This document provides a glimpse into the narrator's classroom, which they refer to as their "wild room" where they lead and teach various "wild things". The room has colorful decorations and quotes on the walls. In the mornings, a gentle hippopotamus arrives and writes a pun on the whiteboard before leaving. The narrator fondly remembers spending time in their father's classroom as a child. They look forward to visits from recurring students, especially a dodo bird who unpacks his emotional baggage during visits. The room is divided into sections, with desks arranged facing the front podium in an artistic, amphitheater-like style.

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119 Voices: My Wild Room
I have met many wild things in my life, from booger-filled brothers to prowling
kitten claws to things that slither in the corners of my imagination. And likewise the wild
has come to visit me with these wild things—breathing down my neck from the edge of a
cliff face, whispering between pungent pine needles overhead, dancing on the back of an
unexpected mountaintop sunrise. But Where the Wild Things Are reminds us that wildness
is not about trees and oceans and mountains; rather it is all about wild things that will eat a
person up if they are not given a proper leader to tame them.
I go to the island where the wild things are every day. There is no traveling “through
night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year” to get there, but time has
been known to misbehave in my room. Minutes can feel like millennia, and likewise
seconds can slip by too quickly—maybe this is because the clock on the wall is almost
always broken. The door into my wild room is branded with the number “119,” although
this building has no door anywhere marked with a “1.” I know—I’ve checked.
Outside this room there are blue rectangular boxes that some wild things use to
store battered books and too-thin jackets and sticky crumbs from shared donuts that have
spoiled their appetites. Inside, there are three walls of white and one of purple, the kind of
purple that is sincere and bright, reminiscent of star-shaped spring flowers and sunsets
that have exploded into too many colors to count. Each wall is quilted with postcard-
shaped markers that are emboldened by catchy phrases—things like “A person’s a person
no matter how small!” and “Save the drama for your llama,” and “Some days you’re the
pigeon; some days you’re the statue.” There are posters of book covers and maps of
Hogwarts, author Facebook profile pages and a collage of wildly colored Billy Shakes

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cartoon heads. On the purple wall with the door, there is also one metal-framed corkboard,
one that some might call “bulletin.” It has been covered with a teal piece of fabric and an
assortment of bright photos that encourage good behavior among the wild things.
⌘⌘⌘
The parade of my creatures will begin sometime between 7:45 and 7:59—early
enough to have time to talk but late enough to the building thanks to long lines at the latest
caffeine fix joint. Lately the front-runner of the small trickle is a hippopotamus, soft and tip-
toe-bouncing as she wanders over to the grumbling heater in my room. Hippos have been
known to kill more humans every year in Africa than lions, elephants, leopards, buffaloes and
rhinos combined. But this hippopotamus is gentle. With Diet Pepsi can in hand, she snuffles up
to the white board at the front of my room and writes out her latest “pun of the day.” Her
laugh sounds like a mix between bark and neigh—or maybe the sound is all her own, as I’ve
no idea what hippos actually sound like. After she scribbles out her joke, she will remain
perched on my heater until the five-minute morning bell rings. Then her Croc-charm-covered
feet will pirouette out my door, following by the soft, fizzing tingle of liquid in her Diet Pepsi
can.
⌘⌘⌘
When I was first assigned this room, there was one wall of maroon and three of a
sad excuse for white. The paint had clearly not been touched up in years, and halfway up
the wall, there was a hand-drawn border all around the classroom. It was made of a
combination of intricately designed phallic symbols and some of the least intelligent poetry
premiering “fuck” in different contexts. There was a part of me that always felt a deep
shame for this classroom filigree, as if I should have been able to prevent wild things before

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my time from defacing these walls in such poor taste. In this same “before” time, the room
for my wild things had a floor of chipped lime green tile, a ceiling overwhelmed by harsh
rows of florescent light bulbs and two ceiling fans, and a chalkboard that always seemed to
leave its mark on the ass of my pants.
Then the summer after my second year, my wild room was offered a makeover. I got
to choose the paint colors and lose the penis wall mural and gain a whole extra ceiling fan.
The lights in my room were switched out for softer, kinder fixtures. And the floor tiles—the
ones that used to crackle when my wild things jumped on them too hard—were switched
out for a tasteful array of cream squares, with a single band of maroon just one row from
the edge.
⌘⌘⌘
There will be a few hours of teaching. Honors English apes followed by freshman
fetuses followed by some other species. Then the lunch bell will ring. And sometimes, if I’m
lucky, an eye-pair or two will peek through the door to my room and ask to perch with me for
a while.
The most recurrent delinquent is one of my graduated monkeys. I offered him English
training for two years, and then he had to move on to the upperclassmen circus. He heads
straight to the back of my room, to a shopping cart full of monkey toys—swords, floofy hats,
and one rubber chicken that make infuriating noises, always at the wrong time. As he dons an
electric blue wig and starts reciting lines from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I
try to stifle a grin between my finger-creases. He will leave soon, but I know I can prolong his
time in my room if he has to work harder to make me smile. For once, it is nice to have
someone else doing the song and dance around the margins of my wild room. I have become

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the nature photographer, doing whatever I need to for a shining moment of true wildness to
picture snap back to civilization.
⌘⌘⌘
Perhaps my appeal to this place where the wild things are is genetic. My father made
a career out of taming wild things, his arguably wilder than mine in their teeth-gnashing,
middle school gruff. I get the stronger ones, the survivors, those whose skin is lizard-thick
from years of puberty and the entrance into high school. But when I myself was tiny and
untamed with miniscule razor teeth, my father’s wild things towered above me, a forest of
legs and body odor and excitingly foreign elements of the adolescent world.
I can still remember late afternoons and evenings stretched out in my father’s own
wild room. These times often felt longer than they really were more because I was hungry
than because I was bored. Maybe this is why I remember the food people gave me to share
with my little brother, Paul, at this time—small M&M packets that I would rip open and
divide by color before devouring, Bazooka bubble gum wrapped in comics whose text I
couldn’t quite yet read on my own, pretzels and juice boxes packed with love by a mother
who was somewhere else being a career woman. I remember spattering fights between
Paul and me for the smell of chalk across our child-chubby fingers as I developed an
elaborate fresco of a whale diving in and out of the waves that doubled as the bottom tray
of the chalkboard—Paul always wanted to draw dinosaurs. I remember the wobbly,
leather-squeak feel of my father’s tall taming chair beneath me as I waggled a long stick at
my little brother and dictated homework assignments to him of elaborate proportions. It
could be argued that Paul was my first wild thing in those days, although I’m not entirely
sure if I ever succeeded in taming him.

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⌘⌘⌘
There are repeat offenders I will see more than once throughout the day—a grizzly
bear that can be heard sometimes through the tissue paper wall between our two rooms, a
penguin who struts and nods to the rhythm of his own pristine uniform, an eagle who swoops
back and forth to us across the international pond now and then, even a hyena who can
barely speak between giggles at her own hilarity.
But I most often look forward to the visitation of the dodo bird, a feathered creature-
boy who waddles into my room and steals mints from a container on my desk without asking
permission, who helps himself to hot cocoa and leaves empty Twizzler wrappers on my wild
room’s floor. He stuffs his beak with any shiny plastic pieces he can find, never once
replenishing any of my stores or apologizing for his mess. There is something about him that
screams he needs a mother, and I don’t mind offering him that shelter.
I met him during his freshman year when he introduced himself as a student of the
world, one who would rather be reading Into the Wild and watching Boyhood than meeting
Olaf from Frozen. With him now comes the baggage he has revealed to me over our time
together—the pile of memories about his alcoholic mother who flew through a car windshield
when he was very young, the gift of a Kurt Vonnegut signature procured for him by him
janitor father, the scent of an ashtray seeping from his pores like a natural musk.
There are days when I watch him literally unpack the weight from his shoulders, book
by book by book. With it comes the truth of his time in my wild room. This dodo will never be
the strongest academic, nor will he ever be truly understood or appreciated by his fellow wild
things. But at least in my room, I can remind him he doesn’t have to be extinct.
⌘⌘⌘

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My room has divided itself into three sections. First there are the desks, an oddly
numbered 29 in all. Each is one I carried in myself through my too-thin doorway, one I had
to earn through bruises and scraped knuckles and sticky wax-covered floors on
exuberantly humid days. I have arranged them all in mismatched angles that fan out
toward my outer walls and focus on the pinpoint of my podium at the front of the room.
Some have accused me of making the seating look too artistic, but I prefer to think it echoes
the gladiator amphitheaters of Rome.
Just in front of the desks is about six good feet of tiled floor between the whiteboard
and the desks of my wild things. Some days this space feels like the chair I’m holding in the
lion’s mouth to keep it at bay; other days I am front and center in my own one-woman
show, with the wild things grunting and snorting in approval. As an added precaution, I
also keep my podium in my training space, one extra barrier between the wild things and
me, especially during the season of a full moon.
⌘⌘⌘
Once I met a litter of lion cubs trying to crawl into the space between the heater
mounted on my wall and my large teacher desk. They had managed to make a mess of things
before they squirmed out of my hands’ reach, sprawling paper clips and intricate magnet
building blocks all over a pile of newspapers on my desk’s crackled surface. One had even
defecated in a corner of my room, the scent adding a whole new meaning to the wild in this
space.
Over the months and years they took up residence in my room, I tried to coax them out
from behind my desk, first with promises of zebra pudding and snippets of the soundtrack
from The Lion King. I called their mother lions and stayed past closing time to teach them

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about proper lion cub behavior in public places. Soon, however, I came to realize that if the
wildness in their hearts was to be tamed, it had to be their choice, not mine. And so I sat back
down in the chair behind my desk, doing my best to ignore the random paw that got tangled
in my shoelaces now and then.
⌘⌘⌘
Of all my furniture in my wild room, none of it is brand new. In fact, my podium,
desk, and chair were all pulled from a storage space/garbage dump by a compassionate
janitor when the original furniture in my room was stolen to support someone’s lumbar
support. The first rule of teaching that no one teaches you: it’s the desert island boundary
patrol who are often more vicious and conniving than the wild things themselves. Maybe
that’s all the explanation that is needed for my podium, propped up on a set of whimpering
wheels and marked with large teeth marks where someone gnawed away a wood-and-
plastic corner. It’s where I pile the endless pages of tree guts and other such items I use in
my song and dance for the wild things.
My personal desk resides in the far front corner of the room, nestled between the
windows overlooking an asphalt driveway and the heater that only works on the warmer
days of the year. It is covered in empty mugs for drinking tea and paperclips the size of my
fist and rocks with things painted on them like “Theatre Rocks.” There is also a daily
calendar, a rubber Shakespeare duck, and usually a ragtag jumble of wires that connect to
some machine or another. My taming chair sits behind it, covered in a faded mustard
pleather, also with strange teeth marks here and there where the foam and fabric covering
has been pulled back to reveal the chair’s metal frame.
⌘⌘⌘

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For one whole semester, my room was inhabited by a tiny owl, only 6-8 inches tall on a
good day. I offered her some official title in exchange for her keeping my room vermin in
check, and soon she had built a nest to brood over among the bound pages I have placed in the
back corner of my room.
I met this particular owl for the first time in the wilderness of a summer camp. Back
then my hair was curlier—I was less tamed, my cheeks marked with the constellations of
1,001 late nights of starlight. And even though the years since then have not made either of us
taller, our minds have grown up, rising in stature and knowledge.
Even when the lights are out in my room, her large owl eyes reflect the light of others
who bend around her, like sunflowers before their sun. She has told me it has something to do
with the air in this room. According to her, all the other rooms on this island feel dark and
cramped compared to 119, which is open and airy. When she enters, I’ve watched her draw in
a deep breath through her thin, sharp beak—owls need oxygen too, you know.
Air and light aside, I know this owl’s favorite part of my room will always be the words.
As a symbol of wisdom, it is both her calling and her career to collect as many of these
artifacts as she can find. I have tried to make sure these walls are covered with them—advice,
instructions, quotes, jokes, and books for any owl boy or girl. It’s a place where she’s always
happy to complete her duties. If owls could smile, I’ve seen the closest thing in the crinkled
eyes of my contented owl-friend when she nestles into her nest of my books.
⌘⌘⌘
In the far left corner of my room against the purple wall with the door, there is a
space that has been dubbed “the reading corner.” It too has evolved over the years,
beginning with only with a few dog-eared, spine-crackled novels on one bookshelf and a

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lime green sorry excuse for a papasan chair that managed to fold in on itself every time
someone tried to sit in it. Then over this past summer, it blossomed into a two
bookshelved, peach arm-chaired, bean-bagged, overflowing-reading-selectioned, carpeted
extravaganza. The two bookshelves have also become home to a collection of Seuss friends,
namely the Lorax, Yertle the Turtle, the Cat in the Hat, Horton—and Perry the Platypus,
from Phineas and Ferb. It takes everything I have most days to keep my wild things focused
forward toward my teaching space instead of the much-coveted-comfiness of the reading
corner.
Any books I couldn’t fit in the new bookshelves have now taken up residence on a
collection of three rickety shelves in the opposite room corner, away from the purple wall
and by the windows. This is where I keep copies of Shakespeare’s original folio, graphic
novels about rhetoric, and a paperback copy of Mein Kampf a coworker dared me to buy.
The wild things may not know this, but every single piece of literature in my room has a
story behind it, pages of memory folded into the pages of the books themselves.
⌘⌘⌘
And such is my wild room. There is no air conditioning in the summer, and the heat
never really fills the room in the winter. Most days the windows won’t open without a good
shove, and when it rains, the window closest to my desk leaks. Stink bugs come and go as
they please, and when my colleague plugs more than four things into the sockets in her
walls, the fuse to my room’s electricity blows. There are miniscule wood splinters sticking
out of my purple wall by the door where a wild thing pulled a pencil sharpener from its
screwed-in anchoring in a moment of anger. And yet it is all these imperfections, these eye-
roll-worthy blemishes that mark the years I’ve spent in this space, the pieces of my soul

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that have seeped into the walls and the desks and the floor tiles.
It is 7:30 on a Monday morning as I look into the eyes of my wild room and write
about what I see there. Maybe it is the early light from the sunrise breathing in between
windowpanes, or possibly it is some other magic I have awakened in this early hour—but I
could swear the room is winking at me. I know why it winks—I have become the Max to its
wilderness. Where others see tooth and claw, I have seen potential and corners of
possibility. This morning my wild room purrs in appreciation at my effort, if for nothing
else.
Outside my room, the hallway lined with locker boxes hushes and whispers in
anticipation before the storm. Soon there will be shoe-squeak rhythm, keeping time to the
flap of bags being upended and zippers singing their monotone tune. There will be chortles
and huddles and quick-flashed selfie snaps before the cattle bell call to order. By 8:00am,
my room will be crawling with wild things who have knuckle-dragged their bodies into
their seats like obedient cavemen. They will slink toward me slowly like feral creatures, all
wide-eyed and uncertain as I hold out a mouthful or two of knowledge.
Throughout my day I will see the wild things.
I am the cat curled up between the gas heater and sunshine by the wall of windows,
revealing a row of mouth-razors every time I yawn.
I will hear the freshling rustle of feathers as they stretch their newborn pubescent
wings.
I am the lizard who darts for the door as soon as the bell rings.
Wise-fool-sophomores will sharpen their talons and Cheshire-cat-smile around my
desk as they wait for me to relapse in updating my online grade book.

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I am the elephant who snuffles through desk drawers and backpacks until I find
another sweet.
Juniors will race in and out, babbling their baboon banter about the hours I put into
taming their minds.
I am the giraffe who awkwardly jolts around the wild room, populating the higher
atmosphere with a joke or two.
And the seniors, once shaky-legged and shy-headed as colts, will move ever closer to
the edge of the cliff of these wild rooms, shifting wings they are now used to on their
shoulders until they are ready to soar.
Such has been my life for four years now—four years of desert island coconuts and
hope and fostering wild dreams. My wild things breathe easier in my room these days—
something about a good reputation snake-whispered among the hallway-tunnels. But what
they will never know is what they have done for me. To find one’s wild place is to find a
certain sense of self, and that is what my wild things have done. In their wild eyes, I am
reminded of love and effort and expectations, of dreams and a future yet uncharted, of a
world still worth waiting for. Their claw marks are ever in my heart, as they daily teach me
how to roar.