I'll be heading to Albuquerque early Tuesday morning. The SW/TX Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association will be hosting 1,200 of us at the Hyatt hard by the Civic Plaza. You can find me and my panelists at the Enchantment F room, 2:15-3:45, section 136: Eco-Criticism and the Environment. But if you can't make it, I'll give you this to read.
Sit back. It might take a while.
Writing the Place You Know
When I was first teaching composition and taking poetry workshops, I was struck by how similar the core format was: close attention to student texts as well as reading and critical engagement with expert texts. But the composition classes I was teaching seemed far more interesting pedagogically then the workshops I was taking. The students were asked to range far and freely in topics and interests; we kept coming back to their texts as they worked on revision; they were encouraged to see how their texts connected to other parts of their academic and non-academic lives. Workshops and readings were designed to challenge assumptions and habits. It was hard, and it was fun.
You can imagine my delight, then when given an opportunity to teach a class in my own field, creative writing. If comp was fun, then I expected poetry to be a blast. But after going through a scholarly MFA program and moving on to a PhD program, I knew that I didn’t want a poetry class that merely recapitulated the lore and recipes that I had received in my early poetry workshops. I had become convinced that creative writing classes are excellent sites for critical engagement and for extending critical thinking and writing skills—I can read my previous description of the composition classroom as a description of the creative writing classroom as well for the most part—but creative writing classes seem to be rarely acknowledged as places for critical inquiry. This avoidance of the critical work that can go on is in part a continuation of the Romantic notion that poets are born as rare geniuses who have everything they need to be poets but an understanding of craft (and I will go ahead and include other kinds of creative writing classes here, though my training is as a poet). That we’re special geniuses is a comforting thought for successful writers, I suppose, but it erases almost the entirety of human experience and history. So when I started to teach undergraduate poetry classes, I looked to people like Wendy Bishop and Katherine Haake, some of the relatively few thinkers engaged with creative writing pedagogy that looks beyond the classroom to larger conversations and engagements. Recently, I’ve begun to look further afield, to the exciting and important new field of ecocomposition to inform my creative writing pedagogy.
I will be using the work of ecocompositionists and creative writing theorists—and the category of place—to suggest pedagogical strategies and practices for an ecologically engaged undergraduate creative writing class. These practices are central to engaged pedagogy, to successful writing, and to developing a sustainable future.
First, a little bit about ecocomposition and engaged pedagogy: Eric Otto argues that ecocomposition is a furthering of post-process composition theory in that ecocomposition extends the interest in “non-codifiable, social dimensions of written discourse” to examine the “relationship between writers and their surroundings.” Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser, two of the most visible proponents of ecocomposition, add writing and place to identity inquiry in order to explore the “role of place and identity in writing.” They stress that ecological texts might be used, but they should not overwhelm the primary concern of student’s writing. It is in fact a central concern of many theorists that although questions of environmentalism and sustainability (at least) are politically charged, that the classroom not be turned over to proselytizing. Greta Gaard, for example, writes that her ecocomposition classroom allowed for diverse opinions while supporting student insights and improved writing.
Thus, as the theorists have it, ecocomposition reaches outside the classroom, and encourages seeing the classroom connected to other issues and the literal world as well as capital-N Nature and urban nature. Connecting student writing in the creative writing classroom is exactly what Katharine Haake and Wendy Bishop argue for. Haake in particular warns us to remember that students aren't copies of ourselves. She notes that creative writing is a kind of making, but one that occupies a privileged position in culture and the academy. For that reason, we must, as teachers create spaces for everyone to speak, to open access to that privilege—a difficult task, she recognizes. In any classroom, silence can be easily imposed—and this is a particular pitfall of the older workshop model—but it is breakable. Haake links this to the vexed question of responding to student work. She suggest that even, perhaps especially, the place for student voice is in the evaluation process. [and I was happy to note that there are papers on this topic—evaluation in the creative writing classroom—going on at this conference]
Of course, the time and attention it takes to negotiate the classroom carefully means that it becomes easy, given the demands of an academic career, to ignore teaching. Mostly, our advancement lies outside the classroom, in publishing, conference presentations, service and so on. As writers, the temptation is great simply to rely on the Romantic genius model, to use the lore and recipes we received from our own classroom experiences, and then appear in the classroom with a minimum of preparation. But we signed on as professors, not insurance executives, doctors or lawyers. We need to pay attention to our pedagogy. And engaged pedagogy matters because we are authority as well as a model of authority. We are expert, and the model of the expert. We are keepers of the topic and reveal the concerns and practices of the topic. We must interrogate and consider our practices, and by seeing ourselves in a complicated, ecological web with our students, our department, our college and/or university, our campus, our bioregion and so on we will become better teachers, as well as practitioners of our art (and this feeding back into artistic practice is something I rarely see taken up—I hope someone will, and I hope they come talk to me about it). While the demands of engaged pedagogy are high, the self-reflexive nature of the work can and should feed back into our own practices—perhaps even more for creative writers than for compositionists.
I want to touch on the category of place for a moment. Place allows for engaged, even radical, pedagogy. Arlene Plevin argues that place expands and decenters the classroom, it reveals how important choices in class have repercussions in the real world out there. She argues that critical thinking skills will reveal students own placement and wants to include the non-human world as part of critical consciousness. Similarly, Colleen Connolly argues that diversity should include Nature in critical awareness and argues for an awareness of earth as Other. In the classroom, she claims that ecofeminism works to make explicit the nature/woman oppression ideology and that ecofeminism then resists recreating hierarchies when approaching ecological concerns.
The politics of poetry can lead to unexamined practices, particularly in the classroom. Poetry and the study of poems seems to encourage an engagement with intellectual, aesthetic and cultural contexts to the exclusion of anything beyond. Ecocomposition allows a fruitful way to extend interest. Plevin, among others, argues that the category of place moves beyond the unitary self, but not in a way that fractures or breaks, instead the self becomes embedded, enwebbed, becomes a part of something larger.
So far, I’ve talked a bit about how ecocomposition is situating itself in its call to expand the parameters of topics in the classroom and how the classroom connects to larger issues and structures (both human and non-human). I’ve underscored the importance of teaching, particularly if we’re taking an ecological and sustainable view of the academy. Place, I suggested, is a way to use and, quite literally, ground ecocomposition theory. Throughout this, I’ve been touching on the creative writing, pointing out where ecocomp theory can extend to creative writing, and briefly critiquing the inherited lore and recipes (“I used exercise a to get students to think about issue b in their writing”) that mostly passes for current creative writing pedagogy.
This brings me to the next part of my presentation, the part that I’m really excited about, some suggestions about praxis. Again, while I think these practices will prove useful across genres, I’ve had experience primarily in the poetry classroom.
And first, I want to talk about maps. I’ve always been fascinated by them as aesthetic objects as well as for the information and cultural capital they carry. But I became interested in maps and mapping as a pedagogical tool recently after reading the work of Derek Owens, Nedra Reynolds, and Robert Brooke. I want to discuss maps and their usefulness for a bit before discussing my own experiences and where I see these experiences leading.
Owens starts his composition class each semester with student-drawn maps, which leads to an essay assignment about place that has students commenting on, writing from/about their places and/or homes. He uses the maps and written student work to create discussions about turf and the situatedness of school buildings, and an unrooted curriculum and profession. It might seem like a lot to bring into an composition class, but it’s a strategy for framing and placing the classroom that I found intriguing and that fits with the theories I’ve been discussing.
As useful as Owens’ example is, I was delighted to find the work of Nedra Reynolds, a geographer. Her work has a careful, detailed discussion of the history of maps and mapping, their advantages and difficulties. In particular, she notes that maps are never complete and the text never matches the internal map of a place a person or dweller carries in their heads. The exercises that she describes—and which I’ll touch on in a moment—are the sort of activities that can direct the kind of “deep mapping” that Robert Brooke and others use in the writing classroom. Reynolds asks for maps to be expanded, returned to, and revised. She encourages exaggerations in hand-drawn maps for things closest to us, the places, people, activities that are most important. These practices are familiar to anyone who’s drawn maps for friends and colleagues (who among us ever draws to scale when providing directions?), but she also looks at how class and race influence mental maps of real places. And the questions she asks her students about how these categories show up and play out in their maps are perfectly suited to engaged pedagogy—of geography, composition, and creative writing. Reynolds also encourages attention to how bodies work in the mapped terrain, so that various abilities and perspectives are considered and engaged. She points out to students that “no-go” and other “problem” areas perceived differently if a resident, and draws attention to how class and culture form each/all of these perspectives. For Reynolds, maps are modes of encounter like walking or dwelling; maps are metaphorical, material and, overall, rhetorical.
Reynolds argues that streets are “perhaps the most contested” cultural locations. They are—or can be—inhabited by many kinds of people, as well as non-human nature. Streets are places where identity is public and constructed on the street through body, dress, performance, etc. In her conclusion, she asks students through these practices to move beyond identity to “boundaries and movement, locatedness or surveillance, and sense of place.” The same kind of linked construction of self in the environment that ecocompositionists are calling for.
During the time when maps and their pedagogical usefulness were fresh in my mind, I came across Julie Drew’s idea of students as travelers. Drew argues that students—and student knowledge—is always placed, and placed variously, which opens up different senses of culture to explore: intellectual, physical, natural, and so on. Mapping, she says, allows students to change their perspective; it reveals place and situation and lets students begin to speak back. The classroom is part of their map or maps, part of their travel, but only a small part.
I have used Drew’s and Reynolds’s ideas as well as some of the practices of Robert Brooke and Derek Owens in designing mapping exercises for my poetry classroom. I have asked students to draw maps on large sheets of newsprint paper and pull material from those places or people they found important enough to include. This activity has worked fairly well, but I’ve been thinking of ways to extend this approach.
First, I missed the opportunity to revisit, revise and challenge the maps they constructed in my classes. That is, I missed the chance to have students deepen their maps. I asked them to map any place they wanted to: home, school, activities, travel, whatever. For several days, I asked them to return to their maps to draw out stories and details for their poems. But what Brooke and others call a deep map would have us looking into the history of the places, activities, and so on. I needed to have the students continue to return to their maps with new ideas and information. The exercise was sound, I think, but reading these theorists has helped me to see how to extend the exercise and, more importantly, why I need to revise my own practice.
Second, I missed what is perhaps the least literal, and most familiar, mapping in the creative writing classroom: a map of poetic influences. Keeping track of these influences through the course of the semester or quarter would allow students to see how their writing has changed in relation to their reading and learning in the course. This kind of meta-content project—which seems rare to me in the creative writing workshop—allows for the kind of space that Haake asks for that allows for students to have a voice in their experience of the class, and offers students a way to evaluate their progress, something they can use in final course evaluations.
When I do the class again, I will extend the time we spend with mapping, as well as the questions I ask of them. I might ask them to develop multiple maps: of living space, family, friends, emotional spaces (both in the head and in the world), activities, campus activities, travel, the poets we’ve read that they identify with. Some questions I would ask them to consider would be: where do these maps overlap and intersect? what is the weather, animals, plants, people, culture, history, etc that inhabit these places? what draws you to map this place? Place gives students something real outside themselves to engage. It is the category on which other categories build. And these strategies point toward creative writing not as a set of instructions to follow for a semester, but as a way to be intellectually engaged and curious about the world.
The idea of creative writing as being available for everyone is especially important if we believe D. G. Myers—and I don’t know why we wouldn’t—that we’re not doing the rest of the students any favors by simply being talent scouts. We’ve signed on to be teachers, not editors, mechanics, insurance executives, doctors, lawyers, or what have you. Given that, ecocomposition—with its attention to place—gives us specific tools for helping students engage their world, write about it, and discover both the aesthetic joys of poetry and how they, the students, think and feel about their environment. These tools, these concerns about place and the lived environment, expand and give a frame to the sometimes haphazard exercises we assign students. I have tended to give writing prompts that resonate with whom we’re reading, or the technical aspect of poetry we’ll be discussing next week. But the details the students are usually asked to supply are arbitrary from week to week. They might be purely linguistic—lists of nouns, verbs, and so on—or an imagined event where x or y happens. Next week, the oldest person you remember from being a child. The week after, a time and place you felt afraid. But ecocomposition suggests that the lived world—and attention to that world—can allow us as creative writing teachers to deepen students’ engagement with technique as well as their understanding of what they are writing about.
The field of creative writing pedagogy, unlike when Wendy Bishop was writing, is becoming full of texts for students that combine anthologies with critical and craft apparatus. These books have exercises and prompts that allow for imitation and that suggest how a student can go beyond mere copying. That is, these books—at least, if not the instructors as well—are connected to other writers, to the cultural and intellectual work of creative writing. The next step is to connect farther out. To think ecologically about our students’ place and life beyond our classroom, to engage that life, so that they can be as much themselves as they can.
As I finish, I want to suggest that these practices in the creative writing classroom contribute to sustainability, a category that Derek Owens, for one, defines quite broadly. Certainly, it applies to the physical continuation of the campus, but he extends it as well to scholarly life. For my purposes, sustainability means that creative writing students will leave the classroom understanding what’s at stake in creative writing, will no longer fear poetry, and will understand that writing is not the solely the concern of unkempt geniuses.
A consistent frame for the creative writing class underscores the work that students accomplish, reveals the intellectual work of creativity, opens the lives of the students to exploration in ways that aren’t random and scattershot. Mapping reveals connection in a broadly ecological sense, generates detail, and allows stories and emotional resonances to come to the surface. As students deepen their maps with historical research into the human and non-human past, they can begin to see that the self they draw on for poetry cannot be removed from these other selves, lives, histories, places, practices, and so on. An overarching shape to the semester creates a creative writing class that is engaged with the rest of the student’s experience, that looks beyond the classroom to situate the student—and the course and the instructor—as part of a larger ecology without pushing an agenda or making the course a “nature poetry” course. It is the kind of engaged practice that needs to happen in a world and at time when it is too easy to feel fractured and ungrounded.
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