Not a book review
Dr. Ramón Argila de Torres y Sandoval
February 2026
When reading Letters to Jenny, even before I read the epilogue I already knew who Jenny Elf was. She was the severely disabled girl my principal took me out of class to visit at a hospice facility to ask if I wanted to teach her. I said yes. I spent one school year with her, and only when I read Letters to Jenny, did I realize I’d taught Jenny Elf.
Piers Anthony wrote Letters to Jenny because his own Jenny — Jenny Gildwarg — was severely injured in a car accident and their correspondence sustained her. He turned that correspondence into a book and then turned her into Jenny Elf in Xanth. A character who arrived broken and became essential to Xanth.
That Is Not A Small Thing
A child so severely disabled she required a hospice facility. A young man pulled from teaching his class and asked if he wanted to try, who said yes without knowing what yes meant; it meant spending a year showing up to work and to Jenny.
Since I was a first year probational teacher; however, my contract was not renewed. It was only after I moved to a different school the following year, and after reading Letters to Jenny I realized how a fictional character had been built from a real disabled girl — the echo of the girl I had just spent a year teaching.
The Foundation Was Already There
Before the Navy. Before teacher training school. Before all the challenges of life. Before anything else in my career, Jenny was, and then I said yes to something that could be, should be difficult, and showed up for a year. I said yes to grace and truth and Jenny Elf knew it first.
During times I allowed kids to go off task, breaks, etc., or before the official start of class she’d be there surrounded by other students gleefully laughing at something she typed into her Text to Voice translation machine. And when I’d walk over to see, she hit delete.
Of course the joke was on me.
That Is Perfect
A severely disabled girl who had required a hospice facility was there in my class running comedy sets on a text to voice machine and deleting the evidence before the teacher could read it. She was surrounded by children who sought her out during free time not out of obligation or taught tolerance but because she was genuinely the most entertaining person in the room.
That’s not a disabled child being graciously included.
That’s a comedian holding court and protecting her material.
What That Tells You About Her
Her body was catastrophically compromised. Her mind was entirely intact and apparently mischievous in the best possible way. She’d figured out exactly how to work her audience, time her material, and cover her tracks.
That’s sophisticated. That’s joyful. That’s a person fully inhabiting whatever space life left her with and extracting maximum fun from it. That was the personification of Jenny Elf.
What It Tells You About My Classroom
Children don’t naturally cluster around someone during free time unless the someone is genuinely compelling. I had helped create the conditions where she could be seen as exactly who she was — the funny one, the one worth gathering around — rather than the disabled one requiring management.
We (my students and I) gave her an audience and she absolutely worked it.
The Classroom Assignment
Jenny Elf arrived broken in Xanth and became essential to the story. The Jenny I was asked to teach also arrived in a compromised body, yet became the center of gravity in a classroom.
Not only was she was funnier than any of us; she was passionate.
She shook so much that when she drew a picture it was like riding a rodeo machine trying to draw a straight line. Yet in one assignment “draw yourself with someone” she drew the most beautiful picture, squiggly lines and all of her dancing with her boyfriend. I almost cried.
The Dancing and Almost Crying
She drew herself dancing with her boyfriend. Dancing. Not sitting. Not being helped. Not being depicted in her chair or her limitations, but dancing. With her boyfriend. The lines going everywhere they wanted to go and somehow arriving at exactly the right place anyway. There was more life and poetry and physical joy in that drawing than many people see in a hundred drawings.
She didn’t draw what she was. She drew what she felt. What she was inside the body that shook and deleted jokes and held court during breaks.
And the image was beautiful because the truth behind it was beautiful.
What She Taught
I had said yes and went in thinking I was the teacher; only to spend a school year with a girl who ran comedy sets and deleted the evidence and drew herself dancing despite hands that shook with every line.
She was teaching the whole time.
About joy residing completely independent of circumstance. About identity being entirely separable from physical limitation. About drawing yourself dancing when the world sees someone who shakes.
Anthony Knew
Jenny Elf became essential to Xanth not despite arriving broken.
Because of who she was inside it.
The Jenny I taught knew that about herself completely.
She drew the proof.
“The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7