PENINSULA PROFILE: Nonfiction essay wins Port Townsend teacher national writing award

PORT TOWNSEND — For schoolteacher and traveler Teresa Janssen, this fall has been laced with surprise and promise.

One early morning in September, she received a call from New York City: You’ve won $5,000 in the Norman Mailer Center’s High School Teacher Non-fiction Contest, and we’d like you to come to Manhattan for a gala dinner in your honor.

Also to be saluted at this event: Janssen’s heroine Maya Angelou, along with novelist Junot Diaz and the late journalist Michael Hastings.

Janssen, a 20-year resident of Jefferson County, took a few days away from her job teaching French and social studies at Port Townsend High School and flew East to attend the gala at the New York Public Library. As if that weren’t a sufficiently heady experience, she then met O. Henry Award- and Pushcart Prize-winning author Joyce Carol Oates.

The two writers hit it off, chatting for a bit before stepping onto the stage, where Oates presented Janssen with the Norman Mailer Center trophy.

On that night in October, Janssen read an excerpt from her winning piece, a remembrance of the Thanksgiving and Christmas she spent in the Amazon basin of Ecuador.

With her husband Claus, and their four children then age 7 to 14, Teresa moved to Ecuador soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Claus, a family physician, wanted to work as a medical volunteer, while his wife hoped to find a school needing an English teacher.

The Janssens also wanted to give their daughters, Britta and Stina, and their sons, Lukas and Nico, a gift: the gift of a larger view of the world.

Janssen’s essay is titled “In Search of Pink Flamingos: A Journey to the Middle of the Earth” because this writer is enchanted by flamingos: creatures that walk with grace through their fluid environment.

And Ecuador, which sits on the Earth’s equator, beckoned with its rich cultures, cultures sharing the Amazon forest with a multitude of wild creatures.

“Travel is about hope — hope for a revelation and transformation, a belief that beyond the horizon, beauty and truth await,” Teresa writes.

“In my youth I had traveled like a sponge, floating from place to place, absorbing what I could, while trying to learn from the universals and the particulars.

“I had come to believe that everyone deserved to have enough: enough food, enough love, enough room to grow, enough opportunity to do good work, and enough freedom to think deep thoughts and express them.

“I was uncomfortable with my culture’s definition of enough. I thought it was too much.

“I wanted my children to know about enough, to distinguish from wants and needs, and to know what that meant to the rest of the world.”

The Janssen family arrived in Cuenca, Ecuador, in November 2001, and on Thanksgiving had a restaurant meal of tamales, beans and rice. The following week they traveled to the village in the Amazon region where they would spend the coming year.

Claus found work in the Shuar indigenous communities surrounding the town of Gualaquiza. Teresa cared for their children, looked for a teaching job and eventually found work teaching English in a seminary.

In Gualaquiza, the couple and their four kids lived in a tiny apartment.

“We grew used to life without automobile, phone, television, movies, radio, Internet, hot water or reliable electricity or water. The kids adjusted to living in a space a fraction of the size of our house in the States,” Teresa writes.

“They must have observed the homes of some of the village children who had much less, and did not complain. We read aloud, listened to the dollar CDs we picked up in the city, talked a lot, and grew close.”

By their second Ecuador Thanksgiving in 2002, the family had moved to the highland town of Loja, where they spent the holiday with some Peace Corps volunteers they had befriended during the year.

In an interview just before this Thanksgiving, Janssen recalled how, since she was the only one with an oven, she cooked the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy — and packed them and her family into two taxicabs bound for their friends’ apartment.

“I remember asking the taxi driver to take the corners slowly, so the turkey wouldn’t go flying in the trunk. We had authentic pumpkin pie because the parents of a Peace Corps volunteer had mailed cans of Libby’s pumpkin.”

For entertainment, the family had music of their own making: Britta is a singer, Nico plays guitar and Stina the violin.

During their Ecuadorian time, the kids “developed their imaginations,” Janssen said. “We just had a couple of games, so they would take them apart, and make new games with them.”

But this was no idyll.

“That Thanksgiving, we were grateful to be alive.

“We had survived Dengue fever and a horrendous landslide that had killed many people in the Amazon, including our closest Ecuadorian friends,” Teresa said.

Yet “we were grateful to be in the company of the kind and generous Peace Corps volunteers. And we were acutely aware of how privileged we were to be just an air flight away from home if things got overwhelming — unlike so many living in unsafe conditions and poverty.”

The Janssens did return to Port Townsend in January 2003, where Claus continued his family practice and Teresa sought additional teaching certification, to work at Jefferson Community School and then Port Townsend High. She also has developed herself as a writer, working on fiction and nonfiction.

Britta, their youngest, just graduated from Port Townsend High School, and started this fall at Oberlin College in Ohio. Her brother Nico is working and attending graduate school at American University in Washington, D.C.; his brother Lukas is a student at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Stina lives in Seattle, where she works for the Tenants Union of Washington State.

Janssen, while teaching French I through IV at Port Townsend High School, has also sought to give her students the opportunity to travel. This past summer she chaperoned a group trip to Toulouse, France, where her teenage charges stayed with local families.

“We did it ourselves,” instead of using a tour company, “which kept it affordable,” she said.

Shortly before that excursion, Janssen submitted her essay to the Norman Mailer Center. She finished it around the same time she was turning in grades at the end of the school year.

When asked how she summons the energy to write while working full time, Janssen smiled.

“When I write, it’s something I do for myself,” she said.

“It’s something creative. I love the creative process.”

Teresa has also enjoyed being part of a writing group in Port Townsend. She’s gotten away from that, though, even as she and colleague Chris Pierson work with Port Townsend High School students on a literary magazine. The two teachers won a Port Townsend Education Foundation grant to produce the magazine, with SOS Printing of Port Townsend, this spring.

“Chris mentors a poetry club at the high school, and I meet once a week with a group of students to explore creative writing,” Teresa said, adding that student Rory MacDonald will be in working on the publication as a part of his senior project.

As for Teresa, there is much more of her story to tell.

The 14 months in South America were a pilgrimage, a journey of the soul. Teresa’s prize-winning essay is only part of a book about her family’s time in Ecuador, a book helped along a bit by the Norman Mailer Center award money.

When she’s ready, Teresa plans to seek a traditional publisher for her book, but she’s not averse to self-publishing.

Yet “I see myself as a teacher,” she said: one who not only instructs, but also shares her love of writing with her pupils.

“I think students need to see their teachers active in their fields . . . and see that it’s a passion,” be it writing or another art form.

Another who is an example of this, Janssen added, is Jennifer Nielsen, the drama teacher at Port Townsend High School who also acts in local productions. Nielsen, besides directing her students in Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach” this November and Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid” last spring, portrayed the daughter Barbara in the family saga “August: Osage County” in Port Townsend earlier this year.

Teresa and Claus Janssen had a quiet Thanksgiving this year. Three of their four children are far from home: Lukas in the Danish Institute for Study Abroad program in Copenhagen, Nico in Washington, D.C., and Britta is in Ohio.

“But we will all be together for Christmas,” said their mother, “and for that we are thankful.”