Yearly Archives: 2013

In celebration of Black History Month, how about teaching poetry using some of the Jazz greats?  From the Bechtel-winning article "A Slip Into The Breaks: Teaching Jazz Poetry", available in our Digital Resource Center, Emily Raboteau talks about a lot of great ways that Jazz can inspire poetry and creative writing in the classroom. 

In a letter to Billie Holiday, one young writer writes: "Dear Billie, wilted flower, we want to save you, but not from the needle scratching your voice."

Another young writer listens to Holiday's "My Melancholy Baby" and is inspired to write this poem:

The Deli

just juice
        alto sax says to piano
piano keeps flipping
        eggs
        bacon
        juice
this morning I unscrambled scrambled eggs
alto says

“It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth. To get to the essence of things in this society is a monumental task of awareness.” – V. H. Cruz

Victor Hernández Cruz, born February 6, 1949 in Puerto Rico, grew up and went to school in Spanish Harlem New York. Cruz started writing at fifteen and his first chapbook, Papo Got His Gun! (Calle Once, 1966) was published when he was seventeen. His first collection, Snaps (Random House, 1969), was published three years later at the age of twenty. Cruz is known for blending English and Spanish into his spoken and written poetry (read about the Nuyorican Movement), and for writing about New York as a Puerto Rican. He writes as though he is a perpetual traveler, someone who has visited just long enough to feel at home in New York, California, Puerto Rico, Morocco, and Colorado.

When Urayoán Noel asked in an interview [published in the article “The Music That Is Yourself,” (T&W 38:2, 2007] about the effects of growing up with two languages, Cruz said, “It’s a limbo that I’ve learned to cultivate. I tell you, what’s more important is what I want to say. The question is, can I say it with more strength in English or in Spanish? I feel the subject itself, the content, will call forth the language it needs; the language chooses itself. …In my poetry I am also a student of history and, as I travel, I travel with that in mind. For me, traveling is just as important as investigation or reading texts because it’s seeing cultura viva (living culture)…You can see it in the kinds of food you eat, and in music influenced by this guitar or that melody.”  

In an interview with turnrow (2002), Cruz talked about how he became involved with Teachers & Writers Collaborative. “I met people [in 1968] who were important to me—Herbert Kohl, who I actually met in New York—he is an educator. … I met Ishmael Reed, the African-American novelist, who encouraged me and wrote about my early work. In California I was able to see New York from a distance, from a bird’s eye view. I usually write about places after I've left them.” In the interview with Urayoán Noel, Cruz elaborated on this:

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Using the love kids have for comics can be a great way to get kids writing and using their imagination.  The website for The Comic Book Project says, "The Comic Book Project engages children in a creative process leading to literacy reinforcement, social awareness, and character development, then publishes and distributes their work for other children in the community to use as learning and motivational tools."

If you're interested in using creative comics in your classroom, see the article in our Digital Resource Center titled "Launching a Comic Book Club" that Michael Bitz (Executive Director for The Comic Book Project) wrote for Teachers & Writers Magazine.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative is accepting submissions for the 2013 Bechtel Prize, awarded annually to the author of an exemplary essay on literary arts education. The winner of the award receives a $1,000 honorarium, and the winning essay is published in Teachers & Writers Magazine and on the T&W website.

The 2013 Bechtel Prize winner and finalists will be selected by Susan Orlean, the best-selling author of eight books, including My Kind of Place, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, Saturday Night, and Lazy Little Loafers. Her 1999 book The Orchid Thief was made into the Oscar-winning movie Adaptation. In 2011, Orlean published Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, and her work has also appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Outside, Smithsonian, and the New York Times.

The submission deadline for the 2013 Bechtel Prize is 5:00 PM (Eastern), Monday, July 1, 2013.

See the 2012 Bechtel Prize essay Now Let's Stare at the Purple, by Barbara Flug Colin, at http://www.twc.org/bechtel-prize-winners/.

For full submission guidelines, please go to www.twc.org/magazine/bechtel-prize.

Think NYC is a city full of noise? Here are some ideas on how to translate all that wonderful sound into poems about the city!

And be sure to check out our POEM AS BIG AS NYC: LESSONS page for more great ideas!

Like most people, before I learned to read and write, I taught myself to draw. How easy to pick up a crayon, a magic marker, or a pencil, and make something—anything—on the page (or on the living room wall). As children, we confidently draw what we want to see and what we see, as we see it. Our drawings are not wrong, misspelled or illegible—and if they are illegible, it’s often the kind of illegibility that one reads as poetic, abstract, mysterious, and open to interpretation. Thankfully, we don’t need to speak an artist’s national tongue to read his visual work. Everyone is capable of reading a painting by Rothko or a sculpture by Brancusi, sans translation.

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners -- and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

-Wisława Szymborska from T&W book Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing

Tuesday, January 8 • Doors open at 6:30, Reading at 7

TELLING IT SLANT AND STRAIGHT:

Susan Buttenwieser, Vanessa Mártir, and Ibi Zoboi 

T&W writers Susan Buttenwieser, Vanessa Mártir, and Ibi Zoboi will share differing perspectives written in differing genres about love and loss, the beautiful and the heinous. Susan Buttenwieser will kick off the evening with a short story; Vanessa Mártir will jostle you with excerpts from her memoir, A Dim Capacity for Wings; and Ibi Zoboi will make your imagination soar with a piece from her YA fantasy novel.

Tuesday, January 8

Doors open at 6:30, Reading at 7

The Center for Imaginative Writing

at Teachers & Writers Collaborative

520 Eighth Avenue, Suite 2020

(between West 36th and West 37th Streets)

 Queries: 212-691-6590 or events@twc.org 

T&W is now accepting submissions for the 2013 Bechtel Prize, awarded to the author of an exemplary essay on creative writing education. Susan Orlean will select the 2013 winner. Go here for the submission guidelines.

In January of last year I began a nonfiction-writing residency at a  high school, here in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.  At an early point during the residency as a teaching artist, I asked my students to explore a memory.  What I meant essentially, when I asked for an exploration, when I asked the students to use or employ their memories, a flash of a memory, a blink or spark from the corridors behind their collective eyes, was supposed to be rather simple.  Pick or choose a moment within an event and use that moment like a flash card.  Put that moment to work as a piece of a scaffold or, as a bone  in the structure of a larger narrative.

From the onset of the residency, my goal was to have the students produce a collection of nonfiction pieces for our year-end anthology.  The idea was to transform a memory from a fact or group of facts into a central thread in a narrative.  I gave them an example, from my own days in high school, from an exceptionally different or perhaps foreign landscape.