In This Issue:

Fellowships
Workshops
Books from Teachers & Writers
Teachers & Writers Magazine
Jobs
2020 Visions
Deadlines

Teachers & Writers Turns Forty

Dear Friends,

This school year marks the fortieth anniversary of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Like all enterprises that last, T&W was created by people of vision and commitment, founding mothers and fathers who included Grace Paley, Robert Silvers, Anne Sexton, Herb Kohl, and Muriel Rukeyser. They and others-writers and teachers alike-met in late 1967 at The Huntting Inn in East Hampton, Long Island, to talk about how to improve the teaching of writing in schools. The result was a “manifesto” calling for the creation of a Teachers and Writers Center.

T&W grew out of the prior experience of writers, teachers, and students. In the words of the manifesto:

“In contacts with writers themselves, teachers saw their pupils discover the existence of live people who wrote down words. The children’s response was unexpected. It was as if they were saying, “That grown-up says what he wants to say. I can say what I want to say…” The children saw that one could be brave and bold with words. [They] learned that power resides in language and that writing is a way of preserving and experimenting with power. And the children wrote.

The writer in the classroom is reminded of the potential in life, of how easily children can forget what they were supposed to feel and discover new possibilities of feeling. The writers have been stimulated by the students’ questions and their immediate response to the work. There is feedback. The writer offers his work to the students and is changed…by that audience.

The necessity of a dialogue between teachers and writers therefore becomes apparent.”

T&W continues to foster dialogue between teachers and writers, a dialogue dedicated to and inspired by the voices of students whose creativity lies at the heart of our work. In this edition of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative e-News, we celebrate that continuing partnership by looking back in excerpts from the fortieth anniversary issue of Teachers & Writers magazine, by highlighting our current writing residencies with gifted and talented students, and by hearing from the next generation of writers who are carrying on the organization’s forty-year-old legacy: 2007-2008 T&W Fellows Laren McClung and Tiphanie Yanique.

We’d love to read your memories of T&W’s first four decades. To share your stories, or if you have questions or suggestions about the e-News, please write to us at e-newsletter@twc.org.

Thank you.

Amy Swauger, Director

FELLOWSHIPS

Our T&W Fellowship Experience

-Laren McClung and Tiphanie Yanique

We have been serving as fellows in fiction and poetry at Teachers & Writers Collaborative since October 2007. During our tenure we’ve continued to feel as though we contribute to something greater. This sounds corny, and since we’re writers we should know better. But sometimes you need the cliché because it expresses a truth. Part of the reason we wanted to participate in T&W was because we were both new to New York City. Tiphanie was a new assistant professor in creative writing at Drew University and Laren a new MFA graduate student at New York University. We wanted a community outside of our academic worlds that would still enrich our writerly selves. T&W has been this community for us, and not the least of it has been us getting to know each other.

But what does a fellow do? This is a question we’ve both been asked by our curious friends. We’ve been able to participate in a variety of aspects in the organization, including the production of Teachers & Writers magazine. We work closely with Editor Susan Karwoska, soliciting articles and assisting in the editing process. We are also planning and organizing this year’s 2020 Visions reading series. We have welcomed poets and writers including David Keplinger, Felicia Luna Lemus, Thomas Glave, and Nick Flynn, and will be hosting readings with Bret Anthony Johnston, Kimiko Hahn, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tracy K. Smith this spring, as well as reading our work. We’ve designed the series around the ideal of mentorship and community. The readings of the 2020 Visions series pair emerging writers with established writers who have served as guides or inspirations to the former. This has been a means of highlighting new writers’ voices and also celebrating the idea of a dynamic writing community. There is always food and drink and, more importantly, there is always sustained conversation and interaction after the readings.

An unexpected highlight for both of us has been getting to see some of the ins and outs of actually running a nonprofit organization. This has been especially important for Tiphanie, who is co-founding a new creative writing program for children in her native St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. We’ve participated in staff meetings where our opinion has been actively solicited and valued. We were invited to the T&W Board’s Annual Meeting and gawked at the writers we admired who were now sitting beside us. (Wow, that’s Phillip Lopate!)

Whether it’s discussing a new novel with Program Director Jeffrey Rosales or talking about writing after the MFA with Loyal Miles, the director of development and marketing, T&W has been a community. Sharing office space with T&W sub-tenant Girls Write Now and participating in artist meetings with writers who teach for the Collaborative has shown us possibilities for continuing to be active in nonprofit writing world. T&W’s Center for Imagination and its library are a public space for writing and research; one that we might continue to use as writers and teachers even after our Fellowships are over.

We’ve both been lucky to work with T&W Board Co-chair and former Director Nancy Larson Shapiro as our mentor. She’s been an unfailing advocate, encouraging to us throughout this fellowship. She has offered her support and ideas as we work on our own writing and professional projects. Nancy has been especially helpful to Laren in beginning her career as an emerging poet.

One of the vital aspects of our fellowship time has been the use of the office space and the actual free time the fellowship has provided us. A view of the Hudson River. A computer. A printer. A copier. All more than what Virginia Woolf said we needed as writers. But we have that, too: a room of our own. Perhaps that’s another cliché. Still, it’s true and we continue to be grateful for it.

The T&W Fellowship Program is made possible through the generous support of the EDWARD AND SALLY VAN LIER FUND in the New York Community Trust. For more information about the Fellowship, including the 2008-2009 Fellowship guidelines and application form (available after March 31), go to www.twc.org/about/tw-fellowship or e-mail fellowship@twc.org.

WORKSHOPS

Multi-year Residencies for Gifted and Talented Students

With generous support from the EHA Foundation, Teachers & Writers Collaborative has initiated year-long residencies with students in accelerated and gifted and talented programs. We will continue to work with the same students and classes over the course of three academic years.

This is our second year working with two Manhattan elementary and middle schools, P.S. 77M, the Lower Lab School on the Upper East Side, where Olivia Birdsall is working with first- and fourth-graders; and P.S. 187M, the Hudson Cliffs School in Washington Heights, where Matthew Burgess is the T&W writer-in-residence working with fifth- to eighth-graders. It is the first year for Gia Rae Winsryg-Ulmer’s work with second- and third-graders at P.S. 153M, the Adam Clayton Powell School in Harlem; and for Bertha Rogers’ residency at P.S. 122Q in Astoria, Queens, the Mamie Fay School. Rogers is working with the third through fifth grade.

Burgess writes about his experience at Hudson Cliffs:

“Every Wednesday I walk into P.S. 187 excited and exit amazed. The extended residency allows us to delve more deeply into the creative process, and the teachers are supportive and engaged. Before the winter recess we wrote poems about poetry. I wanted to give the students a chance to reflect on their experience thus far, so I gave them a few possible approaches but left it open to interpretation and whim. I asked them to surprise themselves. At the end of the workshop, Ms. McCullough, who is generally rather reserved, gave a speech to the class about how far they’d come since the beginning of the year. She said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.’ Below are some excerpts from the fifth-grade class poets. Within these metaphors are some profound ideas about poetry and its possibilities.”

Poetry pollin-
ates minds like bees and butter-
flies pollinate trees.

Poetry is not
about flowers except ma-
ny people think so.
-Ron

Poetry is like a river flowing
through your body and it comes
out through the pen into words.
Poetry is like a thunderstorm
coming and going as it pleases.
Poetry is like a sun that never
puts out its light.
Poetry is like the stars appearing
in the sky like the words appearing
onto your paper.
-Giselle

Picking up a pencil to write.
Erasers really help me
Never stop making mistakes.
Capturing pictures or things you
want to write about in
your mind.
Imagination at work.
Listening to what my pencil has to say.
-Gianna

Poetry is like having the feeling when you win a race for a top prize.
Poetry is like saying goodnight a million times to your mother so you don’t have to go to bed.
-Chase

Poetry is the empty streets with music.
Poetry is like a candle that flickers on and off
just like your ideas do.
-Marcel

Teachers & Writers residencies can run from one day to as many sessions as the school needs. Extended residencies with a T&W professional writer allow for students to further develop their writing skills by providing the opportunity for practice in multiple hands-on literary techniques. Our writers have experience in working with students from kindergarten through twelfth grade, including young people with learning disabilities and other special needs students.

To set up a residency for your school, contact T&W’s Program Department at workshops@twc.org, or call 212-691-6590.

BOOKS FROM TEACHERS & WRITERS

Margot Fortunato Galt Offers Strategies for the Classroom

St. Paul-based poet and nonfiction writer Margot Fortunato Galt highlights thirty years of lessons learned as a teaching poet in the schools in two books she published with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, The Circuit Writer: Writing with Schools and Communities and The Story in History: Writing Your Way into the American Experience.

These books emphasize the classroom magic of inspiring young writers with carefully crafted, step-by-step exercises. Perhaps more important, both show how the writing teacher can gain inspiration from collaborating across disciplines-especially social studies, history, and culture-to infuse rich content into the writing process. The author’s own evolution as a “circuit writer,” whose early experience led to The Story in History, comes to fruition in The Circuit Writer. In the latter work, Galt emphasizes not only history and culture as presented in most textbooks, but tapping into each classroom’s regional, ethnic, and language traits to draw students whole-heartedly into writing their diverse worlds.

Galt describes the beneftis of teaching writing in one cross-disciplinary context in the introduction to The Story in History:

“The connections between telling history and telling a story can thus be used to enhance the writing of each. When interpreted with the techniques of creative writing, history takes on the vibrancy of lived experience. Students can imagine themselves into the past, wearing the clothing and assuming the destiny of heroes or common folk. Undistinguished players-children, servants, hobos, forgotten knitters and quilters-make a difference in the larger world when we see them not only as representatives of group experiences, but also as individuals.”

Galt holds a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota, and is an adjunct professor both there and at Hamline University.

Order The Circuit Writer, The Story in History, and other titles from T&W’s current catalog of resources for classroom teachers and writers who teach at www.twc.org/publications, or call 1-888-BOOKS-TW (1-888-266-5789).

TEACHERS & WRITERS MAGAZINE

Spring Issue Celebrates Forty Years of T&W

Volume 39 Number 3

T&W’s four decades of bringing the joy and craft of creative writing to students are celebrated in the spring issue of Teachers & Writers magazine. The articles in this special issue feature reflections from the three groups that have been critical to T&W’s efforts since 1967: writers, teachers, and students.

Excerpts from Ron Padgett’s 1969-1970 teaching diaries are a highlight of the issue. Padgett, former T&W publications director and now a T&W Board member, began his work with the organization as a teaching artist in an elementary school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Padgett captures the excitement of inspiring strong writing from fourth- and fifth-grade poets and the frustration of finding a writing exercise that works well with one group of students, then falls a bit flat with another. Writers who teach for T&W continue to keep and to share teaching diaries, which become a valuable source of insights, ideas, and inspiration for their colleagues.

As our name attests, Teachers & Writers Collaborative promotes collaborations between writers and the teachers in whose classrooms they work. The teacher’s perspective on the writer-teacher partnership is the focus of Esther Rosenfeld’s article “Breaking New Ground: A Classroom Teacher’s View of T&W.” Rosenfeld charts the impact that teaching artist Phillip Lopate, author, editor, and T&W Board member, had not only on her students, but also on her own teaching strategies.

The fortieth anniversary issue includes articles by Jane LeCroy, once a student in a T&W writing residency and now a teaching artist for the organization, and her former student Diana Rivera-Bryant, who is now a fifth-grade teacher; authors who have written for and about T&W, including Margot Fortunato Galt, Jenny Robinson Hartley, Katherine Koch, Mark Statman, Sam Swope, and Meredith Sue Willis; and an excerpt from Lopate’s interview with T&W’s Founding Director Herb Kohl in Journal of a Living Experiment, the book that documents the first ten years of T&W.

Teachers & Writers is being mailed to subscribers and T&W members this month. Excerpts from the spring issue can be found on the T&W website.

To read excerpts from Padgett’s teaching diaries, go to www.twc.org/assets/magazine/magazinesample/39-3_Padgett.pdf.

Read “Breaking New Ground” at www.twc.org/assets/magazine/magazinesample/39-3_Rosenfeld.pdf.

A one-year subscription to Teachers & Writers magazine is $20. Subscribe online at www.twc.org/publications/magazine.

JOBS

Summer Internship

T&W will have openings for two unpaid interns during summer 2008. Interns will work the equivalent of at least two days (fourteen hours) per week. Interns may establish individual schedules during the summer internship period, which runs from Monday, June 2, through Friday, August 29. Interns report to the T&W director, who will assign them to work on specific projects based on the intern’s interests and availability and the organization’s needs.

During the summer of 2008, interns may work on one or more of the following projects.

• Reviewing teaching diaries kept by writers who lead creative writing residencies for T&W and cataloging the diaries (e.g., by age of students or genre taught) to make the lessons and strategies included in the diaries easily accessible to others.
• Gathering and editing material for the fall 2008 issue of Teachers & Writers, T&W’s quarterly magazine.
• Establishing a “T&W alumni” database of individuals who have taught/written for the organization in the past and who are not currently affiliated with the organization.
• Reviewing submissions for the Bechtel Prize, an annual award for the best essay or article about creative writing education, literary studies, and/or the profession of writing; book proposals; and unsolicited material submitted to Teachers & Writers.
• Maintaining a database of resource materials in T&W’s Center for Imaginative Writing, which houses a library of books about the teaching of writing.

To apply for a summer internship, send a cover letter and résumé to volunteer@twc.org or T&W Summer Internship,
Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 520 Eighth Ave., Ste. 2020, New York, NY 10018

The cover letter should include dates available to work during the summer months (if different from June 2-August 29), anticipated number of hours available to work each week, and areas of interest from intern projects listed above. For more information, e-mail volunteer@twc.org or call 212-691-6590.

2020 VISIONS

Reading Series Continues Through May

T&W’s 2020 Visions readings will continue through May, with many events in the series featuring established poets and authors reading with early-career writers who have been inspired by their work. The readings are free and reservations are not required.

Upcoming readings include:

• March 14, 6:30-David Floyd, Abraham Smith, and Bret Anthony Johnston
• March 20, 6:00-Eva Kollisch
• March 28, 6:30-Cathy Linh Che, Evelyn Ibarra, and Kimiko Hahn
• April 11, 6:30-Yusef Komunyakaa, Dante Micheaux, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths, co-sponsored by Cave Canem
• April 16, 6:00-Miguel Antonio Ortiz
• April 25, 6:30-Tiphanie Yanique and Patrick Phillips
• May 9, 6:30-Laren McClung and Tracy K. Smith
• May 15, 7:00-DeWitt Henry and Greg Sanders, presented by Red Hen Press
• May 27, 6:30-Matthew Sharpe and Elizabeth Hand

Biographical notes on the authors can be found at www.twc.org/events.

2020 Visions readings are held at T&W’s Center for Imaginative Writing, 520 Eighth Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), 20th floor. For updates on upcoming events and directions to T&W, e-mail events@twc.org, call 212-691-6590, or go to the T&W website: www.twc.org/events.

DEADLINES

June 30 Deadline for 2008 Bechtel Prize

The submission guidelines for the 2008 Bechtel Prize are now available on the T&W website at www.twc.org/publications/bechtel-prize. The receipt deadline for entries is 5:00 PM, Monday, June 30, 2008.

T&W initiated the annual Bechtel Prize in 2004 with generous support from The Cerimon Fund. Named for Louise Seaman Bechtel, an editor, author, and teacher of young children, the prize recognizes an exemplary article or essay about creative writing education, literary studies, and/or the profession of writing.

The recipient of the 2008 Bechtel Prize will receive a $2,500 honorarium, and the winning submission will be published in Teachers & Writers magazine. Authors of finalists for the award will share honoraria totaling $1,000.

2008-2009 T&W Fellowship Guidelines Available March 31

Submission guidelines and the application form for the 2008-2009 T&W Fellowship program will be available on T&W’s website beginning Monday, March 31. Applications for the Fellowship will be due Monday, July 7, 2008.

To review the guidelines and application, go to the T&W website: www.twc.org/about/tw-fellowship. For additional information, e-mail fellowship@twc.org or call 212-691-6590.