Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
Writes of passage: women writing
Writing the creative writing professor teaching, or not teaching, creative writing
LORRI NEILSEN GLENN
Your silences will not protect you. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
— Audre Lorde
I have since reconsidered Eliot
and the Great White way of writing English
standard that is
the great white way
has measured, judged and assessed me all my life
by its
lily white words
its picket fence sentences
and manicured paragraphs
— Marilyn Dumont
Northwest Territories, 1980s. Calgary writing consultants fly in to teach government employees, most of whom are Dene and Cree, how to write complete sentences and fix their punctuation. Two former English teachers in tottering heels and southern clothes flapping around an overhead projector at the front of a room of silent women. From the distance of decades, I can still see the neon on the consultants’ foreheads: Doofus môniyaw. My god, the workers must have howled when the workshop was over.
In a small classroom, people sit behind tables in a U-formation. “I am here to help you with your writing,” the instructor says, too chipper and upbeat. “To help you tell your stories so you can finish your GED.” Silence. “Maybe we can start by saying a bit about ourselves? Would you like to start?” The woman at the back looks down. No one speaks.
That earnest instructor has been teaching writing since she faced a crew of motorcycle fanatics in Alberta, rowdy and rambunctious teens only a few years younger than her twenty-one years. And what she remembers from that wild classroom are those boys; she doesn’t remember the girls.
I’ve spent decades consulting, teaching writing at a number of Canadian and international universities, researching women’s writing, organizing workshops in community halls, supporting technical and business writers in corporate boardrooms, advising graduate students writing theses and dissertations, and coaching poets and creative non-fiction writers.
It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties, however, that I began to look beyond women’s and girls’ silences and acquiescence to see them in the classroom. To hear what they weren’t saying, and to learn how to listen. As they struggled with their “writes” of passage, I was undergoing my own.
Who the hell do you think you are?
She sat in my office, picking at her hands, her eyes red and teary.
“You’ve done enough,” I assured her. “You’ve read almost thirty books for this one course. You understand the issues. It’s time to write, to discover what you think.”
It has happened again. A woman who has scaled emotional mountains, a capable worker, wife, mother, someone who may have survived abuse or chemotherapy or who wrestles with food insecurity, aggressive landlords, racism, and loss, enters university with a bundle of insecurities, little sense of agency, and a firm belief she has nothing to offer.
Of course, you say. It’s obvious why. Patriarchy. Colonialism. The privileging of the English language and the values it inculcates. Years of hiding in classrooms where others — the more confident, or the louder voices — take centre stage.
We know this woman. We might even be her. As Canadians teaching writing we know the “who do you think you are?” reference, and we see it playing out daily. Joan Bolker says, “Writing is not only a metaphor for the problem, but the thing itself: women’s inability to write their concerns out into the public realm both increases their powerlessness and arises from it” (185). She adds, “If those among us who have had the most advantages have had this much difficulty overcoming silence, what hope is there for the woman who has never known she is entitled to any power in the world?” (186).
I lost my talk. You snatched it from me
A 30-below morning and the school door is locked when I arrive. A young man in an open coat offers a little girl a chip from the bag he’s carrying; I watch as they make their way to the bus stop across the road. A woman darts around the corner, smiling. She holds up a key.
“Holy crap, it’s cold today, eh?”
The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation report includes the statement: “The preservation, revitalization, and strengthening of Aboriginal languages and cultures are best managed by Aboriginal people and communities.”
Yet here I am. The threads of my own Indigenous ancestry are slender; I was raised and schooled into Canadian working-class and middle-class settler values. I’ve learned, to use Marilyn Dumont’s words, “the Great White way of writing English.” Like so many writers, I excelled in school and never left it; I simply worked my way to the other side of the desk. And like other writing instructors, I talk risk-taking, blowing open systemic structures that silence women and underrepresented populations, and yet find myself toeing the line in more ways than I can count.
“Our stories are what connect us to the world,” I say to the women in the small classroom. “Let’s start with our stories.”
Right. Those of us soaked in conventional education practices assume everyone wants to say something about themselves to strangers, that speaking is the only way to participate. We enter a classroom expecting a group will trust us — and each other — without the passage of time, without working on relationships to support that trust. The old “lionizing lone wolves” approach to writing workshops.
In this room are women who have not written for years, if ever.
My instincts as an instructor are to focus on holistic approaches, to create a setting where experiential learning can take place, where people can make connections and come to believe they have something valuable to say. To believe in the power of their own story.
Those beliefs have flown in the face of conventional institutional expectations: write (or tell) on demand; work promptly, quickly, and on your own; conform to the implicit rules of the writing classroom: keep a journal, write multiple drafts, revise, revise, focus on the work (not the writer), expose your work to others’ critique, revise again, publish. And … go!
Months ago, working with Indigenous women in northern Canada, I arrived promptly at 1:00 p.m. for the workshop and found the room empty. As the women arrived, some of whom had brought their children, we dove into the coffee and snacks and began to talk. I set out empty journals for everyone and the books stayed unopened as the afternoon unfolded. One woman gave her journal to her daughter to colour in. We laughed, there were thoughtful silences, a few dark moments, as well as tears. The women asked me questions about myself and my children, told me about their children and their home communities. We made more coffee, stayed long after the allotted time. I learned a lot about listening that day.
It’s an honour to hear others’ stories. And I’ve learned there are many ways to tell them. I’ve often begun a workshop with novice writers — especially those whose voices have been muffled or silenced by the standards of the Great White ways of teaching and learning — by bringing out blank paper, coloured pens, and small paint pots. Words aren’t the be-all and end-all.
“Let’s start this way,” I’ve said. “Draw a picture or a map of a place you remember from your childhood. A street, a place by the river, a favourite spot where you always met your friends, the old shed where you buried a treasure.”
As I’ve stood in front of women whose early lives weren’t Dick and Jane and Spot or the Canadian version of The Brady Bunch, I rub up against my own limitations and deeply embedded biases. Once, I told a group, “As children we are closer to the ground; those places become our body memories.” Later, I caught myself. The very notion of a body memory (as if there were any other) is steeped in a (still) long-held Western belief in the separation of mind and body. My Great White way cultural foundations betray me again.
What I do recall from that workshop, however, was what happens when we get beyond words and use other sign systems. Recreating and acting out a conversation. Telling a story to a partner and having them sketch what they hear. Once people realize there will be no judgment, no expectation of being “a good artist,” inventive and colourful images will quickly appear. Even better, conversations seem to open up. Not all have responded to the opportunity to create art; but many do.
You took my talk
Mi’kmaq poet Rita Joe wrote years ago about the loss of her language. So many of the women I’ve worked with, including those who may speak Cree or Michif, are in a liminal place — their language has been systematically extinguished, either in their parents’ generation or their own, and so writing in English is learning to abide by cultural norms they may not wish to take on. To work on your Great White way education is both necessary and problematic. How to keep your talk and yet take advantage of opportunities that may benefit you.
Regardless of the cultural or educational background of the writer, I have learned the importance of getting to the core, the heart of what matters. Even during the times I’ve been asked to sit by the writer and scribe her story as she narrates it, I can sense, as she does, the tremors of something moving. I always hope it’s the beginning of belief.
The heart of the matter
Like most women, I’ve dealt with loss, sexual violence, invisibility, emotional abuse, and silencing. But I have reaped so many benefits from my Western and colonialist upbringing that I am able to draw upon cultural, social, and financial resources to support me. A good percentage of writing instructors I know have as well.
So many women I have worked with, however, have more scars than most of us can find on or under our skin. They might have been from low-income families, had abusive marriages, travelled from a war-torn country with nothing in their pocket, birthed babies at fourteen, become deaf from beatings, lost a sister or a cousin, dealt with men who run off and keep coming back. They might have made compromises for a drug habit or lived in a succession of foster homes. They might have been a farm wife for thirty years before returning to school, survived residential school, or been scooped up in the sixties, wrenched from their home communities. The colour of their hair or their skin may have caused them to be followed by store clerks or targeted on a bus. They are struggling even now with illnesses of the body and the spirit. And despite all this, they are strong. They persist. They want an education.
We don’t fully take into account the devastating impact of women’s experiences on their ability not only to finish school, but to learn when they are there. Jenny Horsman, who has studied literacy in the lives of marginalized women for decades, says that “the education system must recognize the impact of women’s and girls’ experience of violence on their attempts to learn.” I would suggest, too, that it’s not only physical or psychological violence in the home or in the local community women have experienced, but the violence inherent in the kinds of cultural collisions so many must overcome in order to step into a classroom at all.
The heart of it all is their stories. Stories, as Thomas King says, are all we are. They are what drive us, soothe us, give us strength. Tapping into those stories isn’t fundamentally about technique or style or grammar, nor about —
lily white words its picket fence sentences and manicured paragraphs
— those features we too-often emphasize when we work with women who’ve had little opportunity to pick up a pen. Writing is a way — one way — into the world, and when marginalized women have the luxury of time to begin to tell their stories, the nascent sense of agency that arises can be life-changing. We can see our lives — interdependent and mutually reflected — on Indra’s net, alongside others’. We learn we are not alone. For so many women without agency or good fortune — women whose lives are done to them rather than composed by them, the truth of their lives is what matters. To be [esse — Latin] is to speak one’s truth.
It’s difficult to keep that in mind when conventional educational settings are sites of ongoing judging and assessing. Oh, we make an effort to de-emphasize the fact; we candy coat our words in a writing classroom: “This part works, but here you could …” “Have you tried x?” “I love the part where …” Yet in any setting where writers are unsure, feel intimidated, have been crushed by judgment, or worse, are surrounded by cultural values antithetical to their own, what matters is the germ of a story, the spark that can ignite connection and resonate with the curious person across the table who wants to know what happened. Corbett and Connors’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student or Strunk and White can’t compete with the stirrings of an untold story ready to be released. Maya Angelou’s comment about the agony of carrying the burden of an untold story speaks to us all, but especially to those who’ve never been supported in telling theirs.
On many occasions when I’ve sat in a church basement or a community hall listening to women pulling fragments from their past I have found myself thinking: dazzling prose that earns an A or a sigh from the creative writing seminar on my campus would pale against these tales of blood, bone, and sinew. I have so much still to learn. We all have so much to learn.
I think back now to the last century, to that naive consultant of the last century, a young woman in her fancy leather heels determined to impress upon northern government workers how important the difference is between the active and the passive voice, and I shake my head. The irony was completely lost on her. On me. What a dumbass. Classic môniyaw.
To Give My Children
My stories are my wealth, all I have to give my children.
— Bronwen Wallace
A few times, I’ve helped workshop members gather their writing into a booklet or on a blog. And on occasion, writers have brought their family members to the reading. We usually sit in a circle with their publication in hand. Always there are treats and flowers.
One writer will ask her friend to read on her behalf. She’s too nervous. Another two will take turns reading lines from the other’s. Children eye the cake and the cookies on the table; once I saw a young boy counting the number of soft drinks left in the box.
After the reading, we often stay around the circle, talking, laughing. The mood is celebratory. No one is rushed; there is nowhere else to be. A long afternoon stretches its supple legs like a satisfied cat. It looks back at us, knowing more than we all can know, with a glint in its eye and something close to a smile. Stories are in the air and in the minds of others, and something has happened that writing can never tell.
Acknowledgements and Author’s Note
Thank you to the women in a range of settings across the Maritimes, Newfoundland, western and northern Canada who have taught me, and many others, about what matters in education. Your stories have the power to change education.
The workshops I’ve described here are ones I have been invited to or contracted to organize and lead, as a volunteer or for a small honorarium. The workshops were instructional, and not part of any research project. This essay is intended as a means of honouring the women writers who have helped me unlearn old patterns and see more clearly my own biases. In the interests of privacy, I have not named these women nor have I revealed any of their stories.
Works Cited
Bolker, Joan. “A Room of One’s Own Is Not Enough.” The Writer’s Home Companion. Ed. Joan Bolker. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Print.
Dressman, Mark. “Lionizing Lone Wolves: The Cultural Romantics of Literacy Workshops.” Curriculum Inquiry 23.3 (1993): 245—63. Print.
Dumont, Marilyn. “The Devil’s Language.” A Really Good Brown Girl. London: Brick, 1996. Print.
Horsman, Jenny. Too Scared to Learn: Women, Violence, and Education. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. Print.
Joe, Rita. Song of Eskasoni: More Poems of Rita Joe. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1989. Print.
Lorde, Audre. Statement originally delivered at The Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, 28 Dec. 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters Ink: San Francisco, 1980). Print.
Wallace, Bronwen. “Testimonies.” The Stubborn Particulars of Grace. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987. Print.