ALT/space

When I studied at a fine arts high school, our creative writing teacher, Mrs. Trimm, burst into the classroom one Monday, triumphant: she had knocked down the barrier which kept her from finishing her novel.  That Saturday, she woke to the usual stream of what ifs and false starts, of doubts and disagreements, of urges to burn all three hundred pages of her current draft.  She realized she was worrying the piece to death.  She forbade herself from working on her novel.  She got up, cooked breakfast, steeped tea, soaped dishes.  While she pruned her roses, it happened: the break-through she’d been trying to force herself to have.  Suddenly, the solution rushed to her, and she rushed inside to write it.

Now that I’m a teacher myself, I often ask myself what makes a good writing teacher.  Every time, I remember Mrs. Trimm’s classroom.  I think of the three hours we spent writing each day.  We watched her at her desk, pen poised over notebooks, fingers poised over the keyboard.  We then turned to our own notebooks, our own keyboards.  We had a running joke – leave Mrs. Trimm alone! She’s working on her novel – and that joke taught us how to live our lives as writers, taught us so many things: dedication, discipline, passion, pushing through even when we felt like failures, trying and trying and then trying again.

In order to be a good writing teacher, you have to be a good writer.  By “good,” I don’t mean talent, or some ineffable quality like “genius.”  As Mrs. Trimm told us, talent will only get you so far.  Talent won’t sustain you through night-long boxing matches with doubt, or with a mailbox brimful with rejection slips.  Discipline and dedication, however, will. 

If I want to teach my writing students anything, it’s how to keep writing: how to keep the pen sliding across the page and the fingers punching the keyboard, even if you feel like your talent has failed you.

When I walk into the classroom, I think of Mrs. Trimm.  She taught us by showing us, every day, how she did what she did.  The best thing she could do was to treat us like equals, like writers.  I try to do the same.  It isn’t always easy: opening up to a roomful of strangers about your deepest worries and struggles, your dark hours of wavering confidence, writing along with them and reading to them what you wrote, even if you know it’s awful.  It’s enough to make the strongest writer pause at the door of the classroom.  Then I realize that’s exactly the position my students are in. I think of Mrs. Trimm, and how I learned the most when she shared the most, how at those moments she was probably feeling vulnerable, too. 

I take a deep breath.  I walk in, ready to sit and write with a room full of people who will, for the next hour, not be students, but writers, just like me.

 Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press).  She was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and for a Ruth Lily Fellowship.  She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.  Contact Emma  www.emmabolden.com  www.theyawp.com

Also by Emma Bolden in ALT/space:
Five Ws and an H: An Exercise to Help Students Explore Their Identities as Writers
Burning the Box: A Teacher Does Her Homework
Share and Share Alike: The TA as Artist Studied
The Teacher’s Nightmare: Or, How Modeling Can Make a Class a Dream
Facing the First Day: What a Writer Can Learn from a Lump of Clay
Giving Voice to Silence: The Poetry Block Exhibit

WHAT: The journalist’s six cornerstone questions.  An idea I had one day: what if those questions were flipped inward and then outward?  What if I had my students ask themselves how those six questions relate to their lives as writers?  An exercise.  An inquiry.  A way for students to explore who they are as artists.  A way for a teaching artist to introduce herself to her students.  A way for students to learn about each other.  A way for students to learn about themselves.

HOW:  List the six questions on the board: who, what, where, why, when, and how.  Explain that you’re not going to explain much more than that: each question can mean different things to different students, and that’s fine.  The answer to where could be a physical space, like a desk, or a psychological space, like in anger.  The answer to how can describe the physical act – with a super fine Uni-Ball pen in an unlined Moleskine – or the metaphysical act – by leafing through the card catalog of memory and image that is my mind.  The question can mean what the student needs it to mean.  So can the answer.

WHEN: The first day of class, in lieu of or as a supplement to introductions.  The last day of class, as a way for students to reflect upon their growth over the course of the semester.  Outside of class, hopefully, and years after the class is over, even more hopefully: over coffee, after dinner, after waking up in the middle of the night, as a way to gauge one’s development as an artist after one is no longer a student.

WHO: The students stepping into a writing class for a first time who needs to realize that they’re already writers.  The graduating students who need to remember why they started writing.  The teacher who needs to reflect upon who she is as an artist.  The artist who needs to reflect upon who she is as a teacher.

WHERE: In the classroom, that generic space in which every teacher, professor, class, student must learn how to speak and write and learn.  Posted on student blogs or class blogs.  Printed and push-pinned to a cork board behind a writing desk.  Taped to the wall of a studio.  Folded and tucked into a pocket, a wallet.  Posted on Post-Its in a dorm room.

WHY:  Because, first and foremost, asking oneself six questions about one’s life as a writer means first making a very important statement: I am a writer.  Because making this statement provides a student with confidence, with encouragement.  Because, in a writing class, students are required to risk and push themselves and share what they might prefer keep secret, which requires confidence and encouragement.  Because even the most experienced writer needs to take stock of their process and product from time to time.  Because knowing yourself is vital to expressing yourself.  Because you can’t have answers if you don’t ask questions.

 Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press).  She was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and for a Ruth Lily Fellowship.  She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.  Contact Emma  www.emmabolden.com  www.theyawp.com

Also by Emma Bolden in ALT/space:
Burning the Box: A Teacher Does Her Homework
Share and Share Alike: The TA as Artist Studied
The Teacher’s Nightmare: Or, How Modeling Can Make a Class a Dream
Facing the First Day: What a Writer Can Learn from a Lump of Clay
Giving Voice to Silence: The Poetry Block Exhibit

Where are you going, where have you been: though they’re widely known as the title of a harrowing short story by Joyce Carol Oates, those eight words describe exactly what I want my students to think about in their last assignment for my class, the self-reflection: where they have been as writers and where they are going, where those two roads intersect, and what they’ve learned from a semesters’ worth of readings, exercises, class discussions, and peer critiques of their work. 

In college-level writing classes, these assignments are so common as to be rote requirements; most writing professors automatically assign them – myself included.  Nonetheless, I am struck every time I read a student’s self-reflection with wonder at the learning process.  I’m struck with my students’ abilities to change, to improve, to embrace and incorporate new ideas.

This semester was a bumpy one, as any professor’s first semester at a new institution is bound to be.  Every first semester seems like a test: the students, wary of a newcomer, are often resistant until the professor earns their trust, and the professor herself must gauge for the first time what the students need.  In this semester’s wake, I felt it best to complete my own assignment, to see what I’d learned in my own self-reflection.  I learned this semester the most difficult thing not just for any writer or teacher or artist to learn, but for any human being to learn: not everyone is going to like you, especially when you’re challenging them, forcing them not only to think outside of their box but to take a match and burn that box to ash. 

When I think back to where I have been in terms of my own educational experiences, I realize that I learned the most from teachers who I at first, well, didn’t like very much – because they pushed me past my comfort zone, because – I now realize – they cared enough about my mind, my writing, and my art to push me to take risks, to never accept the status quo, to change and learn and think and re-think and always, always move further. 

This has helped me a great deal to see where I am going, both as a teacher and as a writer.  When I go into my classroom, I will come from a place of mercy and sympathy – or, rather, empathy – for the difficult task both my students and I are doing.  I’ll be less defensive and more willing to share my own struggles as a writer so that my students can learn from them.  After all, we are all in that room together for three hours a week for the very same reason: to write, to learn, to grow and improve and write again.  This may not be an easy process, but if we approach others and ourselves with empathy and understanding, it’ll make the road from where we have been to where we are going a little bit smoother.

Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press).  She was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and for a Ruth Lily Fellowship.  She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.  Contact Emma  www.emmabolden.com  www.theyawp.com

Also by Emma Bolden in ALT/space:
Share and Share Alike: The TA as Artist Studied
The Teacher’s Nightmare: Or, How Modeling Can Make a Class a Dream
Facing the First Day: What a Writer Can Learn from a Lump of Clay
Giving Voice to Silence: The Poetry Block Exhibit

I was trying to zip up a bag over-filled with books when a student stopped me.  “Professor Bolden?  I just wanted to say I read your chapbook.  I really liked the poems about sailors.”  My hand jerked and the zipper broke open.  I felt red fill my cheeks.  “Oh gosh,” I said, then “thanks,” not knowing what else to say.

I had never shared my writing with my students, besides reading aloud my responses to in-class exercises.  In my creative writing classes, I wanted more than anything for my students to develop their own voices and find the styles which best suited their subjects.  Since students would ultimately receive a grade in my class, I feared that having them read my work would lead them to think that parroting my writing would garner a good grade in the class. 

In reality, I expected the exact opposite; I wanted each student to arrive at the arrangement of words which best suited what they needed to say.  I didn’t want to create a class of students who sounded like versions of me: I wanted a class of students who sounded like the best possible versions of themselves.  In actuality, I was as frightened as my students were to bring their writing to the class.  I sympathized with my students because I shared their worries: what if no one liked what I wrote?

I reached a conundrum, however, when I taught creative nonfiction.  The class was to end with a unit on a researched essay; I brought in selections from research-based works of nonfiction, such as Sarah Messer’s Red House, to show students how research for creative essays differs from research for academic essays.  Though the students understood how the product differed – how Messer’s book was more like a story than an essay for their Composition classes – they were confused as to how the process differed.  I realized the best way to help students understand the process was to show them how I had gone through it.  I had to do what I most feared: teach my own work. 

I assigned an essay I’d written about the Salpêtrière, the French hospital for hysterics, and asked them to come to class with questions about my research and writing process.  I showed my students how the essay evolved: the first sparks of inspiration appeared in my undergraduate drawing class, when I’d sketched the shape of the body in the throes of hysteria.  I showed them the books I’d underlined and dog-eared.  I showed them my notes and drafts, what I’d circled to keep and crossed out to cut.  I showed them how important it was to let yourself experiment, to take risks in research and revision, much as I’d taken a risk by teaching my own work.  When I received their drafts, I was happy to see that each of them had taken risks in writing and research – and that none of their essays sounded like them, not me.

Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press).  She was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and for a Ruth Lily Fellowship.  She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.  Contact Emma  www.emmabolden.com  www.theyawp.com

Also by Emma Bolden in ALT/space:
The Teacher’s Nightmare: Or, How Modeling Can Make a Class a Dream
Facing the First Day: What a Writer Can Learn from a Lump of Clay
Giving Voice to Silence: The Poetry Block Exhibit

I stood in front of the classroom, my hand and the marker inside of it half-raised towards the whiteboard, and suddenly realized I’d been staring at a circle with the word “Spring” inside of it for a long time.  It was like that actor’s nightmare you always hear about, the dream of being on-stage naked and having forgotten your lines, and even though I was fully clothed, this somehow seemed worse.  There were no lines to forget.

This was my first experience with modeling: showing my writing students how to go through the process of writing by writing myself, in front of them.  I’ve always been keenly aware and observant of my own writing process: my shelves are crowded with notebooks I’ve saved to save the process of writing each poem and essay from my first scribbled notes – often just a phrase or two (Grey Gardens and fake engagement rings? Elephant baseball dream?) – to first drafts scribbled over with editing notes (too snooty? Darling, I think you’ve got to kill this darling).  I even, for a while, kept a notebook to track writing sessions.  However, this was a private and personal archeology; the idea of going through the process in front of my students terrified me. 

What would I do when I made mistakes, which I knew I’d inevitably make, when I came to the pauses and problems which characterize any writer’s process?  I knew, somehow, that in order to be a better teacher of writing, I needed to be willing to bare my writing process to my students. 

I started my fight against my writer’s block, slowly writing another word next to “Spring” – tree – then circling it, then watching the board as other words circled around it – leaf, flower, pollen, bee.  Soon, the whiteboard filled with circles, and my students not only saw how to create a cluster diagram for pre-writing, but also how to move past a writer’s block.

After this, I started modeling in my creative writing classes, too, trying my hand at our “morning warm-up” exercises along with my students and reading what I’d written aloud when we shared our responses.  I realized that modeling was essential in a writing classroom, perhaps not so much because it showed students how they should write as because it showed students that they could write, that snares and snags and stand-stills were part of every writer’s process – and that they could overcome them. 

Teaching writing, particularly creative writing, can be particularly difficult because it often means challenging students to push past their own expectations.  There are no tests or universally-accepted answers, and there is no such thing as perfect.  If I as a teacher can show them how I deal with this and other problems which pop up when I write, students can see that writing may be a challenge, but it’s a challenge they have the power to overcome – a reminder welcome in the lives of any student, teacher, or writer.

Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press).  She was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and for a Ruth Lily Fellowship.  She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.  Contact Emma  www.emmabolden.com  www.theyawp.com

Also by Emma Bolden in ALT/space:
Facing the First Day: What a Writer Can Learn from a Lump of Clay
Giving Voice to Silence: The Poetry Block Exhibit