Mentoring as Mosaic: Life as Guerilla Theater

The author never had a formal mentor. Indeed, when people ask her who was her mentor and she says "No one," they react with shock. How could that be? Yet neither the concept nor the reality were available to her as a grad student at Michigan 1957-62, territory largely off-limits to women at the time. Nevertheless, having snuck in under the cover of lightness, she had to learn how to enter the profession and, once she had a toehold, how to survive. Concomitantly, she had to learn to become a scholar and professional writer while, at the same time, she was learning to be a wife, mother, and citizen, and more--in short, while she was learning how to survive in the guerilla theater of life. Fifty years later, she is still inventing and re-inventing ways to do it all in this life that is ever-exciting, never static. In this article, the author presents an anatomization of some significant ways in which she--and by extrapolation, everyone--can experience the mosaic of mentorship, acquiring the elements of what one needs to know and do to survive, even prevail, in professional situations. (Contains 10 notes.)