Yesterday I spent the morning teaching poetry at a central Maine middle school. For at least a decade the school's librarian has valiantly organized an annual Celebration of Reading, and for a few years I've been a regular presenter. It's a local gig, and only a half-day of work, and this year I had the pleasure of team-teaching with fiction writer Patrick Shawn Bagley. Yet despite those advantages, this is consistently one of the hardest gigs I do.

It's easy enough to run a good workshop when students and teachers are excited and involved. But year after year, the students in this school are quiet, stifled, repressed. By the end of the hour-long session, they begin to loosen up, but getting to the end of that hour can feel like the hardest work I've ever done. Meanwhile, the teachers, the students, my co-teacher watch me snarling myself into a mess. It's a bad feeling, but instructive . . . not just as a demonstration of the perils of the classroom but also as a reminder of the immensity of imaginative loss that can afflict an entire population. It's heartbreaking, really--a school, stocked with perfectly nice teachers and a decent building, that nonetheless year after year turns out students who don't know how to let their minds wander.

Having Patrick alongside me was good, for a number of reasons. He is a serious writer and reader in a genre that isn't mine, so we share a similar mission and mindset about the work but have disparate goals. He's also interested in being the kind of writing teacher whose focus is connecting the vocation with the human being--which is not a usual approach among people who are working with kids. Most importantly, though, his daughter attends this school. And he worries and cares, because this is his town, and her town. And despite all the ways in which we might love and respect the inarticulate difficulties of being citizens in Somerset County, when they begin to weigh down our own shining, curious, questing children, we are afraid.

Last week a correspondent from the Waterville Morning Sentinel sat at my kitchen table and interviewed me for a forthcoming article in the paper. Among other topics, she introduced activism: "Your work doesn't seem obviously activist," she said, and I felt surprised, and a little embarrassed about how insular my writing can be. No, I don't talk much about wars or oil spills or poisonous anti-intellectualism or human rights, though I'm distressed about them all, though I vote the straight bleeding-heart-liberal ticket. But as the reporter and I talked, I began to realize that, in fact, if I am an activist about anything, it's about these school writing workshops. When I have students who ask me, in all perplexed honesty, "Is it okay if I make this up?" . . . when I have parents who tell me, "I had no idea my daughter had so many feelings," I do see that the writing matters, that thinking matters, that the adventure of imagination matters.

So even though I kind of hate this middle school gig, I'll do it every year I'm asked: because if Patrick and I don't stand up in the middle of that room of silent children and say, "Hey, kids! Telling lies matters!" I fear that no one else will ever let them know.