Laynie Browne taught for T&W at Bushwick Alternative High School in Brooklyn from 1994 to 1996. After stops in Seattle and Oakland, she now lives in Tucson with her family. Browne recently designed and launched a new educational outreach program at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona in collaboration with the school’s College of Humanities and Graduate Creative Writing Program. Her recent poetry collections include Daily Sonnets, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series), and The Scented Fox (recipient of the 2007 National Poetry Series Award).
- Q: How did you come to teach for T&W?
- A: I love to recount my initial interview with then director Nancy Larson Shapiro. When I first got to New York I worked in publishing, as an Associate Editor at St. Martin’s Press. It became clear to me fairly quickly that I didn’t want to continue on that path. So I applied for a residency at the MacDowell Colony, and when I was lucky enough to receive it, I quit my job. When I returned I became officially a teaching gypsy, adjuncting and taking whatever classes I could get.
- My meeting with Nancy was very refreshing because it was clear from the very first moments of our meeting that what she was looking for were teachers who identified themselves primarily as writers. In other words, I didn’t have to pretend to want to be anything else. My involvement in the field (organizing readings, stacking chairs, taking money at the door, trying to publish) was considered crucial, not a distraction. It was the first job interview I ever had which felt completely authentic.
- Q: What was your first residency like?
- A: It was Bushwick Outreach, an alternative high school. At that time it was a pretty devastated part of town. Walking from the subway, every block there was a mural commemorating someone who had died. Students at the school were there by choice, which was a plus, and the teachers were exceptional. They had good rapport with their classes and were eager to work with me—those ingredients are really key for a successful residency.
- The students had so much to write about. They had such rich life experiences, all kind of exploding beneath the surface, that came pouring out. The writing was heartfelt and intense. They would write difficult complicated pieces, like letters to their future selves. The residency and some of the student poems were written up in the New York Times. [View a student poem from this residency here.]
- Q: What were the highlights of your first days in the classroom?
- A: It was my first time teaching creative writing to kids—I just loved it immediately. Part of it was that kids’ work is always surprising and inspiring. Kids reside in a creative state in way that a lot of adults don’t. There was always a sense, also, that coming in as a visiting writer was a unique and privileged position. You don’t have the responsibility day in and day out that the teacher has.
- Q: What are some of the keys to a successful residency?
- A: It’s really important to have an ongoing conversation with teachers in the classroom. Initially you have a planning meeting, and they let you know what’s happening in the classroom, and then you come up with a general plan. Once you get into the classroom, there also has to be a real-time relationship with the teacher. Having a conversation throughout the relationship, being flexible, being able to adapt to the moment, and to move to where the kids are are all key. It is crucial to be open and flexible as the residency goes on.
- Q: You said you immediately loved working with kids. Why?
- A: When there are students who clearly don’t identify themselves as academically successful, and at a certain point they realize that they can make a unique contribution through their writing—the look in their eye then, when they get over their shyness and develop confidence in what they’re doing is inspirational. They’re realizing that poetry belongs to everyone.
- In my Bushwick residency, I remember bringing in poems by Lucille Clifton. They were written in a more vernacular language. One of the kids asked why the poet was trying to “write like a black person”—the kids just made the assumption that poems could not have been written by an African American writer. I’ve had similar experiences in other schools when I bring in bilingual poetry. I’ve had native speakers reading Neruda in Spanish or translating their own work as a way to begin to see being bilingual as an amazing asset.
- Q: So you taught with Teachers & Writers until 1996. Describe your work in the years that followed and how that impacted your development as a teaching artist.
- A: I went from New York to Seattle where I taught for Seattle Arts & Lectures, as a Washington State Rostered Artist, for The Seattle Center Academy and for a program called Powerful Schools. I also taught creative writing at the Bothell campus of the University of Washington. Then I moved to California, and I volunteered in my kids’ schools. It helped because I saw so many different models and different issues in the schools. I’ve also noted in all these various situations, whatever the challenges are in the specific school, the kids are always there and ready to jump in in an immediate way. The kids are always benefiting. The adults are always scrambling, trying to figure out how to keep the program going, but in the classroom there’s a kind of timelessness when the creative process is happening.
- Q: What are you working on now?
- A: I’m developing a new arts education program for the Poetry Center in Tucson, Arizona, in collaboration with the College of Humanities and the Creative Writing Department at the University of Arizona. The basic goal is to get MFA students in creative writing teaching creative writing in elementary schools in Tucson. The program launched this fall. I’m teaching a yearlong seminar. In the fall, we do coursework as students prepare to be teaching artists. They spend time in the classroom where another teaching artist is working. They also develop lesson plans, practice them in the classroom, and read educational theory and other texts that are useful in preparing to work in the classroom. In the spring, they begin teaching independent residencies. In many ways this program is modeled after the T&W program. My students will be going in as teaching artists for ten weeks, teaching one day a week, and creating an anthology and a culminating performance.
- Q: What is your vision for the program?
- A: My vision for the program is to build a mentoring community for the students who have been through the program and for those who are coming in. Right now, I’ve hired a very experienced teaching artist to work with these first students. But as students move through the program and go from earning credits to being paid for their work in the schools, they will also help teach the coursework and mentor incoming students.
- Like in T&W programs, the vision for our individual residencies is to find the intersection between the interests of the teaching artist and the teacher’s curricular needs. The collaboration creates an opportunity to create curriculum that is always new, always relevant, always dynamic. The collaboration is really key. The course is titled “At the Intersection of Teaching and Writing.” For the teaching artist, it’s really about listening for how their interests are going to overlap with what’s going on in the classroom and the interests of the teacher.
- Q: It makes a lot of sense to train MFA students as teaching artists. How are your students responding this first semester of the program?
- A: My students are terrific. I wish there had been something like this when I did my MFA. With an MFA, you can teach anything, and I jumped in and learned from teaching, but I really want to develop a program that focuses on collaboration and mentorship and that gives students on the graduate level tools to prepare them for teaching. There is so much professionalization of the MFA that often younger writers think they are following a clear, predetermined path from degree to teaching job. But I think it’s important for students to reflect upon various options and to realize the privilege and responsibility of being a writer. If you have the privilege of being an MFA student, it’s a good time to reflect on the ways you can give back to the community, to consider various paths for giving back. Being a teaching artist is one way.
- Q: Why does placing writers in schools help kids and teachers?
- A: I think it works now for the same reasons it has always worked, since the beginning of Teachers & Writers and other similar programs. Having imaginative writing and arts integration in the classroom can serve as an opportunity for youth to look at school in a new light. There are so many different ways to get kids engaged in school. Because of the current financial climate, in which school budgets are looking bleak, the work is more important than ever. We have so many teachers who are overworked and underpaid and who feel so much pressure. They begin to feel that creativity is a luxury. A teaching artist can bring in a lightness and a playfulness and present a different relationship to language that can create a new pathway for learning.
- Q: How have your experiences at T&W carried into your continuing work as a teaching artist?
- A: Those experiences have informed all of my teaching experience. One of the first things I did when I began research for this new program was get in touch with Nancy [Larson Shapiro], who put me in touch with Mark Statman and also [T&W director] Amy [Swauger]. I have a continuing sense that what I am setting out to accomplish is based on the work of Teachers & Writers that has been going on so long. I’ve been grateful for the insight provided by the history, personal relationships, and the organization. Of course I’m using T&W books for my students.
- Q: You’ve published several collections of poetry and a novel. How would you describe your writing process?
- A: I tend to write many books at once. With each new book, I try to come up with something I’ve never done before. When I wrote a novel, I wanted to see: Can I do this? Each book is a new question, a new form. In The Scented Fox, I was particularly looking at folk tales and received literature and how that collides with poetry and prose poetry. In Daily Sonnets, I was trying to figure out how I could write with two small kids in tow.
- Before I wrote Daily Sonnets, and a newer work The Desires of Letters, I felt I had to have a control and precision that was predicated on my having lots of time alone—I could choose what my influences were. I thought of the personal realm as somewhat taboo. But as a young mother without large blocks of time I had to explode my notions of process and try something different. I had to find a way to be permeable, to use everything that was going on in my life. So I wrote about people breaking into houses on my block in Oakland, about my kids interrupting me and pulling me out of my chair. I also wrote about literary events in the Bay Area, the Iraq War. Instead of looking at all these circumstances as an impediments, I looked for a way to use them to inform what I was writing. I wrote an essay about this at the end of Daily Sonnets called “The Permeable I, A Practice.”
LAYNIE BROWNE’S FAVORITE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
- Handmade Books of Poems: “One of my first memories from arts education programs when I was growing up, was creating, illustrating, binding, and decorating my own book of my own poems. This is one my all-time favorite projects.”
- Whole Class Poems: Browne typically used these as a warm up before individual writing—“In one class a teacher wanted me to do something historical, and we wrote a really long extended definition of history that was a list poem, and there were rules for every line. It ended up being a terrific poem, with a heavy emphasis on personification.”
- Pantoums: This form has worked well for Browne in teaching all ages, from very young kids to adults.
- Pablo Neruda, Book of Questions: “He’s one writer I always return to. I like reading his book of questions and having kids write their own questions and answers.”
- Breakfast Poems: “I’ve been trying to see if my kids and I can write a poem together every day at breakfast. We do lots of list poems. They love it. They’re starting to get up and perform with me too, which is really great. We had a fundraising open mic reading in Tucson for the POG reading series and Chax Press recently, and I had my kids get up and read. They’re seven and nine. One read a science fiction story, the other a pantoum. They started dictating poems when they were really young, but now they write on their own. I’ve always liked doing dictation with kids. It really frees them up.” [Read “Things You Wouldn’t Want on Your Towel,” a breakfast poem Browne wrote with her kids, here.]
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