department, they finally disappeared. One Tuesday we were still in the "only diarrhea-proof classroom in the district," as I sometimes told my secondary alternate students. The next day the toilets and the pink stalls had been removed, replaced by three plywood sewer plugs. The Grabber, as some students called the speckled fungus that had grown and made itself at home in one of the bowls, was gone. Forensically, the only elements that betrayed the room as a genuine classroom were the size, the pink door and window trim, the many capped pipes that stuck out of the walls, and the aluminum vent that joined our space with two other bathrooms on the same floor of the building with no name. One bathroom served boys and men, the other, girls, women, and staff
      Once our red-faced, wrinkly Superintendent of Schools told me laughingly, "At the Board Office nobody knows what to call this old building. Myself, I call it The Barn. Ha!"
      "Listen," Aldous, who occupied one of the seven well-scratched wooden desks, said, "You can hear someone taking a whizz."
      Radomira groaned. She was a beautiful 17-year-old; she had enormous ears that stuck through her long, brunette hair.
      I was teaching seven students in my 8:30 secondary alternate class.
      Aldous put down his novel, The Outsiders. He was looking up at the vent.
      "Where's Kaarlo?" I asked. I had just noticed that while I had been marking Kaarlo's math unit one pre-test on fractions that he must have slipped again through the pink doorway to the hallway.
      A tinkling sound exited the vent.
      "That's disgusting!" Radomira said. She rolled her eyes.
      Then sounded a splash.
      This could have been a perfect teachable moment to define onomatopoeia.
      "I'm going to barf!" she exclaimed.
      Aldous was hysterical with laughter. Except for Radomira, who had run out of our class and was stomping down the hallway, and for Kaarlo who I needed to locate, the other four students in their wall-facing desks had also grown hysterical. I tried to look sober. Not that I'd been drinking. But my face often betrays me. I could not have been a spy or a bank robber or a career criminal; my face would have been a portrait of "arrest me, I'm guilty." In the end, I had to release myself with a large "Ha!" followed by a pseudo-serious, "I'll put in another requisition to get the vent covered. Or sound proofed."
      "I should write a story about this one day," I told myself.
      "Try to get back to work," I said, rising from my pre-World War II desk to locate Radomira and Kaarlo.
      I passed Arlene, the short-haired speech therapist who shared the top floor with my, and an adult education, class. Her eyes usually went round when she saw me or my secondary alternate students. Between clients, she often sat outside on the steps treated with a cyanide compound that delays rotting. I was grateful that none of my students liked to lick them. She often ate yogurt and fruit, peaches usually. But once I or any of my students appeared in her field of vision, she generally stopped eating, glared, and immediately returned to her laboratory of remedies and posters of tongue and mouth positions for various consonant, vowel, diphthong, and digraph sounds.
      "Morning, Arlene," I said.
      "Your students are spitting on the steps again," she told me. "How am I supposed to sit on the steps when there are horrible gobs everywhere?"
      Sometimes Arlene reminded me of a gay Peter Pan.
      "I'll certainly address that," I told her, heading for the outside doorway, passing the single-toilet staff'/girls'/women's bathroom that certainly was occupied.
      Outside, the autumn sting of cool northern air and the smell of mildewy leaves greeted me as I stood on the steps, that were not gobless, I confirmed, searching for Radomira and Kaarlo.
      I heard a throaty "Blaaaaagh!" from around the stuccoed corner of The Barn.
      I discovered the source of the noise. Radomira, doubled over, was pretending to vomit.
      "When you've recovered," I said, trying not to smirk, "get back to your Social Studies work, Radomira."
      "My mother says I'm getting a sub-standard education. Our class is in a #%&6@!!! bathroom."
      "Radomira," I reminded her, "try to remember to use a synonym. Instead of that word, use freaking, or some other synonym."
      She muttered several exclamatory statements under her breath, but nevertheless climbed the green-treated steps to re-enter the school.
      I heard what sounded like footsteps on the flat roof.
      "Kaarlo! Is that you on the roof again?" The sounds stopped. "Kaarlo! I told you not to walk around up there. It's dangerous!"
      I hoped I'd heard the sound of a raven walking on the roof. They often walked about up there, sounding like "aliens trying to claw their way into our classroom," I had sometimes said to the students. Some, except for Radomira, had laughed.

      I returned to my classroom to hear, through the vent, the staff'/girls'/women's toilet flush and to find Aldous standing on his desk, pretending to play riffs on an imaginary electric guitar.
      "My mother knows a school board trustee," Radomira said. "She's going to complain about this place. You just wait and see."
      I settled the kids down by focusing their attention on the scene outside. Thunderheads, visible through the one clear window--the other two were opaque as most bathroom widows are--were accumulating in the southern sky. A teachable moment. "How many believe that lightning travels from the ground to the sky?"
      Kaarlo, however, interrupted the survey. Under ordinary circumstances, the first two things, I think, that most people would notice about Kaarlo would be his naturally platinum hair and variety of pimples. But that day, his contorted shape out-advertised his other features. Bent at the hip, leaning against the doorway, looking white in spite of his complexion troubles, and breathing in gulps, he blurted, "Mr. Landers, take me to the hospital!" With his hand, he wiped blood off the end of his nose.
      The thunderhead lost its appeal. We had been a clump of 14 eyes, studying the outdoors, but now we were about faced, studying Kaarlo.
      "What's wrong?" I asked, stepping across the wavy, ancient tiles called a floor. "What happened?"
      "Take me to the hospital!" He moaned. His usually pale lips looked terribly white. "I fell off the roof! I bounced off the rail on the steps! I woke up on the ground, doing the chicken!"
      "I told you not to go up there!"
      "Take me to the hospital!"
      "Who will look after my class, if I take him to the hospital?" I wondered. "Arlene?" I didn't think so. My principal? "Hm." He resided in his oak-trimmed office, about a ten-minute drive across town to the newly constructed Board Office Building, known as B.O.B. As for the skinny adult education teacher next door, the balding, middle-aged man with the gently humpy back (Tom), he wasn't very happy about sharing the building with my students. Last week, one of them--"One of your students did this!" he had said, and I had tended to think he was right--had mixed Comet cleaner from the sink cupboard with the sugar that some adult students used in their coffee. One large student, a lady with an enormous voice, screamed about the weird green bits she'd discovered in her coffee, after she'd discovered its horrible taste. Class detectives noted Comet spilled on the counter beside the percolator and Comet in the Styrofoam sugar cup.
      "Your students are no longer aloud to buy coffee from our class. In fact, none of your students are allowed to enter my classroom for any reason whatsoever."
      "I'm going to phone your father," I told Kaarlo. I'd spoken to Mr. Hitchcock on the phone the day before, to ask him to make sure that Kaarlo stopped bringing his jackknife to school. Kaarlo had played with it in class, unnerving students, and gouging crevasses in his desk. Mr. Hitchcock had told me he had been working the graveyard shift at Rolco Sawmill--I'd woken him up--and that he wasn't impressed with his son's "incessant bloody #%&6@!!! behavior."

      Kaarlo sat on the steps, waiting for his father, moaning, pressing his hands to various parts of his abdomen, and frequently looking at them as if he might discover blood.
      I stood on the winter-broken cement below, waiting too, occasionally entering the school to check on my class. Fortunately, they worked on their individualized programs. They worked! Sometimes such days filled me with joy. Even Aldous had momentarily given up his virtual career as a lead guitarist.
      Radomira did ask me during one of my security sweeps, "Has the idiot died yet?"
      I exited the building to find Mr. Hitchcock standing in my place at the bottom of the stairs. He shook his head and stared at his son, his only child. Mr. Hitchcock had an enormous belly, providing his body on thin legs with a mushroom, or giant fungus, effect.
      Kaarlo painfully stood up. "I think I'm bleeding internally." Still bent at the hip, he shakily descended the gob-littered, weather-resistant steps. "Hurry up and take me to the hospital!"
      "What were you doing on the roof?" Mr. Hitchcock said, shaking his head once again.
      "I've told them repeatedly not to smoke on the roof," I said, wondering about my liability in this incident. But Mr. Hitchcock's next statement made me feel better.
      "That was a #%&6@!!! stupid thing to do! Do you think Mr. Landers has nothing better to do than drag me out of bed?"
      Back in the hallway, my step surprisingly light, I felt a need to share with an adult that one of my students had fallen off the roof. I passed my classroom and peered into Arlene's office/laboratory. Tom, the adult education teacher, seated on her desk, leaning towards her, almost kissing her on the lips, suddenly saw me. He immediately leaned back, arching his spine too quickly, falling off, and landing on his humpy back on the floor, his arms and legs sprawled in the air.
      "Oh, Tom!" Arlene blurted, fixing her short brownish hair that needed no fixing--as if doing that would erase the scene.
      I said, "Oops!" and returned to my students. They were complaining about a terrible smell emerging from the vent.

Chapter 2

            As the rain falls,
            Still the wet old woman
            Calls her cat.

      I ran three classes. 8:30 to 10:00 am, seven students; 10:15 to 11:45 am, seven; and 12:30 to 2:00 pm, seven. Efficiency. Twenty-one adolescents (grades 11 and 12) with moderate to severe socio-emotional issues, who each brought in more than twice the Ministry money that each "regular" high school student brought in.
      This was the 12:30 class. Kaarlo had returned to the 8:30 class four school days after a day in the hospital. He'd told us all about his bruised kidney and cracked ribs. The only significant reminder of his fall to earth was the big scab on his nose. Aldous had asked him whether he'd like to go have another smoke on the roof.
      It was just after 12:30. "Soon you students will be on your own, working out in the world. Let's talk about career paths. Maybe we can start with hearing about jobs you have had in the past."
      The students' desks strategically faced the walls, to help reduce gabbing. They seemed interested in career paths. They turned in their desks to face me at mine. Gabrellia blew a huge bubble of pink gum, which she withdrew from her mouth, tossing the wad into the garbage can. She had hair so black, thick, and shiny, it looked fabricated.
      "I worked at a Chinese restaurant last summer," she said. "I was a waitress. We served re-cycled rice."
      "Recycled rice?" I said. The others seemed interested in knowing what that was too.
      "Any plates with leftover rice--we had to scrape the rice into a big bowl the owner had in the back kitchen."
      "My word! You served that to other customers?" I said.
      Other students were aghast too.
      "Yup."
      "Didn't the Health Inspector ever come to inspect the place?"
      "I don't know. She did lots of other weird things too, like butcher meat in the kitchen. Sometimes it was hard to walk. The blood on the floor was so slippery. I actually fell once. I had to change my clothes, and the smell in that kitchen was so bad it made me want to barf."
      "Could I have ever gone to that restaurant?" I asked, cringing.
      "Have you ever been to Porksville?" she asked.
      "No."
      "Then I wouldn't worry about it."
      "I want to be a mortician," Dagmar said, with headphones from his Discman around his neck. "I think it would be neat to work on dead people."
      Vibol, who often looked as if he expected a pterodactyl to suddenly descend from above and carry him off as food, asked, "Why don't you ever take us on field trips? This school sucks. We never go anywhere."
      "I'm probably never going to take you guys anywhere," I said to myself. "That would be complicated with three different classes coming here each day," I said.
      "What's the matter?" Vibol asked. "Don't you trust us?"
      Arlene, clutching a one-serving-size plastic container of yogurt, and looking larger than usual in spite of her diminutive size, entered my classroom. "There are footprints on my car! Footprints! Someone has jumped on my car! "

      Outside, my students and I enjoyed our first field trip. Arlene pointed to two running shoe footprints imbedded in her almost new, fire engine-red Celica's hood. Her normally exactly fixed short hair appeared to have been pulled at various spots, creating several hair pinnacles that looked most incongruous on her.
      "One of your students did this," she said, her eyes jumpy. "I want to find out right now who did this." She glared at my horseshoe of students around the front of her car, and then she glared at me, waiting for an immediate solution.
      "What's going on out here," Tom said abruptly, flanking us from the rear.
      "One of Don's students has jumped off the roof and landed on my new car," Arlene said, with notable bitterness.
      "None of my students left my class for any reason," I said, "not even to go to the bathroom."
      "And you're sure about that, are you?" Arlene said sarcastically.
      "Yes," I said, a little coldly.
      "How can you be sure?" Tom said, his back looking much straighter than usual. "Your, your, your students run around here--like--like--chimpanzees."
      Vibol ducked, avoiding, I think, another pterodactyl.
      "What about your morning students?" Arlene asked. "This could have happened this morning."
      Pavlos, who had four nose rings, asked Tom whether he'd always had such a big mouth.
      "You insolent little--" He placed one hand on his balding head.
      "Why don't you stuff it in your ear, Mack, you hunchbacked dumb-ass."
      This was not going well.
      "Students, go back to class," I said." "And Pavlos, you can't insult staff."
      "Is that right?" he said. "I can't insult staff? If this wart can call me a chimpanzee, then I can call him anything I #%&6@!!! please. Maybe I should phone my dad and he should come down here and break this guy's arms and legs."
      Tom, shaken, abandoned his original chivalry, and retreated, but not before saying, "I'm reporting this to the superintendent."
      "You do that, and I'm reporting you to my dad," Pavlos said. "Maybe I should tell you what he does for a living."
      Arlene had begun to cry. She stormed back inside the school, behind Tom, muttering that the school had turned into a #%&6@!!! zoo.
      "Use a synonym," Gabrellia said. She tossed a wad of gum into her mouth.
      Vibol ducked. Sometimes I imagined him taken by talons to a prehistoric feast.
      "Back to class. Get back to work. I'll be along in a minute. Pavlos, stay behind."
      "Why? Are you going to lecture me?"
      After the other students lingeringly left, I spoke: "Pavlos, when you talk like that, you create problems for yourself, and for me."
      "If that weasel causes you any trouble, Don, you tell me, and my old man will fix him good."
      This was not a good time, it seemed, to discuss this matter further.

      I usually taught with the pink door open, to create the illusion that our classroom was bigger than it really was. But I had closed it. The outside world seemed peculiarly far away.
      "We're always the scapegoats," Pavlos said. "Right? The secondary alternate students. They're the criminals. In regular school, teachers picked on me. Principals picked on me. Students picked on me. Yeah, well--"
      "I threw a desk at a principal once," Babur said. He had a deep scar above one eyebrow. "He asked me, 'What the hell are you doing carrying that desk up those stairs?' I said, 'What the hell does it look like I'm doing?' He said, 'Bring it down here right now.' I said, 'You want it right now? Here then!' I threw the desk at him. I almost knocked his puny little head off."
      "Too bad you didn't," Pavlos said.
      I managed to direct the students to think again about career paths.
      "Gabrellia had told us about--recycled rice." There was groaning. "Does anybody else have--can anybody else tell us about a part-time job he or she has had?"
Babur said, "Sure, before when I lived in Vancouver, before my Mum and Dad split up and I moved here with my Mum and her moron boyfriend. Did you know he has a drain from his brain to his stomach because his brain cells make too much fluid? Ha!"
      "You had a part-time job in Vancouver?"
      "Yeah. Two of my buddies and I were cocaine addicts, and we broke into houses every night of the week to steal stereos, money, jewelry, anything that we could carry and run with.'
      "Babur!" I said.
      "Everybody down there does it. We were career criminals. We fenced our stuff for money, and we used the money to buy cocaine."
      "Everyday?"
      "Every night. I needed about $300 bucks a day to support my habit."
      "Were you a pimp too?" Pavlos asked.
      "I paid my debt to society," he said, defensively. "I spent three months in a youth detention centre. That's a nice way of saying a frickin jail."

Chapter 3

            "All right," she said,
            Lying back on her belly.
            "Do it yourself."

            "You're a real sweetheart,"
            He said, tossing a bottle
            Of sunscreen
            Into a red beach-bag.

            He leaned away from her
            And the white sun;
            He used an empty Coke bottle
            To draw a big circle in the
            Black sand:

            "I wish we'd never come here,"
            She said, trying not to
            Think of--

            "I'm going in." He stood up
            And dipped a foot into the hot sand
            Beside her striped towel.
            Then he raced to the water.

            "Don't bother to come back,"
            She said, raising her head,
            And she almost repeated it
            Loud enough for him to hear,
            But instead she wiped her
            Stinging eyes.

      During the 10:15 am class, the novelty of Qasim's hat had worn off. None of the other four students bothered to laugh anymore at the orange safety helmet that boasted a beer can on either side.
      "They're empty," he'd assured me, bending over at my desk to prove that both Labatt's were empty.
      Short Qasim was wiry, like a coat hanger. He was missing a front tooth from, he'd once told me, his sister throwing a jar of pickles at him, knocking it "clean off."
      "Why did she do that?" I'd asked.
      "I told her boyfriend that she was seeing three other guys. Aaaaaaaaha!"
      He'd seemed to think the lost tooth was worth it.
      Now that he'd moved on from the spectacle of his beer helmet, he, along with me and the other students, listened to the 10:30 CBC 3 newscast on the dinky class radio. This constituted our current events lesson.
      "Today in Prince Rupert, a mud slide," said the newsman in a pleasantly deep, calm voice, "sent the mansion of famous Canadian singer Chuck Dickens downhill into the mansion of his ex-wife movie star, Pariah Stompins. Both homes were completely destroyed--"
      Uilliam's entrance diverted our attention from the little plastic FM radio to Uilliam's face. He stood in the doorway, and said, "I got blowed up."
      Although Caucasian, Uilliam had enormous, deeply African lips. That was normal. But now he also had enormous bumps on his cheeks and forehead.
      "Uilliam, you look terrible," I said.
      "Remember I told you last week that I'd complained to my landlord that that dumpy cabin I rent smelled of gas, and he said I smoked too much pot to notice what anything smells like? Well, I guess he was wrong, wasn't he? I opened the front door last night and the place blew up. I got blowed right across the front yard and woke up on the sidewalk."
      I rose to turn off the radio, just as the newsman said the Prime Minister had been put in jail in Singapore for getting drunk and spitting on a policeman.
      "Goodness, Uilliam. You could have been killed."
      Everybody agreed. Uilliam could have been killed.
      "I just got out of the hospital."
      "Sit down," I told him. "You look a little shaky."
      "Yeah? I feel kind of faint."
      "Want a beer?" Qasim asked, pointing to his hat.
      I wanted to hear more about the story, but another student, the seventh student of the class, Xurxo, arrived. He was frowning, making his face appear narrower and longer than usual. "Um, Mr. Landers, sorry I'm late, um, could you come to talk to my dad?"
      "What's wrong, Xurxo?" I rose from my prehistoric desk, and as I followed Xurxo into the hallway, I told the other students, "Just stay there--Uilliam, tell them all about what happened."
      Xurxo's stride quickened. Soon he was outside, his lanky legs descending the green steps.
      "Wait up," I said. "What's the hurry?"
      "Dad, here's Mr. Landers."
      His father climbed out of the cab of the unbelievably rusted-out Ford pick up. He looked like Jed Clampett. Still in the cab were two others, a Labrador and a lady. The Labrador sat on the bench seat and looked somewhat in charge. The lady, I figured, was Xurxo's mother. One of her eyes, crossed, looked directly at her nose. The Labrador began to lick the dashboard.
      Xurxo stood fidgeting beside his father.
      "Mr. Thompson, what's wrong? Xurxo seems all wound up about something."
      Mr. Thompson shoved his fist into his shirt pocket, withdrawing dentures. He opened his mouth wide, inserted them and then smacked his lips. "Something's gone wrong," he told me.
      "Yes, yes." I looked back and forth between Xurxo and his father's mouth.
       Suddenly the Labrador jumped out the open door of the drivers's side, trotted to Tom's orange Aveo, and urinated on one of the wheels. Then it began licking various parts of the car
      "Hurry up and tell him," Mrs. Thompson said, sticking her head out the driver's side.
      I noticed nervous-looking Xurxo frequently glanced at the lump in the back of the pick up. A canvas tarp covered something bumpy, and rocks placed here and there apparently had kept the canvas from blowing away during the drive to town.
      Mr. Thompson wiped his lips dry with the back of one hand. "Something's gone wrong."
      "Oh, for Pete's sake," Mrs. Thompson said, looking at her nose and me at the same time. "Tell him your fawther died sitting on the crapper and he's right there in the pick up, looking a pretty as a tulip."
      Xurxo jumped back as Mr. Thompson pulled the canvas off his father, causing a cascade of rocks that thumped noisily on the metal bed.
      "Mr. Thompson--what?--why--ah!--why have you brought your dead father to school?"
      He clicked his dentures. "Don't know what to do with him."
      The corpse's eyes, wide, gazed lifelessly up at ravens flying by. That was the first time I'd seen a dead person in the flesh.
      "Mr. Thompson! You can't drive all the way to town with a corpse in your vehicle!"
      "That's what I told Mawther here. Told her we should just bury him in the orchard, but no, oh, no, she says, it's against the law to bury your own dead."
      I hoped Uilliam was keeping the students busy.
      "That don't make no sense to me. If I can't bury my own pop, then what am I supposed to do with him?" Again he clicked his dentures.
      Xurxo turned around, standing with his back to the corpse. He had a hole in the rump of his jeans. He had green underwear.
      "Ask him what we're supposed to do," Mrs. Thompson said. "He works for the government. He should know what we're supposed to do. Ask him if we should take Grandpa to city hall."
      "I thought dead people in town go to the corner."
      "Corner?" I asked. "What corner?"
      "The corner that works in one of those vaults that stink in the basement of the hospital."
      "Coroner. You mean coroner."
      "That's what I said," he told me.
      "Well how on earth are we supposed to get him down to the basement?" Mrs. Thompson said. "Don't you think that'll look a little bit odd?" She rolled her good eye. "What do you think you're going to do, carry him on your shoulder and wander around the hospital looking for the bloody basement?"
      "The funeral place. We'll take him to the funeral place. We passed it back there a couple of blocks." He was growing frustrated. He took out his dentures, placed them in his pocket, and blurted, "We should have buried him like I said!"
      "Let's take him to city hall and ask one of the secretaries what to do with him. This Mr. Landers from the government certainly don't know bugger all."
      "I think you should take him to the police station," I said. I was developing a crazy hysterical feeling deep in my throat that wanted to turn into laughter, or perhaps a scream. I wasn't sure I could contain it.
      Xurxo sheepishly opened the passenger's door and climbed inside. "Let's take him to the police station," he said gruffly.
      The Labrador jumped inside and sat on Xurxo. It barked.
      "So that's the way it's going to be," Mrs. Thompson said. "Let's take him to the police station," she mimicked. "You won't listen to your mawther, but you'll listen to your high-falootin teacher."
      Mr. Thompson began rearranging the canvas when I heard a familiar voice behind me.
      "Don! One of your students has fainted!" Arlene ran down the stairs, reinforcing the immediacy of the problem. "He's lying on your classroom floor!"
      That was when she peered into the back of the pick up. She was a short lady, but tall enough to see the corpse of Grandpa Thompson.
      "What! What is that?" She threw up her arms. "My lord! That's, that's--"
      That's when she fainted.

Copyright © 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without written permission from the author. You may contact the author at landersdon@hotmail.com.

[1] Various sections of this work have appeared in one or more publications: in Canada, The Artist's Journal, Wildflower, The Journal of Secondary Alternate Education, Brady Magazine, CanTeach, The Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Canadian content, The Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine, *spark, Tale Spinners, Firm Noncommittal, Green's Magazine, Western People, Kids Are Great Press, Over the Edge, The Westcoast Reader, Coffee Break, The Cariboo Observer, The Brunswickan, The Speaker, Ahoy, and The Canadian Children's Annual; in Singapore, Students On The Net; in Finland, Muuna Takeena; in New Zealand, Deepsouth; in South Africa, The English Teachers' Online Network of South Africa, SchoolNet Africa, and Artslink; in England, Current Accounts and Children International; in Wales, Splizz; in Australia, paper wasp: a journal of haiku and Redoubt; in India, Cyber Literature; and in the USA, Japanophile, Pegasus, Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, Academic Exchange Extra, Up Dare?, The Teachers.Net Gazette, 79 Words per Minute, Reflections: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Seeker Magazine, Fullosia Press, Pink Cadillac, Omnific, Coffee Bean Shop, Poetry Magazine, The Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, The Green Tricycle, The Neovictorian Cochlea, Syncopated City, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, Fuel, Entre Nous, Anthology Magazine, MOON Magazine, Arnazella, and Fresh Ground.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader response to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

------------------------------ Page Citation Reference:
Landers, Donovan A. (2005). AE-Extra. March. Available Online.
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Created: 2 March 2005. Updated: 27 April 2005. Accessed: ]

Margins ©

Forward

Prologue

Book I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3