AiRMail 6/30/24

This is very loosely based on some experiences I had as a teaching artist one summer in an Indiana town that has seen successive boom-and-bust economic trends and was once a base of Klan activity. In one of its 20th century “boom” periods, the town attracted large numbers of migrants from nearby Appalachia. The writing workshops were conducted in a low-income neighborhood where many of these migrants’ families had settled decades before.
 
I want to make clear, however, that this is fiction and told in a voice that is not my own, but that of a fictional character. So when I say the story is “loosely based” on past experiences, I mean that I’ve drawn on real people and events, but this isn’t my – or anyone’s – actual story.

                                   WHEN A STRANGER COMES IN
                                                          Week 1
            When six women show up for the first of six classes, you say, “Hi and welcome to Writing for Our Lives.”
            You have to assume the group has had little if any formal training in creative writing. Few in this area likely have the resources for boutique education. But everywhere people have things they want to say, stories they want children and grandchildren to remember. And actually, one woman does have some background in poetry. Unlike the other five, whose families have been here for 80 years, 150 years, 200 years or more, Ellen arrived fairly recently. When she introduces herself she mentions that she’s originally from a more upscale place further east. But she likes the sense of community here. For some people low-income residency is like living in a commune, at an ashram, on a kibbutz. It’s a religious loadstone. People feel they can belong here. You think maybe you can too.
         The other women, the ones other than Ellen, can’t seem to string sentences together, even in casual conversation. Each utterance contains a thought or observation, but the utterances don’t connect. You listen - try to, anyway - but you never get their stories. How can there be stories when there is no narrative arc?  When sentences don’t connect?
                                                                 Week 2
          A memory, a happy memory, isn’t a bad place to start a workshop. The women in the group are in their thirties and forties. Old enough to have spouses, children, homes, habits, jobs. So you start with this: “Try to remember one happy memory from your school days: maybe a teacher, something you accomplished, a friend you made.”
            Myra starts to cry. She fusses with a backpack, looking for something. She pulls out loose papers, some tissues, a small notebook, a single orange mitten.
            “I’m sorry,” she says and leans back in her chair, still crying.
         You attempt to provide comfort, tell her it’s okay, nothing to be sorry about.
            She tells you she’s just having a bad day. She smiles, sort of.
            Around the table, the others are still and quiet. Expressionless.
           You suggest to Myra that she try to think about a happy memory. She nods.
            A minute later, everyone has pen in hand. They are writing, if haltingly, in the journals you’ve given them, still very quiet. Suddenly Myra drops her pen, sighs hugely. The tears come.
            “I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I’m just so upset,” she says.
          No one reacts, and you start to wonder if Myra is high, or is manifesting symptoms of a mental condition. Maybe something about the assignment troubles her, triggers something.
            Myra insists she’s just having a bad day. That she’s really fine.
            But Myra is not fine. In minutes, she interrupts the conversation you’re having about adding sensory details to the stories. “Oh God,” she moans. You let it pass, but then it happens again.
            “Oh God.”
            The others seem not to be upset by these outbursts, but you’re finding it impossible to run a workshop. Of course you want to be tolerant, nonjudgmental, inclusive, but you’re thinking, this is not a situation of someone having a bad day and needing the group’s support. No amount of compassion is likely to help. Anyway Myra isn’t asking for support. Obviously she’s not getting any benefit from the writing, and if she remains no one else will get the benefit of a workshop either. You have to decide: focus on Myra’s needs or intervene on the group’s behalf?
          Even as you analyze the situation, Myra breaks down, crying hard. You get up and stand behind her, hoping to urge her away from the group and into the hallway. Caroleen, who is sitting to Myra’s right, touches her hand as she rises. From across the table Ellen says, “No worries, Myra.”
You escort the weepy Myra to the community center director’s office. She’s invited to sit down, which she willingly does. You leave her in the director’s competent hands and return to the group. There you are met by two bowed heads and three pairs of intense eyes.
                                                                     Week 3
          You abandon your original workshop syllabus. It’s rife with so many elements and concepts that will surely have no attraction or sticking power. No one except (maybe) Ellen is remotely invested in the craft. In fact, you wonder why any of them signed up or continue to show. It’s doubtful they know.
          You subscribe to the Times, listen to public radio, read poetry, follow politics, invest in the stock market, support progressive causes, travel, watch the late night shows, have almost 800 Instagram followers. You’re conscious of your privilege, your values, your closeted ambition, your urge to do right, your craving for stimulation. You embrace cynicism, liberalism, irony. None of this has any relevance whatsoever.
            You ask the group to think of some political issue in their lifetimes as a way into a discussion about conflict, story tension, historical context. As examples you use apartheid, The Cultural Revolution, McCarthyism and Brexit. Those shorthand terms don’t register.
           “Is McCarthy still coaching?” Mandy asks.
            “Coaching?”
             “I think so,” Ellen says. “But he turned down the Browns.”
Understand they are talking about a professional American football coach. It isn’t the kind of historical conflict you had in mind, but at least it provides an opening. Everyone has something to say about sports: an unfair call at the plate during the World Series, their kids’ hockey coach, a husband going on a month-long binge every year during the World Cup.
           In the midst of all this you ask yourself what you’re doing here among people who can barely put three words together in a sentence, who can’t follow simple directions. How are you supposed to nurture creative writing in people who don’t seem to care about language, the art of language, the search for meaning through wordsmithing. Who operate on nonverbal principles you can’t begin to fathom?
            Imagine what’s it like for them. What’s it like to be with people who far exceed you in conventional measures of intelligence. Ask yourself, can they articulate their needs? How do they take care of their needs? Do they think their needs matter? What do they love? What is love to them? How do they even survive?
            You have an awful lot to learn.
                                                           Week 4
            In preparation for a writing exercise, you ask the women to use two words to describe themselves. Terry is the first to speak.      
            “Fortunate.”
             Caroleen asks why she thinks so. Terry shrugs. She says all her life others have been envious of her. She says good things have come her way, other people see that, it’s hard to explain.
            You can see why it would be hard to explain. Because what you see is that she lives in a rural community that has never seen better days. She has bad teeth and gray skin. Her clothes are well worn. She lost her job recently when Carson’s Hardware closed its doors. That’s why she has time to be here at the community center, taking a free creative writing class. She left early last week for a doctor’s appointment. They were doing a breast biopsy. She has arthritic knees. Her husband has gout and diabetes and is on disability. Where does her good fortune lie?
            You ask for her second word.
            “I can’t think of one,” she says.
            You say you’ll come back to her. When you do, you’ll find she can’t come up with a second descriptor.
            Meanwhile, Caroleen chooses “honest” and “sensitive.” Mandy says those are her two words, too. Bobbie describes herself as God-loving and grateful. The two words Ellen selects are “complex” and “curious.” When it’s Myra’s turn, the first word she picks is “stupid.”
This draws a reaction from everyone except Mandy.
            “You are not stupid,” Ellen says.
            “No, you aren’t,” Caroleen agrees.
            “You should pick something else,” Bobbie tells her, and Caroleen and Terry nod.
            “Well, okay,” Myra says. “I guess I’ll say I’m a good writer.”
            “That’s two words,” Mandy points out.
            Myra ignores her. “I mean, I’m not always stupid. I’m just in a bad situation right now. But writing helps. I love to write. I’m good at it I think. I wrote some stories for my nieces and I’m trying to get them published. Do you know where I can publish them?”
            You tell her Children’s Lit is not really your area.
            Now Myra pulls a folder stuffed with looseleaf sheets from her backpack.
            “I’m writing a mystery novel, too,” she says. “I showed it to my friend who’s an English teacher. He says it’s very good. I could read the first chapter.” She looks at you hopefully.
            “Maybe not now,” you say. “Now’s not really a good time.” You offer to talk with her about it after class. You ask if she has another word in mind that describes her.
            “Beautiful,” Myra says.
                                                                   Week 5
            You bring in small potted flowering plants. For a poetry exercise, you’ll have everyone write rhyming couplets about plants and flowers. They can paint the couplets on the flower pots and decorate the pots as they like. The idea is they can gift the flowers to someone. Mother’s Day is approaching.
            The couplets they write are mostly predictable, one or two syllable rhymes:
Daffodil is a dapper fellow/ He comes along dressed in yellow.
The snow melts, the goldfinch sings, / Flowers rise, it’s spring!
It’s not much of a gift but this little pot/ and this silly old poem is the best I got.
            You consider but make no attempt to talk about iambic pentameter. It’s not important. And why disturb the mood? For once the women are smiling, they’re talking. They share their rhymes.
            This isn’t what you expected when you signed up to teach a writing workshop. You are only here in this town because your husband accepted an offer to teach at a nearby college for the semester. Hearing that his wife was a writer, one of your husband’s colleagues told him about this center, and that it offers different adult learning opps. A chance to use your skills, get to know people in the community outside the academic circle, that’s what your husband said.
            You ask the group what they hoped for when they signed up to take the class.
            “Nothing, really,” Terry says. “Jamilla said to try it. Only she isn’t here being as it conflicts with her work. Her boss at Food Lion is, oh man!” She shakes her head.
            “Glad I don’t work. Except volunteer at the church,” Bobbie says. “Mostly the food pantry. Over at 7th Street. Jesus is my boss I guess. I took a painting class in the fall. I like to learn new things. Usually I sign up for something.”
            Mandy says, “Caroleen talked me into it.”
            “Well you’re a good writer,” Caroleen says. She turns to you. “She always wanted to write. Some teacher told her she’d never be any good. I made her come to prove her wrong.”
            “Is that true?” you ask. “A teacher said that?”
            “Yep. Really hurt me.”
            “You believed her?” you ask.
            “Well yeah.”
            “That’s terrible,” you tell Mandy. “She was so wrong.”
            “Told you,” Caroleen says.
                                                               Week 6
            It’s raining hard. Inside the community center you sit alone, waiting. The last class day, fifteen minutes past starting time, and no one has shown up.
            You wander over to the director’s office and poke your head in, just to say you’ll be taking off.
            “How’s it going?” she asks.
            Nobody’s here, so that’s a clue. Everyone had been asked to bring in their best work to read to the group. “Maybe I scared them all off,” you say.
            “Oh I don’t think so,” the director says. “People around here aren’t easily scared.”
            That’s probably true. Even so, you confess to not being sure they got much out of it. That you found it difficult to connect. “No one seemed all that willing to share,” you say.
            The director raises her eyes, looks steadily at you for a few seconds. “I doubt that’s the case,” she says. “When a stranger comes in, they don’t understand.”
            You stand awkwardly in the doorway, expecting more. When nothing else is said, you make your polite goodbyes and depart.
            ‘They don’t understand.’ You think, now there’s an understatement.
            You’re standing just outside the entrance manipulating an umbrella when you see Myra approach.
            “Am I late? Clocks change or something?” she asks.
            You tell her she’s “a little late,” but no, the clocks didn’t change. You say you just didn’t think anyone was coming.
            Myra says she missed her ride and had to ask her sister for a lift. “She isn’t too happy with me,” she says. She tells you it’s okay if you want to leave, since it’s her fault she’s so late.
            You say, “You’re here now. Why don’t we go in.”
            In the Crafts Room where the class usually meets, the custodian has already put away the chairs and is mopping the floor. He says the gym is open, though, so you and Myra go there and settle yourselves on the lowest tier of bleachers.
            You ask if there’s anything in particular Myra would like to do.
            “I brought my novel,” Myra says. “I couldn’t stay late last week, but maybe you could look at it now.”
            You read through the first couple pages. It’s a mix of memoir and fantasy, a far cry from the mystery novel Myra said she was working on. A few good phrases, but rambling, disorganized.
            You ask her what the basic story is she wants to tell. You invite her to describe it in a few sentences.
            This brings on a lengthy response, not about the novel, but about Myra, what has happened in her life.
            So you ask if she wants to write her own story, or fiction, and she says a little of both. Ninety minutes pass during which you ask questions intended to unbraid motivations and break down the process of writing narrative into manageable pieces, and Myra listens earnestly, almost desperately, and tries to explain her ideas and make sense of her life. In the end, you offer to take the novel home for a few days and send it back with written feedback. She declines. She doesn’t want to risk losing her only copy.
            “It’s on a hard drive,” she says, “but I don’t trust machines.”
            You tell her you’re sorry the others weren’t here to hear her read a bit of it. “Maybe the rain discouraged them today,” you say.
            “Probably not the rain,” she says. “Most likely they’re all at the Annual Barn Burner.”
               “The what?”
            Once a year, she tells you, the community holds a gigantic flea market. “There’s all sorts of giveaways. Games and karaoke and oh, all sorts of stuff. It’s only one time a year. Even in the rain. There’s big tents. Everybody goes.”
            “Wow. I wasn’t aware,” you say. An understatement.
            “I’ll probably head over that way now,” Myra says. “I mean, you never know what you might find. You should come.”
            She’s right, of course. So yes, you should go, you really should.