Dear reader: Be aware I own the honor of Teri Rizvi’s friendship for more than 40 years. I’ve read many of these essays in their original presentations, as newspaper columns and magazine features. Every ending left me marveling how once more, Teri had won the writer’s game of pinning her thought to the page and coaxing it to unfold.
“One Heart With Courage” is Teri’s collection of more than 60 essays, and what’s remarkable is the striking consistency of Teri’s voice, full of wonder yet of realism.
This pointillist memoir tells an impossibly beautiful love story. She is the shy small-town Roman Catholic girl who grew up working in the family ice-cream shop near the Dayton airport. After college, she goes to London for a short-term job. One night, she meets Zafar Rizvi, a brilliant student from Lahore, Pakistan, a jewel of his Muslim family with parents ready to select a bride for him.
What to do, our star-crossed lovers? They shed too many tears in airport partings until they realized that the stars were theirs to uncross. Teri’s essays reveal this mindful path of love that builds and nurtures. Teri and Zafar settled in her hometown, reared two sons with two faiths; visited the Lahore family every year, even after 9/11, and became anchors of their community.
Teri also worked for nearly 30 years as head of communications for the University of Dayton, and that task sets up another turning point in “One Heart With Courage.”
For more than two decades of the 20th century, Erma Bombeck was a major American force. She wrote a humor column syndicated in more than 600 newspapers, she was a regular television personality. One of my favorite cuts in “One Heart With Courage” is Teri’s 1991 interview with Bombeck, an UD alumna.
But not long after Bombeck’s 1996 death, newspapers began their industrial collapse, and her legacy looked to be dust.
Teri would not have that. In 2000, the Bombeck family donated the columnist’s papers to UD, and as part of the festivities, Teri set up a humor-writing workshop. The event was a hit, and a second one in 2002 was even bigger. Every two years since, 400 writers gather on the UD campus for the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, a weekend of energizing and empowering writers to think big and to keep writing. Even in the new coronavirus pandemic, on a virtual platform, the workshop thrived in 2020.
The workshop’s success is all Teri’s vision, and in “One Heart With Courage,” a reader will see how it wouldn’t have happened without all that Teri Rizvi is.
I love that Teri has put her story together in this way. She’s a modest person, but you can see what’s she made of. You’ll want to be her friend, too. She’ll be glad to have you.
Top reviews from the United States
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Anne Patrice Saker
This book is worth your money
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2022Wwuc
Beautifully written. Essays laced with humanity.
Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2022BlueTick Belle
Beautifully written and full of inspirational takeaways
Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2021Denise Eder
This book and writer are an inspiration
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2021