My writing students complained the other day about certain canned responses to their disappointments: Well-meaning folks assured them, "Everything that happens to you is for a reason!" I asked them to raise hands if they agreed or not with this statement. 75% said they disagreed. I'm their writing teacher, and find cliches born of other people's discomfort with our discomfort hard to stomach too. But I suggested a revision: what if you said to them (and yourself), "Everything that happens to you...is for art?" A common problem: Where can I say how I really feel? At a seder this weekend, an older female guest in a glow-worm white jacket confided in me, "We're about to lose our family home. My husband got forced out of his work two years ago. I'm so sad--'" she lowered her voice, "but no one really wants to hear about it." I am always interested in what's really going on for people, and as a result, even strangers often open up for me. I felt for her, what felt like losing her roots. And she was right: it was hard to elicit the empathy she really needed. Much worse things were happening to people everywhere...but so what? This was her grief. She should be able to find an ear for it. My philosophy: Everything That Happens to You Has a Home in Your Art I couldn't tell her this, then, nor did I know if she ever wrote, but we could say: Every single thing that happens to you has a home in your art. That annoying comment your teacher made about your test. That t-shirt you won at the fair. The way your mom looks at you when you get home late. The family home you lost. The cough that wouldn't go away. The school you didn't get into. The kid you hope to have. It doesn't matter what it is: art can handle it. Art will hold it. Art gives you a place to hold it and understand it. In my intro to personal essay class, "Word UP," I ask my students to call out, "Thank you, Life, for giving me my material!" It's goofy but accurate and it never hurts to be Continue Reading …
poem
A poem to inspire your best college essay
Stafford's Poem From time to time I find a poem that would be a perfect college essay, as is. Read it, and weep. William Stafford's "A Ritual to Read to Each Other," guts me word by word. I want to help my students make their college essays this pointed and distilled. So let's study this guy, a master of his form; he knows word economy. His poem unsettles. Good-- who wants to settle? That's for pre-Trump era folks. "If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star." Read the rest here. Stafford's poem helps us figure out how to be with one another as people (because generally speaking, we're pretty piss at winning peace prizes, folks). He is a badass** writer, somehow direct but also circumspect: "Lest our mutual life get lost in the dark." How is that for Twitter-able accuracy? As a side note, I would also feel really cool if one of my students wrote something this devastating and accurate. (Which, by the way, they sometimes do, just that most of them aren't famous for it yet.) These lines have haunted me for years. They could not be more relevant. Be Woke As a buzzkill and injunction to BE WOKE, I'll post Stafford's last lines. But you're best served by reading the whole poem aloud, again and again. Better if you can read it to somebody. Maybe somebody who, like the rest of us, needs to WAKE UP ALREADY. "For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep." Again, you can visit the whole poem here. Light up your essay I often misremember the poem's last lines as "the answers we give should be clear..." But you could easily substitute, "the college essays we write...should be clear!" --because the Continue Reading …