One Senior Class With a Gift for Words

The stories alone could break your heart.

An adolescence spent in a sanitarium, recovering from tuberculosis. A mother’s mental illness forcing a Depression-era stint in an abusive foster home. The death of an alcoholic father. A childhood spent trying to outrun the Nazis.

But it is in the sharing--the writing down and passing along--that they become instruments not of pain, but of pride, convincing us not of life’s cruelty, but of the human spirit’s capacity for resilience and recovery.

They come lugging folders and spiral notebooks, crammed with hundreds of years of collective memories. For two hours every Tuesday, the 20 elderly men and women swap stories and pick up writing tips in the “Life Stories” class at this Reseda senior center.

Teacher Jeanette Shelburne begins by passing out a leaflet extolling the value of incorporating thoughts and feelings. “‘I am nervous. I am sad. I am excited’ are the kinds of feelings that will make a story more interesting,” the handout says. Today’s session will have all of that.

Shelburne asks who wants to read, and hands shoot up around the table. She tries to keep the group on task. After each reading, classmates are asked to comment on the quality of the literary effort. Was there enough dialogue? Too much description? Could you feel the characters, see the action?

Although class rules limit each story to two pages, no one objects when Jack reads his five-page, single-spaced tale of his Aunt Jane’s disastrous attempt to have her picture taken with Jimmy Durante, who lived near their home in Beverly Hills. They chortle over his Durante imitation and applaud heartily when he ends.

Shelburne has been encouraging her students to be more disciplined writers and more critical of one another. “Do you think maybe he played with words too much?” she asks “Did the story move a little slow at times?”

But the dynamics of the class work against her efforts. “I thought it was very interesting,” Shelly insists. Bill nods in assent. “Sometimes my mind wandered,” he admits, “but then he’d say something that brought it back.”

Group members tend to be “really protective and supportive of each other,” says Shelburne. So when Bill finishes his story about his final day with his dying father and wonders aloud if maybe it didn’t “bog down in places,” Shelburne hardly gets a chance to speak before his classmates intervene: “No, no, it was wonderful,” says one woman, while the others nod vigorously. “I thought it was very well written,” agrees another. She reaches over to pat Bill’s hand. “And I’m so glad you got to be with your father.”

So much for Shelburne’s gentle admonishment that the class stick to a story’s literary merits “and not go on and on about what this reminds us of in our lives.” After all, what draws these people here is a chance to connect the dots, not just in their lives but in the lives of others who share the touchstones of their generation.

“A lot of them haven’t talked about this stuff before,” Shelburne said. “They don’t think their kids are interested. I tell them, ‘They might not be interested now, when they’re preoccupied with their own kids and marriages and careers, but think about how valuable this will be to them when they’re the age that you are now.’”

Shelburne has been teaching the class for one year, though many of the seniors have been coming for much longer. It meets at the ONE Senior Center and is funded by the Los Angeles Unified school system’s adult education division.

Similar classes are popular at senior citizen centers and community colleges across Southern California and around the country. Few of the participants actually publish their work, but there have been spectacular exceptions. Five years ago, a 98-year-old Kansas woman sold her memoir, “The Life of Jessie Lee Brown From Birth up to 80 Years,” for $1 million. The 208-page manuscript was an assignment in a senior writing class.

But most come for the camaraderie, the opportunity for introspection, the chance to be in the spotlight, if only for a few moments. “Certain kinds of life transitions have question marks attached to them, like ‘How did I end up here?’” explains Donna Deutchman, executive director of the senior center and co-author of the 1992 book “Guiding Autobiography Groups for Older Adults.” The classes “help give their lives a new sense of meaning at a time their self-esteem may be beginning to wane. “

For many, the weekly sessions are like therapy. “People get in here and talk about things they’ve pent up for years, stuff they thought they were the only ones going through. And they find that everybody has similar struggles and failures and pain. It becomes a place where you learn to understand, to forgive yourself,” Deutchman says. “You watch seniors come to a discovery ... to look back through their lives and realize all that they’ve been through, and what a major accomplishment they’ve achieved simply by still being here.”

Some spend hours each week, scrawling their most private thoughts in longhand, page after page. Others record theirs on computers, complete with digitalized pictures to pass around. Many read aloud haltingly, hobbled by poor eyesight or unfamiliarity with English. Some hands shake as they hold their papers. A microphone amplifies their voices, because many are losing their hearing.

For some, it is the first time they have shared painful secrets. And Shelburne never fails to be amazed by their considerable lack of self-pity. “They don’t pretend the bad things didn’t happen,” she says. “But they’ve all found something within themselves to see the glass of their life as half full.”

Indeed, even the saddest of this day’s stories tend to be laced with subtle humor, searching questions or wry observations. And the readings unleash tales--yet unwritten--from classmates around the table, of handicapped children, failed marriages, guilt over the death of a sibling.

They commiserate, but only briefly. “Life is a gamble,” Henry concludes. “A joke. On us.” His classmates laugh. And the next writer takes the microphone. There are still many more stories left to tell.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Sundays and Tuesdays. E-mail her at sandy.banks@latimes.com.