So here I am, writing to you at 4:30 in the morning, because I have been awake since more or less 2:30 and I finally gave up and came downstairs to make coffee and sit quietly for a moment before T's alarm goes off and we have to lurch and stumble into snow shoveling. Late yesterday afternoon we cleaned out the driveway and the sidewalks, but overnight several more sleety icy inches fell and the city plows proceeded to transform each driveway into a walled city. It's an ugly sight and I am not enthusiastic.
Still, I have a moment here to myself.
It was a long weekend--good but long. Teaching at that intensity is tiring, zoom adds to the weariness, but afterward I received this note from one of the participants, which brought me to tears:
I always enjoy your workshops because you delve deeply into work and also because your prompts always challenge what is on the page to revise its way of being. You have a magical way of showing a break dancer ballet moves. The poems come out like someone has brushed the lint off a jacket. This is to say, for anyone at any level, you honor their own creative muscle and let them flex it.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm making a mistake, if participants would really prefer that I get off my cloud and go ahead and slash up their drafts with a red pen. But I just can't bear to do it. I hate that version of power so much. My abhorrence for correcting papers is a major reason I evaded full-time teaching. And to do it to poetry, poetry . . . the act feels like pure poison.
So I've invented these work-arounds, ways to talk about revision without telling people what to change, and I know they often come as a shock. People enter a revision class focused on Wrong. I ask them to focus on Look what you are making.
Anyway, now it's Monday. A big job is behind me; big jobs are ahead of me, including that wretched snow shoveling and all of the laundry and housework I did not do over the weekend. But my neighbor and I are going to go out for lunch, and I won't be required to use my brain too much today, and maybe tonight I'll get a real night's sleep.
2 comments:
Your approach to teaching is exactly right; mentoring and co-learning are the model that gets the most people excited, and is the most effective. Whether you stumbled on it or if you have drawn from what you needed most from a "teacher," you are an exemplary guide for all of us. Never doubt it. =) I had a fabulous time digging into the drafts this weekend, and it was not painful-- that's the beauty of it, of revision; it's a true re-visioning of what might be hiding in the words. Thank you. You help to make me a better writer and a more effective teacher.
I love your Revision workshops for precisely the way you structure them. On my own, I know something needs change, but so often I do not know what to do to make changes. Thanks to the work I've done with you over the years, I have many more tools...such a way too metal a word...options and what-if's to go ahead and experiment.
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