Anne Whitehouse taught for T&W in more than 30 schools from 1978 to 1984. She has also taught at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Marymount Manhattan College, and College of New Rochelle. Whitehouse currently works in development and communications at DOROT, a multi-service agency that assists frail elderly through a partnership of professionals and volunteers, and as a consultant for the American Opera Projects. She is the author of the novel Fall Love and the poetry collection The Surveyor’s Hand. Her website, www.annewhitehouse.com, features her professional life as a writer. This interview was conducted in October 2008.
- Q: How did you come to teach for T&W?
- A: I was a student in the Writing Division of the School of Arts at Columbia University in the fall of 1978. Steve Schrader, who was the director at that time, gave me the opportunity to start right away, at a school where another writer had dropped out before the end of a residency. Steve accompanied me to the school to meet the principal. It was in Queens in the worst neighborhood I’ve ever been to. All the commercial buildings were boarded up. There was broken glass all over the street. The neighborhood had never recovered from the ‘77 blackout.
- Q: What was your first residency like?
- A: My first full-length residency was at a junior high school in East Harlem. It was an enormous school in an amazing Gothic building that was completely falling apart. There were eight staircases in that school. It was really trial by fire. I had a 20-week, three-class residency, mostly poetry. I also worked with teachers at the school one period a day and was responsible for training two younger T&W writers.
- Q: How would you describe the role of a writer-in-residence at a school?
- A: The role of a writer-in-residence is to stimulate creativity and self-expression—that is the main reason we should be in the schools. Also, I wanted to teach children the possibilities of language and using it as a means of self-expression.
- Q: What were some of the challenges?
- A: I felt a tension between the idea that a teaching artist brings a unique sensibility, mentality, and vision into the classroom and the idea that what we do as teaching artists can be replicated. There was a movement when I was at T&W to train teachers to do what teaching artists do. You can certainly give teachers a lot of tools, but there’s a sensibility, a developed instinct that teaching artists have—an ability to look at student work and see where it’s trying to go. It’s not something you can teach in a replication seminar. There’s no replacement for having an artist in the classroom working with students.
- Q: What’s one of your best T&W memories?
- A: At a school in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium I volunteered to do additional work with a small group of children. In just a few weeks they wrote a play, we produced it, and they acted in it. It was a mystery detective story. Everything was their own idea. It was probably based on TV, but that didn’t matter. The process is more important than the product. You don’t necessarily get there the first time. You have to be able to go back and rewrite. That internal judgment that you develop about your own writing is one of the most important things about writing. You teach that by doing it, by working through the drafts, by working through the process.
- I was proud of anthologies that I produced with the kids. I learned that it’s important to include work from every child in the anthology, so they become vested in it. Doing the publication was a really important part so that you do have a product—even though the process is what it’s all about, it is important for the kids to have a product. We produced some nicely printed books at T&W with illustrations by the children. Now, of course, with computers it’s much easier. I remember using mimeograph machines with this runny blue ink on the paper to reproduce poems for lesson plans. It had this certain smell. That was before schools had photocopiers.
- Q: Describe some of the challenges of balancing the everyday demands of making a living while being a teaching artist.
- A: It’s always been a balancing act to figure out how I’m going to support myself and still do my own writing. In 1980, when Reagan was elected, federal arts funding was cut and became harder to get enough T&W residencies to support myself. So I worked as an adjunct at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City College of New York, College of New Rochelle, and Marymount Manhattan College—it became very hard to earn enough money. On the plus side, the work I did for T&W fed directly into my own writing. In my novel Fall Love, one of my characters—Althea, a painter—is an artist in the schools. Her experiences as a teacher were based on actual experiences from my T&W days that I transformed in the novel.
- Q: You’ve done extensive nonprofit work over the years. How did you get started in that field?
- A: I moved into the development world. That was a fluke! A friend of mine offered me a job. She said, “You can do this.” And I found out I could. It just sort of happened and it turned out to be a good fit for me. I’ve been at DOROT for almost 12 years now. I also consult for American Opera Projects, a company devoted to commissioning and developing new works of opera and music theater.
- Q: As someone with experience on both the teaching artist and the administrative side of the nonprofit world, what are some of the changes you’ve seen in the field over the years?
- A: The 60s and 70s were an idealistic period when a lot of nonprofits were established with their important missions, including Teachers & Writers. DOROT, which serves the elderly through a partnership of professionals and volunteers, was also founded then. Over time, the early free-flowing idealism has evolved to a more bureaucratic structure based on the business model. I think it’s an inevitable part of the process of professionalization. There’s more focus on statistical evaluation and accountability, which is a good thing. There are definite pluses, but on the downside everything takes a lot more money now, especially in New York City. The fact that nonprofits have not only survived for 40 years but are flourishing shows that their missions remain vital and the work they are doing is important.
- Q: How do you view the relevance of T&W programs today?
- A: Our national educational system has moved toward testing and more testing. You’ve got kids just spurting out these answers—is this truly what we consider education? Isn’t it really more important to stimulate creativity and imagination and critical thinking and analysis? To open young people up to using the possibilities of language as a means of communication and self-expression? We don’t want to produce cookie-cutter kids who just check off the box next to the right answer. That’s not the kind of citizen we need to create, and it leaves out a very important part of what education is about. Every writer must first see the potential for what he or she wants to do, and that potential exists first as an idea. You have to listen to your inner voice and you can’t hear it if you’re getting spoon-fed all the answers. Every writer writes in a different way. In fiction, I try to visualize a scene before I write it. It’s often a trial-and-error process, and you have to have faith in the process.
- Q: What do you take away when you think back to your time at T&W?
- A: I loved working with T&W. It’s harder to teach adults. Children learn so much faster. I love their fearlessness. I’d say, “You have 10 to 15 minutes to write a poem.” And they’d all do it and then be raising their hands to read their poems. I take away a real respect for children and young people and their imaginations and their abilities. It can be a wonderful and exciting thing to work with them.
ANNE WHITEHOUSE’S FAVORITE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
- William Carlos Williams—“The Last Words of My English Grandmother”:
“I’ve always felt that this poem is like being drenched with ice-cold water. It’s unsentimental. The grandmother is ready to die. It’s a wonderful lesson because it gives the students permission to look very unsparingly at emotion and life. It’s also a persona poem with a strong voice and is full of vivid observations.”
- D.H. Lawrence—Animal Poems: “He has these wonderful poems about animals (bats, fish, snakes, etc.). I enjoyed using these with kids.. They’re very visual. Even with younger students these poems can be a really good springboard.”
- T.S. Eliot— “Virginia”: “This is a short lyrical poem that is very musical. The sound and music of the poem evoke a hot, Southern landscape. I loved to use this poem to get students to develop their ear and to think about using the sounds of a poem to suggest the sense of what they’re writing.”
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