Can anyone really teach creative writing? Are writers born not made (nature or nurture)? I don't know. But I do know that everyone has a story and I believe that anyone who can communicate in some fashion, can tell that story. Will it be well written or well spoken?
I think anyone with desire, who is willing to work hard, edit unmercifully, and be patient as a stone Buddha can become a writer. A best selling writer? A great writer? There are many best selling writers who are not great writers but they're successful because they know how to leverage luck and are great self-promoters. Conversely there many great writers who struggle to get their work published.
The great writing teachers I've worked with facilitate learning. They provide the necessary tools, encouragement, and support that would-be writers need. Anyone who took English in high school knows the tools. But how many remember them?
My high school English teacher, Mrs. Foster, died in the classroom two years after I graduated. She was an angry person, one whose internal cauldron of anger boiled into purple rage within a couple of heartbeats. Mrs. Foster, barely over five feet tall, weighed close to two hundred pounds. She hopped up and down, from one foot to the other, which accelerated as her anger increased. Mrs. Foster's body jiggled like it was recording the after shocks of an earthquake. She slammed an 18 inch ruler on the wooden desk of the person who was targeted for wrath in a staccato that shamed the best drummer. My family practiced violence with the diligence of praying monks so I knew how to disassociate when I was the target of Mrs. Foster's wrath.
" I don't care if English isn't your first language, you're in America now so learn it," she yelled. The target that day was a new student from Argentina who spoke Argentinian Spanish and German. She assigned him to me because I spoke Spanish and was taking German.
When she yelled, regardless of the object of her wrath, I went to the safe place in my mind, where violence had been banished. My feral, angry family had taught me how to avoid rage or at least minimize the fall-out.
Whenever she vented her fury I imagined she might jump into the air and then punch through the floor of our old high school. We were on the third floor and I viualized her slamming through floors until she crashed into the basement. Then I felt guilty. I worried that she and all of the debris that she and gravity accumulated, along with other students, might land on Mr. Yazzie, our janitor, who slept during the day in the basement directly below our English classroom.
Two years after I graduated a vein exploded in her head. I asked the person who told me: "Was anyone else hurt? Did they report her death right away or did they wait until the bell to make sure she had really died?"
I realize now that I was spiteful, seeking revenge on a woman held hostage by her own rage, lonely in her inability to be the person I'm sure she would rather have been. But in spite of my fear of her I learned the basic components of sentences, good grammar.
I started college only because it was a warm place to spend most of a day. I had run away from home just after high school graduation, so I was homeless, living in my car and on the couches of friends. I was the first one into the student union, at day break, where I helped in the kitchen enough during the day to earn coffee, breakfast and often a couple more meals per day. After classes I went to labs where I could stay until midnight and also where most TAs didn't mind my dog as long as she lay on the floor beneath my feet.
I made friends with a writing teacher named Red Bird. He gave me jobs around his home: shoveling snow, splitting and hauling firewood, mowing the lawn and he invited me to enroll in his class. He taught me how to write poetry and prose, how to read like a writer. Red and his wife didn't know that he had, since the fifties, been slowly dying of leukemia triggered when the army made him stand up during atomic blasts in the Nevada desert. Red had flaming red hair (hence the nickname Red). He said he had never had freckles until after the atomic blasts.
Later, it was mentoring and encouragement by people like Carol Houck Smith of WW Norton, Brady Udahl, and Dawn Morano who sparked the English composition that Mrs Foster beat into my head and stoked the smoldering fire that Red Bird ignited in me. And it was the patient help of Shen Christenson--an incredible writer and the best editor on the planet--and her love that really jump started my writing.
Now I'm "teaching" writing at the University of Utah in the Lifelong Learning system. Go figure. But I don't own an 18 inch ruler, I don't get angry in class, and even if I jumped up an down and punched through our classroom floor I could only fall a couple of feet.
I think anyone with desire, who is willing to work hard, edit unmercifully, and be patient as a stone Buddha can become a writer. A best selling writer? A great writer? There are many best selling writers who are not great writers but they're successful because they know how to leverage luck and are great self-promoters. Conversely there many great writers who struggle to get their work published.
The great writing teachers I've worked with facilitate learning. They provide the necessary tools, encouragement, and support that would-be writers need. Anyone who took English in high school knows the tools. But how many remember them?
My high school English teacher, Mrs. Foster, died in the classroom two years after I graduated. She was an angry person, one whose internal cauldron of anger boiled into purple rage within a couple of heartbeats. Mrs. Foster, barely over five feet tall, weighed close to two hundred pounds. She hopped up and down, from one foot to the other, which accelerated as her anger increased. Mrs. Foster's body jiggled like it was recording the after shocks of an earthquake. She slammed an 18 inch ruler on the wooden desk of the person who was targeted for wrath in a staccato that shamed the best drummer. My family practiced violence with the diligence of praying monks so I knew how to disassociate when I was the target of Mrs. Foster's wrath.
" I don't care if English isn't your first language, you're in America now so learn it," she yelled. The target that day was a new student from Argentina who spoke Argentinian Spanish and German. She assigned him to me because I spoke Spanish and was taking German.
When she yelled, regardless of the object of her wrath, I went to the safe place in my mind, where violence had been banished. My feral, angry family had taught me how to avoid rage or at least minimize the fall-out.
Whenever she vented her fury I imagined she might jump into the air and then punch through the floor of our old high school. We were on the third floor and I viualized her slamming through floors until she crashed into the basement. Then I felt guilty. I worried that she and all of the debris that she and gravity accumulated, along with other students, might land on Mr. Yazzie, our janitor, who slept during the day in the basement directly below our English classroom.
Two years after I graduated a vein exploded in her head. I asked the person who told me: "Was anyone else hurt? Did they report her death right away or did they wait until the bell to make sure she had really died?"
I realize now that I was spiteful, seeking revenge on a woman held hostage by her own rage, lonely in her inability to be the person I'm sure she would rather have been. But in spite of my fear of her I learned the basic components of sentences, good grammar.
I started college only because it was a warm place to spend most of a day. I had run away from home just after high school graduation, so I was homeless, living in my car and on the couches of friends. I was the first one into the student union, at day break, where I helped in the kitchen enough during the day to earn coffee, breakfast and often a couple more meals per day. After classes I went to labs where I could stay until midnight and also where most TAs didn't mind my dog as long as she lay on the floor beneath my feet.
I made friends with a writing teacher named Red Bird. He gave me jobs around his home: shoveling snow, splitting and hauling firewood, mowing the lawn and he invited me to enroll in his class. He taught me how to write poetry and prose, how to read like a writer. Red and his wife didn't know that he had, since the fifties, been slowly dying of leukemia triggered when the army made him stand up during atomic blasts in the Nevada desert. Red had flaming red hair (hence the nickname Red). He said he had never had freckles until after the atomic blasts.
Later, it was mentoring and encouragement by people like Carol Houck Smith of WW Norton, Brady Udahl, and Dawn Morano who sparked the English composition that Mrs Foster beat into my head and stoked the smoldering fire that Red Bird ignited in me. And it was the patient help of Shen Christenson--an incredible writer and the best editor on the planet--and her love that really jump started my writing.
Now I'm "teaching" writing at the University of Utah in the Lifelong Learning system. Go figure. But I don't own an 18 inch ruler, I don't get angry in class, and even if I jumped up an down and punched through our classroom floor I could only fall a couple of feet.
