BAWP "Teachers as Writers" with Greg Hamilton

Bay Area Writing Project facilitator (BAWP) Greg Hamilton works at the Marin Teaching Network, Larkspur where he coordinates the Literacy Project and is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at UC Davis.

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.

The Art of Memoir with Adam David Miller

NPWP Breakout Writing Workshops:
THE ODDNESS OF TRAVEL: FROM UNFOCUSED WANDERINGS
TO THE SHAPE OF THE JOURNEY
presented by Audrey Fielding

Where do we stand as travelers and writers? What is the nature of travel writing? We will talk and write about our focus, values and facts. We will explore how one moves from a personal travel event to a story to a thrilling travelogue. Bring your favorite travel journal entry to the workshop (optional).
Audrey Fielding is a retired San Francisco USD teacher and a long-time Bay Area Writing Project Teacher Consultant. For the past six years she has worked on a story-writing project in Namibia that has led to the publication of ten classroom readers for Namibian learners. Also, as an amateur birdwatcher, she has written a 2008 bird trip report you can find online at www.birdtours.co.uk/tripreports/mexico-25/Yucatan-march08.htm. She is currently at work on a book about the land, food and music of the Salentine Peninsula in the heel of Southern Italy.

MANY ROADS TO MEMOIR
presented by Judy Bebelaar

In this workshop, we'll look at different ways to approach memoir, and different possibilities for genres. We'll do some warm-up writing, read some wonderful writers, and then write ourselves.
Judy Bebelaar is a BAWP Teacher Consultant and a writer who taught high school English and creative writing classes in San Francisco for 37 years; her students won many prizes, including eight National Scholastic writing awards. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in literary magazines including Rudolf's Diner, Red Wheelbarrow, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, Slant, Cape Rock, Blue Unicorn, Poem, The California Poets in the Schools anthologies Remembering What Happened and True Wonders, Willard and Maple, The Griffin, Pearl, and The Sulphur River Literary Review.

Bay Area Writing Project

Well, well, well, I never got to begin the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project (maybe next year) but I did take a writing workshop with the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) at UC Berkeley on Saturday morning.

My partner, Neil, a struggling, newishly employed English teacher at a continuation high school, was all gussied up and heading for the door. I asked, "where on earth are you going? It's only 8 AM. There's no school today." He mumbled something about attending BAWP but said he didn't think I could go too because I wasn't a teacher.

Ever the one to take "no" lightly, I fired, "Nonsense. Of course I can go."

Besides, the arts organization I teach through, California Poets in the Schools, AKA (CPITS) and BAWP have had a longstanding relationship, with Neil's mentor teacher, and BAWP coordinator, Judy Bebelaar, having served on the CPITS board. Few non-profit arts education can claim such a fabulous English teacher/poet as a board member as Judy. We served together. Oh, and she belly-dances too. I was the one who suggested that Neil mentor with Judy in the first place. Sheesh! Besides, the workshop was free.

And with less than 10 minutes warning, I managed to pull it together and blearily find my way into some reasonably unrumpled clothes, brew a vat of tea and then write write write. Not exactly a novel, but something to publish nonetheless. (What a portmanteau word is that!)

Saturday was one of those achingly beautiful Indian Summer days where the warm Santana winds had whipped the marine haze to the hinterlands and the coastal mountains ringing the bay were scimitar sharp silhouettes of indigo verging on violet against a cyanide sky.

The Bay was a cerulean mirror with gleaming jade islands, and on the Berkeley campus the liquidamber trees threatening to burst into pyrotechnic splendor.

(One NaNoWriMo mini contest is to submit your worst constructed sentence or paragraph to Red Room and the previous two paragraphs could easily qualify under the purple prose, or maybe the puce adverb category...)

Or maybe they could be a dishonorable contender for San Jose State's Bulwer Lytton Fiction Award for the world's worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel. ("It was a dark and stormy night..." You know the one.) My friend, writing teacher, Marianne Ware used to egg us on with a plethora of adjectives and adverbs to enter bodice-ripper sentence each year. But I just wasn't rotten enough. One of her students did win the dubious award.

But I digress, we were ensconced inside the hallowed halls of academia all day...the siren call of reflected light off the Bay plashing through the windows proved to be too much, so I snapped lots of photos of the participants and of poet Adam David Miller, whom I hadn't seen in years, between writing pages and pages of persuasive essay/personal memoir and travel memoirs.

From Bay Area Writing Project 11/15/08

But then I'm used to dividing my attention/ time. A Sagge, less than a week away from my birthday, with a Gemini rising, I secretly think my creativity is closer to the surface when I'm slightly distracted. No room for the censor to just say "no."

Now, Neil works from "No, you can't do that..." thing. It's a Scottish thing. Or maybe a UK thing. Or an escaped Beatles lyric. Fear of censure, fear of breaking rules, fear of disrupting societal norms, fear of drawing attention—are deeply ingrained. "I got something to say that might cause you pain.... No. You can't do that..."

Poor guy, even his initials have "No" embedded in them NONeill... Yeah, and denial is a river in Egypt. Having spent the summer in Scotland, I saw firsthand, the subconscious cultural artifacts at work, in situ. Not that I can begin to understand it, but I have a better understanding of it.

American culture is based on "Yes we can" and Europe is "No you can't." Cultural divide, cultural watershed.