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| From Bay Area Writing Project 11/15/08 |
My first BAWP Saturday Workshop was with teaching consultant Greg Hamilton and our job was to meld memoir with the teaching practice. The personal meets the persuasive. Interesting. We all do this automatically, using personal story with argument. Only this time the process was made concrete—or should I say—transparent?
We wrote our introductions: Greg says he extensively uses the transcript process to rethink the writing process. He likes the blur between fiction and non-fiction. He asks, "Who's the audience? Teachers like story." Fiction = story (or vice versa) and concrete fact is the lens of non-fiction.
Theory and methodology.
1. Write an autobiographical incident and imbue it with story memoir). Theme: inspiration and writer's identity.
2. Write a persuasive expository paragraph. Prompt: What do you believe about teaching and language? Teacher/writer reciprocity.
I scribbled: "One must 'DO' before one learns" and in the learning process comes the teaching skills. My mother always said, "Those who DO, paint (or write) and those who can't, teach." So I do both. I teach and paint and write through several arts education venues including California Poets in the Schools (CPITS), Young Audiences of Northern CA (YANC), and KQED's SPARK program. This year I am funded through a new program as I am the recipient of an Oakland Cultural Arts grant at Cleveland Elementary School in Oakland.
My mother, who was clearly nuts, always drove me a little nuts. And so, on some level, when I became an artist in residence in Bay Area schools, I proved to her that I could do both.... She saw what I was doing with kids and later retracted that statement.
As we all introduced ourselves to the writing circle, I noted that I was the only non-teacher but there were great quotes from Linda Gregg and Amy Tan so I knew I was in very good company. Truly Teachers as Writers (or vice versa).
Q: Describe yourself in terms of a writer (focus on identity).
It was a bright, sunny day, much like today, I was pushing ten, standing on the cement slab below our house in West Marin, overlooking the lower field, while my horse grazed. I was daydreaming. I was always getting into trouble for daydreaming. As a consequence, school was a nightmare with teachers hounding me for attention. During math and reading, I'd daydream and drool, staring out the playground window to the sky above. My involuntary slurp always gave me away.
That day, I was adrift in thought, or maybe it was closer to non-thought, my mind was a blank slate, the winter sun warming me, when a disembodied male voice said, "You will be a famous writer someday."
Startled, I looked around. Not a being except my bright chestnut horse cropping the pale new grass and Winky the cat. Chiquita cocked one slender ear my direction.
Like Baby Snooks, she was an elderly skin-and-bones livery horse from the Lagunitas Stables, and then she later made the rounds as a Forest Farm Camp horse. She had to be at least 35, deep hollows above the eyes and long tooth slant confirmed her advanced age but not as old as old swaybacked Blackie in Tiburon who was well on his way toward breaking the Guinness Book of World records. My mother even rode her, for gawdsakes.
Chiquita and I were satellites tracking each other. We had a deep mammalian bond, perhaps because I had literally saved her from the tommy knackers (glue factory) crying, kicking and screaming.
In those days, Sputnik was still a new sky metaphor—though both launched and fallen a half-life ago. I knew the Iron Curtain, McCarthy, Communism and Russia were bad. Parts of Sputnik landed in LA. But my friend Stephanie's grandma Mimi spoke Russian. Would they deport her? We loved watching for the shiny cigar on its wobbly orbit across the Milky Way on crisp nights when the stars wavered.
Surely my horse didn't speak. But I was still young enough to believe in fairy tales and guardian angels.
I quickly slipped back into that dreamy reverie, as Winky the cat rolled luxuriously on the warm slab, inviting me to a tummy rub. I studied the pattern of his pale tiger stripes all smoke on grey. The disembodied speaker began to backpedal when I began to query him in earnest. "What do you mean by famous?" He retracted, "You will be well known as a writer..." to "perhaps in small, but important circles." Talk about backpedaling.
Flummoxed, I said. "That's impossible. I'm going to be an artist like my mother when I grow up, not a writer." On this point he stood firm, "No, you're going to be a writer." I thought that was an odd prediction as I could barely read. Having just learned at the end of third grade, I would wait two decades for the prophecy to come true, and to find that I am dyslexic.
Q; What are the connections, themes, observations? (Post-writing).
Storyline is central to my own writing process. But I want to begin at the beginning, instead of "in media res." I always want to go back to that moment when the idea of writing stories first entered my head. Then I get bogged down and overwhelmed by my own fastidiousness. It was a bit of a surprise to find that I hadn't visited that idea in 20 years. But I have unfinished business with the muse.
At this point we partnered up and read each other what we wrote. We then summarized the two parts into a short introduction.
I was delighted when one woman quoted Linda Gregg on writing. In "The Defeated," from "All of It Singing," she wrote: "It was like being alive twice." Taking the writing and presenting it back to the world was a never ending quality.
I thought of predictability versus surprise. I can't remember which poet told me, perhaps Carolyn Forché: if you know what you're going to write, then why do it? There has to be an element of surprise. Writing should both surprise and delight the senses. (Was that Frost?)
Hari Bhajan in her blog, Poetry Evolution, noted that at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival Linda Gregg said on Going Public with Private Feelings: "First I contain the poem, then I write the poem. My life is run by the rules of poetry. I feel safe in the world of poetry. I don’t argue with the poem."
The Gregg quote has an unexpected effect. I grew up on the next road over from Linda. Her family owned Forest Farm Camp—probably where my old horse came from, as she seemed to know the place. About the time Sputnik was triangulating the sky, Linda was graduating from Lagunitas School.
I remember Linda all golden running towards home when Billy Joe hit a pop fly foul ball and everyone had to retrace their steps to the last base. I was always trailing a decade behind her in school. It was a small community in those days. But like clockwork, after school, we rode our horses through Forest Farm Camp, much to her father's consternation.
I've long since learned that I can't argue with the writing. It goes where it wills. It has a life of its own. I find I can't contain it. I am the vehicle. It is writing me, defining me with its experience. A Nantucket sleigh ride.
Marty Williams, a Language Arts specialist, said she likes to honor each piece of writing by giving it its own folder (housed with all its revisions). I thought, if I did that, I'd have no room in my file cabinets, let alone, my house. The floors would buckle. She said particulars are needed for good writing.
Marty sees teaching as a reciprocal activity. Within the need for predictability, and structure, comes the writing, that being alive twice, is what teaches us. Writing is a journey, a psychoanalysis, a sharing of knowledge. Writing gives us a way how to present ourselves to the world.
Another teacher mentions that teachers and students are enigmas to each other. Sort of like the weatherman predicting the weather. You don't know what to expect. Another teacher said, "We're all so full of stories, they get so fired up but to put it into words is difficult." I thought of Muriel Ruckheyser's line: "The universe is made of stories."
Sure, writing is messy and out of control. I thought of my favorite Bob Hass conundrum, "Each particular erases from the clarity of a general idea." Go for the particulars. That's the juice of the storyline, not lofty ideas.
Someone mentions Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird." The story goes, that when she couldn't write about something—writer's block— her father said, "You just do it bird by bird."
I was relieved when Anne wrote: "Very few writers know where they're going until they've done it." Amen.
One teachers uses autobiography with her 11th graders to create meaning so that they become interesting to themselves and that is the beginning of compassion. Another uses memoir writing as a transparent process, the idea of model versus teach.
Greg says, "A teacher makes 300 decisions every 30 minutes." No wonder my brain hurts. Greg has us develop a social location map:
What are the main areas in your writing timeline? Write a history of your life as a writer.
We mind map. I'm really lousy at clustering, I find that I begin to over-explain my bubbles and soon I'm writing prose. My cluster orphaned at the top of the page.
My Social Map:
I began writing in earnest somewhere between 1978 and 1979. I didn't know what to do with it, as it was somewhere between ballad and poetry. I was given a lead on a poetry professor at Sonoma State where I was finishing up my BA in Art Studio and hanging out taking extra classes so I wouldn't have to begin repaying my student loan.
Someone urged me to submit poems in order to get into David Bromige's poetry class. I remember the phone call. I was at work, I was a housekeeper nanny working in Belvedere. I was in shock as he had accepted my work. I told David Bromige I didn't know if it was poetry or not but I couldn't help myself, it was pouring out of me.
What kicked off the hemorrhage of words—I'd been to a poetry reading with my first boyfriend Bob Hamilton, at Olney Hall, College of Marin. Gary Snyder was reading about MY landscape, my home hills—he was an interloper, didn't even get the place names right.
I knew the crevice and folds of West Marin like no other, having spent most waking hours of my life traversing the hills on horseback. I was a native. These ere my hills. My grandfather's hills. I listened to "Manzanita" and coyotes howling on the Bearshit Trail. I thought these were my mountains, my woods. I said, I can do that.
And so that was the seeds of my writing.
It was a hard arena to enter as Snyder was all for celebrating the mountain men poets, no women poets in his landscape. As Sharon Doubiago once asked me, "Where are the women poets on the Bearshit Trail?" She later wrote a paper on it.
Woods. Funny lexicon pollution. Here, on the Left Coast of Ectopia, we call it forest. Woods is an East Coast term. Connotes civilization versus primal wilderness. Mending walls aside, to invoke Frost, the west, by comparison, is still wild and untrammeled.
I got my first opportunity to visit an East Coast woods last summer, when I was poet in residence on Cape Cod, MA. We sat on Brian's deck at twilight, drinking homemade wine while being thoroughly sampled by mosquitoes.
Brian said his house was built on the crossroads of an old Indian Trail. We were sitting at the paleolithic crossroads to Cape Cod. Under moonlight we could see the white quartz gravel lining the path, like phosphorescence. I could see it though the dense pine forest was thick on all sides. I thought, "Aha! This too is a forest, not woods. Not deciduous."
Speaking of language usage, "Path" is another East Coast word. We tend to say trail, sticking to our mountain roots. A trail leading into the impenetrable forest conjured up more mystery than a path leading into the woods.
The darkness of the forest was like the unknown, the fear of being lost in the woods was very real in a place of no hills to find your way. Only dark, whispering branches and the pungency of pine needles underfoot.
No wonder the founding fathers were so eager to clear the land. They were claustrophobic. No hills of note to see far distances. The sea was the only place where one could see vast distances.
Writing is a tract leading into thick darkness. A clearing in the forest, a patch of sunlight. Gnosis.
(I really didn't like where that last piece of writing went, it made me squirm uncomfortably, I'm so out of my element, but as we were rediscovering, we don't control it, it controls us.)
Q: What is my advocacy topic in teaching? What do I want students to learn from my workshops? Take a topic, identify it, make a statement, not a story. We discuss autobiography and a series of incidents and critical moments that unfold and build a story whereas the persuasive focuses on bigger issues, education advocacy. Larger message.
All this writing in only an hour? Wow. It will take me fourteen times as long to transcribe it all.
What do I want my students to learn from my poetry workshops? Surprisingly, I discover that my own personal story doesn't enter into the mechanics of teaching writing (or art) in that I rarely share those personal moments with my students. I rarely step outside of myself to transmit a distillation of what I know. As for the probable outcome, the student writing as artifact serves as my checks and balances.
I want students to find authenticity of voice without degenerating into trite sloganistic language, I want them to tell their own story, not a TV version of how life should be lived. I use free verse (versus rap) as it lifts us out of the tyranny of bending to peer acceptable "voice," or a forced writing structure where the mechanics interfere with "voice." (Cat/hat/bat/sat/rat). (Or ho/mo/slow; bitch/itch).
The free verse approach allows them to leap from idea to idea, or to follow a threat they didn't know was there, the old adage that form follows function.
As a CPITS poet, I work with students of all ages and their abilities vary with age level. K-3rd graders are caught up in the physical mechanics of writing and the act of writing itself is a challenge. I do more oral work and take dictation, if necessary. (When I work with elders, I use a similar technique as they too are often writing challenged. It's too hard for them to hold a pen or type.)
I also pretend I have a bad memory and will reiterate the line so that they will correct me. I want them to correct me, it invests them in the language of they storytelling process. But kids are also attached to the empowerment that writing it all by themselves brings.
They are often frustrated by the fact that their minds are going at the speed of sound and they can't speak that fast, let alone write it down. The mechanics of writing interferes with, and changes their storyline and we mourn that loss. How then to work with them, it's a complex process of dictation and writing.
Part Two: Tell a story. Have the two forms talk to each other.
I grew up, not ABC (American Born Chinese) or Banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), to borrow a classmate's phraseology. I grew up Shamrock. I too was ABCI, American Born Child of Immigrants. Though we spoke English, it was Hiberneo-English. Consider it a dialect. Joyce did in "Ulysses."
I felt ashamed, I wanted to sound like those American born around me so I changed both my sentence structure and the music of the intonation. The urge to assimilate in the 1950s was a great leveler. In the process, I think I lost something of myself, and as a result, I became mute, without language for a long time—years. This is probably why I became a writer, to assuage the ghosts. Something about using one's language against the oppressor came to mind. That's an Irish saying.
How then, to preserve one's own authentic voice, and to not cowp under the pressure of subject/object structure? There's a reason why the Irish (or Scots) speak English differently. Irish (Gaelic) is a VSOP language: verb, subject, object and preposition.
Yes, preposition, it's the work-engine of the language, for without it, you can't construct a sentence in Irish, which is an extremely old and highly inflected Indo-European language. In addition, prepositions conjugate: at you, at me, etc. No infinitive verb forms either. No "to do." You can be at-doing, however. Then there's the is-be thing. But the verb to be is complex in any language.
UC Berkeley anthropology professor, the late Dr. Alan Dundes expressly warned us against the urge to clean up language when we were collecting our 40 bits of folklore. He instructed us not to destroy the integrity of the spoken word, to record, verbatim, if possible, with "warts and all" as that was part and parcel of the authentic language experience of the oral tradition.
Tape recorder and transcription was recommended, whenever possible but subjects often froze—like deer caught in the headlights—at the sight of a tape recorder and mike.
A camcorder introduced a whole new level of anxiety and interference to the faithful recording of oral tradition. Subjects dressed up, spoke in stilted phrases and generally dried up. So I resorted to discreetly writing down what they said. Luckily I'm a very fast writer (I was a newspaper reporter), so I can transcribe most of what people say (I can also read upside down). But I'm still unconsciously editing as I go.
What was harder, was to step back from my own literacy awareness and compelling urge for proper grammar and sentence structure as well as pronunciation. I actually "hear" punctuation within the spoken word—it's almost like having synaesthesia.
Here, I'd spent decades honing my speaking and writing skills (I was my own Henry Higgins), and on top of that, I had dyslexia to contend with as well. I was in the constant process of translating myself to myself. Dyslexics make 300 decisions every 30 minutes just to be understood.
The dyslexia is a whole other story I won't delve into her due to time constraints.
Suffice to say, it was important for me to "sound American," but as a collector of folklore I was asked to step out of that "voice" into an alien, yet familiar world of oral tradition. I was in the middle of code switching and speech acts, if you will.
Writing is a tract leading into thick darkness. A clearing in the forest, a patch of sunlight. Gnosis.
(I really didn't like where that last piece of writing went, it made me squirm uncomfortably, I'm so out of my element, but as we were rediscovering, we don't control it, it controls us.)
Q: What is my advocacy topic in teaching? What do I want students to learn from my workshops? Take a topic, identify it, make a statement, not a story. We discuss autobiography and a series of incidents and critical moments that unfold and build a story whereas the persuasive focuses on bigger issues, education advocacy. Larger message.
All this writing in only an hour? Wow. It will take me fourteen times as long to transcribe it all.
What do I want my students to learn from my poetry workshops? Surprisingly, I discover that my own personal story doesn't enter into the mechanics of teaching writing (or art) in that I rarely share those personal moments with my students. I rarely step outside of myself to transmit a distillation of what I know. As for the probable outcome, the student writing as artifact serves as my checks and balances.
I want students to find authenticity of voice without degenerating into trite sloganistic language, I want them to tell their own story, not a TV version of how life should be lived. I use free verse (versus rap) as it lifts us out of the tyranny of bending to peer acceptable "voice," or a forced writing structure where the mechanics interfere with "voice." (Cat/hat/bat/sat/rat). (Or ho/mo/slow; bitch/itch).
The free verse approach allows them to leap from idea to idea, or to follow a threat they didn't know was there, the old adage that form follows function.
As a CPITS poet, I work with students of all ages and their abilities vary with age level. K-3rd graders are caught up in the physical mechanics of writing and the act of writing itself is a challenge. I do more oral work and take dictation, if necessary. (When I work with elders, I use a similar technique as they too are often writing challenged. It's too hard for them to hold a pen or type.)
I also pretend I have a bad memory and will reiterate the line so that they will correct me. I want them to correct me, it invests them in the language of they storytelling process. But kids are also attached to the empowerment that writing it all by themselves brings.
They are often frustrated by the fact that their minds are going at the speed of sound and they can't speak that fast, let alone write it down. The mechanics of writing interferes with, and changes their storyline and we mourn that loss. How then to work with them, it's a complex process of dictation and writing.
Part Two: Tell a story. Have the two forms talk to each other.
I grew up, not ABC (American Born Chinese) or Banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), to borrow a classmate's phraseology. I grew up Shamrock. I too was ABCI, American Born Child of Immigrants. Though we spoke English, it was Hiberneo-English. Consider it a dialect. Joyce did in "Ulysses."
I felt ashamed, I wanted to sound like those American born around me so I changed both my sentence structure and the music of the intonation. The urge to assimilate in the 1950s was a great leveler. In the process, I think I lost something of myself, and as a result, I became mute, without language for a long time—years. This is probably why I became a writer, to assuage the ghosts. Something about using one's language against the oppressor came to mind. That's an Irish saying.
How then, to preserve one's own authentic voice, and to not cowp under the pressure of subject/object structure? There's a reason why the Irish (or Scots) speak English differently. Irish (Gaelic) is a VSOP language: verb, subject, object and preposition.
Yes, preposition, it's the work-engine of the language, for without it, you can't construct a sentence in Irish, which is an extremely old and highly inflected Indo-European language. In addition, prepositions conjugate: at you, at me, etc. No infinitive verb forms either. No "to do." You can be at-doing, however. Then there's the is-be thing. But the verb to be is complex in any language.
UC Berkeley anthropology professor, the late Dr. Alan Dundes expressly warned us against the urge to clean up language when we were collecting our 40 bits of folklore. He instructed us not to destroy the integrity of the spoken word, to record, verbatim, if possible, with "warts and all" as that was part and parcel of the authentic language experience of the oral tradition.
Tape recorder and transcription was recommended, whenever possible but subjects often froze—like deer caught in the headlights—at the sight of a tape recorder and mike.
A camcorder introduced a whole new level of anxiety and interference to the faithful recording of oral tradition. Subjects dressed up, spoke in stilted phrases and generally dried up. So I resorted to discreetly writing down what they said. Luckily I'm a very fast writer (I was a newspaper reporter), so I can transcribe most of what people say (I can also read upside down). But I'm still unconsciously editing as I go.
What was harder, was to step back from my own literacy awareness and compelling urge for proper grammar and sentence structure as well as pronunciation. I actually "hear" punctuation within the spoken word—it's almost like having synaesthesia.
Here, I'd spent decades honing my speaking and writing skills (I was my own Henry Higgins), and on top of that, I had dyslexia to contend with as well. I was in the constant process of translating myself to myself. Dyslexics make 300 decisions every 30 minutes just to be understood.
The dyslexia is a whole other story I won't delve into her due to time constraints.
Suffice to say, it was important for me to "sound American," but as a collector of folklore I was asked to step out of that "voice" into an alien, yet familiar world of oral tradition. I was in the middle of code switching and speech acts, if you will.
What I discovered was that it excavated a whole new are a of writing for me—that the style of language was inexorably tied to specific events—memory and memoir taking a twisty-turn back to my origins.
At that moment I realized how hard-wired the stories are, dating back to the far reaches of time. How then to share the process with my students, many of whom are children of immigrants themselves—a "multinaety" of styles (to coin a word).
Writing is an intersection of one's own native thoughts and academic thought processes almost like____ (here I was interrupted and was never able to remember the end of my thought....)
Note bene: Ironically, to this day, I'm still asked where I was born as the singsong musicality often slips back into my voice when I'm not paying attention or the sentence structure slips into a quaint Yoda-esque VSOP. Most people guess London. Ouch! How did that backfire occur?
At that moment I realized how hard-wired the stories are, dating back to the far reaches of time. How then to share the process with my students, many of whom are children of immigrants themselves—a "multinaety" of styles (to coin a word).
Writing is an intersection of one's own native thoughts and academic thought processes almost like____ (here I was interrupted and was never able to remember the end of my thought....)
Note bene: Ironically, to this day, I'm still asked where I was born as the singsong musicality often slips back into my voice when I'm not paying attention or the sentence structure slips into a quaint Yoda-esque VSOP. Most people guess London. Ouch! How did that backfire occur?
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