SRJC professor channels own adversity, and her students’, into writing

Leslie Mancillas believes everyone has a story worth telling. The Santa Rosa Junior College professor and author has worked with her students over the past few years capturing their stories of hardship, hope and triumph in anthologies.

Gearing up for her latest student compilation, Mancillas finds herself reflecting on surviving childhood abuse in a memoir she hopes to finish next summer.

Her mother beat her and two siblings while hooked on amphetamines and barbiturates, Mancillas said, which had been prescribed for weight loss and sleep. The amphetamines gave her mother - a petite hospital nurse - super strength, she said.

“When she was on this stuff it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” said Mancillas, who previously co-authored with Press Democrat wine writer Peg Melnik a book on how to keep romance alive while married with children.

The regular physical and verbal abuse persisted for almost a decade until her then-divorced mom discovered Nichiren Buddhism and got off the prescription pills. Mancillas said her late mother chronicled the abuse in diaries as part of therapy.

“My mother gave me this gift from the beyond. Her journals not only corroborate what I’m writing, they also show she loved us,” said Mancillas, who this summer returned to the 13-story apartment building where she grew up on West End Avenue in Manhattan.

“She felt so much pain and guilt about our childhood. She really never forgave herself. It haunted her.”

It’s a story she likes to share with students in her college skills classes that are aimed at preparing them for college-level courses, to encourage and teach them about the power of hope and resilience.

“All of a sudden they look at me as a real person,” said Mancillas.

And her students opened up about the dreams and obstacles they face.

Lisa Windesheim-Zigas, 21, wants to become a counselor or teacher. She said as a recovering drug addict who spent time living on the streets of San Francisco the challenge is to stay sober and in school.

“I’m figuring out how to live a normal life,” said Windesheim-Zigas, who now lives in Santa Rosa and wants to help others wrestling with drug addictions, depression and suicidal thoughts, as she did.

She liked learning about Mancillas’ childhood and her challenges in writing and publishing a book, but the student anthology project, she said, “opens a lot of doors for people to discover themselves.”

For the past few years, Mancillas has shaped her course curriculum around autobiographies, such as Malala Yousafzai’s “I Am Malala” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” selected by the collegewide SRJC Reads program.

This fall, her students will use as inspiration the story of Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinjosa, a California migrant worker-turned-neurosurgeon who co-authored the book, “Becoming Dr. Q.”

The student anthology will be sold at Santa Rosa’s Copperfield’s Books, where there will be a public reading by students at 7 p.m. Nov. 9.

Quiñones-Hinjosa agreed to write the foreword for the student anthology. In his book, he writes about growing up poor in a tiny village near the U.S.-Mexico border and working in the tomato fields before attending UC Berkeley and Harvard Medical School.

Quiñones-Hinjosa currently oversees the Mayo Clinic’s neurologic surgery department in Jacksonville, Florida.

“It’s motivating to me a medical person is going to be reading something I’m writing,” said Alyssa Gallegos, who is in Mancillas’ writing class.

Gallegos, 19, of Santa Rosa wants to be an emergency medical technician, but knows it won’t be an easy journey. Gallegos said she suffers from memory loss and a reading disability.

Many students in her class face disabilities, addictions and language barriers. Mancillas said the writing project aims to instill confidence and propel her students forward in academics and life.

“I want to teach my students about grit and perseverance,” she said. “I want to make them feel like they have unlimited potential.”

You can reach Staff Writer Eloísa Ruano González at 707-521-5458 or eloisa.gonzalez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @eloisanews.