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Passionate, confessional, inspired and distressed, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) contributed to Teachers & Writers as a poet-in-residence in 1967, the same year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966). Despite her critical and public acclaim, Sexton felt nervous as a teaching artist in the classroom much of the time, and she struggled with whether she could teach as an expert in her craft. One of her students wrote in a letter to Sexton [published in Journal of a Living Experiment (1979)], “If you think you are a failure to communicate with the kids you are wrong…If you think that you are a failure because you cannot find out what counts to us, you are also wrong…You made the students care.”

Sexton’s work as a writer in the schools followed not only her Pulitzer Prize, but also the publication of multiple collections of poetry and her collaboration with Maxine Kumin on four children’s books.  In her 1967 artist diary, which was published in a Journal of a Living Experiment, Sexton wrote, “I’m interested in what the kids like because I want to be more in touch with my real audience. I write for kids. People who grow up, half the time, most of the time, they forget how to feel.” Sexton’s diary entries are full of vivid descriptions of the kids, how they made her feel and how she and the classroom teacher, Bob Clawson, helped them to learn. She wrote, “The naughtiest kids are the ones with the most intelligence and the most creativity. They’re creating a scene in class and they can create a scene on paper just as well.”

“[Bob Clawson] said I was a poet and he a teacher, and we would keep journals and we’d like [the students] to do so if they would. One girl asked me what a journal was, was it a diary. I said yes, only longer and more truthful. I didn’t know.” Sexton was honest in the classroom and tried to teach her students by trying to learn who they were. She also struggled with poetry’s place in the classroom.  She mused, “Teaching them to be original, will it help them to get in to college? Is originality a commodity that’s useable?”

"I’m just a practicing writer. That doesn’t seem to affect [the students] too much,” Sexton
wrote in another journal entry, which was published in Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook (1991), “They’re not too surprised about my writing. I don’t think they’re impressed, which is all right with me. I don’t want to impress them. I want to stimulate them.”

-Sally Stark

Sally Stark held an internship at Teachers & Writers Collaborative last spring as a participant in the Coe College New York Term (www.coe.edu/newyorkterm).

Maya: In Hebrew my name means water. In Hinduism, illusion. It is the NYC taxi driver’s favorite question. A familiar yawn in Israel and one letter away from Palestine. It means I know you from somewhere. Soft and sharp: the meeting of hair and metal comb.

Find me one person in the world who has nothing to say about her name. (Then find me a writer who doesn’t wish, longingly, to write like Sandra Cisneros.) Whether adored or despised, our names live with us. We cherish them, announce them proudly, turn away from them shamefully, shrug them away, change them, and twist them into nicknames. They are our identifiers and our travel companions. Points of mockery and praise, they make us cringe, stand tall, and perk our ears at their sound. 

The chapter “Names” in Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street introduces us to Esperanza:

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

The lesson is simple. Students read this short chapter and then explore their own names in a free-write. The narrator’s own playful and personal associations make it easy for students to dive into the deep waters of their own names. Without knowing Esperanza, we feel like we know her as we might an old friend, simply based on these vivid descriptions. And so we can get to know any young writer who takes the same plunge. Each voice, inevitably, sparkles.

-Maya Pindyck

Maya Pindyck is a poet and T&W teaching artist.  You can read more about Maya here.

Different
By Magda Chinea

My name is different and easy. It represents a shade of dark. Some people say it like it’s a long name. A lot of times, people say it wrong. Only Spanish people say it right. My name represents everything about me—from my head to my toes—from my outside to my insides. My name comes from a beautiful place that I wish to visit. My name is also a sort of mistake, but as much as people make fun of my name and mess it up, the more I like it. I love my name: Magda Luz Chinea, and I will never change it. It is the reflection in my mirror.

My Name
By Ashanti Garner

My name. It’s like a windy day or a huge black cloud. My name is like a question with no answer. I feel it’s pointless. I don’t know what it means, or hardly where it comes from, and I don’t really care. My mother named me. I don’t know what she was thinking. I wish I were Tiana or Emmanuella… 

Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble -- I will write independently. I have written independently without Judgment. I may write independently, and with Judgment, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself -- In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure...

- John Keats

To find more writers' insights about writing, read T&W's book Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing.

    “I sense that humans have an urge to map—and that this mapping instinct, like our opposable thumbs, is part of what makes us human,” Katharine Harmon writes in her introduction to You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, a collection of artists’ maps including both real and imagined places.  “Part of what fascinates us when looking at a map is inhabiting the mind of its maker, considering that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience.”
    The maps in the book include the Italian artist Sara Fanelli’s "Map of My Day," which breaks down the typical child’s routine into nine sections including breakfast, school and playground, depicted in a bright, playful painting.  In John Fulford’s The Walk to South School 1964-71, 2003, the artist recreates his walk to school for his nieces who attended the same school thirty years later.  He includes places that are no longer in existence such as a tree house and a baseball diamond, as well as additions by the girls like a Stinky Spot and a tiny orange Fiat.
    I’ve used both these maps in a lesson on personal geography that combines writing and visual art and is especially effective towards the end of the residency.  It also provides an opportunity for students to convey or express something that they may not have been able to, such as a death or another painful event.

For a complete lesson plan on how to incorporate personal geography into your teaching practice, go here.

-Susan Buttenwieser

Susan Buttenwieser is a prose writer and T&W teaching artist.  To read more about Susan, go here.

All of us at Teachers & Writers Collaborative were saddened by the death of T&W Board member Wendy Weil on September 22.

Wendy founded the Wendy Weil Literary Agency in 1986, following a 25-year career in book publishing. Her agency’s clients include Rita Mae Brown, Andrea Barrett, Mark Helprin, Alice Walker, Anthony Doerr, Phillip Lopate, and Amity Gaige.

In 2008, Wendy joined the T&W Board of Directors. She provided the Board and staff with important insights into the publishing world, and we will miss the humor and wisdom she brought to the Board’s deliberations.

Our condolences go to Wendy’s husband Michael Trossman; to her stepsons Josh and Andy; and to her colleagues Emily Forland, Emma Patterson, and Ann Torrago, who plan to remain at the agency to continue Wendy’s legacy.

T&W teaching artists Melanie Maria Goodreaux, Matthew Burgess, and Jane LeCroy will join the students in presenting A Poem as Big as New York City, and will then lead a collaborative poem-writing activity for children and families at the event. 

Melanie Maria adapted thousands of poems written in T&W programs into a single narrative poem describing the journey of A Poem as Big as New York City. Universe (an imprint of Rizzoli New York) published A Poem as Big as New York City in September 2012. The book features a foreword by Walter Dean Myers, the national ambassador for young people's literature, and illustrations byMasha D'yans. 

See highlights from the Poem's appearance at the Brooklyn Book Festival http://www.twc.org/category/blog/. 

Learn more about A Poem as Big as New York City, including new lesson plans to help you incorporate ideas from the book in your classroom, http://www.twc.org/about-us/a-poem-as-big-as-nyc/. To make a tax-deductible contribution to support Teachers & Writers Collaborative's programs and publications, go to http://www.twc.org/support-tw/donate/.

Last week Melanie Maria Goodreaux read from A Poem as Big as New York City at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  Everyone had a great time! Check out these highlights:

A Poem as Big as New York City, the children's book adapted from work written by kids in T&W programs, made the September 9 New York Times. Read the review here!

The fall issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine is now out, featuring excerpts from our new book, A Poem as Big as New York City; exercises and ideas for creating your own community poem project; an interview with writer Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of the newly-released Several Short Sentences About Writing; a look at Houston Writers in the Schools partnership with the Menil Collection, a local art museum; profiles of two longtime Buffalo, NY-based teaching artists; and the following essay by Oregon-based writer Michael Copperman.  We look forward to hearing your responses to the issue!

 A Kid Named A.

by Michael Copperman

A., a tall, thin kid from North Portland, A. of the backward cap and the swaggering slouch, was so confused about his thesis in class that he sat tapping his pencil and shifting in his seat all class long. He needed to identify the reason he felt speech regulations on college campuses should be banned. He wanted to say “freedom of speech” was the reason, and I asked him why freedom of speech was useful to students on college campuses, and he frowned, furrowed his brow, shrugged and then stared down at what he had written as if the words might appear on the page through sheer intensity of stare. 

After class, he lingered at the front of the classroom and asked again, “What should I say?” “What you think is right and makes sense,” I told him, and despite his persistence, I would not give him “the answer.” That attitude of “just tell me” is common among even the better students who make it to college out of our overcrowded and under-resourced public schools: they care about doing well, but have rarely been asked to figure things out themselves, let alone had their own opinions valued and evaluated on clarity and merit. We went in circles, and finally he stood with his hands at his sides in despair. (more...)

A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY is a delightful book-length poem that spreads the wonder and joy that is New York, as told through the words of its young people. Lyrical, heartfelt, and bursting with imagination, A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY proves that a poem can be as vast and exciting as the greatest city in the world.

Check out an early review of the book.

Purchase A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY directly from Rizzoli, New York. Also available from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

Find out more about A Poem as Big as New York City here.