Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.This interview was split into two posts to do justice to Madenski’s generous sharing of time and wisdom. Part 1 covered her biography and writer’s origin story. Part 2 focuses on craft and teaching.
How does one identify the seed of a piece of writing?
Surprise. My Achilles heel is that I get too sentimental. The more sentimental writing gets, the greater the distance. When you write universally, describe, and keep those emotions out, you open it up.
What questions should a writer ask themselves at the beginning of a piece?
Know?
Don’t know?
What to know?
It’s about finding [one’s] curiosity.
What should a writer consider, and disregard, when beginning a piece of writing?
The first step is not creating a story. The first writing, what we used to call free writing, is first thoughts. It frees you from having to be worried about the things you might worry about in a final draft.
One of my small rants is that free writing became a thing, and teachers sit children down and make them write. Once something becomes institutionalized, it’s difficult for students to feel safe with it. If you look at writing as a place to explore, to find meaning, it becomes a different thing.
Why is working through first thoughts important?
A student I loved told me she wrote about a problem she had for five days in a row. The first version was awful, full of blame; after five days, she’d narrowed it to what she could change and what she couldn’t. That was never going to be published, but that is the writing process.
As an adult, I started [writing] the first day after [my husband] Mark died. Those journals were useless – they were just questions. In two full journals, there are probably two salvageable sentences. But it helped me to be a better parent, to get through that.
How important is defining an audience?
I never do until the end; maybe not even then. I write what I’m curious about and if I have that intuitive sense, if it feels good, I’ll keep working. After I finish, then I’ll think of where to send it.
How can writers get better at finding seeds? And drafting?
They get better as they practice, as with anything else. Writing, and maybe this is true of dancing and photography, offers lots of rewards when you start to use it across the arc of your life.
What opportunity does writing bring the writer?
The chance to see things more clearly. The opportunity to notice, to slow, to look. I wrote a poem called ‘Ode to Black’, during the Black Lives Matters protests. I was walking one day and there were crows everywhere. And I walked to the creek and the ducks have this black so black it’s almost indigo on their faces. So much of what I love in nature is black – trees in winter – so I wrote this poem.
Writing has given me knowing what I want to get good at; stability, better understanding of myself, much better understanding of students. I love publishing, but it wouldn’t stop me writing if I didn’t publish.
Madenski recommends
The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?
‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe, which I memorized in sixth grade. And Robert Frost, ‘The Road Less Taken’, reading them, something shifted in me.
The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?
Early Morning by Kim Stafford. It’s a very personal book [about his father], but it’s universal. It helped me see people as complex and beautiful. You can struggle with someone or something, but still see the beauty in them.
A classic you would love to teach?
My Antonia by Willa Cather. I don’t go around thinking of myself as a feminist, but I am a feminist. Willa Cather cut her hair, wore pants, got a job as a journalist. It is beautifully written and would be a perfect thing to teach. To have [students] read the book first, and not know about her, then fold in her influences as a woman writer when it wasn’t easy to be one. That would open up some wonderful conversations.
A contemporary work you would love to teach?
Happiness by Aminatta Forna. It’s about two characters in their late adult years, their children are raised. They have experience; they’ve lived hard lives, and that is part of the story too. The book is complicated: it’s about where we are in the world, our relationship to animals, the divisiveness that pulls us apart. It’s about aging, what it means to have loved, to have a long career. It is about a different type of happiness.
A book about writing every writing student should read?
The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop Vols I, II & III by Diane Lockwood. I wish I’d found these [books] years ago.
A visual artist/musician/film maker who inspires you?
Greta Gerwig. She’s a great example of how we can come to stories about love, friendship, culture, with a different lens. She started out independent with Lady Bird and Little Women, then the Barbie movie, which I wasn’t going to see because of my assumptions. But I went and I loved it. [Gerwig] has a different voice, a way of storytelling that is the opposite of what I thought it would be.
A book you buy copies of to give to friends?
Who Dies? and Unattended Sorrow, both by Stephan Levine. They are about grief. At this time in my life, people are losing big things – parents, children, partners. Levine writes about compassion, in its true sense. Looking through a lens at the hardest things in our lives. I soak up instruction in how to endure difficult things. It’s not an exercise in denial, it’s an exercise in facing.
What’s next?
Inspired by Ada Lemon’s linked sonnets in The Lucky Wreck, I am working on seven verses that began with a walk on the Columbia River. I saw an asylum of loons and that’s where the poem started. It’s not ready to read aloud yet, but it’s going somewhere good.
I’m also working on an essay about ageing, and pulling together poems for a reading with Andrea Carlisle at Broadway Books on 5 September.
Not least, I walked Neskowin Creek [near my old home] from the headwaters to the coast. I had been teaching all summer, couldn’t afford to travel and needed to do something, so I walked. I collected about 80 pages of field notes. [My daughter] Hallie and I, will go in the fall and she’ll photograph it. Then I’ll publish that, maybe.
Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.This interview will be split into two posts to do justice to Madenski’s generous sharing of time and wisdom. Part 1 covers her biography and writer’s origin story. Part 2 will focus on craft and teaching.
Full disclosure: Melissa and I have known of each other since I was growing up in Lincoln City, Oregon; her children attended my mother’s day care. About a decade ago, I reached out and shared some of my writing. She responded with characteristic generosity and has become a dear friend, mentor, exemplar.
Photo: Hallie Madenski
“I’ve had everything in my life I wanted, but not one thing went according to plan.”
Melissa Madenski delivers this statement with poise that belies the extraordinariness of the claim.
White hair frames dark tortoiseshell glasses and silver hoop earrings. A boho-chic bob to make Anna Wintour green. The kindled joy in her eyes refracts through the the kitchen-dining-living space of her Portland, Oregon home, which is as spare, chic and elegant as she: drip coffee-maker, glass-fronted book shelves, black-and-white prints on crisp white walls.
Elsewhere, these might be bland markers of commodified good taste. But they are Madenski’s tools: functional and essential as carpenter’s adze or blacksmith’s tongs.
Born and raised in Portland, Madenski moved to the Oregon coast as a young woman, taught school, married, had children. One imagines a life rich in the delights of partnership and parenthood: time-poor, perhaps, but abundant in laughter. A time to make one say, “I’ve had everything I wanted.”
But: “Not one thing went according to plan.” The rosy narrative ended in a thunderclap moment when Melissa’s husband, Mark, died, aged 34. Their children, Hallie and Dylan, were one and six years old; their hand-built wooden house in the Siuslaw Forest unfinished.
“My healthy, athletic husband had simply stopped breathing,” she wrote in her 2015 essay, ‘Starting Over.‘ “We would soon learn that an arrhythmia shook his heart until it stopped.”
Such an unthinkable, unspeakable loss can drive unbelievers to their knees and turn Christian soldiers into atheists. How many people, in that crucible, muster the grace to craft an original response?
Madenski mustered — no — created that grace.
“That’s when I started to write every morning,” she recalls. “I missed Mark very, very much; I held onto writing for my sanity. I’m not an early riser, but I’d set my alarm for 4:30. It was a wood-heated house, so, freezing. I’d stick my head under well water – also freezing – make a latte, then shut myself in my office.”
Though Madenski traces her deliberate writing practice to the cataclysm of loss, its roots reach across generations and oceans.
The youngest daughter of a traveling salesman and a homemaker, Madenski grew up in Portland, happy to daydream alone beneath a spruce tree in their yard. Her grandmother, an immigrant from Norway, lived with them. “I credit her with raising me. She told me lots of stories.”
They were the stories of a vibrant and spirited woman who “hiked, rode horses, lived in logging camps.” A woman who knew, too, what it was to be struck by fate.
A burst appendix led to an infection that ruined her grandmother’s hip. In an era before accessible replacement surgery, this irredeemably altered the last 30 years of her life.
“She lost everything that she loved.” Madenski sits with her memories for a moment, then continues. “My grandmother been a seamstress, so my mother would bring her thread and fabric. She sowed until the last three days of her life. It was like writing: the one thing no one can take away.”
Another thing no one can take away: the example of a woman who chose not to be defined by suffering, but to — Penelope-like — stich and unpick, stitch and unpick, until the stitching and the unpicking became a new tale.
Though “drawn to stories,” Madenski didn’t want to be a writer. “As a kid, I only wanted to imagine. I would go to bed early, lay there and create stories where I was always the heroine.”
Madenski was a voracious reader. But it wasn’t until high school that writing began to glow as an idea.
She was the first person who said I was a writer; the first person to believe in me as a writer. There was no big lineage: I kept a boring diary, which thankfully was lost in a house fire, but what I’ve come to believe is that so much of writing is story. We are wired for narrative. We’re wired for beginning middle and end.”
Despite the brush with inspiration, Madenski began “a traditional path”, earning a degree in elementary and special education from Portland State University.
Her first job, age 22, was teaching second grade in a public elementary school. “It was hell,” she says. Disadvantaged students. A teachers’ strike. The inevitable tribulations of being green and unschooled. “It was trial by fire. I witnessed things I’d never seen. I had to learn to report abuse. Teaching wasn’t teaching, it was trying to keep people’s head above water.”
The steeliness of her working-class Scandinavian ancestry flashed when she refused to sign a contract for the following year until the principal promised things would change.
After fulfilling her childhood dream of moving to the beach, Madenski taught at Oceanlake Elementary in Lincoln City and at a private school in Neskowin. Although she calls the freedom and miniscule class sizes of independent schools “heaven,” she is quick to say, “I believe in public schools.” Only there did she find the diversity that stretches and challenges.
Mark’s death precipitated her out of conventional classrooms. “There are single women who could raise kids and teach, but I couldn’t. I had some insurance money and the house, and thought, I’m going to piece things together.”
Her next first job was driving to Hebo Ranger Station to teach English to migrants employed in the local dairy industry. “It was a good time to not be alone. I was in grief, but so were they,” she muses. “Dairy milking is a hard job, they were sending money home to Mexico, but they had the most wonderful stories.”
Teaching English became one of the legs of the “three-legged stool” required to stay afloat in the Oregon Coast’s parlous tourist economy.
It was then, too, Madenski began the cold-water morning writing practice that she maintains to this day (“I wake up at 5AM, come to the table and write. It’s home to me. It’s stability”).
Her most lucrative year as a writer brought in $6,000. (“It wasn’t enough, but it was a leg.”)
Other legs included teaching at the NW Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, founded by friend and fellow author Kim Stafford; running adult literacy programs in libraries; leading writing programs for children; teaching citizenship classes to immigrants; mentoring young authors; and creating her own writing workshops.
“These jobs I pieced together didn’t give me a big retirement or benefits,” she says, matter-of-fact, “but they gave me a lot of experience.”
To anyone who says, experience don’t pay the bills, Madenski’s life is an emphatic beg to differ.
Experience can make the difference between between resilience and collapse.
A couple of years ago, Madenski had hip surgery, then broke her femur in a fall. Cue months of pain, compromised mobility, physical therapy; Covid and long Covid. A downward-rushing torrent that could sweep a person away.
“I was trying to keep going as before, and I kept falling. So I learned to say ‘no’ so I could say ‘yes’… yes to friends, family, writing. I don’t expect to grow old without pain; it doesn’t shock me or surprise me.”
The simple lucidity of the statement is a gong.
It doesn’t surprise me.
The voice of experience.
“I am at peace,” Madenski adds, stating what shines in every plane of her face and every gesture. “That’s a skill for life: not to take things personally that are not. Life teaches you what is personal. Death is not. It happens to everybody. The world is completely sorrow woven with happiness. I’ve learned not to forget that all day long.”
Two weeks ago, I signed the papers to buy my first house.
One week ago, Le Sallay called, said they couldn’t afford two literature teachers, and that I was not it.
This week, I’m moving my cats to their new home.
Let’s just say none of this was foreseen.
But it has reminded me to hold fast to what Michael Downs remarked: “The unexpected doesn’t have to be dread inducing. The unexpected can also be the reason you get up in the morning.“
***
Though I’m prickly about getting the sack barely six weeks out from the start of the school year, the words of Epictetus come to mind: “Everything has two handles, one by which you can carry it, the other by which you cannot.”
The cannot handle holds the unpleasantness, loss, unsaid goodbyes to my lovely students. All of which are real things.
What I can hold this reality by is trust that there are other opportunities, gratitude for those heartbreakingly great kids who shared their stories with me, affection for the colleagues who enriched my life in many ways.
Goodbye to all that
What’s next?
Who knows
Not I.
I’ve got cats to move, pictures to hang, boxes to unpack.
Everything is open. Anything is possible.
What I can say is the blogging will continue. The learning will continue. Once the moment is right, the teaching will continue.
Coming up soon on the blog, an interview I am thrilled to share, with the poet, educator, gardener, creator, wise woman and dear friend Melissa Madenski. She is a hero; one of the most generous, warm, fully alive human beings I have the privilege to know.
It is a huge honor to share her words and stories.
Stay tuned!
How do you face the unexpected? All advice welcome! Hit me in the comments please — I deleted my Twitter account because, X.
Joan Didion said it was a good idea to stay acquainted with the people you used to be, even if you don’t much like them anymore.
It’s good advice.
In 2016, life was changing so fast my head spun. I met my now-husband in December 2015 and the next year was spent jumping on planes to get to him, culminating in a move from Ibiza to Memphis, Tennessee. Small wonder it was a year of comfort-reading favorite books in snatched moments.
Here’s what I read, and why I read it.
***
If, like me, you have a voice in your head that tells you off for paying attention to your own life, for saving boarding passes and scribbled-upon napkins, for stopping to write love letters in the sand, ignore it.
Happiness and creativity depend on valuing our lives. They depend on listening, watching, recording, remembering. It is easy to envy other people’s lives — so exciting! Such superior children/holidays/houses/jobs/wardrobes/sex lives! Such a torrent of fabulous Instagram photos and witty Facebook status updates. We get so caught up peering through the virtual window of our neighbours’ lives we forget to look at our own. We don’t see the pathos, adventure, and pleasure of our own existence because we’re not looking.
Two years ago I started a keeping a list of all the books I read. It seemed like a self-indulgent tic indicative of an unhealthy level of ego. Or, worse, a pointless exercise (who cares?) My delight in list-making narrowly trumped these niggles. Now a blue virtual post-it on my home screen contains a list of all the books I read in 2016.
The list reminds me not only what I’ve read, but how I read. It is a snapshot of the ebb and flow of time and energy. January 2016 was a book-heavy month, gobbling up a glut of Christmas goodies and biding a lot of time until my second date with the soon-to-be boyfriend. February was a respectable showing. March, the month I spent between London, Dominican Republic and Brussels, I read almost nothing. The next two months were spent in a miserable, unsuccessful attempt to assimilate into a receptionist job at an overrated luxury agrotourismo in Ibiza — it was bad enough I only read a book and a half. Finishing Anna Karenina took me through June. The rest of the year I read in fits and starts. What jumped out, reviewing the list, was how many books I reread. And, with the exception of High Tide in Tucson and Jane Eyre, not just for the second time.
Looking over my top ten rereads reminds me what I value and crave. The books on this list all offer, directly or through illustration, wisdom and encouragement to those trying hard to live by their own lights. From the esoteric musings of the Glass siblings to the tough-love advice of Cheryl Strayed, each book is, in its own way, a tonic. They were rocks in the fast-moving stream of a year where everything changed, stepping stones to a new life.
The summer I was 15 I lived with my older sister and worked at Wendy’s. Every day on my break I hunkered down in store cupboard and read Franny & Zooey. To this day I’m not sure where I got the book, or why it grabbed me. What I do know is I’ve read it somewhere between 30-50 times, can quote entire sections of it verbatim, and reread it at least twice a year. In part it’s the reflection of myself I see in Zooey who says “I’m sick to death of waking up furious every morning and going to bed furious at night”, an echo of my relationship with my siblings in the narrator’s aside that the Glass siblings share a “semantic geometry where the shortest distance between two points is a fullish circle”, or descriptions like, “the Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table in Monte Carlo.” In part, because the wildly verbose, witty, strangely timeless sentences still reveal new flashes of character. The narrator says it is a “compound or multiple love story, pure and complicated” which is a fine description of the writing, too.
Ostensibly a book about writing, Bird by Bird is a wise, funny, heart-rending guide to living life when you don’t fit in a box. The combination of Lamott’s acerbic yet self-deprecating turns of phrase coupled with her palpable compassion is almost unbearable. I cry every time I read it, even though I’ve read it so many times I well up in anticipation. It makes me want to walk around hugging everyone and at the same time makes me want to be a blazing good writer. Every chapter is a gem, but “Jealousy” and “KFKD” are maybe the best things you’ll ever read on, respectively, the eponymous emotion and self-doubt. And her advice about avoiding libel charges is hilarious, priceless, and involves the memorable comparison of a penis to a baby bird in its nest.
This I plucked off a library shelf in Tigard, OR on the strength of the fact that Lady Gaga has a Rilke quote tattooed on her upper arm — it reads in part, “confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write”. The line, it transpires, is from Letters To A Young Poet which is so rich in exquisitely worded wisdom it flays me. Rilke’s advice on sex, solitude, and seeking ones calling is so incisive it takes my breath away. And, as a poet, he makes every word count, crafting artful sentences that blow my mind on both a philosophical and aesthetic basis. I love it so much, I read it aloud and sent the recording as a gift to a friend.
Woolf’s trenchant analysis of what women writers need is as relevant today as when she delivered the lectures from which it was drawn in 1928. We may have “come a long way, baby” but women are still underpaid, overworked, and too often cut off from the privileges that enrich men’s prospects. Sexism may not be as crude as the beadle who ordered her out of the Oxford library, but it thrives in a thousand insidious ways that women internalise or ignore at their own risk. I also love Woolf’s dazzling prose, which gave us, “one can not think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
This collection of Strayed’s advice columns written for The Rumpus’s Dear Sugar column breaks my heart wide open. I’m sobbing by the time I get through the second or third letter, whichever it is that is from the women who suffered a late-term miscarriage. It is hard to put my finger exactly on what it is about Tiny Beautiful Things that makes me gasp. Mostly, it’s Strayed’s unflinching willingness to examine the hardest things in her own life. She doesn’t rush through awfulness, or glide past suffering, she stays, unafraid to study it and claim who and what she is in the wake of it. This solipsism is unexpectedly comforting. By inhabiting and sharing her experience she makes it okay to inhabit and unpick my experience. Line by line, she demonstrates the potential for growth and change in every life. If one is willing to embrace an almost Stoic determination to live well by doing what’s right.
In 2015 I committed to memorising a poem per month, and did. Not all of them have remained word-perfect in my head, but it was an incredible experience with language. When you learn something by heart, you discover things. Cadence, repetition, punctuation, imagery all become vivid in an unpredictable way. I didn’t set out to memorise poetry in 2016 but I read a lot of it — including fantastic collections by Jack Gilbert and CP Cavafy. My favourite reread, though, was this slender chapbook by an Oregon writer. She lost her husband to an unexpected heart attack when she was in her 30s with two young children and the grief of that loss reverberates through Endurance. These are poems about learning to live with the worst case, not with resignation but with courage and, ultimately, joy. It’s another one I can’t make it through without tears, but they’re cathartic.
Of all the my rereads, this was the most fun because it was so different from my memory of it. I must have been 12 or 13 when I read Jane Eyre and I was bored witless. Years later, I read Wuthering Heights and hated it, confirming my prejudice against their weird, masochistic and wildly overrated Brontë sisters. Then on a whim I read Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall and liked it. And somewhere I heard that Jane Eyre was feminist. So I gave it another shot and fell in love. Bold feminism plus a terrific yarn? Brilliant. Free Kindle edition
I reread at least one or two of Goldberg’s books each year. Most often Writing Down the Bones or Wild Mind, but this time I went for The Long Quiet Highway which is mostly about her study of Zen Buddhism over the years. Which of course means it is about writing, being, meaning, truth, acceptance, and everything else that matters. Writing is Zen; Zen is writing. Whatever we do is meditation if we allow it to be. The subtitle is Waking Up in America which is nearly what I named this blog because that’s what I’m trying to do: wake up in a country I left 16 years ago; figure out what it means to be me in America in 2017, and how to do something good here.
Treasure Island has been a staple of my literary diet since I was 15 or so. I was a precocious reader, but not above devouring whatever I could get my hands on, and this yarn of seafaring and daring-do always hit the spot. Years later, when I moved to Ibiza, I started to think of it as treasure island — a supposed paradise guarded by dead men’s bones and half-crazed exiles. Overly dramatic personal parallels aside, it is a fantastically fun book and an excellent template for writers looking to craft a fast-paced, unforgettable story. Free Kindle edition
Kingsolver is the most recent addition to my pantheon of southern American writers (Carson McCullers, Hunter S Thompson, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, etc.) and possibly the one I’d Most Like To Meet. Writing implacably reveals character and every word I’ve read of Kingsolver makes me think she is a Good Person, smart as hell, and cracking company on a night out. Her fiction boggles me and this book of essays is one of the finest, sharpest, most humane collections I’ve had the pleasure of reading. The title essay alone is worth the price of admission; Buster the stranded hermit crab may change your life.
What books to you read over and over? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke
Five years ago, author Anise Eden traded the hectic, emotionally demanding life of a mental health social worker in Baltimore, MD for a slower-paced existence in Mallow, County Cork. “The lifestyle here suits me,” she says, a fact evident in her warmth, ready smile and enthusiasm.
The move forced a career adjustment, too, as her US qualifications and role were not transferable. While she navigated retraining and finding a place in the Irish social work system, Eden, who leaned to poetry, began writing prose.
Her debut, The Healing Edge trilogy, won the Paranormal Romance Guild Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Series.Dead Keen, the second instalment of her second series, The Things Unseen thriller trilogy,is released on 10 August 2023.
The common thread is that all of Eden’s heroines are mental health social workers. “What I’m interested in is exploring the intersections of faith, love, belief and mental health,” she explains, “and how that collides with the real world.”
From the beginning
There were early signs Eden would become a prolific writer: her penchant for “throwing five or six-syllable words I’d heard into a sentence, even though I didn’t know what they meant”; her propensity for drifting through the woods behind her house, making up stories; avid reading. That her work would be driven by caring and curiosity was likewise evident: when developers cleared part of her “sacred” forest, a 10-year-old Eden and her friend shoved sticks into bulldozer treads, hoping to sabotage the operation.
“If I hadn’t had such understanding, loving, accepting parents and teachers I would probably have gotten into a lot of trouble,” she admits. “I was a handful, but a people-pleasing handful.”
Eden was recently diagnosed with ADHD, which “explains a lot of my childhood.” It has also heightened her desire to educate people about mental health and advocate for robust self care and social care.
Life and flow
In addition to addressing mental health themes in fiction, Eden teaches social workers and researches women’s mental health. She sees these as complimentary endeavours, though admits that juggling them is “constant negotiation. It’s like water flowing into different containers; it goes where it needs to go.”
Wherever the water flows, Eden prioritizes her mental well-being. This should be axiomatic for any writer, any person, but writerly misery is a stubborn tradition. As Hemingway may have said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” (the Hemingway Society explains why he probably didn’t) – and the implication that suffering equals significance has proven hard to shake.
Eden resists this, personally and professionally. Her Mac is unsanguineous. Her home writing space comforts and inspires. “I’m looking out into the back of a house across the way, an empty lot with wildflowers, trees and above that sky,” she reports. “The sky is dramatic in Ireland; there is always something going on with the clouds. On my wall, works of art from friends and pictures of my family; when I need to be inspired I can look over and be reminded there are people who love me.”
In career terms, she ignores unhelpful advice. “Anyone who says, ‘you shouldn’t be doing it if you’re not making money,’ knows nothing about writing and publishing. If I pinned my confidence or motivation on money, that would be sad indeed.”
Eden knows from experience that confidence and motivation are hard, and hard won. Far from being dispirited, she relishes the opportunity to make mental health a focal point. It is part of an ethos of care: care for writing, care for readers and care for writers.
On writing & mental health
What mental health challenges can writing pose?
It’s a solitary activity. You are the writer, and you have to do the writing. You can collaborate, you can talk about your plot, you can workshop, but ultimately it’s you with your screen, or notebook.
Also, there is no real mechanism for feedback until you get published. There can be years and years of toil before you get feedback. In other creative fields where you have an audience – music, theatre – you can put out pieces, get feedback, adjust; it gives you confidence. With writing there is more lag time between when you start working and when you get feedback. You won’t get people cheering you on. It’s just you. A lot of writers have imposter syndrome as a result. Passion and grit is required to pull through, which can be asking too much. A lot of people don’t start, or don’t continue.
Once you publish, or are in a workshop, it can be difficult to take feedback. What you write is personal; it’s your heart, brain, mind. It can be hard to take the slings and arrows of criticism if you’re not mentally prepared. It takes learning to develop perspective on what you’re hearing.
What types of writing can be particularly challenging?
Not that the stories are autobiographical, but I draw on my emotional experiences. In my last book, Dead Sound, the protagonist is with her ex-boyfriend. She’s having a flashback to the moment they broke up. He hit her in that scene and he’s now gaslighting her, telling her it didn’t happen. And she’s questioning herself. That is something that happened to me, and I wanted to write about it for the readers who might be wondering if they had suffered abuse. In order to do that, I had to revisit those experiences. Reliving something difficult or painful is difficult and painful. I have to have self-care in place for during and after. While writing, I have my dog, my coffee, my music; afterwards I might need to go out.
How has writing affected your mental health?
I didn’t write prose until I was 39. Before that, I wrote poetry, which is very therapeutic. It is a direct line to heart, soul, mind; it pulls everything together. I’d start a poem with a dilemma or problem, and by the end I’d solve it. Poetry was like mini therapy sessions. I stopped writing when I became a therapist. I was putting all my creative energy into helping my clients.
It was during a period of unemployment that I wrote my first novel, which started as a way to answer a question for myself about mental health, and the challenges of the work. For an ADHD person, [writing] is the perfect hobby. You can go on any adventures you want.
What do you make of the trope that depression and misery spur great writing?
[Reading her work] I got the feeling Sylvia Plath would have loved to be mentally healthy. She was someone who would have loved to be happy. She would never have romanticised [her struggles]. It ended in tragedy.
What can trigger mental health difficulties?
A mental health issue arises from a mixture of factors, not just genetics or circumstance. Political factors, economic factors, physical issues, how resilient individuals are based on genetics and upbringing. For writers in particular, how we deal with isolation and criticism are important.
What resources can writers use to protect their mental health?
Having other writers in your friend group is huge. Being a part of a writing program, a workshop, or reaching out to writers on social media can lead to friendships. There was a Facebook group I joined of 10 debut novelists, all our books were coming out the same year. We were going through the same stuff for the first time, at the same time. We could compare notes, kvetch, problem solve. Nobody apart from other writers really knows what it’s like.
One of the things I tell my students in social work, and I would say to writers: we are the tools of our trade. You have to take good care of your tools. If you don’t, your work isn’t going to be great.
Eden recommends
The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time – it was science, philosophy and faith mixed together in a book that was suspenseful and thrilling, that tapped into emotional truths. I wasn’t being patronized or condescended to. I try to do that with my books: include science, philosophy, relationships; I do a lot of research to make sure it’s right.
The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?
Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone changed my life for the better. I was a young woman suffering depression, feeling lost, at a loss, which is the situation the heroine finds herself in at the beginning of the book. Several things [in it] helped me. One was feeling seen in a positive way: the character’s mental health struggles are not stigmatized or romanticized. There was also seeing her recover, seeing there was a point of feeling better.
A classic you could read over and over?
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It’s hilarious. It’s insightful. What can I say? It’s reality. With our changing world, it is more and more relevant.
A contemporary book you wish you’d written?
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. The poetry of it is so unexpected, in a way that only poetry can be. It’s like reading a novel that’s a poem, and a poem that’s a novel. And the love story is massively compelling. The characters are so real and complex that they can carry an incredibly complicated story line.
A book about writing you recommend?
“I Give you my Body…”: How I Write Sex Scenes by Diana Gabaldon. I don’t even write sex scenes, but she gives fantastic advice in general.
Who would you cast as the lead if your forthcoming novel, Dead Keen, were filmed?
Katherine Langford as [the protagonist] Neve. For the main male character, Con, Jason O’Mara; it is important to have an Irish actor.
What’s next?
The 10 August launch of Dead Keen. My writing group, the Mallow Scribes, is going to do a dramatic reading. We’ve been rehearsing for weeks.
Among the notable words I learned in 2022 was hyperlexia. Burrowing into articles about autism, the term popped up. Hyper = excessive, lexia = related to words. That rung a bell, personally and professionally.
Defining hyperlexia
In 1997, Aram described hyperlexia as, “the developmental disorder in which children decode words early but have significant impairments in aural and reading comprehension”.
Nation (1999) defined it as, “advanced word-recognition skills in individuals who otherwise have pronounced cognitive, social, and linguistic handicaps.”
Four years later, a meta-study by Grigorenko, Klin and Volkmar (2003) concluded “that hyperlexia is a superability demonstrated by a very specific group of individuals with developmental disorders.”
A few years further along, the definition had grown more nuanced: Ostrolenk et al. (2017) wrote that it is, “the co-occurrence of advanced reading skills relative to comprehension skills or general intelligence, the early acquisition of reading skills without explicit teaching, and a strong orientation toward written material, generally in the context of a neurodevelopmental disorder.”
The final clause of that last sentence is significant to the discussion/debate around hyperlexia, which has been running since the mid-20th century. Is it a disability or, as Grigorenko et al. argue, a ‘superability’?
Hyperlexia and developmental disabilities
The answer starts with statistics. Ostrolenk et al. (2017) found that 84% of hyperlexic subjects were autistic.
This does not mean there is a direct correlation between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and hyperlexia. In a 2021 study by Solazzo et al., “9% children with ASD showed early hyperlexic traits”.
So, while autistic individuals are not necessarily hyperlexic, there is a good chance that hyperlexic individuals are autistic.
This makes hyperlexia a significant issue for teachers, especially those who teach gifted students. Arguably, especially those who teach gifted girls.
In Aspergirls (2010), Rudy Simone writes, “this early ability to read and comprehend above our years (hyperlexia) gives some young Aspergirls an air of intellectual maturity that tricks people into thinking we possess emotional maturity as well. It also hides autism by shielding our deficits.”
Conventional education is built on a foundation of reading and writing. This fundamental bent of our educational system privileges students who appear to read effortlessly and above-grade-level.
As a teacher, it is natural enough to be wowed when a student sets down their book 10 minutes into an assigned reading period and says: “I’m done. What do I do now?”
Since we associate literary skills with intelligence and competence, it is tempting to stereotype precocious readers as super-competent or super-smart.
It takes discipline to stop and ask ourselves: “What is this student really absorbing? What needs might this apparent super-competence be masking?”
Knowing that north of 80% of hyperlexic kids are on the autism spectrum, we need to treat hyperlexia as seriously as we would treat dyslexia. Otherwise, we risk overlooking significant intellectual, developmental and social-emotional needs.
What hyperlexia is not
Key to academic success
Proof a student has it all figured out
Sign of high executive function
Substitute for social and emotional skills
Let’s look at these one by one
Academic success
According to Zhang and Malatesha Joshi (2019), “originally the term ‘hyperlexia’ only referred to those readers with low IQ but precocious decoding skills”. Though, as we’ve seen, the definition has become more nuanced with time and research, the significant fact of hyperlexia is that it is out of sync with the child’s other capacities.
Whipping through a textbook chapter or an assigned story is an accomplishment, but it doesn’t mean the student is equally precocious in other areas. Hyperlexia should be treated as a sign that a student potentially needs more, not less, general academic support.
Proof a student has it all figured out
Rapid reading does not mean improved comprehension. In 2010, Castles et al. published research that found “clear evidence of a dissociation between reading accuracy and comprehension of the same set of irregular words in hyperlexia.”
In the classroom, I’ve witnessed students who read with astonishing speed and fluency but struggle to offer a simple summary of what they’ve just read. Their decoding is phenomenal, but they are not grasping the significance of the words they skim so easily.
It is vital that teachers do explicit work on comprehension (including explicit and implicit details, descriptions, inference, word choice, etc.) with hyperlexic students, not assume, they read it = they got it.
Sign of high executive function
Author Cynthia Kim was diagnosed with Asperger’s (now formally included under ASD) in her early 40s. In her 2014 book, Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, she reflects on her schooldays:
“Doubly-exceptional children have an advantage in their intelligence.
Unfortunately, part of this advantage is that we can mask a big portion of our disability with coping strategies and adaptations. And when we fail to hide something, people assume we’re not trying hard enough. Or we’re being deliberately obstinate. Or that we’re lazy, defiant, insolent, shy, ditzy, or scatterbrained.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ they ask incredulously. ‘You can memorize the batting averages of the entire Major League, but you can’t remember to put your homework in your backpack?'”
Research shows up to 80% of people with autism have executive function difficulties. Again, as educators, we need to avoid the category error of assuming that a hyperlexic student will be as quick in other aspects of their life and studies. Rather, we should be alert to the fact it’s likely the opposite: hyperlexia means greater likelihood of executive function challenges.
Substitute for social and emotional skills
Being able to read texts about sophisticated social and emotional realities does not equal understanding or being able to navigate those realities.
Precocious reading is more likely to be a refuge than an aid to an autistic child. Books are safe, comforting and non-judgmental. They have predictable narrative arcs. They are readily available and don’t demand emotional reciprocity.
Books are marvellous, natch, but as teachers we have a responsibility to support students’ holistic development. That means supporting social and emotional skills through appropriate collaborative or group activities, encouraging them in discussions, and not singling them out for their hyperlexia.
Ideally, we help our hyperlexic students leverage this strength to support weaker areas without making too much or too little of it.
Every student has unique capacities. We need to be aware of the blind spots in our educational system, and ourselves, to ensure these develop in full, and avoid privileging specific (dis/super)abilities that fit our narrow definitions of what is useful or laudable.
What is your experience with hyperlexic students? Questions? Comments?
Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.
All photos courtesy Michael Downs
Light filters into Michael Downs‘ basement office, as if it were underwater.
Twin decorative dragonflies, backlit on a windowsill, and a red goose-neck lamp stretched into a honk, heighten the effect of a numinous natural space. It is, he says, the best writing room he’s ever had.
And he’s had a few to compare.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Downs rode economic currents with his family, first to Vermont then Arizona. After graduating from college, his journalism career took him back to Hartford for a spell; he met a woman and fell in love, moved with her to Montana; later, they moved to Arkansas, where he attended grad school, then to Baltimore in pursuit of work.
Downs nods in recognition at the mention of the 1960s-70s cadre of hard-drinking, fly-fishing Montana writers: ‘Tom McGuane, those guys, sure.’ Though a former sportswriter, Downs doesn’t need to prop his ego with tales of a trout [this] big.
His body of work reveals someone who lets nuance speak for itself; someone who illuminates and distils the details, then leaves them to do the work.
As befits his journalism background Downs, now a professor of English literature and director of the Master’s Program in Professional Writing at Towson University, regularly publishes short stories, essays and reportage. As befits a scribe, he also turns his hand to ghostwriting and editing.
Gathering words
The TV Guide, cereal boxes, the Bible, historical romance novels, Of Mice and Men, comics: ‘I read everything,’ Downs said. ‘I loved words; wanted to understand them.’
His precocious reading meant he struggled to keep pace with their sounds. ‘I’ve learned so many words just by reading that my pronunciation, throughout my life, has been terrible. “Inchoate” — is that in-ko-ate or in-cho-ate? I can never remember, but I know what it means.’
There is something to be gleaned from this primary engagement with writing as text. Technology has gifted the writer, or would-be, many ways to engage and construct, but there is power in being able to seed words on a page and watch the lines grow into a riotous harvest
Downs relishes the labor of it, the physicality of writing (more on that in a moment). His most influential teachers were the ones who, ‘demanded more of me than I thought I could do. And did so unapologetically. That helped me understand my capacities.’
The purpose of literature
Exploring his capacities took Downs to the University of Arkansas MFA program in the late 1990s. This was his grounding in Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Don Quixote, and teaching. ‘I wanted my tuition paid,’ he says with a grin. ‘But it was a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons.’
Foremost, teaching (as any teacher who gives a damn will tell you) demands the kind of close study many students elude. ‘I had to break down stories, novels, sentences; I had to do the craft aspect better than I would have otherwise.’
The process of deconstruction facilitates a deeper understanding of construction; clever writer/teachers seize opportunities to teach authors they love, or genres they want to better understand. Downs, for example, taught a historical fiction course while writing a historical novel.
Teaching writing is about more than just craft, though; Downs increasingly focuses on a less-discussed aspect of literature:
This generation has had a lot to deal with. It’s clear in their stress, their anxiety, what they talk about. What I want to do is use literary work – either the writing of it or the reading of it – to help them understand that the world is worth it, that it’s beautiful, that the unexpected doesn’t have to be dread inducing. The unexpected can also be the reason you get up in the morning. I spend more time now talking about beauty and how to use literature to help yourself get along in the world.
For all the joy he’s found in 30-odd years of education, Downs is transitioning to full-time writing. ‘I’m rich in former students, but I’m not as rich as I’d like to be in books.’
During his recent Fulbright Scholar year in Krakow, he encountered a quote by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski stencilled on a staircase: ‘it is not time that is lacking, only focus’.
‘Like so many other writers, especially writers who teach, I say things like ‘I don’t have a lot of time, I’m trying to find the time to write, etc.’ he says. ‘I read that quote and thought, ‘I need to change my focus.’ My focus has been students, for decades. I’ve been grateful for teaching at a university and having the summer to write, but I’m old, I’m a slow writer, and I want more.’
Part of how Downs accesses ‘more’ is through what he playfully refers to as ‘method writing’. He was kind enough to share examples and insights on this element of craft.
On Method Writing
Q: Why is it important for writers to get out from behind the desk and get their hands dirty?
A: Emily Dickinson didn’t do that, and she pulled off some good stuff. So I don’t want to say it’s a moral imperative, but for some writers, young writers especially, it’s important to get out of your own belly button. There is a world out there, experiences, things that are tactile, not just in your head. We take in experience through our five senses, then meditate on them. If you don’t have experiences, you don’t have stories. You can have think pieces, but you don’t have stories.
Q: What is your first memory of tangible experience that led to, or was integral to, a piece of writing?
A: When I was an 8th grader, I had a paper route. A stray dog used to follow me. I’d stop at a convenience store, buy some food, share it with the dog. It followed me for weeks, until it followed me across a road one morning, as the sun was rising over the mountain. Someone came along, driving fast into the sun, and hit the dog. And it fell to me to pull the dog off to the side of the road – still breathing, but clearly dying, and to stay with the dog.
Some time later, I went to a writing camp for kids, and a college professor told us to explore stories by writing about the parts of our lives that confused us. And I went back to that moment. It was a successful story, because I remembered the weight of the dog, what it felt like to touch it; that it was still breathing. That was the first time physical experience worked itself into my writing.
Q: How does tactile experience operate as a research mode in fiction versus non-fiction?
A: When I’m doing narrative non-fiction, I’m experiencing the world as me, so paying attention to my five senses. When I’m doing it in fiction, I’m trying to be someone else. So if they have experiences that I haven’t, I have figure out how to get close to those experiences. I try to save my imagination from doing too much work, or from getting it wrong. The imagination isn’t always right.
When I was writing about a woman who was burned in the Hartford circus fire, I drew from this wonderful Red Cross pamphlet about how people were treated after that fire, because it was groundbreaking. But also – I‘m going to sound a little crazy now – I needed to know what it felt like to be burned. I put my hand over the gas ring [on my stove], and held it as close as I could, for as long as I could. I did not hurt myself, but I got an idea of the feeling of a sustained burn. And that’s what I wrote.
If I hadn’t held my hand over that fire, I could not have imagined how it felt. It was cold.
Q: How do you incorporate method writing into second or third person POV?
A: It’s about coming to a place of focus where I can combine my engagement with the world and my imagination to say. If it’s working, it becomes transcendent. The words end up there; I don’t know exactly what brought them, but they are right, and I could never find those same words again.
Q: How do you know when to stop experiencing and start writing?
A: It’s always time to sit down and start writing.
It’s time to start experiencing when – in fiction – I don’t know what the character is experiencing. The character is in a situation and it’s time to figure it out. When working on the Horace Wells novel, I was struggling with the fact the main character wasn’t an enjoyable person to be around. He wasn’t super successful, he was whiny, he wasn’t that bright. I had to figure out a way to make him palatable.
How it happened surprised me. I went to a museum that had his tools, his notebooks, his death mask. They brought out the death mask. I put on white gloves and picked it up. His face was small, surprisingly small. I started touching his face. And I decided that his wife had touched his face. That though he betrayed her, and made her life difficult, she loved him. And if she loved him, I could love him through her. That changed him as a character, from a nebbish to a person who was loved by his wife.
Q: What is a rookie mistake writers make when attempting this?
A: To think their experience is how the character would have experienced it. John Keats said that Shakespeare possessed this amazing quality of self-nullification; he could stop being Shakespeare and be someone else. That’s how so many [of his] characters are who they are.
I encourage students to work at not being themselves. As a writer, your job is not to ask, what would I be doing if I were them? You have to become that character and know. Andre Dubus talks about studying Zen and becoming the word as he writes. It has to do with focus.
Q: Which writers do this particularly well?
A: Andre Dubus, absolutely. He was a man who wanted to be out there in the world, make stuff, experience stuff. Alice Munro, you know she’s out tromping the fields. Louise Erdrich, a favorite of mine, she doesn’t just sit behind a desk. Joan Didion, of course.
Q: What is an assignment or exercise you use to teach this to your students?
A: A terrible thing happened near my campus more than 100 years ago, before campus was there. A black teenager was lynched. I wanted the students to write about it. We walked to the site and sat for an hour; looked at the trees and the jail, which is still there, and touched the walls, looked at the sun. I wanted them to imagine how it was then, and see how it is now.
Downs Recommends
The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?
The Lord of the Flies. It completely freaked me out. I hadn’t know that boys could be so cruel. I was a shy, awkward boy who wore glasses. I could have been Piggy.
The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?
William Kennedy’s Ironweed, a profound and magical novel. Kennedy – a former journalist who never stopped thinking of himself as a journalist – wrote a novel set in a small north-east city, Albany, NY, that nobody paid much attention to. I wanted to write about Connecticut, about a small town no one paid much attention to, and this [novel] gave me the blessing.
A classic you love to teach?
‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor and ‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin. If I could only teach two stories for the rest of my life, it would be these two.
I love what Baldwin writes about art in that last scene; he’s writing about music, and Sonny’s blues, but … I’ll blow the quote, they were doing it at the risk of their own lives, but they had to do it, because we need those stories, and we need to make them new. It’s a gorgeous description of why we need stories.
‘Good Man’because it is such an inexplicable story. Students have no idea what’s coming. Their mouths drop open. It’s a perfect story for proving to them that you can’t say what a story means.
A work you love to teach from 21st century?
Lydia Davis Varieties of Disturbance – she blows up the idea of what a story is, disregards everything anybody says. There’s a novella in it, which purports to be a sociological studies about get well cards written by a second grade class; it is just heartbreaking, funny, and reveals so much. She also has one-sentence stories in the book. Literally one sentence.
A book about writing every writing student should read?
Colum McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer.
A book + film adaptation combo you love?
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which was turned into a TV series with Ethan Hawke.
A living writer you’d love to hang out with?
Olga Tokarczuk.I’m fascinated by the concept she discusses in her Nobel Prize speech of the ‘tender narrator’ – a new approach to narrating fiction. A different point of view.
Your perfect writing space?
If space and time are related, it’s more about the time than geography. If I create the time, the place doesn’t matter. I can be on a park bench, a balcony, a windowless room, sitting in the front seat of my car.
What are you working on now?
I’ve written about six essays and would like to write another four to six and put together a collection. I have some ideas that have been – there is no other way to say it – that have been strong in me lately. They are wanting to come out.
The following presentation on culturally responsive teaching was written for, and delivered at, Le Sallay Academy’s January 2023 conference on blended learning.
The term culturally responsive teaching was coined by Geneva Gay. It entails crafting and delivering curricula that is relevant to students’ lived experiences. The aim is to engage students with material that is “personally meaningful” in order to pique their interest and motivation to learn (Gay, 2002).
My interest in culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy (which I didn’t have the time to get into in this talk) springs from the cultural homogeneity of my own education. As a high school student and undergraduate I read, mostly, books, stories and poems by white male Europeans.
Students deserve better. They deserve to be introduced to a rich, multicultural world of literary experiences and they deserve to see themselves represented in what they read. As a teacher, its my job to think about students’ intersecting identities: nationality, language, gender, ethnicity, class, faith, etc.
This presentation focuses on language as a form of cultural and self-identity, and the importance of representing multiple Englishes within an English Language Arts curriculum. This was highly relevant because the students in this class hailed from several countries and spoke more than a dozen languages.
Including world Englishes within a literature/language arts program is something I feel strongly about because, 1) it’s good for students and 2) it’s fun. Some of the fabulous things about the English language are the richness of its vocabulary (much of it borrowed from other languages), how its (relative) grammatical simplicity sparks creativity and the way it has been adapted/refined/altered by linguistic communities around the globe.
There are more great presentations from the conference available at the Le Sallay website.
Culturally Responsive Teaching in Blended Learning: A Case Study
Share your thoughts and ideas on CRT/CST in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke
Recently, I binge-watched Netflix’s relationship reality show The Ultimatum: Queer Love.
If you haven’t seen it, the show features five lesbian couples that split up and reshuffle. One partner in each wants to get married, the other isn’t sure; the show is a chance to figure out now, forever, or never.
The premise is whatever but it was transfixing to watch a show where queer was the default. There was none of the usual exception signaling or tokenism of shows with only a few queer participants/characters; no hetero normativity. Instead of being Other the participants just were.
Soapy plot-lines aside, it was cool and refreshing to see queer women flirt, do their make-up, argue, shuffle around in slippers, make romantic gestures, walk their dogs, pitch fits, drink too much.
It should NOT be revelatory that queer people are human too, but, watching The Ultimatum, made it clear that what we are presented with as normal is in fact (hetero)normative. This doesn’t reflect reality but constructs an image that we are taught to accept as real.
Resisting the norm
Michel Foucault’s concept of normalization, the process by which ideas or ways of being come to be taken for granted, is pertinent. As educators, we are immersed in normalizing messaging, as are our students. They can be as invisible and pervasive as the air we breathe. Like tainted air, they are dangerous. Sociocultural imperatives about normalcy or (worse) naturalness — often deployed around subjects like sex, gender, social roles, economics, etc. — have the potential to do massive harm. Even when they seem innocuous, they put a subtle curb on imagination.
Resistance is the only antidote. According to Foucault scholar Dianna Taylor, “Refusing to simply accept what is presented as natural, necessary, and normal – like the ideas of sex and the norm itself – presents possibilities for engaging in and expanding the practice of freedom.”
Positive normalization
Humans are neophobic, shying away from the unfamiliar. This calls for conscious effort to challenge unhelpful or restrictive norms with positive normalization, i.e. not of a particular way of being but of an open, curious approach to life.
Replacing an old norm with a new norm simply shuffles the exclusion tiles. What we need, and we as educators should model, is normalizing acceptance, inquisitiveness and respect towards what is unfamiliar but not harmful.* Nobody is obliged to embrace someone else’s way of living, but a good education should provide them with the self-awareness and self-confidence to live and let live.
*By all means, resist and reject ideas and actions that harm oneself or others.
Making mistakes: Students are under mad pressure about grades, achievements, performance, etc. This fuels counterproductive perfectionism and alienates kids from their greatest learning tool: mistakes. As I wrote in ‘On Screwing Up‘: “You can’t learn what you already know… Existing expertise may gratify the ego, but it doesn’t grow the intellect.”
Asking for help: Along with making mistakes, it is critical to encourage students to ask for help. Teachers are not (or shouldn’t be) remote judges, hovering only to instruct and assess: we should be there to solve the problems before we grade the answers. We have to resist the Anglo-American individualist tradition and remind kids that asking for help is a sign of intelligence, not weakness.
Discussing problematic language: As a literature teacher, problematic language is an all-the-time issue. How do we understand Jean Toomer’s use of the n-word in Cane? Is it ever acceptable to use the r-word? What about swearing? How do we get better at remembering people’s pronouns? Teachers cannot protect students from problematic language, nor prevent them from using it. What we can do is explore why words or phrases are problematic, how they got to be that way, and what using them really means. We can educate students about the power of words and help them understand what their word choices say about them, and how their use of language affects others.
Talking about intersectional privilege/disadvantage: There is no contradiction in urging students to treat everyone they meet as a unique individual and teaching them about how individuals are shaped by intersectional privilege or disadvantage. It is fact, not indoctrination, to articulate that white females have different experiences than white males, cis people different experiences than trans people, people of color different experiences than white, etc. Yes, people are more than the sum of their identities, but those identities matter and by understanding them we gain greater understanding of those around us — and ourselves.
Fluid gender and sexual identities: The majority of literature portrays a limited range of gender and sexual and identities. There is no getting around that, although the canon is growing joyously year by year. What I can do as a teacher is A) bring in as much LGBTQ+ literature as possible and B) teach texts in context, i.e. the couple in Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ are a man and a woman not because that is ‘normal’ but because it reflects the gender roles and romantic partnerships of that time and place. Typing that, I see how reductive it sounds. Yes, it is an imperfect approach, but it at least opens discussions about how gender roles and sexual identities have changed over time.
What would you like to normalize in your classroom (or world)? Share in the comments!
My full-time teaching year has just wrapped for the summer. After the hectic, emotional final weeks and days, it is time to pause and take stock.
This was my second year as World Literature and English Language teacher at Le Sallay Academy. In my previous life, as a music journalist, we bandied the phrase ‘difficult second album’. Nobody mentioned there would be a ‘difficult second year’ in teaching. Now I know.
We should embrace the difficult, Rilke advised. He is right.
Part of the difficulty of the year was my egotistical/oblivious assumption that everything would run on tracks — after all, I’d done it before. That made some things easier, sure. But nowhere near everything.
Each year, each class, each assignment, each student is a new opportunity and learning curve. Rather than expect (naively) to rewind and press play, it is better to figure out what works in broad terms, and use that as a springboard for the next fresh start.
Because I’m a geek and like mnemonics, I boiled down seven key lessons from the past school year into the word ACCLAIM — something all teachers want (right?). And all students deserve.
Adapt
I like planning, making lists, ticking things off. When preparing lessons, I get a kick out of an orderly progression. What feels like orderly progression to me, though, can seem incomprehensible or plain boring to my students. One of the important things I learned this year was that to be effective meant to adapt. Sometimes, this meant tossing out a whole assignment; sometimes it meant an in-class pivot when an activity sank like undercooked souffle; sometimes it meant adding materials or exercises to ensure an individual student had what they needed to succeed.
One example of an individual adaptation that benefited the whole class was when student said they were struggling to follow the plot of All Quiet on the Western Front. This alerted me that the dense, gun-smoke swirl of memories that carry the reader from the battlefield to the intimate reaches of Paul’s life were a lot for a less-experienced reader to follow, so I created a chapter by chapter summary/study guide that included plot points, key characters and vocabulary lists. By reading the summary in advance of the chapter, students were able to track the main events of the novel, learn vocab and better understand the narrative arc.
Challenge
Adapt works both ways: sometimes it is appropriate to summarize and simplify; sometimes, students need to be challenged. Doing this right, means they should be at the edge of — or just beyond — their comfort zone, but in a situation where they have tools to address the task.
For example, my sixth grade students learned what Shakespearean sonnets are, then wrote them. This challenge worked because we defined everything: iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme, volta, etc. Once they understood how a sonnet was constructed, we read humorous contemporary examples that showed how the form, however strict, could be applied to any topic. Then we worked through each student draft together, line by line, counting syllables, testing rhymes, reinforcing by repetition while also having fun.
Co-create
Students are only going to be participants in their learning if they are allowed to participate. For me, this means letting go of my ideas about perfectly formatted assignments and visually pleasing presentations and letting students co-create with me, and with each other.
Midway through the year we trialled collaborative Google Slides presentations, where students contributed their efforts to a single presentation. Initially, I created the presentation and turned them loose on it. By the end of the year, they were setting up the joint presentations themselves.
For final writing projects, there was a co-creation element, as students were given the option of choosing a set question or pitching their own big idea. Most students choose to come up with their own topics, with me as a consultant to ensure their ideas were appropriate to the scope of work.
Link
One of the things I love best about teaching literature is tracking ideas, themes and debates across epochs and regions. Without this connectivity, literature would just be words on a page — who cares? Only by helping students identify and explore the links can they truly appreciate the scope and magic of the written word. This is critically important at the ages I teach: 11-15. Kids are teetering towards independence, trying to understand the world they find themselves a part of; they haven’t yet claimed their literary heritage. So it is imperative to make explicit connections they might not see otherwise: historical, economic, social, topical.
For instance, when studying Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, my students read Jeanette Winterson’s essay, ‘Love(lace) Actually’ which links Shelley with pioneering machine-maker Ada Lovelace with Alan Turing, and Frankenstein’s monster with modern technology. We also dipped into The Heart of Darkness for another example of a frame narrative, establishing thematic and stylistic links to anchor the text in broader conversations. Also, I introduced Romanticism by showing them Meatloaf’s ‘I Would Do Anything for Love’ video. Let’s just say, there were no new Meatloaf fans after that. Maybe you have to be a child of the 80s to dig that OTT?
Aim
Have a target. Make sure students know what it is and how to hit it.
This is a work in progress for me, but I can confidently say that classes run more smoothly when everyone knows what we’re doing and why. Sometimes the why might sound arbitrary, e.g. we’re reading this book because it is a great example of X (notwithstanding all the other perfectly good literary examples) but even so, it is worthwhile to articulate the class aims and repeat as needed.
As a student, I hated fuzzy assignments or vague grading standards. How do you know what you’re supposed to be doing if the aim is undefined?
As a teacher, I want to protect my students from that frustration, and myself from their excuses (‘but I didn’t understand…’). Clear, concise goal setting, including deadlines, frees up everyone’s brain space to focus on what matters. For example, each classes final writing project was scheduled, broken down into steps with individual deadlines and students were given the rubric and grading standards in advance. (This might sound over-prescriptive, but middle school is where structure needs to happen so students can break free of it in secondary and further education.) Obviously, how (and to what extent) students hit the aims varied, but they had a clear, fair, impartial structure to work within.
Iterate
My expectation that year two would be easy was based, in part, on the assumption that I could wholesale reuse materials and texts from the previous year. That was lazy thinking.
This year was better was when I rejigged, or even started from scratch. Though working with the same broad themes and literary time periods, there was massive opportunity to iterate and improve. For example, instead of using Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling as a main text, I selected a handful of stories and wove them into reading Grace Lin’s stunning novel When the Sea Turned to Silver, which weaves Chinese folklore into a zesty YA adventure story. My students were far more immersed in the novel than the would have been in the stories alone, and they were able to see the link between Songling’s 18th century work and contemporary Chinese writing and traditions.
Model
This year, I’ve been more open about my geekiness, quicker to say how crazy in love I am with an author or text. Do my students think I’m weird, or maybe should get out more? Possibly. But they also seem to respect my passion for literature and language, even if they don’t understand or share it.
To me, this is what modelling is all about. How can I persuade students to love words, or to push themselves on an assignment, if my example is meh?
If I want students to be excited about books, I need to be excited about books. If I want them to take risks, I have to take risks. If I want them to make and learn from mistakes, I need to make and learn from mistakes. If I want them to discover joy, I need to embody the joy that awaits discovery.
The vast importance of modelling hit me when I realized that I remember a mere handful of books I read prior to high school graduation: To Kill a Mockingbird in 9th grade, The Odyssey and something by Shakespeare in 12th grade. That is it. And I love literature and lived for those classes. So, realistically, even my most engaged students will remember between one and zero of the books they are assigned.
What I do remember about literature classes? My teachers and how damn much they cared about words and writing, and how those models encouraged me to believe these were things to cherish and celebrate.
That’s what I want for my students. Any year I succeed in communicating that will be a good year.
What are some of the key things you learned this year, as a teacher? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke
Cila Warncke Writer 