There have been a number of conversations lately about the teaching of creative writing (See Roxane Gay , A D Jameson, and Aubrey Hirsch at HTML Giant and Amber Sparks at Big Other), whether it can or should be taught. These conversations revolve mostly around teaching college students. But I want to take a step back to talk about reaching students before they’ve arrived in college. Because teaching creative writing to elementary, middle, and high school students is a vital, necessary act that nurtures creativity, critical thinking, and civic engagement. When we teach students how to approach a text they don’t understand, one like nothing they’ve ever seen before, we help them develop confidence in their own abilities. This changes how they approach the world: no matter who you are, or where your parents were born or the size of the apartment you live in, you are invited to participate in the meaning making of a poem, an amendment to your state constitution, and everything in between. When these same students write in response to these texts, their work becomes part of our shared cultural history. This changes how they see themselves: they are not islands, exposed and separated by their difference, their place of birth or ethnicity or the take-home pay of their parents. When they write they become part of American Letters. As a writer-in-the-school in Denver, with Colorado Humanities & Center for the Book and DenverScores, I have taught many students in underserved communities, students for whom the bar has been set too low by too many. We’ve listened to Mozart’s nocturnes, read Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Hoah Nguyen, and Amiri Baraka’s poems, even Barry Hannah’s stories. For me, this teaching of creative writing takes on a tremendous importance: it teaches students not to underestimate what they’re capable of understanding and creating and to never let anyone else either.

Many people, in programs throughout the country, are empowering students through creative writing. Virginia Reeves teaches workshops with elementary school students in Austin, Texas, through Badgerdog Literary Publishing. Like other writers-in-the-schools programs in Houston, Denver, Seattle, New York, California, Idaho and so many other places, Badgerdog sends writers into classrooms to teach texts students are less likely to encounter in school (an Alissa Nutting story, an excerpt from Italo Calvino) as models to inspire their own writing. The same stories and poems many of us have read in M.F.A. and Ph.D. programs elicit the most fascinating, unheard-of responses from elementary school students–writers who aren’t afraid their initial response is wrong; writers whose imaginations haven’t yet been clipped. I wanted to talk to a teacher who’s in the thick of it. Reeves is a stellar instructor, beloved by her young writers and likewise entranced by them. She sees firsthand in the classroom the unique and quantifiable effects of exposing students to texts that challenge their notions of language–texts that inspire them to create exhilarating, sophisticated, visceral works of fiction and poetry.

Badgerdog writers teach with this system: Read, Write, Share. How do you choose which text to read(teach)?

My 4th grade students write poems from fiction prompts and prose in response to poems. At this level they’re writing more short pieces; the form of the poem, the short story, the prose-poem, works well for them. I usually start the workshop with something I love, one of my favorite stories, one of my favorite poems; I like to show them a lot of flash fiction. I really push that great writing doesn’t have to mean long writing. One of the most daunting things for young writers is the idea that you have to produce a lot. Whereas some of the best things, some of the hardest things to write, are really short pieces. This is a length that shows them that every word counts. For young writers, this length makes them go back and interrogate every word. Many of these students have gotten used to writing pretty traditional sentences with words they’ve seen a million times before. The key is to find out how to break that down but also to strengthen those traditional forms. To show them that you don’t have to use the same word that you’ve always used; or you don’t have to use those words in the same sequence you’ve always used them.

One of the best aspects of teaching a text you love is that the students have ideas you’ve never thought of before. They take these oblique angles and they’re totally unfiltered. How they respond to a character or how they respond to a word or turn of phrase. I’ve loved a text more because a 3rd grader showed me something in it I’d never considered.

Absolutely. A text I’ve taught a lot before, to five year olds and college students, is Gary Gildner’s “Dogtoothed Violets.” It starts with the line “I don’t know how a dog’s mouth / got involved in their naming.” Every student has picked up on a different image or idea in the poem. Some of the best work I’ve seen in response to this poem is when I’ve brought in native plants and told the students their names: the connections students make between the object, the name of the object, and the feeling–that they make that transition is so important. I think that students, kids, see the world in metaphor. They’re born capable of making metaphoric connections. One of the sad things I’ve seen is that the world is teaching this out of them. For some students, their natural ability to make metaphor has been quieted. They learn to rely on stock phrases: “The sun is round like a beach ball.”

Those cliches have been sewn into their brains! So now, when they look at a comparison, they don’t know there should be this electricity, this magic between dissimilar things. They’re not taught to find the magic, to let the word spark something fabulous in their imaginations.

One of our greatest goal as writers is to find similarities between discrepant things, discrepant objects. So when we relate two things we never thought to relate, there’s this crossover. It’s progress. It gives us a new idea.

And even approaching the world outside of art. If you read a metaphor that surprises you, it almost re-wires your brain, and that re-wiring seems so important, not only to writers but these young people who will become politicians and teachers and future leaders. They can learn that there are always alternative ways of seeing the world.

Yes! My students took a field trip to the Blanton Museum of Art and we wrote in response to Ellsworth Kelly’s “High Yellow.”

Then we read the poem accompanying the painting in the museum. When we came back to the classroom the next week, I had my students draw images similar to “High Yellow.” [student name redacted], a student who until to this point had written three words a day, even though he’d been engaged and participating in conversation–had convinced himself he wasn’t a writer. Yet he wrote this:

“Green Silence”

Reminds me of an island
surrounded in water, forced
to stay silent. Just waiting
and staring at the water
so quiet and abandoned.
It waits for something
to happen. The cold
wind blows and shifts
around the island so soft
and slow. The water
splashes and shifts
so gentle it could almost
disappear. It waits and waits
like a bear so violent when
awake, but harmless
when asleep.

This was one of the moments where I thought: why would I do anything else in the world? This is where [student name redacted] needed to start: from no language; he needed to be able to bring language to the image.

I feel like: what if this student wrote this poem in response to a standardized test question?

[Conversation redacted to protect EVERYONE involved.]

One of the things I do want to do is put my students in contact with writers they might not see. I read them pieces out of Nabokov’s Transparent Things. There was a lot of crossover between what I was studying and what I brought into the classroom, like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge.

That’s one thing I really want to talk about: this erroneous idea that younger students aren’t capable of understanding the textures and nuances of “high literature.” This idea that they aren’t capable of seeing and appreciating the same language that adults appreciate.

I’ve read my 4th graders Alice Munroe, the opening scene in “Miles City Montana.” It begins with a childhood memory of a boy who’s drowned. The narrator sees mud clotting the boy’s nostril and ear. The narrator has this moment: “I couldn’t have seen that. I couldn’t have been that close.” I use this story to talk to students about false memories, the things we add to the true stories we re-tell. One of the prompts for my students was: describe something in detail that you’ve seen and tell us how it was possible that you hadn’t seen that. I tell my students: “You can remember anything you want. Then tell me why it couldn’t have ever, in reality, been in that way.”

An English Language Learner who started the workshop speaking very little English, wrote this in response to Munroe’s story:

“I See Blue Water”

The blue water had long snake-like fish in it.
The fish were a rare gold.
They looked like a set of golden rings.
They were tiny black and blue fish.
I could not have seen it,
because I was not in
Thailand.

She had just moved here. She had very limited English skills. And to have that turn, that twist at the end. What makes this experience not perfectly true, though her feelings of it were: that she wasn’t there.

I love this. The idea that fictionalizing something brings us closer to it. That we can feel at home more in the fiction of the experience than in trying to describe the memory exactly.

Yes! We can sometimes get at the greater truths when we unravel the real experience.

I’m always interested in the expectations readers have—most of these have been taught to us somehow (by the narrative of the news, for example.). What have you found that 4th graders come in expecting of the stories they read?

I’ve definitely had a lot of: “That’s not a story.” So, I break that down and say “Why?” They expect that very traditional conflict resolution. I think they come in expecting to be able to identify the conflict: how do I sum this up in two sentences, because that’s how it’s done. And then I tell them, write me a short piece that is just about your shoes. And they say, “But who are the characters…” They don’t feel that freedom to say: I can write about anything; I can embody anything; I can recount anything. I try very hard to share with them pieces that challenge their expectations.

But I think that kids can [if given the opportunity] re-arrange easier; the language part of their brain is more flexible. They think: I can put the adjective before the noun.

In some ways it seems that if you can get students to do this, it’s like bicep curls for their brain.

Seeing their work published, seeing them read their work in public [at the end of the workshop]. It’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened.

There’s this sense of agency realized.

It’s hands down my favorite teaching I’ve ever done. I think working with kids is a reminder of what it means to be a writer. I tell my students we’re colleagues; I’m further along in my career, but we are colleagues. And I fully believe that. When I have those moments of crisis: why am I not in real estate?–it’s those moments of connection, getting to share one of my favorite stories with 4th graders who “get it” better than most adults. We’re all trying to make sense of the world. There’s things for us writers that we learn to check off: we can never write about that because “that’s been done before.” Yet my students work reminds me that nothing’s off the table: there’s no theme, no story, no interaction, that isn’t an opportunity. They remind me of that. They are funny and more inspiring than any writers I’ve ever worked with.

Your students, for whom certain opportunities aren’t so readily available–who knows how this kind of critical thinking might lead them to consider their lives, their futures, and the world they live in differently.

There’s also the connection to the passing down of stories. My students sometimes think they don’t have anything important to say. I ask them: what if you’re the recorder? What if what’s happened is lost if you don’t write it down? We’ve lost so many stories. I feel like these students can be scribes. A lot of the families of the students we’re working with live in multi-generational homes. Their grandmothers and great-grandmothers can tell the history of the neighborhoods, of their city. And for the students whose grandparents or parents don’t speak English at home. They can be the scribes. What they write matters.

Students often learn that writing is a chore. When this happens I stress to them: you made something out of nothing on a blank page.

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