Mike Schlemper

Mike Schlemper What Grades Do We Give the Dead Read Mike Schlemper Fade Read   Mike Schlemper, Entry: Red Lake High School, March 21, 2005 3:35 p.m. Mike Schlemper, Repression and Emergence

I am the art teacher at Red Lake High School and have been suffering PTSD from my experience with the shootings there on March 21, 2005. The security guard killed in front of my classroom had been one of my students. The shooter was one of our best artists.

These paintings and poems explore what it feels like to lose people you care about in a place you thought was safe and to have someone you care about kill those people. In my poetry I try to show how it feels to be powerless in a situation when you are supposed to be in control, to have no control over the replay of those horrible events, and to not know what to do about any of it. I started making this work to gain emotional perspective and control over the events through actual control over the visual representations. I could make a painting and put it away and look at it when I wanted to. I found that helpful for a while.

Ultimately the images and feelings would resurface in other ways, twitching, jumpiness, etc. I am on medical leave because of the effects of PTSD and am working with therapists and support groups to accept what has happened and to move forward again. I am asking questions of the images I created and pushing deeper into what they may represent for me and how they can help me. For instance, the mummy in "Repression and Emergence" was a part of a Halloween still life we used in class and became emblematic of the process of forgetting and reanimating the trauma I couldn't handle at the time. I believe the unconscious is telling me what I need so I can heal, if I listen.

My poetry is a record of this reflection and more complex understanding. The poem "Fade," a conversation with the security guard who died in front of my classroom, developed from the painting "Entry: Red Lake High School, March 21, 2005 3:35 p.m." Conversation itself has also made a difference. By expressing myself, either through words or images, and listening to others express themselves, my own experience opened up and included the experiences of others who were similarly affected. In the poem, "What Grades Do We Give The Dead," I draw from a number of stories of the shooting from other teachers while using a first person point of view. In a strange way, shouldering some of their burden made mine lighter. I hope that sharing this work will help others heal, too.