DATE: Sunday, July 27, 1997                 TAG: 9707170659

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

SHE'S USING HER TIME TO SING HER SONG

When teacher Beverly McColley was diagnosed at midlife with leukemia, her physician said her life expectancy could be from two years to 30.

``But I heard the two,'' she says. ``So I said you have to sing your song. You have to do it.''

That was two years ago. In the time since, McColley, 55, has made the time count, giving herself to her first love and work - the printed word. She has taken the counsel of another physician, surgeon Bernie Siegel, who maintains that everyone has a song to sing.

``And writing,'' McColley says, ``is a way for me to sing my song.''

McColley is a sunbeam of a person, light of hair and outlook, with an animated manner and youthful appearance that contradict her years.

She graduated from Rutgers University and holds a master's degree from the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont.

McColley has been an English and Latin teacher in various Virginia junior high and high schools for over a quarter of a century; she is now an instructional librarian at Norfolk Academy, where she continues to cultivate and disseminate the joy of language. Having published widely in journals herself, McColley sponsors the student literary magazine there. And there she earned a fellowship to study creative writing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

In fact, the folks at St. Andrews could learn a thing or two from her.

``I lie down in the sea,'' McColley has written, ``close to the water's edge. I would not do this on my own, but now that I am a grandmother, I can take liberties. My daughter sits in a beach chair with the water respectably touching her toes, but I lie down on the rippled sand of Chick's Beach, remembering the ridges on the floor of the Irish Sea, where I waded once, knowing Ireland lay beyond the horizon.

``Small waves create foam around me. Suddenly I am not alone. I feel next to my shoulder the pudgy arm of 2-year-old Joshua, who has come to lie in the sea beside me, a smile on his face.

``Then on my other arm I feel another warmth. It is Jessica's arm - Jessica in her Pocahontas bathing suit lying beside me - the three of us facing out to sea, two small bodies touching mine, as we watch the windsurfer mount his board and, holding the frame of the sail, ride out to sea.''

That's music, indeed.

McColley loves language. Teaching it, she reports, has given her the opportunity to read poetry, drama, prose. Teaching it has given her the opportunity ``to understand life.''

Well, has she found out yet what it all means?

``No,'' McColley admits. ``Maybe the purpose of reading has not been to provide an answer but to raise more questions. So life is deeper.''

Her gift has been not only to share her words but also to encourage that impulse in others; McColley began taking her teaching of writing out of the classroom in workshops elsewhere, first with women of her church (All Saints Episcopal of Virginia Beach), then with patrons of Dolphin Tales bookstore, and later with staff members, faculty and students of Norfolk Academy.

Soon she will be offering creative writing and poetry workshops at ``The Common Wealth in Education,'' the fifth international seminar on learners and learning, at Hampton University Aug. 5 through 8, sponsored by the schools, colleges and universities of Hampton Roads.

At Eastern Shore Chapel in Virginia Beach, I attended a recent McColley workshop that began in prayer and ended with praise.

Gently, she engaged her audience of eight. Disarmingly, she enlisted them as collaborators. And, ultimately, she surprised them with spontaneous prose of their own, fashioned on the spot and offered, communally, aloud.

Joyful noise.

``The writing is bigger than the leukemia,'' McColley says. ``It has been a part of me long before this disease. It has been my way of connecting with life.''

Let us tarry with her a little longer at the water's edge.

``Jessica shrieks with delight at each oncoming wave,'' McColley has written. ``And I realize how we give each other permission. I give them permission to lie in nature's lap, and they give me permission to accept gleefully.

``Maybe it all began with the ritual of suntan lotion - the way we touched each other and prepared our skin to receive this moment.`` MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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