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:

“[Kohl] always tells me that I was one of the first poets to go into the schools—I suppose I should take his word for it. I met him when I went to high school in Spanish Harlem. I was at Benjamin Franklin High School and he was working with a group of people in an alternative school in a storefront in the neighborhood. They came looking for students who wanted to participate in these after-hours creative writing and drawing classes and I was very interested in all of that, so I started going there to take classes. After a while I started to lead little workshops and to talk to students about writing. And this all came about because of Herb Kohl’s encouragement. …It was a good experience: It gave me a connection with those first days of Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and experiences that helped develop my teaching skills.”

When Noel asked how teaching informs Cruz’s writing, he said “When you discuss the work of other people it makes you see your own work more clearly. You learn what other people see in your work, and how your own work can be misinterpreted. …When you’re teaching in a class and talking to students, what they get out of the poem helps you see if the spirit of what you were writing got through or not.”

“When you teach writing, it’s not like teaching how to fix an electric contraption, or teaching mechanics. You teach awareness, you make people aware of the subtleties of the written and phonetic aspects of a poem, the silent spaces and musical sounds.” –VHC, T&W, 38:2, 2007.

Cruz’s collections of poetry include Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press 2001), Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets (Cruz as editor, Persea Books 1995), and The Mountain in the Sea (Coffee House Press 2006). Cruz is also a founder of The Before Columbus Foundation. 

-Sally Stark

Sally is a recent graduate of English and Creative Writing at Coe College (Cedar Rapids, IA); she was an intern at Teachers & Writers Collaborative last winter and spring.

The Lower East Side
was faster than the speed
Of light
A tornado of bricks
and fire escapes
In which you had to grab
on to something or take
Off with the wayward winds—

from The Lower East Side of Manhattan — Victor Hernández Cruz

Like most people, before I learned to read and write, I taught myself to draw. How easy to pick up a crayon, a magic marker, or a pencil, and make something—anything—on the page (or on the living room wall). As children, we confidently draw what we want to see and what we see, as we see it. Our drawings are not wrong, misspelled or illegible—and if they are illegible, it’s often the kind of illegibility that one reads as poetic, abstract, mysterious, and open to interpretation. Thankfully, we don’t need to speak an artist’s national tongue to read his visual work. Everyone is capable of reading a painting by Rothko or a sculpture by Brancusi, sans translation.

It’s no surprise then that visual images—particularly abstract ones—can lead students to written poetry. When what stands before us is not easily described or defined, we must engage our imaginations and search for our own words to make meaning. In the presence of non-narrative, non-graphic visual images, we are forced to let go of our reliance upon narrative and focus instead on sensitizing ourselves to tone, color, mark, mood, and feeling. Perhaps most importantly, we are left to trust our own readings.

Here is a playful lesson that brings together written and visual poetries:

Genre: Poetry, Art
Grades: 6 – 12
Student needs: general ed, especial ed, visual learners
Common Core Learning Standard: E2: Response to literature
Interpret, analyze, and evaluate narrative, poetry, and drama, aesthetically and philosophically by making connections to: other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events, and situations.

Workshop Objective: To explore mood and develop connections between visual and written languages.

Do Now: What’s your favorite song? How would you describe its mood?

• Students share. List words on board.
• Distribute three poems: “I’m Nobody—Who Are You?” by Emily Dickinson, “Winter Moon” by Langston Hughes, and “miss rosie” by Lucille Clifton.
• After each reading, ask: “What is the mood of this poem?” “What feeling/s does it bring up?” Add to the list on the board.
• Distribute visual images on a color printout, or display using a projector.
• Activity #1: Pick a visual image that you feel goes with each poem. In your journal write down the name of the poem and the # of the visual image that you picked. Let us know why you paired the poem with that particular image.
• Activity #2: Pick a visual image, but don’t tell anyone which image you picked. Write a poem or a story that evokes the mood of that image. Remember, you’re not trying to EXPLAIN the image—you’re just writing something that relates to the image in terms of mood or tone. Repaint the picture using words.
• Students read their poems out loud and the class tries to guess which image they chose.

Student poems:

The Sunlight

I see the clouds
are the shape of the moon. The clouds are the shape
of Mexico. They fill the air with gases that spread
far and near. They feel
like wind blowing,
and the clouds are shaped like
blue waves.

The moon is around like the sun.

–Anonymous

Except For You

A love cast away
Endless memories of home passing by
The heart beats slow and soft
Fruitless trees and flowerless fields
The blood pumps through the veins
Cast away, alone, except for you

–Anonymous

–Maya Pindyck

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

One effective way to hook students’ attention and interest is to listen to poets read their work or watch poets perform, not only on that first day, but throughout the residency.  And thanks to the Internet and modern technology, it is now relatively easy to do that in the classroom, even when an author visit is not possible.

Charles R. Smith’s “Allow Me to Introduce Myself” is full of rhythm and musicality as he describes his abilities on the basketball court.  Students literally dance in their seats listening to it and want to hear it again and again.  It’s a great example of the use of hyperbole, description and show don’t tell.        

Writer and actor Daniel Beaty’s piece “Knock, Knock” details his experience growing up with a father who was in prison for most of Beaty’s childhood.  Not only is the piece itself powerful, but Beaty’s performance of his monologue is completely engaging and inspiring.

By starting off with an activity that students most likely do in their spare time—listen to music, watch videos—it can help demystify poetry and make it more accessible, especially for reluctant readers and writers.  It truly brings the poet’s words to life, right there in the classroom, in a way that is otherwise impossible to replicate.  This also models for students the significance of reading their own work out loud.  How the best medium for their words, their stories, their voice is actually themselves.

-Susan Buttenwieser

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

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).

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… 

With generous support from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation and The Lotos Foundation, T&W is partnering with the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the Queens Library to offer free poetry workshops based on our 2008 A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY project.

Through this initiative, thousands of young people in NYC schools and community centers took part in workshops in which they wrote poems about their experiences growing up in New York, imagining the city as its own poem character. The poems created were adapted into a single narrative by T&W writer Melanie Maria Goodreaux, A Poem as Big as New York City, which Universe (an imprint of Rizzoli) will publish as a hard-cover, illustrated children’s book in fall 2012. 

Our FREE one-hour poetry workshops will be held in select library branches on the following dates and times during August.  Come pay poetic tribute to our beloved city!

As a summer intern for T&W I attended two hour-long workshops led by seasoned T&W playwright and teaching artist Frank Ingrasciotta at the Dyker Library branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Upon my first visit (which was Frank’s first workshop at the library), eight participants, some of whom are part of Dyker branch’s “Teen Time,” silently waited as Frank wrote his name on the small easel. Blank expressions were their only response. Reaching for the book Alphabet City, Frank told the participants that today they’d be using their spatial-reasoning skills. Alphabet City is an abstract picture book that explores the alphabet by identifying individual letters found in various urban objects. For example, the profile of a wooden-horse forms the letter “A,” a fire escape forms the letter “Z,” or if you rotate the book, it might be a capital “N.” Frank flipped through the book, asking what letters the students could spot. The group was polite and reserved, raising their hands and patiently waiting to be called on to speak. Despite their initial restraint, gasps and smiles broke the silence as the objects became more abstract, and identifying a letter more like revealing a secret. 

Frank set the book aside, certain that everyone understood the general concept. He then asked the group to create their own abstract-alphabet acrostic poems. Redirecting their gaze to the easel, Frank read aloud a list of New York City boroughs, notable places, and monuments: the Bronx, Queens, the Empire State Building, Citi Field, Ellis Island, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens — the list went on. Participants were asked to pick a location and write the letters vertically on a blank piece of paper. We did an example together: using the word “Bronx,” the poem began: “B” is for bike racks on the street, “R” is for…students brimmed with excitement. Not only were there no right or wrong abstractions, but they could also draw pictures that emphasized the letters within their urban objects.

Many people struggled after the first few letters, unsure what objects might make the “K” in Brooklyn or the “F” in Field, but as Frank circled the table, he offered hints such as: “You might find this letter in a playground,” or “Where do people park their cars?” By the end of the class, everyone had completed their poems. One person even asked, “Can I do another one?”

At the end of the session, everyone shared their poems; some were straightforward and others a bold imaginative leap.

Upon my arrival the following week, I was pleased to see that a few of the participants had started a new abstract-alphabet poem rather than sitting idly. In New York fashion, Frank was tied up due to an accident on the Brooklyn Bridge. In the meantime, the group talked with Eileen, the librarian in charge of “Teen Time,” about how they’d continue after their third, and last, session with Frank. A poetry slam and a presentation of their poems in the library were suggested by Eileen, but without much support. Then, a participant raised her hand and suggested the group teach what they had learned to other library-dwellers: a great idea! Everyone nodded in agreement.

Frank arrived. He said that today participants would be interviewing New York City landmarks. Using five questions that pertain to the five senses, participants would use personification, imagery, and imagination to take on two personas: interviewer and interviewee. This assignment came easier than last week’s to most of the group, although a couple people struggled to take on the perspective of the tall Statue of Liberty, or crowded Times Square. It seemed that they were more willing to take more creative leaps with their work this week than the previous week; one student addressed Times Square as “Mr. Square,” another called Madison Square Garden “Ms. Garden,” casually referring to her as “Madison” by the end of the mock interview. One person asked the Museum of Natural History: “What do you feel when people enter your mouth?” eliciting the response, “I feel very sick with all those humans stepping on my tongue.”  

Once again, all of the poems were read aloud before the session’s end. I watched one of the students in deep thought as his turn to share approached. His look of frustration quickly turned to excitement as his pencil left his temple and took to his page, putting the finishing touches on his poem before its completion and presentation.

The group’s sincere desire to learn from Frank and their eagerness to write was a pleasant surprise. No one at the Dyker branch said “I can’t” or “I don’t want to” – words you often hear during school hours. Rather, they rose to the occasion when asked to engage their imaginations. Young people need to be given opportunities to express themselves. The public library provided materials and space for the students to use, and Frank modeled and created prompts that were fun and inventive. For me, this experience was refreshing.  Not only was I impressed with the group’s willingness to explore creativity through writing, but I was inspired by the fresh and loving attitude they had toward the great city we live in. 

–Corinne Bennett

For more information on T&W’s free poetry workshops in NYC’s public libraries visit our webpage here.  

T&W is pleased to offer FREE poetry workshops for children and teens this summer!

With generous support from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation and The Lotos Foundation, T&W is partnering with the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the Queens Library to offer poetry workshops based on our 2008 A Poem as Big as New York City project.

Through this initiative, thousands of young people in NYC schools and community centers took part in workshops in which they wrote poems about their experiences growing up in New York, imagining the city as its own poem character. The poems created were adapted into a single narrative by T&W writer Melanie Maria Goodreaux, A Poem as Big as New York City, which Universe Publishing (an imprint of Rizzoli) will publish as a hard-cover, illustrated children’s book in fall 2012. 

Our FREE one-hour poetry workshops will be held in select library branches on the following dates and times.  Come pay poetic tribute to our beloved city!

In early 2013, T&W will prepare an anthology of poetry created during the branch-based workshops for publication in April 2013—National Poetry Month. We hope to provide copies of the anthology to all program participants, with several copies for each host library branch.

STAY TUNED FOR MORE FREE LIBRARY WORKSHOPS IN THE FALL!

“I was onto this new way of writing that I could tell people about, and help them to write, give them feelings of power, confidence, excitement,” Koch told Teachers & Writers Collaborative in an interview. Often, getting students to feel this excitement involved opening them up to poetry in the first place, which initially proved difficult.  “A lot of the best writers in that school already hated poetry,” Koch said, when talking about his work at P.S. 61, where he started teaching in 1968. He blamed some of this hatred on what he called “essay-poems,” poetry that was overly academic and that contained obligatory allusions to figures like Helen of Troy or Cuchulain. Koch wanted to make language fresh and concrete for his students.

“When I had kids write directly –I mean directly in the sense of, when they write about what they think about the President or what they think about their block, they always wrote dull,” he said. “I obviously wanted very quickly to make people do something else when they seem to me to be stuck in other people’s language, other people’s ideas.” Koch urged students to write about their own wishes and dreams, to make things up if they wanted. “You can put in a lot of colors, wishes, lies, dreams, bananas, grapefruit, songs,” he told a class.

His success in the classroom led him to write several books about teaching poetry to children, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973).  He credits his work through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative as the seed behind these texts. “One thing I liked, that was wonderful about Teachers & Writers, was I had to keep a journal. Without that, I don’t think there would have been a book.”

Koch produced many books in his lifetime, in many genres: over 30 volumes of poetry, plays, fiction, nonfiction, and even several librettos. Still, he saw his teaching as among his most valuable work. “I discovered a way really to help a lot of people,” he said.

Still, the accomplishments of Koch’s poetry shouldn’t be overlooked. In Poetry magazine, Paul Carroll wrote that’s Koch’s works “embody the poetic imagination as it rejoices in the ebullience of its health and freedom, its fecundity, its capacity for endless invention, its dear, outlandish ability to transform everyday, pragmatic reality into an Oz or a tea-party at the March Hare’s house, its potency in, possibly, achieving a bit of immortality as a result of having brought forth some children of the soul.” Not only did Koch help bring poetry to children, but his poetry is credited with drawing out the inner child of adults.

-Lee Conell

Lee Conell lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in the Chronogram, on Women’s Studio Workshop Blog, and in The New York Times.

April brings us National Poetry Month,and to mark the
occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine 
features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry 
to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.
Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students. This week we feature Sarah Dohrmann’s exercise, inspired by Ross Gay’s poem, ”The Truth.”

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Three:

Because Poems:Teaching Ross Gay’s “The Truth”
to Middle and High School Students

Sarah Dohrmann

At the age of 14 my first “real” job was at Wendy’s. I worked the potato ovens for several weeks until I burned my hand badly. I was then switched over to cashier, but when my drawer was forty bucks short one day, I was demoted to sweeping up the dining area. This presented another problem in the form of a school nemesis who’d come into the restaurant, order French fries, sit in the dining room, and toss her fries one-by-one onto the floor so she could watch me sweep each one with a broom into a long-handled dustpan that I could never seem to hold right.

At the same time I worked at Wendy’s, my family was about nine years into a disperate attempt to patch itself together after my mother’s death. The patching process is still underway these thirty-odd years later, because recovery is slow when no one talks about loss. We prefer to mime our way through innuendo and pain, making our non-actions as weighted and important as anything we might actually say or do.

Perhaps it’s my personal background, then, that first drew me to Ross Gay’s poem “The Truth”, which appears in his first collection, called Against Which:

The Truth

          Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ‘til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

(From Against Which by Ross Gay (CavanKerry Press, Ltd. 2006). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Like all poems we choose to teach, Gay’s poem moved me. It moved me not because of what the narrator chooses to do, but because of what he chooses not to do. I liked that it is a humble reflection, and that the narrator made a choice that others may not approve of. And I liked the repetition of the word “because,” how it lilted me along until I came to a full-stop of truth. Naturally I also liked that the narrator is fourteen years old, working at a fast food restaurant just like I once did—only this narrator is the better version of me, the less narcissistic one capable of thinking beyond his own discomforts while he works at a job he probably doesn’t love.

The youngest age group I’ve taught “The Truth” to is eighth grade. Children are often asked to reflect upon what they did over the summer, but rarely are they able to write their way to a truth that may cast them in an unfavorable light. So often I overhear angry and self-righteous people talking to their friends and loved ones on city streets and in subway cars, telling everyone how they sure did show that guy or how it’s the last time that sucker will mess with them. That kind of thing. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking through a world in which everyone—myself included—is feeling awfully proud for being such a tough guy.

When I teach this poem, I want my students to think deeply about a time when they were not the tough guy. I want them to focus humbly not upon what they said or did, but instead on what they didn’t say or do. What’s more, I want them to narrow this non-action down to a gesture, to something that may not have been noticeable to an onlooker. I want them to think of a time they showed deep compassion for another, or maybe like me in the case of my mother’s death, they chose not to speak about something very important because they felt afraid. I want their poems to be quiet.

I ask my students what word is used most frequently in “The Truth.” I then ask them why it is a person would keep repeating himself: Because he wasn’t heard the first time around? Because what he’s saying is important? Because he’s trying to explain himself clearly? What does the repetition of the word “because” have to do with the title of the poem? How did he come to the truth? I tell students to mimic Gay’s structure if they like—to repeat the word “because” in order to lilt yourself downward toward your truth, using it as a means to peel back the translucent, barely detectable reasons amassed to justify a non-action. At the end of these layers I ask students to reveal the core of their Because Poem, their truth. (It should be noted that Because Poems could also work as an excellent starter for asking students to write a reflective essay.)

After the first read, “The Truth” speaks only to a few teenagers. Some students can’t get past how gross it is that the narrator said nothing about the man’s “water” dripping from his nose into the burger. They say the narrator should’ve been fired and somebody should’ve called the health officials. I agree that a guy’s dripping “water” is unsanitary, but why’d the narrator not even blink when it happened? What do we know about the two characters in the poem? Why does Gay choose language like “he had a wife to look in the face”? I mean, why not just say the guy had a wife who expected him to support the family? High school kids know very well the difference between a 14-year-old fast food manager and a 38-year-old man who’s got real responsibilities like a wife and two kids and two jobs. They know what it means to have to look somebody in the face. They know it cuts deeper.

“The Truth” can cut deep. When I ask students to think humbly about their own lives, there are often only a few takers. Many students can’t help but make their poems into another opportunity to list this reason they did that thing and that reason they didn’t do this other thing, until they’ve written themselves into a tizzy with no real end. But some students are able to use this writing as a way to come to a quiet truth. When these students write, they are writing about the most interior parts of their lives, the parts they’d prefer, maybe, to hide even from themselves. They write about not passing important tests, disappointing others, breaking up with lovers, fighting with friends, and not always coming out the winner. In short, they write about real life.

Untitled

Travis J.

Because he had a beef with my friends
Because he had a fight with my friend
Because he chose me out of everyone to pull a knife on
Because I woke up the next day not in a good mood
Because when I approached him in breakfast to speak about the situation, he disrespected me
Because even though I left him alone, he had the nerve to still talk about me
Because I got tired of hearing his mouth run on and on
Because he was trynna humiliate me in public
Because I snapped and made his mouth stop running for a while to come
Because I should have just went to class instead of making my biggest mistake ever
Because I turned into a person completely out of character
Because the shy and quiet shell that covered me for so long finally cracked
Because he continued to embarrass me and broke the shell completely
Because my friends were there and I felt as if I had to prove myself
Because I stopped and tipped my peak
Because he swung and tried to hit me
Because I swung back and actually hit him and my anger was being unfair and wouldn’t let me stop
Because of all that…
I ended up in hell for three months.

Tragedy

Ben P.

Because when I saw her on the street with another guy
she looked like she wasn’t doing anything wrong
Because maybe she thought she could fool me with anything
Because she thought it was okay to go out with another guy
Because she actually looked happy when she was with the guy
I could only stand under the streetlight
with my broken heart
looking at her from far away.

Why I Wanted to Cry

Rosemary O.

Because you were seven years old
and couldn’t do subtraction
Because I was failing you
and letting you fail
second grade
Because I took every mistake personally
Because I had number lines,
buttons,
and flashcards
and I let you count on your fingers
Because there are only
so many ways to explain
that subtraction
means getting smaller.
I asked you what
four minus two
was
You looked at me
like I had kicked a puppy
And answered,
“Seven?”

Sarah Dohrmann was a teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative for ten years before becoming its education director,  and has been teaching creative writing in Special Programs at Sarah Lawrence College since 2003. She has been awarded a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant,  a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature,  and a Fulbright Fellowship. With photographer Tiana Markova-Gold,  Sarah won the 2010 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for their joint project on prostitution in Morocco. Also in 2010,  she was a finalist for both the Iowa Award in Fiction and the Iowa Award in Nonfiction.