Yesterday, in my Monson class, we used two poems for writing prompts: Morgan Parker's "Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School" and my own "Walking into Town," which I posted here a couple of days ago. The day's focus was on swelling out work from fragments into larger drafts. Parker's poem seemed like a clear choice--a way for students to study how a poet can both connect with and challenge her readers. But using my own work felt risky and uncomfortable--possibly arrogant, possibly self-aggrandizing.

I decided to go ahead and take that risk because "Walking into Town" is, if nothing else, deeply local. It reflects a situation and a place that all of my students recognize--more than recognize: they live inside it, to the point that it hardly seems like subject matter to them. It's also a very small poem, with a sudden ending, and I chose to keep it spare, to leave out a lot of possible narrative angles. The students' assignment was to invent more of the story, another version of the story, new characters, new attitudes to the characters, while also honoring my original intent--e,.g., maintaining a sense of respect for the characters and the place; not turning it into farce, though of course comedy or happy endings or sudden motivational shifts would all be fair game. They are really sensitive to this difference; they recognize how easy it is to drop into cynicism; and they all attended to that limitation in the prompt.

The result overwhelmed me. We ended up with what felt like a narrative anthology: What Happened to Mrs. Richards and Her Grandson. Some lingered with her as she picks up cans in the ditch--allowing her mind to shift back to a daughter in rehab, a son in jail. Some took the point of view of the young store clerk, who can't wait to get out of town and dismisses Mrs. Richards as a smelly old freeloader. Some swiveled away from these characters to their imagined neighbors, arguing in the front yard, and expanded into a long description of landscape. Some followed the child's mind as he grew older. All of them were sharp, precise, unflinching, deeply empathetic, but without sentiment.

I tell you: moments like this are why teaching is the greatest job on earth.