Introducing Young Writers Mentor Ryan T. Parker

The Pure Imagination Program is honored to celebrate the wonderful work of Ryan T. Parker, Justice Lopez, and the students participating in the Open Mic Movement. Their passion for reading and writing is infectious and an inspiration to teachers in the inner-city and beyond of the power of student-centered learning. By empowering and honoring the voices of students taking part in Open Mic Fridays, you can see how they are inspiring not only more committed students but more committed citizens engaged in their communities.

Ryan T. Parker is a Manchester based poet, teacher of the year recipient artivist. Raised by a strong, single mother in Norwich, Connecticut, he has been penning poems and preaching peace since the age of ten. After graduating from Norwich Free Academy, he went on to receive a degree in English at Eastern Connecticut State University and a Master’s degree in teaching at Sacred Heart University. Influenced by the strength, wisdom and humor of his mom, love for hip hop and people,  his practices with tutoring at ECSU, and his personal frustrations with his own educational experiences and education system as a whole (his 10th grade English teacher had a sign in her classroom which read, “Silence is Golden” –Ahhh! Freaky stuff!), Ryan developed a passion for teaching and promised himself he would break that golden silence and bring golden noise into education! For the last fourteen years, he has kept his promise teaching English in Manchester, CT public schools, coaching youth poets, and performing and presenting on hip hop poetics and the significance of empowering youth. In addition to teaching middle school students, Ryan also consults with educators running workshops and professional developments centered on The Open Mic Movement in Education and teaching educators strategies for establishing and maintaining effective classroom environments.

Ryan has also presented at numerous educational conferences including LID, CONFRATUTE, NYCORE and COESBOC, NEAG, delivered a TEDx Talk titled 'Transforming Struggle into Strength', featured as a guest poet performer along with Pam Nomura in Hartford Connecticut’s Riverwood Poetry Series, starred as the feature poet at Hartford’s RealArtWay’s’ Inescapable Rhythms Poetry Series and is currently writing a Memoir and a guide to The Open Mic Movement in Education. Ryan also devotes time towards traveling to various school communities performing poems, giving motivational talks and training staff and students in igniting open mic movements.   When he’s not teaching or presenting, Ryan loves rapping, laughing, poeming, coaching youth poets, running, snowboarding, kayaking, hiking with his bloodhound, Otter, and eating chocolate chip cookies (preferably organic).
 

A Portrait of our Pure Imagination Young Writers Mentor Vincent Walsh

This profile of Dr. Walsh was written when he was teaching at Lehigh University. A dedicated humanitarian who believes in the healing power of literature, today he brings the same innovative teaching techniques to the inner city students at New Britain High School.

It's five minutes before the start of class, but he's already engaged in conversation with the students steadily trickling in on this damp afternoon. Vincent Walsh, who at first glance could pass for one of them in his faded yellow button-down and casual jeans, apologizes to the class for the "ferocious" debate last week about the contentious Race to the Top, attributing his recent remorse to a Tai Chi revelation at 2 in the morning. Then a student, citing an accounting test, asks him if he can turn in his assignment late. No problem, Walsh says. At this point, most have settled in and Walsh is ready to begin. Welcome to the Fam Jam.

As the name implies, the course thrives on intimacy and improvisation, but this isn't group therapy or a jazz class; this is one of the many sections of the required, and therefore often dreaded, freshman composition and literature course. For five years now, Walsh, an English doctoral student, has attempted to break the mold with what he calls "owning the writing process," an alternative approach to freshman composition pedagogy.

"You're writing for yourself," he affirmed. "Not for me."

The process is quite simple. Students write a 750-word paper every week, and every fourth week they're expected to write a 1,500-word research-based academic paper. They are free to choose the topic of each essay, which has to be nonfictional. Walsh then returns their essays in a timely manner, though without a grade. He marks the papers only for the technical stuff -- weak construction problems, dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, subject-verb agreement and so forth. Another key component is that students read their essays out loud to each other. Out of the 300 students he's taught at Lehigh, only one has ever refused to do so.

Walsh tailored the method of teaching to students' needs and wants because, as someone who once taught in inner-city schools, he understands how difficult it is to motivate students when they can't identify with what they're being taught. Typically, a professor assigns students a particular selection of books, which they are expected to write about later. There are many benefits to this traditional scenario, not just at Lehigh but also in most campuses. Students share the effort in trying to approach the same story in different ways, as Addison Bross, Professor Emeritus of English at Lehigh, points out.

But Walsh insists that the traditional method leads too often to what students commonly label "bullshit papers."

He described this pervasive phenomenon. "You look at a text that bores you, you look at a prompt that you don't want to write about, and you imagine what you think the teacher wants you to say. And you say that, and every once in a while you throw in a fancy word to make it look good," he says. "That's why it's bullshit."

A former student of his, Jen Ingalls, abhorred writing in high school because she felt she was constantly trying to write about topics she wasn't passionate about. Come freshman year in college, her outlook on writing changed. "With Walsh's class, I reveled in the freedom of being able to choose my writing topic," she said. Ingalls is now studying to be an English teacher.

Bross recognizes the power of this first step in Walsh's writing process, saying it gives students more ownership of their essays. According to Taylor Hess, another former student, autonomy, instead of authority, empowered him to meticulously craft his essays rather than just push through them when he was a freshman in the class, and despite his rigorous course load as part of Lehigh's IBE program, he said he looked forward to writing papers every week.

As an old adage goes, repetition is the mother of learning. Runners don't prepare for a marathon by training once a month; they train constantly and build on each workout. That same idea is at the heart of Walsh's argument for weekly assignments, instead of the usual four or five papers per semester required in other composition sections. Practice, he believes, makes perfect.

But even then, he's not looking for unblemished essays. The current dogma across the country in writing pedagogy, he says, is thou must not put thy hands on thy student's paper. Of course, Walsh, who led peaceful protests over the Kent State shootings in 1970, swims against the current in everything, even when it comes to correcting students' essays.

He uses the metaphor of the master plumber to justify his hands-on approach.

"I've been a plumber for 40 years and I'm really good at it. And you want to be a plumber, so you're my apprentice. I'm not going to stand in front of a chalkboard and lecture to you and tell you what plumbing is about; I'm going to take you on the job and assign you simple tasks at first. And every time you run into a problem, you’ll call me over and I'll say, oh this is how you do this," he explained. "It's on-the-job learning."

His method of correcting the students' essays doesn't just involve a red pen. He makes himself available to his students, day and night, by phone or email. It's no surprise for Mary Walsh, his youngest sibling, to learn of the way he nurtures his students' writing.

Once, when Mary was younger, she shared one of her poems with Vincent and his friend who was visiting from college. The friend immediately disparaged it. Though she admitted it's still painful for her to recall the experience, a silver lining quickly materialized. Walsh, her oldest brother, praised the small verse because, she said, he believed it to be a sincere attempt at expression. She never wrote another poem after that; however, those comforting words from her brother encouraged her to keep writing, which is now a crucial part of her job given that she's a senior, three-time Emmy Award winning producer at CBS.

This optimistic attitude, she said, inevitably translated into his becoming a teacher.

"For every student - and every person - there are always fumbles and false starts along the way," she says. "Vincent's constructive embrace of that difficult process goes all the way back to encouraging his little sister to put pen to paper."

The writing process doesn't end there. Since day one, Walsh's students are well aware that they are expected to read their essays aloud during class. Students not only will be asked to write later in life, but they will also need to be effective public speakers, he maintains. Bross adds that this reading aloud teaches students to write for an audience and helps them visualize their own work.

Nonetheless, whenever someone is uncomfortable reading, or simply can't because of a sore throat, Walsh will offer to read for them, as he did that damp afternoon.

It's that time of the semester when Walsh asks students to write an evaluation of his class. He turns to look at Wes Corwin, a freshman, and with a simple gesture of his hands and an encouraging smile he seems to be saying, go for it. The student can barely reply; apparently, he has a sore throat. Walsh happily takes his essay and begins. Like a conductor guiding an orchestra, he feels each word, each sentence flowing out of his mouth, his hand gently rising and falling as if it were holding a baton. He keeps a steady tempo, pausing only to make a remark or to gauge the students' reactions. All eyes are on him, a feeling he grew accustomed to when his parents would have guests over and he would play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." According to Mary, Walsh was an exceptional pianist. For him, words are akin to musical notes.

"Writing is like music," he says. "Words have rhythm."

Walsh doesn't want his students' words trapped in their essays; he wants them to flow free and uninhibited and build into a symphony of discussion. This is where the magic of the Fam Jam happens.

What Danielle Daisudov enjoyed about the class was listening to other people recount their stories. "It's more of an evolving process as opposed to just reading a single tome of literature and then beating it to death," the sophomore says. "It's what English should be."

In a way, their two weekly class meetings are the chapters and the students are the characters developing a collective memoir. Walsh is not there to lecture to them; he's there to be what he likes to call the "expert facilitator." The desks are set up in a circle to promote a knights-of-the-round-table type of attitude; no one, not even Walsh, is above the students. The idea, Walsh says, is for peers to hear what each other is doing not only so can they be inspired, but inspire others, as well.

In addition, his students learn to defend their essays or their thoughts with evidence, whether the topic is climate change or concussions that football players suffer, by being put on the spot by fellow students. Sometimes many hands shoot up in the air simultaneously and the conversation rises to a crescendo, while at other times Walsh catches himself going off on a tangent before muttering to himself, "Shut up, Walsh." There's never a dull moment.

“It's no wonder that kids are pawing each other to get into his course,” says Vivien Steele, assistant to the English chair. Robbie Fagan, a graduating senior, who took the class in the spring of 2008, puts it simply: "The best class I've ever taken."

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that Walsh has to do the same for his particular pedagogy. "He kind of has had to fight for it," said Steele, who finds the class an invaluable part of Lehigh students' education.

The feedback he gets from colleagues about his pedagogy is usually wary and skeptical because he deliberately breaks the rules of teaching and writing conventions. But Walsh garners support from the most unexpected people, such as Noam Chomsky. The esteemed linguist, philosopher and MIT professor has been in touch with Walsh for several years now.

"I've been intrigued and impressed by his innovative and creative teaching methods, and by the results. Students have clearly been encouraged to think for themselves, to take on and pursue challenging tasks, to explore and to create, and with real achievements, some of which I've seen," he said by email. "And the enthusiasm and gratitude of many of his students is unmistakable. That's quite a remarkable record, which deserves not only praise, but emulation."

Walsh's younger brother, Mike, explains that his brother was successful in everything as a boy, whether it was chess, music or baseball. But he wasn't selfish in his accomplishments. "He shared it with you, inspired and encouraged you to do it, too," he recalls.

What few people know about Walsh is that he had a terribly dysfunctional family background, a part of his past that to this day hasn't yet been resolved. Instead of acting out in destructive ways, though, Walsh combines his passion for writing with his desire for a close-knit extended family, ultimately creating the Fam Jam.
 

This article first appeared in The Brown and White, Lehigh University's student newspaper.

Liz Martinez is a video producer for the Huffington Post where she focuses on issues related to politics, social justice and identity/culture. She has covered the 2016 presidential election and President Obama’s historic trip to Cuba. Before she helped to launch the award-winning streaming network HuffPost Live, she was an assistant producer for Al Jazeera English's daily talk show "The Stream."  She is a graduate of Lehigh University, where she majored in Journalism and French.

The Pure Imagination Program for Young Writers

"Vincent Walsh has been a friend for many years.
It was evident when I first met him that he was talented
and a person of deep compassion, with real promise. [...]
In Vincent’s classes, and among these students individually,
one can easily see the impact of his creative and stimulating approach.
[The Pure Imagination] students are enthusiastic, energized, and eager to pursue
their own paths; they have been reading widely and carefully
under his guidance. It’s a truly impressive achievement. He’s established
an education model that should prove extremely valuable." 
–NOAM CHOMSKY

Vincent Walsh is our Pure Imagination Young Writers Mentor. Having been an educator for almost fifty years, he is advising on our inner-city and after school creative writing program. It is our aim to bring this education model to high schools across the country.

WRITING AS EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY

I usually tell my beginning writing students that the hardest part about composing an essay is coming up with the opening line; what I don’t say is that the hardest part is actually coming up with a topic to write about, and doing all the necessary brainstorming and possible background reading necessary as preparation before sitting down to begin work. I don’t explain my thoughts on this because I am about to tell them that all their essays will be on topics of their own choosing. I guess I don’t want to discourage them at the very outset by making them feel that the task will be too daunting.

A great deal of research and publication has been focused on the problem of ascertaining the most effective approaches to teaching writing, or “composition and rhetoric,” as it is referred to in more formal circles. A major academic industry has emerged since World War II devoted to the subject, and countless books and articles continue to pour forth, with endless arguments and counter arguments, laundry lists of teaching strategies, and various and sundry speculations and theories. In a sense, all of this can be quite helpful, for writing hasn’t really been formally studied prior to the last sixty years or so, even though the Greeks recognized rhetoric as the most fundamental and important of all intellectual and academic skills. But as a teacher of writing perusing the vast array of printed materials devoted to the topic, I often feel overwhelmed and discouraged; it seems ironic that one could begin to feel lost in a labyrinth of words focused on how to use words effectively and meaningfully. One begins to fear that we are all just bricklayers working on the Tower of Babel.  

As with other complex and crucial subjects, my own sense is that it is imperative to break the issue down into a few fundamental notions, and simply begin from there. This is how I have approach the task: I assume that the best way to learn how to write well is to do a lot of it, and to get some expert guidance along the way. I also assume that students are going to feel more enthusiastic about writing when they are choosing what they want to write about, instead of just responding to topics (or “prompts,” as they are commonly called) provided or assigned by me. I believe this to be true even if it requires more thought and effort on their part, more independent work, to come up with their own subjects for essays; Ithink young people welcome this challenge; they do not automatically follow the line of least resistance, nor always seek the easiest way to accomplish a task. I believe we are all innately curious about the world, that we possess bodies and minds and spirits that have a built-in need to grow. The problem comes when we are frustrated in that desire because someone else is standing over us with a whip telling us how we must grow, and in what direction. 

Of course, I’m not inferring that writing prompts are whips, or that students don’t require some guidance and direction in their writing process. Assigned topics are helpful, appropriate, and even necessary in some cases; a specified topic can help elicit a student’s best effort, and the most satisfying result, for student and teacher alike. But I think it is just as true to say that the best way to get students interested in writing is to allow them to write for themselves, that is, to choose subjects that they have a personal investment in, that they can write about with feeling, conviction, and perhaps even passion. This is especially true, I suspect, for beginning writing courses, ones designed as a general introduction to the subject in freshman year in college, for example. We cannot assume that all freshman students are really interested in writing, any more than we can that they are all already accomplished writers. And we cannot assume that they will all learn how to write effectively under our direction simply because we tell them what good writing is and how to do it. 

So my approach is to allow students to identify their own interests, and to explore the inner workings of their own hearts and minds; I want them to feel that writing is something that concerns them personally on the deepest levels, that it is not just a task they have to perform to meet the demands of an instructor in order to obtain a satisfactory grade.  I want them to understand that there are many different types of writing, each suited for the particular task or requirement at hand, and that formal academic writing is only one kind of writing, one dimension of a vast and varied field. I want them to know that writing is just another means of communication, like talking or shouting or singing, and that it has unique possibilities as such, for it involves a kind of premeditation, and provides the possibility of revision and refinement, something that can never happen in the domain of ordinary spoken language. Spoken words disappear as soon as their sound dies out, and linger only in memory that clouds and fades with each passing second. Written words remain, visible on the open page, and can be re-read and pondered -- savored like fine wine. Hearing a song once in a concert is never quite as satisfying as being able to play the CD over and over again to allow it to absorb slowly into one’s mind and soul.

Students understand that they are going to be required to write papers for academic subjects, but I want them to realize also that the kind of writing they do in composing a letter or email to a family member or friend is just as important. I want them to know that there is a kind of writing called the personal essay that is informal and open-ended, that it allows for the expression of one’s own perceptions and thoughts and feelings about the world, independent of what a teacher might think or expect, and that it allows for a kind of communication that is creative and free, like the sounds of words they hear ringing through their favorite rock’n’roll or rap song on the radio. I want them to know that writing is a form of learning, and that we often don’t really know what we think or how we feel about a given subject until we sit down and try to put it into words. I want them to experience for themselves how sharing their essays and poems and letters with others is one of the best ways of learning about themselves and about the people around them, one of the surest ways of creating a sense of community among those with whom one works and lives. I want them to find out that sitting down to write can be one of the best methods of dealing with painful experiences and feelings, that it is possible to find a kind of release, what Aristotle called “catharsis,” through the process of transcribing one’s inner pain onto the written page.

So far, in the past four years, among the more than 250 students who have taken my writing course at Lehigh, I’ve received essays on a wide variety of topics, from how unsuspected anemia almost destroyed a promising high school track career, to a critical evaluation of Ebonics, the debate about Affirmative Action, the misuse of religious dogma as a justification for war, personal memoirs related to the tragic events of 9/11, narratives about growing up in the inner city, the tribulations of athletic boot camps in the midst of sweltering heat in late August, family tragedies, the drinking age for teenagers, the blurring of lines between church and state, car breakdowns in the mountains, identity crises over being caught between races, and the painful transition from home to college, with its attendant separation from family and lifelong friends. In a few cases, students have requested help in coming up with topics for their next essay, but they usually were asking for guidance in choosing among subjects they were already considering; even when a student seemed clearly at a loss, I always took care to provide several alternatives, so that personal preference was still involved. No student has felt compelled to write strictly according to requirements stipulated by me.

I know that responding to specified prompts is a skill my students are going to need to develop, but my focus for now is to encourage them to become involved in the process of writing for its own sake, and help them realize that writing is first and foremost a matter of personal expression, not just an activity one engages in to satisfy teachers and pass classes in school. I run my classes as a workshop; we sit in a circle while students read their work aloud, and we discuss issues that emerge in seminar style. I never ask students to write during class, and I never break them into small groups. We all work together as a unit, emphasizing the need for collective awareness, for building relationships among members of our group, for supporting and encouraging each other, for providing constructive criticism and feedback in response to each other’s efforts. Generally, most of each class is taken up with students reading their essays out loud; I feel it’s very important for us all to understand that good writing involves considerations of cadence and rhythm and tone and style, that language is rhythmical, and that meaning is conveyed through harmony of expression and clarity of form. Hearing sentences sounded out through the reading aloud helps students understand what’s at stake. Reading aloud helps students get to know each other; it also develops self-confidence and improves public speaking skills. 

Students quickly begin to develop a better understanding of what they want to say and how they want to say it as they read their work and receive positive feedback. My students are expected to compose a minimum of 750 words each week. Every fourth week that minimum length is doubled. We follow a two step process: when the rough draft is ready, students email it to me. I edit it carefully, and return it the next class, often suggesting that we set up a time to meet and go over the corrections and suggestions I’ve indicated. Then students transcribe the first draft into a final draft, which they add to their writing portfolio. At the end of the semester, each student will bring the portfolio for a final conference, where we discuss the work that has been accomplished for the semester, and determine the final grade they will receive for the course.

I’m not claiming that my approach to teaching writing is sophisticated or profound; in fact, I feel a need to keep things simple, and stick to the basics. I believe that one learns how to write by doing a lot of writing, and that one writes best about topics that hold an intrinsic interest for the individual. I think lively brainstorming through stimulating class discussions is essential for generating topics, and for teaching crucial critical thinking skills. I also think it is helpful to post sample essays from members of the group on some kind of class bulletin board -- via an email distribution list, for example -- for all to see, consider, and evaluate. I think it is useful for the instructor to provide examples of his own writing to serve as a model of what effective writing can be, and to demonstrate the fact that nobody’s writing is ever perfect. I think careful editing, individual conferencing, and preparation of final drafts from edited copies are all essential aspects of the writing process. I believe that learning how to write effective personal essays on topics they choose themselves will enable my students to perform well on assignments that require them to do formal academic writing, as well, because they will have mastered strong critical thinking skills, and become competent and fluent in written expression.

As a writing teacher, I’m constantly feeling my way around in the dark, trying to read and understand as much as I can, trying to benefit from the experience and insights of my colleagues, and from feedback offered by my students. In the end, I won’t be able to really tell if any of my strategies have been successful, except insofar as my students feel able to tackle writing assignments with more confidence and competence in the future. Maybe that is something I’ll never really know about for sure, unless perhaps I run into a few of them down the road and they say to me, “Walsh, I sure am glad I took your course, because it helped me become a better writer.” If that should ever happen, I hope they also convey that they learned how to appreciate and enjoy writing in my class, andthat they now incorporate it more fully into all aspects of their lives. I believe that we’re all here on earth to learn how to cooperate and work together in community with each other in pursuit of commonly desired goals, creating happy, fulfilling, satisfying lives for ourselves and our children. I’m the kind of dreamer John Lennon was talking about, I suppose. I see my role as a teacher as a privileged one, where I am able to work with and for the young, contributing to a cooperative process, one where we are all engaged together in helping to build abetter world, a world we can share and celebrate.

I feel sometimes like I want to apologize to my students for not being as fully effective a teacher as I’d like to be, and at such moments I think of lines from a favorite songwriter, Neil Young, an old friend of mine I’ve never met, but one who has, through the transformative power of his words, played an important role in enabling me to understand the world we all live in and share. Perhaps these words I borrow from him here will help my students comprehend more fully what it is I am hoping we can accomplish as we continue in this reciprocal process of learning how to write together:

“Sometimes I ramble on and on

Repeat myself till all my friends are gone

Get lost in snow and drown in rain

And never feel the same again;

But I remember the ocean from where I came

Just one of millions – all the same.

I’ve got the will to love,

Never going to lose the will to love;

It’s like something from up above

I’ll never lose the will to love.”

When all is said and done, effective teaching is just one more manifestation of human love, among many.

Vincent Walsh was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1946. He graduated from Fordham University in 1969, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship from 1969-1970. He earned his Masters in Education in 1987, in the midst of a career as a secondary school English teacher, a career that has included many years of teaching in the inner-city. Vincent taught graduate courses in the Education Department at DeSales University from 2005 – 2012; he entered the doctoral program in English at Lehigh University in 2006, and graduated from Lehigh with a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Literature in 2014. He is currently teaching English at New Britain High School in New Britain, CT, where he is conducting action research on incorporating the principles and practices of Restorative Discipline for the inner-city students he is currently teaching, while simultaneously aligning this disciplinary approach with the scholarly work of Eric Jensen.

Writing as Exploration and Discovery

I usually tell my beginning writing students that the hardest part about composing an essay is coming up with the opening line; what I don’t say is that the hardest part is actually coming up with a topic to write about, and doing all the necessary brainstorming and possible background reading necessary as preparation before sitting down to begin work. I don’t explain my thoughts on this because I am about to tell them that all their essays will be on topics of their own choosing. I guess I don’t want to discourage them at the very outset by making them feel that the task will be too daunting.

     A great deal of research and publication has been focused on the problem of ascertaining the most effective approaches to teaching writing, or “composition and rhetoric,” as it is referred to in more formal circles. A major academic industry has emerged since World War II devoted to the subject, and countless books and articles continue to pour forth, with endless arguments and counter arguments, laundry lists of teaching strategies, and various and sundry speculations and theories. In a sense, all of this can be quite helpful, for writing hasn’t really been formally studied prior to the last sixty years or so, even though the Greeks recognized rhetoric as the most fundamental and important of all intellectual and academic skills. But as a teacher of writing perusing the vast array of printed materials devoted to the topic, I often feel overwhelmed and discouraged; it seems ironic that one could begin to feel lost in a labyrinth of words focused on how to use words effectively and meaningfully. One begins to fear that we are all just bricklayers working on the Tower of Babel.  

     As with other complex and crucial subjects, my own sense is that it is imperative to break the issue down into a few fundamental notions, and simply begin from there. This is how I have approach the task: I assume that the best way to learn how to write well is to do a lot of it, and to get some expert guidance along the way. I also assume that students are going to feel more enthusiastic about writing when they are choosing what they want to write about, instead of just responding to topics (or “prompts,” as they are commonly called) provided or assigned by me. I believe this to be true even if it requires more thought and effort on their part, more independent work, to come up with their own subjects for essays; Ithink young people welcome this challenge; they do not automatically follow the line of least resistance, nor always seek the easiest way to accomplish a task. I believe we are all innately curious about the world, that we possess bodies and minds and spirits that have a built-in need to grow. The problem comes when we are frustrated in that desire because someone else is standing over us with a whip telling us how we must grow, and in what direction. 

     Of course, I’m not inferring that writing prompts are whips, or that students don’t require some guidance and direction in their writing process. Assigned topics are helpful, appropriate, and even necessary in some cases; a specified topic can help elicit a student’s best effort, and the most satisfying result, for student and teacher alike. But I think it is just as true to say that the best way to get students interested in writing is to allow them to write for themselves, that is, to choose subjects that they have a personal investment in, that they can write about with feeling, conviction, and perhaps even passion. This is especially true, I suspect, for beginning writing courses, ones designed as a general introduction to the subject in freshman year in college, for example. We cannot assume that all freshman students are really interested in writing, any more than we can that they are all already accomplished writers. And we cannot assume that they will all learn how to write effectively under our direction simply because we tell them what good writing is and how to do it. 

     So my approach is to allow students to identify their own interests, and to explore the inner workings of their own hearts and minds; I want them to feel that writing is something that concerns them personally on the deepest levels, that it is not just a task they have to perform to meet the demands of an instructor in order to obtain a satisfactory grade.  I want them to understand that there are many different types of writing, each suited for the particular task or requirement at hand, and that formal academic writing is only one kind of writing, one dimension of a vast and varied field. I want them to know that writing is just another means of communication, like talking or shouting or singing, and that it has unique possibilities as such, for it involves a kind of premeditation, and provides the possibility of revision and refinement, something that can never happen in the domain of ordinary spoken language. Spoken words disappear as soon as their sound dies out, and linger only in memory that clouds and fades with each passing second. Written words remain, visible on the open page, and can be re-read and pondered -- savored like fine wine. Hearing a song once in a concert is never quite as satisfying as being able to play the CD over and over again to allow it to absorb slowly into one’s mind and soul.

     Students understand that they are going to be required to write papers for academic subjects, but I want them to realize also that the kind of writing they do in composing a letter or email to a family member or friend is just as important. I want them to know that there is a kind of writing called the personal essay that is informal and open-ended, that it allows for the expression of one’s own perceptions and thoughts and feelings about the world, independent of what a teacher might think or expect, and that it allows for a kind of communication that is creative and free, like the sounds of words they hear ringing through their favorite rock’n’roll or rap song on the radio. I want them to know that writing is a form of learning, and that we often don’t really know what we think or how we feel about a given subject until we sit down and try to put it into words. I want them to experience for themselves how sharing their essays and poems and letters with others is one of the best ways of learning about themselves and about the people around them, one of the surest ways of creating a sense of community among those with whom one works and lives. I want them to find out that sitting down to write can be one of the best methods of dealing with painful experiences and feelings, that it is possible to find a kind of release, what Aristotle called “catharsis,” through the process of transcribing one’s inner pain onto the written page.

     So far, in the past four years, among the more than 250 students who have taken my writing course at Lehigh, I’ve received essays on a wide variety of topics, from how unsuspected anemia almost destroyed a promising high school track career, to a critical evaluation of Ebonics, the debate about Affirmative Action, the misuse of religious dogma as a justification for war, personal memoirs related to the tragic events of 9/11, narratives about growing up in the inner city, the tribulations of athletic boot camps in the midst of sweltering heat in late August, family tragedies, the drinking age for teenagers, the blurring of lines between church and state, car breakdowns in the mountains, identity crises over being caught between races, and the painful transition from home to college, with its attendant separation from family and lifelong friends. In a few cases, students have requested help in coming up with topics for their next essay, but they usually were asking for guidance in choosing among subjects they were already considering; even when a student seemed clearly at a loss, I always took care to provide several alternatives, so that personal preference was still involved. No student has felt compelled to write strictly according to requirements stipulated by me.

     I know that responding to specified prompts is a skill my students are going to need to develop, but my focus for now is to encourage them to become involved in the process of writing for its own sake, and help them realize that writing is first and foremost a matter of personal expression, not just an activity one engages in to satisfy teachers and pass classes in school. I run my classes as a workshop; we sit in a circle while students read their work aloud, and we discuss issues that emerge in seminar style. I never ask students to write during class, and I never break them into small groups. We all work together as a unit, emphasizing the need for collective awareness, for building relationships among members of our group, for supporting and encouraging each other, for providing constructive criticism and feedback in response to each other’s efforts. Generally, most of each class is taken up with students reading their essays out loud; I feel it’s very important for us all to understand that good writing involves considerations of cadence and rhythm and tone and style, that language is rhythmical, and that meaning is conveyed through harmony of expression and clarity of form. Hearing sentences sounded out through the reading aloud helps students understand what’s at stake. Reading aloud helps students get to know each other; it also develops self-confidence and improves public speaking skills. 

     Students quickly begin to develop a better understanding of what they want to say and how they want to say it as they read their work and receive positive feedback. My students are expected to compose a minimum of 750 words each week. Every fourth week that minimum length is doubled. We follow a two step process: when the rough draft is ready, students email it to me. I edit it carefully, and return it the next class, often suggesting that we set up a time to meet and go over the corrections and suggestions I’ve indicated. Then students transcribe the first draft into a final draft, which they add to their writing portfolio. At the end of the semester, each student will bring the portfolio for a final conference, where we discuss the work that has been accomplished for the semester, and determine the final grade they will receive for the course.

     I’m not claiming that my approach to teaching writing is sophisticated or profound; in fact, I feel a need to keep things simple, and stick to the basics. I believe that one learns how to write by doing a lot of writing, and that one writes best about topics that hold an intrinsic interest for the individual. I think lively brainstorming through stimulating class discussions is essential for generating topics, and for teaching crucial critical thinking skills. I also think it is helpful to post sample essays from members of the group on some kind of class bulletin board -- via an email distribution list, for example -- for all to see, consider, and evaluate. I think it is useful for the instructor to provide examples of his own writing to serve as a model of what effective writing can be, and to demonstrate the fact that nobody’s writing is ever perfect. I think careful editing, individual conferencing, and preparation of final drafts from edited copies are all essential aspects of the writing process. I believe that learning how to write effective personal essays on topics they choose themselves will enable my students to perform well on assignments that require them to do formal academic writing, as well, because they will have mastered strong critical thinking skills, and become competent and fluent in written expression.

     As a writing teacher, I’m constantly feeling my way around in the dark, trying to read and understand as much as I can, trying to benefit from the experience and insights of my colleagues, and from feedback offered by my students. In the end, I won’t be able to really tell if any of my strategies have been successful, except insofar as my students feel able to tackle writing assignments with more confidence and competence in the future. Maybe that is something I’ll never really know about for sure, unless perhaps I run into a few of them down the road and they say to me, “Walsh, I sure am glad I took your course, because it helped me become a better writer.” If that should ever happen, I hope they also convey that they learned how to appreciate and enjoy writing in my class, andthat they now incorporate it more fully into all aspects of their lives. I believe that we’re all here on earth to learn how to cooperate and work together in community with each other in pursuit of commonly desired goals, creating happy, fulfilling, satisfying lives for ourselves and our children. I’m the kind of dreamer John Lennon was talking about, I suppose. I see my role as a teacher as a privileged one, where I am able to work with and for the young, contributing to a cooperative process, one where we are all engaged together in helping to build abetter world, a world we can share and celebrate.

     I feel sometimes like I want to apologize to my students for not being as fully effective a teacher as I’d like to be, and at such moments I think of lines from a favorite songwriter, Neil Young, an old friend of mine I’ve never met, but one who has, through the transformative power of his words, played an important role in enabling me to understand the world we all live in and share. Perhaps these words I borrow from him here will help my students comprehend more fully what it is I am hoping we can accomplish as we continue in this reciprocal process of learning how to write together:

“Sometimes I ramble on and on

Repeat myself till all my friends are gone

Get lost in snow and drown in rain

And never feel the same again;

But I remember the ocean from where I came

Just one of millions – all the same.

I’ve got the will to love,

Never going to lose the will to love;

It’s like something from up above

I’ll never lose the will to love.”

When all is said and done, effective teaching is just one more manifestation of human love, among many.

Vincent Walsh was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1946. He graduated from Fordham University in 1969, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship from 1969-1970. He earned his Masters in Education in 1987, in the midst of a career as a secondary school English teacher, a career that has included many years of teaching in the inner-city. Vincent taught graduate courses in the Education Department at DeSales University from 2005 – 2012; he entered the doctoral program in English at Lehigh University in 2006, and graduated from Lehigh with a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Literature in 2014. He is currently teaching English at New Britain High School in New Britain, CT, where he is conducting action research on incorporating the principles and practices of Restorative Discipline for the inner-city studentshe is currently teaching, while simultaneously aligning this disciplinary approach with the scholarly work of Eric Jensen.

Building Fluency in Adolescent Writers

Rain, Steam, and Speed – Building Fluency in Adolescent Writers
Moving Journals Beyond the Banal

Twenty years ago I was sent to a tough inner-city school in San Francisco. It served kids from three of the most difficult housing projects in the city, one of which, a high-rise, has since been torn down because of its dangerous conditions.

I was new to teaching English; my preceding decade had been spent in the lovely labor of working with very young children in early childhood education. These new kids—middle-schoolers, some taller than I, many heavier than I—astonished me. They swaggered. They swore. They were quick to anger, both at other students and at teachers. They were tough-skinned (they needed to be), but slowly, over the course of months, revealed an inner tenderness and vulnerability that moved me deeply. They were kids, after all, and subject to the same emotional storms kids weather. Only their storms had more torment to them, and often had to do with matters of life and death.

AN ADMISSION: EARLY ERRORS

A writer, I wanted my students to write—to jump-start a process that could sharpen their articulation. Writing was easy for me, and I wanted them to discover it to be easy. But with a few exceptions, their skills were low. They’d write a sentence where a paragraph was called for, a paragraph instead of a well-developed essay.

Did they have anything to write about? They sure did: day-to-day experiences so deep that I was in awe, experiences that—embarrassed as I am to admit it now—the writer in me envied. Such material!

I’d read a little about kids’ having success in writing journals. So why not try journals? A good idea, certain to succeed.

The kids were given folders. Write “My Journal” on these, I told them, and your name. We were off on our writing adventure, I thought. Now, for the next five min- utes of the period, write in your journal. You can write anything you want.

What a liberal feeling: empowering students to write their thoughts and feelings. Surely this largesse would engender more fluent writing; surely this would lead to the Elysian fields of write-at-a-moment’s-notice fluency. And imagine! A ready-made activity to get kids to settle down during the first five minutes of class!

But instead of focused—or even discursive—mini-essays on the deep love and violence and complexity each student was experiencing every day, here’s what I got on Monday:

I woke up at 7:00 today. Right on time. I ate breakfast. The bus was on time. I was on time for school, but I went to the donut shop so I was late. My teacher yelled.

Then, on Tuesday,

I woke up at 7:10 today. My alarm didn’t go off. I didn’t have time to eat break- fast. But the bus was on time. I was on time for school. No donut shop today. My teacher didn’t yell.

And so on, from student after student, day after day.

Were they writing? Yes, they were writing. And yes, too, the class was quiet for five minutes, the students compliant. But I was disappointed: why wasn’t I get- ting the depth that I sought? Why were their entries so short? Aha: that was it. Too little time!

The next day I announced, OK, you guys. These journals are really short. I’m going to raise the time to ten minutes so that you can get more writing done. So starting today. . . .

You’ve probably predicted what I got:
Monday:
I woke up at 7:00 today. I was really, really, really sleepy. I took a shower. I ate

breakfast. It was frosted flakes. The bus was late, so I was late for school. Half an hour late. My teacher got mad. It was my fourth time to be late for her class. She got really mad this time.

Was it more writing? Sure. Meaningful? Not what I was hoping for: a mere sequential recall of the morning’s events. The journals weren’t working.

Teachers reading this book have probably had a good laugh already. These were a rookie’s mistakes: too little setup (“anticipatory set,” as it’s sometimes called), instructions far too vague, time far too short, and an overall sense of nonchalance on the teacher’s part that invited reciprocal nonchalance in students. Overarching goals? Absent. Assessment? None. Student responsibility? None. Doomed: the journals were a dismal failure.

The year proceeded, English-teacher-overwhelm occurred by November, and by January I’d abandoned the journals. Journals just don’t work for me, I decided, and focused instead on essay practice.

Yet, not surprisingly, my essay practice failed, too. Though I was proudly liberal- minded in allowing students to make copious spelling errors in early drafts and twist their syntax like grammatical contortionists, their essays remained thin in both volume and content: emaciated reflections of who they were as human beings.

A new year started. I took workshops. One workshop turned me on to response journals, sometimes called “dialectical journals,” in which kids write, on the left side of a vertically folded paper, a textual quote, and record their responses on the right. There was success with that, and, perhaps desperate for any elicited writing, I used dialectical journals madly, daily, and “ran them into the ground” with the kids. They couldn’t stand them after four months.

More workshops, then: about “exchange-response journals,” wherein students write, exchange papers with another, write responses, and repeat the process.

Those worked well, but I had a difficult time using exchange journals consistently while controlling what I perceived to be gossip entries. I wanted to give kids freedom, a sense of ownership over their own writing, yet I didn’t want my English class to degenerate into a roomful of kids writing teacher-approved notes in class, all under the aegis of “freewriting,” rationalized by the idea that kids will achieve fluency and ultimate writing depth if they scribble notes to each other on subjects of their own choosing—often, alas, about crushes on boys, on girls, or about par- ties. So the peer journals went their way, too, and another year passed.

Another year, another workshop. This time, the presenter, a teacher, casually mentioned that he’d had some recent success in journal entries in which kids needed to write a certain amount in a certain time. The idea intrigued me, but seemed anti-intellectual. It implied that quantity and not quality was important. It seemed to ignore kids who were thoughtful, introspective, or slow thinkers and writers. It was artificial. (And what about subject matter? Could a student be expected to do a genuine “freewrite” given a time and length limit? Wouldn’t such an idea kill any modicum of creativity? And how would you grade the darned things?)

Surprisingly, though, when I tried timed freewrites I noticed that about half of my students responded: they rose to the occasion and wrote more volubly than ever before. Some, I was shocked to discover, even ventured past the invisible fence of mere recapitulation of daily routines and out into realm of ideas. Oh boy, oh boy, I thought; their journals reflected less a diary gestalt and more an overall sense of “journalness”—a focused, sometimes discursive, lively reflection on a subject I’d suggest.

I was onto something; I knew it. I read: Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins, others. Though the years were passing, I now felt closer to the locus of what I believed was truly elicited, “student-owned” writing.

I made some decisions. I stayed with the timed journal (a good thing), institutionalized it as a twice-weekly activity (another good thing), and succeeded in communicating to kids that the endeavor was important.

But I continued making mistakes, too. The prompts I wrote on the board were sometimes ambiguous and always too short, giving kids little to work with. I expected lots of writing per session, yet was vague on exactly how much was satisfactory. I gave kids too little time to work, and a sense of frustration and hostility gradually arose around the journals. When I increased the time allotted, I began having class management problems in keeping kids quiet. I tried playing music on my cheap stereo boom box, and though it seemed to help, the music sent through those tinny speakers was banal tripe from a limited repertoire.

However, beyond a doubt, I was getting better writing in these journals than ever before—in essay work kids were writing more fluently than previous classes. Nonetheless, the process needed refining. It lacked clarity, and the kids—quite cooperative, really—let me know explicitly and implicitly.

The summer’s break gave me time to think. I felt that the skeletal structure of the journal program was strong, but it needed some muscle on its bones. When I went back that next September, things broke loose in these journals, and they’ve been a wild, wonderful ride ever since—the highest, most joyous experience of my teaching every year.

WHAT CHANGED?

A few things changed, and their alteration made all the difference. The prompts I wrote on the board were longer, more energetic, their subject matter unafraid; they were multilayered in what they asked of kids. While sticking with the twice-weekly schedule, I increased the time to twenty minutes to give kids room to do what I asked: write long, thoughtful, focused entries.

Usually there are a bunch of questions up on the board. I usually answer each question in a paragraph so everything would be in place. I think the questions really help because it gets us really thinking.

—Anderson Ren

I gave the kids prerogative: choose the topic on the board or write on a topic of their own, as long as theirs was on a subject and not a mere laundry list of what they did yesterday or last Tuesday.

I usually write on something else; I don’t like to write on the topic. I write fast because
I write on things I like, and when it is interesting I can write very fast.

—Betty Yee

It might be second nature to many teachers, but local teacher research has demonstrated the motivational value of giving students choice in learning. Stu- dent buy-in to content as well as process grows dramatically when they have an opportunity to make selections about what they will study. (See “Tim’s Advice” in Appendix D to read about the power of choice.)

I established clear guidelines for grading, and while retaining my relaxed stance on spelling and syntax (journals are first-draft work, after all), insisted on a modicum of neatness. Finally, I bought a decent but inexpensive stereo and began collecting and playing instrumental music of many genres—each among the best of its kind.

One thing that really helps is the music. It’s not too loud because it doesn’t distract me from doing my journal. Actually, it helps me even write more. It makes me feel calm. None of the music has words. If it did, I think it would be distracting.

—Anderson Ren

I’ve stayed with it, refined it, queried the kids at midyear and year-end toward improving the process, implemented many of their suggestions, and established in my classroom a program that still stuns me. (As I write this, the picture of my student Teakeysha is still fresh: Teakeysha, who yesterday got my attention during Journal Time, silently holding up her paper, on which in a dozen minutes she’d easily filled an entire side. I see the proud look on her face: Teakeysha—the one who complained mightily when I explained our journal protocol three weeks ago. . . .)

What comes next, then, dear colleague, is a step-by-step rendering of that pro- gram, carved with the blade of kids’ imperatives: imperatives both voiced by them and communicated behaviorally. This program works if one of your aims is to achieve fluency in student writing, depth in the subject matter, and “drop of a dime” ability in students to write in a way that is either focused or discursive, depending upon the moment’s demand.

This journal process has grown as I have grown. In it I have found not only convincing evidence of writing growth in individual students but also a real plumbing of the depths in their writing. And, not least, I’ve found the bonus of a contagious and communal joy.

So what I’ll lay out here is the protocol for what I’ve come to call Fluency Journals: words on assessing the journals, what works and why it works (sometimes what doesn’t and why it doesn’t), other issues germane to the practice, and enough “prompts” from which to choose for more than an entire school year.

FLUENCY JOURNALS AS PRACTICE

I use the word practice less in the sense of repetition—connoting, at its most negative, a child forced to practice piano—and more in the Buddhist sense: a kind of meditation to which one (the teacher, the student) is committed, and to which one attends, is present for, regularly. It is a quiet study: a study for the teacher in getting to know the students deeply, and a study for students in self-discovery.

I like Journal Time because it’s peaceful.

—Amy Yan

When Mr. Fleming puts his music on, it’s like relax- ing your mind and it puts you to think more.

—Eva Velasquez

Before long, community is created: community not of master and acolytes but of guide and guided: a guide whose role it is to establish and maintain safety, to suggest—even if such suggestions sometimes go ignored by the guided, who, quickly familiar with the lay of the land, feel confident to move on.

That’s what we’re all about, isn’t it? INSPIRATION FOR THE NAME

The name of the program, Rain, Steam, and Speed, is based on a mid-nineteenth- century English painting by J.M.W. Turner. The scene is of a steam train rushing forward through driving rain, framed on one side by people boating, and on the other, by folks plowing a field. The picture is associated with the railway frenzy that swept across England at this time. To us it suggests the power of determination and focus in developing thoughtful literacy.

In the classroom, the “Rain” tying the scene together is the music strand that sup- ports the students’ deep focus and steady writing; the “Steam”—the driving force— is the set of prompts that provide writing departure points to tap students’ interests and open them to the larger world, and the “Speed” is the momentum built by the structured routine for writing that students follow twice a week. When the rhythm of these three components gets established, we think you will find that your students’ writing will become more thoughtful, more correct, and more substantial. In addition, students will develop more confidence as writers and thinkers.

Moving Journals Beyond the Banal 11

06_974560 ch01.qxd9/10/0412:26 PMPage 12

I would say journal writing has greatly improved my writing because I feel less shy about expressing my ideas and thoughts. . . . Before, I hated express- ing my ideas in fear that people would make a pub- lic mockery of me or my ideas.

—Elena Escalante

Through validation, feedback, systematic practice, and examples, students will be able to transfer what they’ve learned to expository writing assignments and projects in other subjects. Finally, the fluency development program presented here provides significant student support for the demands of the many writing tests re- quired of students.

This time produces a mind quick to react to any topic given spontaneously, and that would be more than useful in the torturous SAT-9 (standardized test).

—Charles Kwan

As you observe improved fluency in your students, we hope that Rain, Steam, and Speed will alter the way you (teachers!) think about journal writing. Unlike so many journal programs that are largely busywork, lack focus, and present enor- mous reading demands for teachers without a clearly defined purpose, Rain, Steam, and Speed contains a system of accountability that directs improvement and sim- plifies evaluation. Come explore the simple power of Rain, Steam, and Speed.

I am able to write almost two times as much as I started with. I used to hate writing, but it is different now.


First published in Rain, Steam, and Speed – Building Fluency in Adolescent Writers, Jossey-Bas, 2004.

Gerald Fleming is the author of One (Hanging Loose Press, 2016), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

SORBONNE INTRODUCTION

Selected introductions from The Sorbonne exhibition of The Creative Process:

Pour moi l’image, ou la métaphore, se traduisent en langue par le rythme. Un livre a sa propre musique, sa propre harmonie, ses propres sons. C’est une unité sonore qui fait émerger des images. Un cliché veut que la littérature anglo saxonne travaille d’abord avec les idées, quand la littérature européenne (ou française) travaille d’abord avec les mots. Evidemment on peut travailler avec les deux. Les anglophones seraient davantage des story tellers et les « autres » davantage des poètes, des travailleurs du mot. Il me semble surtout que le marché du livre favorise la story et, immensément, l’anglais, du coup les deux se combinent pour fabriquer des produits-livres, dénués d’images et de métaphores, perçus comme « ennuyeux », ou « une perte de temps ». C’est dommage. La seule phrase intéressante c’est celle qui résiste un peu, à vrai dire c’est celle qu’on doit relire. La langue n’est pas un matériau transparent, en revanche c’est le seul matériau artistique qui appartienne absolument à tout le monde. L’artiste écrivain doit fourbir son matériau, l’extraire du bien commun, le travailler.  Ecrire et lire prennent beaucoup de temps mais c’est un temps qui se dissout, qui s’oublie, qui devient la vie. Ce n’est pas une encoche dans la vie, c’est une sorte d’augmentation du flux de vie - de la réalité augmentée. 

- MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

auteur de Truismes, White, Cleves, et Être ici est une splendeur - Vie de Paula M. Becker (Éditions P.O.L.)

Le problème est que notre culture a commencé par penser l’écriture et les Humanités comme étant périphériques et négociables – un simple et poussiéreux événement de second plan établi à côté du véritable projet, faire de l’argent. Mais le seul moyen qu’ont les gens d’aller dans le sens de la liberté est d’arriver à une certaine compréhension de ce qui les asservit, et cela, en substance est ce que sont les Humanités: un effort contrôlé, s’étendant sur plusieurs générations, afin de comprendre et vaincre ce qui nous asservit. Donc nous marginalisons ce processus à nos risques et périls. Ce processus est (et a toujours été) essentiel aux cultures .

–GEORGE SAUNDERS

author of Tenth of December / Dix Decembre (Éditions de l’Olivier)

Je pense que vous tombez sur un élément crucial. Les Humanités, la culture, concrètement, ont un moindre coût et en font beaucoup. La culture est ma passion. Aujourd’hui, le livre est menacé par l’écran. Une des choses qu’il nous faut vraiment faire est obtenir de nouveaux lecteurs. J’ai la ferme intuition que l’éducation est la chose la plus essentielle du monde. L’éducation sabote l’ignorance. La curiosité est une vertu sous-estimée alors qu’elle est tellement essentielle. Il vous faut être curieux. Il vous faut être intéressé. La curiosité est quelque chose d’essentiel dans la vie. Cela vous aide à rester jeune. 

I think you've struck upon something crucial. The humanities, culture, in real terms, cost very little and does so much. Culture is my passion. Today, the book is very much menaced by the screen. One of the things we really need to do is get new readers. I feel very strongly that education is the most crucial thing in the world. Education subverts ignorance. Education allows people to think in a more nuanced way. Fundamentally, literature has no frontiers. Curiosity is a very underrated virtue and it’s so crucial. You have to be curious. You have to be interested. Curiosity is an essential thing in life. It keeps you young.

–DOUGLAS KENNEDY

THE CREATIVE PROCESS EXHIBITION

I have two passions: painting and writing. I have always been fascinated by a book’s reason for being. Why did this author decide to sit in a room for a long period of time, shutting out the outside world in order to write this book? Apart from having an original idea which they wanted to realise to its full potential, what events in their real or reading life brought them to the point where being alone putting words on a page became an essential part of their existence?

READING OPENS OUR EYES TO DIFFERENT WORLDS AND TEACHES WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN

Of course we all live in our heads and lead rich interior lives, but as we have less time to put these thoughts on paper, when paper itself, as Douglas Kennedy said to me, “is menaced by the screen”, the public service performed by the writer seems more important than ever. They give voice to our private thoughts and contradictions in forms which are artful and dramatic. Neil Gaiman has said “a book is a dream you hold in your hands.” And although I don’t like to ask the same questions of every writer, this is one of the questions which I sometimes ask––What are your dreams like? Hilary Mantel told me, “Dreams are very important to me. I have good recall of them and I record them, and I know I am in a good place to write when my dreams become big and transpersonal. I am very curious about the nature of time and the boundaries of our individual selves.” The Israeli writer and film maker Etgar Keret shared a dream he used to have which involved him being drowned by an imaginary brother who was “King of the Lake” and had no fixed bodily form.

LITERATURE'S LINK TO OTHER MEDIUMS

Some of the writers interviewed here are accomplished visual artists themselves. Michel Faber kindly shared drawings for a graphic novel Ship of Fools, which he wrote in the 1980s but never published. Marie Darrieussecq discussed the role of metaphor in her writing and said that painting has given her “an enormous amount of knowledge about the world.” Joyce Carol Oates, who was the first writer to participate in The Creative Process, discussed the intersection between voice and image. “Characters begin as voices, then gain presence by being viewed in others’ eyes. Characters define one another in dramatic contexts. It is often very exciting, when characters meet—out of their encounters, unanticipated stories can spring.”

I am always surprised when I hear the unusual route some writers have taken to arrive at their vocation. I sense they were always writers (even if they did not yet realise it themselves), they just had to engage in these other practical activities before they found their way in: George Saunders was a technical writer and geophysical engineer and Etgar Keret studied the exact sciences. Yiyun Li studied immunology at the University of Iowa, and Hilary Mantel studied law. Marie Darrieussecq found success early in her career and became a psychoanalyst only after she was a published writer. Richard Ford was a sportswriter. Music has been a significant creative outlet for Sam Lipsyte, T.C. Boyle, George Saunders, Darcey Steinke and other writers interviewed here.

Perhaps the more common route for writers is to enter professions like journalism or teaching to earn themselves the time the write. Tobias Wolff, who has just received the National Medal of the Arts and is this year retiring from Stanford after many years teaching, spoke of his time working for The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal. Jay McInerney, who studied writing under Wolff and Raymond Carver at Syracuse University, discussed the attractions of teaching measured against journalism and engaging in the non-academic world. It was also a question broached by Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz, who teaches at MIT where many of his students are not aspiring writers. “I just know that it has only been my privilege and prejudice to be interested in writing for readers who are not writers. I think that it’s always been my bag. I've never felt any interest in writing for people who themselves want to be writers. And I do think that there is a difference.” This may read as harsh to creative writing students, but to my mind it’s just honest. For literature to remain relevant and a true reflection of society it should engage with other mediums and foster discussion outside of the classroom setting.

WE ALL CONNECT THROUGH STORIES

Writing combines music and image, psychology and character, is a sustained act of empathy and in the hands of masters, like these interviewed for The Creative Process, becomes the most nuanced vehicle for transmission and examination of consciousness I know.

The majority of writers interviewed in this preview are novelists and short-story writers. The 100 authors interviewed will include more storytellers in other mediums and more authors from outside the Anglophone world. The present selection does not include full-time poets, but most have written poetry and their work has a strong poetic impulse. Some have worked in film or have had their works adapted to stage, television, graphic novels, dance and even clay-mation. Most of them would admit they have an obsessive desire to communicate. Where this desire comes from is one of the questions The Creative Process seeks to answer.

–MIA FUNK

Artist and interviewer
Member of the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum