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by Jenny Robinson Hartley

Jenny Robinson Hartley attended Sarah Lawrence College and taught for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She’s won many things, among them a Mixmaster, a blue ribbon for drawing at the San Juan County Fair, and a toy pony. Here she writes about her first experience with free writing.

Free Writing, Not Cold Lampin’

When I was in the fourth grade a writer came into the small, rural elementary school I was attending at the time for one day to do creative-writing exercises with the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classes. There weren’t more than 10-15 kids in each grade, and when the writer came into the school the third, fourth and fifth graders were all gathered in one classroom for the lesson. The visiting writer briefly introduced herself to us as a poet and writer and then pointed to a vase of dying daffodils on the teacher’s desk in the front of the classroom. Without further ado she instructed us to take out pen and paper and to write quietly for five minutes about the flowers on the desk.

I remember sitting at my desk, looking at the flowers and feeling the pressure to write something down on the blank page. In light of the five-minute time constraint the writer had given us, there was no time to question the activity at hand. I looked around the room and saw that all the other students were bent over their desks, pencils moving quickly. As I looked at the flowers and focused on them, an idea took form in my mind that I wrote down on the paper in a series of lines.

Looking in on dead flowers
Thinking on a level of humbleness
Once they were full of life
Now they sit and wilt like an old man

After the time limit was up, our teachers and the visiting writer went around the room looking at the work we had completed and collected our papers. When my teacher came to my desk she told me that the lines I had written could, taken together, be called a poem. I distinctly remember my excitement about having written something that could officially be called a poem. I had always equated poetry with structured rhymes and meters. It had not yet occurred to me that a poem could be about something as simple as the observation of an object and the things that come into your mind when you study that object. By putting flowers in front of us, and instructing us to write freely about what we saw, the writer tricked us all into creating personal compositions. The teachers read some of the class’ writings out loud. Hearing other kids’ work made the independent act of the free write a shared experience. Everyone in the class had written something completely different on the same subject, the vase of wilting daffodils.

When I look back on this experience from the point of view of a writer and a developing teacher of writing, I recognize that this memory fueled my desire to share the act of writing with students. The initial exercise with the flowers was only the bare bones of the overall lesson plan that developed. We moved on to revision, and after that we discussed poetic forms. Yet, I remember this exercise distinctly because it was the first time in school that I had ever been asked to do what I came to know later as “free writing.”