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.
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.
As mentioned in a previous post, I have written for online indie zine Pennyblackmusic for the better part of a couple of decades. One of my recent projects was a series of interviews about my fellow writers, which concluded with one of my fellow writers interviewing me. As my editor, John Clarkson, put it:
“For the last two years in her ‘A Life in Music’ column Cila Warncke has talked to several of our writers and photographers about how music has affected and influenced them. We were interested in finding out in ‘A Life in Music’ what ignited a bunch of obsessives’ passion for music, and discovered that much of our team had lead lives that were just as fascinating as many of the bands. Now that column is coming to an end, and in the last in the series we have turned the tables on Cila and Nick Dent-Robinson has spoken to her about her ‘Life in Music’.”
This may well be the first time I’ve been interviewed in print so thought I’d share.
Cila Warncke: A Life in Music by Nick Dent-Robinson
Cila Warncke is one of the earliest contributors to Penny Black Music magazine, having started writing for them more than two decades ago. Penny Black founder and editor John Clarkson recalls that Cila’s first interview for the magazine was with Cinerama about their “Disco Volante” album. She was the magazine’s first female writer and, as John Clarkson says, he is proud that Cila paved the way for many more excellent female music writers in Penny Black Music over the coming years – as rock music writing was notorious for being too much of a “boys’ club”.
As a professional journalist, Cila says she was attracted by the scope for originality and independence (and lack of male chauvinism) at PBM – and she has produced a fascinating range of articles over her time there. Although she left Penny Black Music in the early 2000s and worked on the glossy London-based music magazine, ‘Q” she was welcomed back in 2012 and has been a regular contributor since then. She has written about the impact of the pandemic on those working behind the scenes in the world of live music, about the eventual demise of ‘Q’ magazine and she wrote a very thoughtful piece about Marilyn Manson. Plus she has produced excellent articles on so many other diverse topics.
Cila also originated the ‘A Life In Music’ series where she probed fellow contributors to PBM about their musical tastes, background and aspirations. – All done with great tact, sensitivity and diplomacy plus insight – key hallmarks of Cila’s style. That series is now drawing towards its conclusion – but not before we turn the tables and seize the opportunity to ask Cila about her own ‘Life In Music”’
Born in 1980 and raised in a small town in Oregon over on the West side of the USA, in her late teens Cila moved to the East Coast to study English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia – an esteemed Ivy League institution. Subsequently she moved to London to undertake further studies at King’s College before becoming a journalist. She thrived in the UK, enjoying all the many cultural opportunities available just after the turn of the millennium as well as the proximity to Europe. She and her fellow-American husband Chris Hall, a production audio technician in the world of live music, have travelled widely and have now made their permanent base in Valencia, Spain. Cila was at her home in Valencia when I started to ask about her ‘Life in Music’.
What are some of her earliest musical memories?
“Well, my parents weren’t musicians and because my mother was an Evangelical Christian, anything that wasn’t a hymn or soft God-rock was not too popular. It was a cool, rebellious thing to listen to anything other than that. My sister and I would listen to local radio, though and so I got some of the sound of late 80s/early 90s rock and pop culture through that. But my brother – who is around 6 years older than I – loved The Smiths, The Cure and some of the other British post-punk/new wave bands. I enjoyed that sound and I recall some of the record sleeves up on my brother’s wall – brilliant images which made a lasting impression.
The first (non-Christian!) record I remember buying when I was 13 or 14 was Sting’s “Fields of Gold…Best of: 1984-94” and my sister (who was 8 years older and much cooler, always) bought me Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ – which I still think is a great record!”
Teachers, like writers, should show not tell (as much as possible).
As a writing teacher, it is imperative that I set an example as a writer.
My first gig outside of the university newspaper was Pennyblackmusic.co.uk — an independent online music magazine and shop that has outlasted countless best-selling, robustly funded publications.
Though not continuously, I’ve written for Pennyblackmusic for more than 20 years. In slow, desultory fashion it’s become a modest but valued body of work, and a chance to keep my journo skills sharp.
One of the regular features is called ‘Ten Songs That Made Me Love…’
Here are my contributions to the long-running series:
“Some bands are linked to an event or time in life; others, to a person. Echo & The Bunnymen entered my consciousness when I was about eight, via an album cover pinned to my brother’s bedroom wall. ‘Echo & the Bunnymen’, their eponymous 1987 album – was to the right of U2’s ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ and above Depeche Mode’s ‘Some Great Reward’. In grainy black-and-white, Ian McCulloch’s inkwell-explosion hair, eyes downcast beneath thick brows, gave a general impression of dark wool and wind-chill. Yet the music encoded in that vinyl dazzled. It made sense that my brother, the coolest person I knew, bought an overcoat and grew his hair. Who wouldn’t want to be them?
My brother moved out when I was 12; for the next few years we saw little of each other. I bought Sting’s ‘Fields of Gold’. Possibly in despair, he compiled CDs for me. Those songs – Echo, New Order, Depeche Mode – were the basis for a new relationship. More than siblings, we became musical co-conspirators. These 10 songs, only a sliver of Echo’s expansive oeuvre, encode a deep friendship. Apart from their personal significance their freshness, verve and originality make a case that Echo were the seminal New Wave band. Let’s run with those dancing horses.”
The first time I saw Patti Smith it was like seeing a flesh-and-blood human after a lifetime among holograms. In a world where everyone is obsessed with image Patti is always, ever and gloriously who she is. Poet, rebel, musician, mother, artist, crusader, writer, warrior, deity of rock’n’roll and inventor of herself, Patti never wanted to be anyone else, never pandered, never tried to please.
Her music reaches deep places because it is born from an authentic self, and that’s why it will last.
“It’s not chocolate boxes and roses/ It’s something darker/ Like a small animal that only comes out at night”. Jarvis Cocker’s memorable assessment of the titular emotion in ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’ (surely one of the Top 10 most awkwardly titled songs pop history) is a perfect epithet for the bands’ oeuvre.
The magic of Pulp is the mingling of sharp, danceable guitar pop with lyrics that veer from cynical to downright sinister. Their most radio-friendly hits are rife with violence (‘Joyriders’ “Mister, we just want your car/ ‘Cos we’re taking a girl to the reservoir”) and voyeurism (“I wanted to see as well as hear and so I hid inside her wardrobe,” in ‘Babies’). Love songs in Pulp world include lyrics like: “You are the last drink I should have ever drunk/ You are the body hidden in the trunk” (‘Like a Friend’).
Studying the arc of their career, it’s clear ‘Different Class’s’ arrival in Cool Britannia was coincidence; the subsequent lumping of Pulp with Britpop a music journalists’ convenience. Pulp never shared Blur’s mockney smuggery nor Oasis’ apolitical performance of working classness. Pulp was on a different trajectory: one that began in Sheffield in 1978, contained more than a decade of obscurity, and survived Britpop notoriety to deliver an acerbic welcome to the new millennium.
Its curve is marked by a rare, unflinching insight into the human psyche. Pulp takes love as a subject but, unlike most pop confectioners, doesn’t sugar-coat it. Cocker sees love as a slippery amalgam of baser needs: status, self-worth, revenge, amusement, actualisation, to see the darkest parts of ourselves reflected in another. Attraction doesn’t lead through flower-dappled fields at sunset but down gnarled alleys stale with fag smoke, booze and latent violence.
Rarer still, Cocker understands that society is an echo chamber of our dark hearts: it isn’t just individuals who behave in warped, self-defeating ways, but our whole culture.
Ibiza, October 2016: What was left of my library was stacked on a slat-wood shelf awaiting collection; the clothes worth taking were crammed into a scuffed purple nylon suitcase; my car was one signature short of belonging to my ex-boyfriend, who was also adopting my cat.
In a few days I would embark for Memphis, Tennessee, a city I best knew as home of Sun Records. To pass time, I was reading ‘Respect Yourself’ (a loan from my Memphis-based boyfriend).
Robert Gordon’s meticulous account of the rise/fall/slip/slide of Stax Records was the history of an alien land and culture. ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’ rang a bell, maybe ‘Shaft’, but my knowledge of Memphis soul ended there. Embarrassment at this ignorance was a welcome distraction from more immediate anxieties.
Those anxieties faded but the embarrassment clings; as a born-and-raised Yankee, a music journalist no less, it is shaming to have been oblivious to one of the richest seams of my country’s musical culture. Shaming because – as ‘Respect Yourself’ and history report – it is no accident that Black musicians have been, and remain, ghettoised, denigrated, alienated.
That’s not why anyone should listen to Memphis soul though; not to pay tribute or broaden horizons. Listen to be immersed in music that grabs your gut and nether-parts. Listen to the sound of something at stake. Listen because, as the following 10 songs prove, it’ll turn you on and take you higher.
Samuel Beckett’s words (from the novella Worstward Ho) are an arch rallying cry for MFA types.
They have never set well with me. Blame a lifetime of planting the flag of my self-worth in the quicksand of perfectionism. Blame Puritan-Prussian heritage (my DNA is halfway to being a ladder). Blame having heard the message too late.
Blame apportioned, a problem remains. Perfectionism is permissible (if inadvisable) for an individual; it is unacceptable in teaching.
Not many days ago, I logged onto Zoom and began my presentation on Culturally Responsive Teaching for the Le Sallay Academy Blended Learning Conference. That it was my first time logging onto Zoom in a while should have given me pause.
Deep breath, off to a start.
We can’t hear you well, the moderator piped.
Jamming on my oversize headphones, I tried to smile and continued.
A pop-up obscured my presentation, something about recording, blah blah. Impatient to be rid of it, I clicked the X in the top right corner and found myself staring at a static screen.
My panicked brain registered, logged out.
My immediate impulse: crawl under the table and call it a day.
Instead, I scrabbled through the emails, found the link, logged back in, found myself flipping through tabs trying to restore my presentation, rictus grin on my face, tried to make light: As we can see, there is always the possibility of technical issues.
Broadly speaking, I’d rather be right than happy. Being right makes me happy.
Perhaps one of the reasons I came to teaching only after a substantial career in journalism was that my younger self needed to control the outcome. I can massage a piece of writing to perfection.
Standing in a classroom, or delivering a presentation, opens up all kinds of variables, exciting new ways to screw up.
There is a deep part of me that will always be appalled by this; counterbalancing, a part that knows learning is more important than knowledge — and that the only honest way to communicate this to students is to model it.
It isn’t enough to say, you can learn from mistakes; teachers need to demonstrate it.
Psychologist Carol Dweck coined the now-familiar terms growth mindset and fixed mindset. Writing for the Harvard Review, she notes: “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset…. they worry less about looking smart and put more energy into learning.”
They worry less about looking smart.
This is where the teacher tug-o’-war starts: the educator desire to want to model excellence and expertise versus the student need to see curiosity and willingness to screw up.
Because we do, oh we do.
You can’t learn what you already know, I tell my classes. Existing expertise may gratify the ego, but it doesn’t grow the intellect.
Adjuring students to take intellectual risks and accept failures as part of the learning process is a cop-out though. Everyone who has spent time around young mammals knows they are fiercely imitative. To have any chance of inspiring imitation, teachers need to show, not tell; act, not instruct.
This is borne out by research: MacDonnell Mesler et al. (2021) found that teachers with growth mindsets had a “positive and statistically significant association with the development of their students’ growth mindsets.”
How does a teacher demonstrate a growth mindset? Only by admitting to imperfect knowledge, making mistakes and learning from them, getting out of their comfort zone and engaging with difficulties.
Students are quick to sniff out inauthentic attitudes. As much as I’d love to be able to convince them it’s not just fine but important to screw up occasionally, that message will ring false if unaccompanied by the grace and humility to make and acknowledge errors. To overcome my reluctance, I challenge myself to do the following.
Make space for student expertise
A friend who knows me very well once remarked, half in jest, that I’d make a good cult leader. He knows how much I love to be right and persuade others of my rightness. Hence, it is a serious discipline to shut myself down (multiple times a day) and make space for student expertise. They know things I don’t, lots and lots of things.
Instead of always telling them what I know (ah, Sinai!) I make a practice of asking what they know. This throws up surprises (another thing perfectionists hate) and sends us on tangents. It is crucial; students need agency, need to know that what they know is valuable and integral to what they are learning.
Adopt a ‘learn with’ not ‘teach to’ approach
Reframing the educational encounter as a mutual learning experience creates opportunities for teachers and students alike. Though it is easy to fall back on the egotistical attitude of I’m the teacher, listen to me, this is precisely how not to inspire a growth mindset. Teaching to implies the teacher is omniscient; depending on the student, this obvious nonsense will discourage, annoy or spur indifference. (Why should I be intellectually adventurous and honest if my teacher isn’t?)
A learn with approach emphasizes that learning is ongoing for everyone, and that no matter how much a person knows about a subject, there is always more to discover.
Screw up and own it
One of the most valuable phrases in a teacher’s repertoire is, I was wrong.
It is also one of the hardest things (for me) to say.
Professional pride, ego, perfectionism all get in the way of admitting mistakes, but it is unutterably important that students have positive models for screwing up and owning it.
Teachers have to be willing to make and acknowledge mistakes to model the next, crucial step: learning from that mistake.
Acknowledging an error opens the door to correcting it; refusing to do so keeps students and teachers locked in false, precarious attitudes of expertise that hinder personal and collaborative learning.
***
Would I prefer to be a flawless, infinitely knowledgeable teacher? Of course.
Would that make me a better educator? Absolutely not.
Resisting perfectionism and owning errors will always be a struggle, but my students will ultimately benefit, and that’s what matters.
There are two kinds of people who give advice to writers: those who want better writing, and those who want payment.
Teachers, from the unsung heroes singing the ABCs with snotty toddlers to college professors hacking through forests of sophomoric prose, are mostly the former.
Once you venture beyond formal education, though, the search for guidance can lead straight into the slough of despond where some self-proclaimed guru will offer you the keys to the kingdom, on an installment plan. There are also wonderful writing teachers who ought to be paid for their time and expertise.
These five questions will help you to avoid hyenas and find legitimate guides —
1. Do non-writers read their books?
This is important because, if you’re going to take writing advice from someone, it might as well be an actual writer. Not someone who has set him/herself up as an expert on the basis of figuring out MailChimp.
When a writer who is read and loved by millions, like Ray Bradbury, E.B. White or Stephen King dispenses writing advice, I’m happy to pay.
2. Do they tell you how much they earn?
The above mentioned writers never, to my knowledge, sent emails to their readers bragging about their income. If a so-called writing guru leads by telling you how much they earn, it’s a con.
Writers can and do earn great salaries as writers. But if a person’s primary income stream is other writers s/he is a huckster, not a writer.
Writers are wishful thinkers, in the best possible way. We wish to understand, report, illuminate, entertain, and above all connect. This fundamental optimism keeps us at the keyboard. It also makes us susceptible to slicks who claim to have discovered a secret to striking rich as a writer.
This prospect is pure mirage — and enticing as an oasis.
If someone really had the secret to endless, effortless cash from freelance writing clients s/he would simply enjoy the income. If the technique were valid and replicable, teaching it would create competition.
4. Do they try to up-sell you?
A writer who earns a comfortable primary income from writing shouldn’t be hustling. I’ve encountered sales pitches ranging from $199 for an online journalism course to $10,000 for one year of “mentoring”.
The give away, whether at the low or high end of the price scale, is the guru’s insistence that this is great value. Two online courses for the price of one! Access to a “community” (as if there aren’t a gazillion free writers forums and Facebook groups)! Cheaper than college! Cheaper than a weekend in Vegas! Only 20 percent of your annual income!
The people most likely to be tempted by dubious expertise are those worst-placed to pay these rates, which makes fake gurus opportunistic dickwads.
5. Do they tell you it’s all in your head?
Without fail, every single fake writing guru will preach some version of “failure is a mindset”.
Never mind that writer’s median income has dropped by 42 percent since 2009, according to the New York Times, and that royalties and advances are down by 30 percent in that period. Or that more than 1,800 newspapers have closed in the U.S. since 2004. Or that magazines like Glamour, Redbook, Cooking Light and ComputerWorld ceased print publication in 2018.
PayScale data show only 10 percent of all writers earn more than $83,000 per year, meaning even fewer earn above the much-hyped six figure mark.
Failing to earn scads of money as a writer is not a mindset — it’s a reality.
The only people who tell you it’s all in your head are the ones who are ass-covering for the inevitable moment when you realize that over-priced bottle of secret sauce isn’t going to make you a millionaire.
Where to find the real thing
Don’t despair of getting sound, disinterested writing guidance— and don’t pay through the nose for it.
Sites like Funds for Writers and Freedom with Writing are a great way to learn about contests, publishers and grants.If you want advice on the craft of writing, hit the library or bookshop.
My favorite books on writing include:
Zen and the Art of Writing — Ray Bradbury
Bird by Bird — Anne Lamott
Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind — Natalie Goldberg
On Writing Well — William Zinsser
Steering the Craft — Ursula K. LeGuin
For honest first person advice, join a writing group or workshop, or take a class. Some of the best, wisest writers I know work in community colleges or extension programs, for little reward and less recognition, because they want other people to experience the life-altering power of writing.
Seek the positive
Writing should be a source of joy, even if it’s a job.
A writer worth listening to embraces both its struggles and its delights.
“Writing is survival,” Bradbury wrote. “Any art, any good work, of course, is that. …We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.”
He looked like the toddler offspring of Paul Simon and Crazy Frog: all exuberant curls and a rubber-band mouth stretched across his small face. It was at breaking point when I saw him, eyes clamped shut, Jagger lips flopped open in an unceasing howl. His tiny body, taut as a tug-of-war rope, pulled against his grandma’s hand.
My class, older by a few years moved into the classroom and settled into worksheets. The image of the tiny frog-face and its owner’s belly-roar of anguish distracted me from the grammar presentation.
What good is there in forcing a tiny, hysterical child into an ESL class, or any class? His brave, futile resistance was engendered by a dangerous notion: the tone-deaf, compassion-free insistence “education” was more important than his distress.
The little boy was experiencing education as an affront to his agency and personhood. He won’t understand those words for another decade or so but children, like all animals (human and otherwise) understand the difference between agency and imposition.
“So what?” you might ask. “Kids never want to go to school. You have to make them.”
If that is the case, instead of accepting it as a fact, we need to ask, why?
Children are curious to the point of being maddening, not to mention fearsome mimics. They will dog your steps demanding to know how things work, how to do things, imitating your words and actions until you’re half-afraid to move. They don’t hate learning. If they hate school it is a sign that education, as it is currently conceived, doesn’t serve them.
Coercion versus consent
Despite his protests, this little boy had “education” imposed on him by force majeure.
Nobody, but nobody, likes to be coerced. Not even if the activity is ultimately something they would have chosen any way. We adults hate being pressured, bullied and ordered around. Children are no different (if anything, I suspect, more sensitive to it, because they haven’t yet had their spirit deaden by years of “education”).
Coercion leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Activities that we might have sought out and enjoyed of our free will become tainted, unpalatable.
When education becomes an object of coercion, we create an ugly frequency that distorts the interaction of teachers and students; parents and children. Curiosity atrophies into suspicion as the act of learning is irredeemably conflated with authoritarianism — with long-term repercussions.
One of my close friends is an intelligent, organised, motivated, assured woman whose self-perception is that she is not a good student. Why? Because as a child and teenager, she was obliged to endure rote, deadening conventional education. Unable and unwilling to conform, she adopted the label they imposed: poor student.
As an adult, she went back to school and performed astonishingly well, earning high marks and taking on leadership roles. Now, she returns to her university every year to give a talk to incoming students.
Children, like adults, need to be active participants in their learning. The first duty of an educator is to inspire them with the possibilities and delights of learning, not drag them screaming into classrooms and force them to fill out worksheets.
Once learning has been established in kids’ minds as a positive, rewarding experience, in which they have agency and the freedom to express themselves, they will be willing and able to cope with the inevitable patches of boredom and incomprehension.
Seeking consent in education doesn’t mean we have to entertain children, or pander to their every whim, but it does mean giving them a fair say.
Man being … by nature, all free … no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. –John Locke, Chapter 8
As a kid, and through high school, I loved standardized tests. Because I was the maddening specimen who scored in the 99th percentile without a flicker of effort.
Given the bias in standardized tests, it’s not surprising. I was a white kid who had been reading voraciously since age four. I was going to ace anything that measured “verbal” skills, which are, of course, in the context of the tests, reading and writing skills.
Being a killer test taker had advantages. My high school SAT and ACT scores got me into an Ivy League university, and scooped a National Merit Scholarship to help pay for it. Not bad for a poor kid from a decaying seaside town in Oregon.
Being Little Miss 99th Percentile felt good. My teachers liked it because I brought up the class average. I liked it because it got me positive attention. My parents? They didn’t care, which is perhaps why I cared so much. Acing those tests was more than an academic achievement, it was much-needed validation. Terrified of losing that, I gravitated towards subjects that came easy: English, history, communication, psychology.
Unfortunately, one thing they didn’t teach in first-year psych was that effort counts for more than “intelligence”. Though, to be fair, the results of Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck’s landmark study on the relationship between praise and motivation weren’t published till 1998, my second year of college.
Mueller and Dweck gave kids a series of tests. One group was praised for their intelligence, the other for their effort. They found that the children who were praised for intelligence were reluctant to try more difficult tests, while those praised for effort were eager to try harder tasks.
Kids singled out for “intelligence” were afraid of doing anything that might show them up. Like those kids, I avoided challenges, got good grades and learned almost nothing.
Opportunities lost
Each month, as I make my student loan payment (still chipping away at that. Thank you American tertiary education system), I think about the classes I avoided: Spanish, math, organic chemistry. I went to university planning to major in chemistry and go on to med school. Sophomore year, I changed to English lit.
It was the right decision, made for the wrong reasons. My motivation wasn’t love of literature and language but fear of math and science. If I couldn’t waltz into an exam and out with an A, I wasn’t even going to try.
Looking back, I wish teachers had pushed me more — especially in the subjects I was good at. Maybe, then, I would have realized my skills weren’t “innate” and would have learned to apply myself.
But, as a teacher myself, I can’t blame them. Having a “good” student, one who enjoys and seems to effortlessly absorb the material, is a treat. S/he is one student you don’t have to worry about, one whose enthusiasm and aptitude makes you feel good about yourself as an educator, even if you don’t really deserve the credit. It is tempting to praise the student and more or less leave them to his/her/their own devices.
Tempting, but an abdication of responsibility. Perhaps the student is doing well because h/s/t are an adept learner. In that case, you should see the work gradually improve. If you don’t, chances are they’re coasting on an existing skill set. And without intervention, they may well be self-limiting to stay within that safety zone.
Breaking out of the success trap
How do you challenge a student in an area where they excel? Here are three ideas:
Process
Once, in a job interview, I was asked: “How do you write?”
It was the first time anyone had asked about my process. Formulating an answer made me realize that I had one, and that it could be applied to other tasks.
If you have a student who shines at art, trigonometry, whatever, as them how. They might think it’s a dumb question (I did) but they will discover the work that goes into their accomplishments. Recognizing their own effort and process will help them see themselves as learners, and start to generalize those skills.
Cross-pollination
Use your students strengths to address their weaknesses. If, for example, your student loves history but hates math, have them research the history of a mathematical concept, e.g. Who was Pythagoras and how did he come up with his theory? Thus tackling something hard becomes a chance to show off what they are good at.
Let them be the expert
Once your students have assessed their own process, reinforce that by giving them an opportunity to be the expert. Pair or small group work is a good setting to allow students to display their strengths. Set up assignments where they teach each other and grade them on how well their classmates do.
We tend to think of “life-long learning” in terms of adults but, to deserve the title, it has to start in childhood. The best, that is highest-achieving, students are necessarily the best learners. They may, in extreme cases, be learning very little.
Helping them uncover their process, use their skills to address new challenges, and share their strategies with others will develop those crucial skills.
Suspended in your limbs the
sky shatters to dancing fractals.
Height makes me dizzy.
Pressed by gravity to your
contours
corpuscles shriek.
My heart screeches
out of control.
Refusing to
fall
I
will
climb
(down).
Wood against flesh.
Taut, anxious;
mute and clumsy; bones
rattle against every
branch on the way. Till I
f
a
l
l
and tangle in your roots.
Bruises rise like
sap. Sunshine
sears the skin your fingers warmed.
Wind dips to kindly whisper: Let go.
A quick trip down memory lane to Kelly Writers House at UPenn. It is where I learned the ropes of non-fiction writing from inimitable, award-winning author, journalist and all-around good guy Paul Hendrickson.
On a campus full of aggressive high rises and smug colonial brickwork it is a delightful clapboard anachronism, complete with creaky stairs and overburdened bookshelves. It was my favourite place at Penn (Mad 4 Mex ran a close second) and I was lucky to be able to pay my respects when I passed through Philly last autumn. Here’s a few snapshots…
Cila Warncke Writer 