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Teachers & Writers Magazine Spring Issue 
Writing Through Trauma, excerpt one

The spring issue of the magazine is now out, and features a special section on Writing Through Trauma.   Each day of the week, here in New York City and across the country, teaching artists walk into classrooms to share their passion for writing. Too often, the stories their students have to tell are of lives disrupted by circumstances beyond their control. What can these teaching artists offer in response to a child who is sick, a teen who has lost a friend to gun violence, a veteran plagued by the war he left behind? What can the act of writing give to those who are suffering? The violence that occurred this past December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, put these questions in stark relief, but they are questions teaching artists struggle with often. In this special section we asked writers in the schools from programs nationwide to describe their work with children and adults whose lives have been changed by violence, illness, the death of a loved one, or other tragedies. Each of their experiences is unique, but together their stories offer insight into how words can help comfort and heal in the face of grief.  

In the following excerpt, T&W teaching artist David Surface describe his work in a writing workshop for veterans.

The Story We Tell Ourselves Afterward: At the Veterans Writing Workshop
by David Surface

When I tell people that I work with military veterans, one of the first things they say is, It must help them to talk about their experiences, or, It must be good for them to get those terrible things off their chest.

The truth is that there are many other places where veterans can share difficult experiences. Group and individual counseling, as well as veterans’ support or “rap” groups, all provide camaraderie and an emo- tional outlet. The question is, does writing and the writing workshop experience offer anything more?

Most everyone agrees that creative or “expressive” writing can have positive effects for people who have experienced trauma. How this works is much less clear. In my experience, the explanation is to be found not in the language of psychology or neuroscience, but in the language of the writing process itself. I believe the key word in understanding how the writing process can help people living with trauma is revision.

As every writer or teacher of writing knows, revision can be painful. To revise, and revise well, we need to stop seeing our first drafts as something fixed and inflexible, and start seeing them a something malleable that we have power over and can change for the better. (more...)

As Black History Month eases into its final week, why not use a lesson from the T&W book Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature to inspire students to write imaginatively?  Among the authors discussed are James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, Rita Dove, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.

"The extraordinary difficulty of childhood, as I recall it, is making sense of an often contradictory and unpredictable world handed down by adults. Adults offer children maxims meant to buffer and protect, but sometimes these maxims do not help, leaving children with nowhere to vent their frustrations, voice their fears, or solicit other help to decipher an incongruent world. This condition of the child in some ways seems to parallel the experience of African people in the diaspora: that a people taught one set of rules that often does not apply to them, or are made to pledge allegiance to a country that has repeatedly discriminated and alienated them. Because of this there are chants and charms, mantras and prayers to help others regain their balance and move forward. African American poetry disproves the notion that words can't hurt us. While some words hurt and maim and disfigure, other words heal, nourish the soul, salve the will, and strengthen the determination."

-An excerpt from T&W book Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature, edited by Lorenzo Thomas

For other resources and lessons to motivate student writing, use our Digital Resource Center to search T&W's archives of magazines and lesson plans.

T&W writers' in-class writing prompts and exercises inspired and generated the adapted poem found in A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY.  From this imaginative, diverse, massive, and multi-faceted material, an adapted work emerged.  Here's a peek at one of the lessons that served as the raw clay to shape young writers' minds.  All lessons were taught in New York City classrooms, but could be adapted to suit your own community and place.

Using Reflections of NYC Arts Movements, expose your classroom to poets writing about NYC so young writers can read how other New Yorkers have envisioned their city.  A great place to start is Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem."

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

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Who can understand the clotted language of everyday American commerce: the memo, the corporation report, the business letter, the notice from the bank explaining its latest "simplified" statement? What member of an insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure explaining his costs and benefits? What father or mother can put together a child's toy from the instructions on the box? Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn't think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must be something wrong with it.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.

-An excerpt from William Zinsser's On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Melanie Maria Goodreaux is a playwright, poet, and native of New Orleans who has made her home in New York City since 1999. Her poetry and plays—including Saydee and Deelores, Walter. Bullets. And Binoculars, amd Ka-trina Who?!—have been performed at Yale University, the Lillian Theater in Los Angeles, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Chelsea Playhouse in New York City, and at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. She is a teaching artist with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Creative Theatrics, and the Manhattan New Music Project, teaching creative writing and drama in all the boroughs of New York City. This interview from the Digital Resource Center on T&W's Website includes a lesson idea for the classroom using poetry from Tish Benson's book Wild Like That: Good Stuff Smelling Strong.

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:

(more...)

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!