PROGRESS REPORT ON THE CLASS IN CREATIVE NONFICTION

Well, the other day when I picked up the mail

there was a check from Lakeland College, the first of four I'll get, this one for the teaching I've done in September. Ah, it certainly is nice to get paid for doing something you love. And, before I'd torn the envelope open, there was an e-mail in my In-Box from the poet, Karl Elder, who had recommended that I teach this course in writing creative nonfiction. Karl said:

I’m receiving unsolicited feedback vis-à-vis your performance in Creative Nonfiction ranging from “very good” to “outstanding.” Students are wowed by your effort and obviously appreciate that you’re keeping their noses in their notebooks.

Even better than getting paid for doing what you love is being appreciated for it! Yeah, it's that kind of thinking, Mary would say, that is my downfall. Yet, admit it, it is always gratifying to hear a good report.

In class, the students told me they could tell I was a new teacher: "You write on the blackboard," they said, almost incredulous. My classes are also "more structured" than some of the other writing classes, they said. Perhaps that's because my teaching experience has been in an industry where, when the students walked out of the classroom, they had to have specific skills they didn't walk in with.

Maybe the students think I'm a little hard-nosed: I make them keep a journal that I read and comment on every week; I quiz them at the start of class about the reading they were supposed to do. "Class preparation" is part of their grade. (Sometimes one or the other will turn in a blank sheet of paper or one with a smiley face on it, as if to say "You caught me.")

"We have all this reading to do for other classes, too, you know," one of them might say.

"I don't care," I will respond for certain.

Okay, I admit it: maybe I did panic after reading the first week's worth of their journal entries and their short paper, "Why I Write." "They're not getting it," I said to myself. I thought I'd failed them. They had to get started working on the 2000-2500 word piece of memoir that was their first big assignment.

So I put together a crash course in "Everything You Need to Know About Creative Nonfiction" and spent a whole class session on it. I talked about Theme and Arc and Frame and Central Metaphor; about Drama, Conflict, Change and Resolution; about Ending and Beginning; about Scene and Summary and the Scene's components - Character, Setting, and Action; about Transition's five elements - character, setting, and action, plus time and mood; about Characterization and its components - physical description, the character's own words, the character in conversation, the character in action, the character in his/her setting; about Setting, about Language. I said "Everything I'm teaching you will work for memoir, where you are at the front; and it will work for the profile you'll have to write, where someone else comes to the front; for the nature piece, where place is the subject, not simply a setting; and for the essay about an event, process, or a 'day-in-the-life.' You use all the same elements in different proportions, with different emphasis."

I gave them a diagram with six boxes to it: "This is what I want," I said. "I want a beginning that sets up the conflict or change. I want four scenes that show us the drama. And I want an ending where everything comes to resolution, to a safe landing. Before you start writing, understand what the drama is, what the theme is. If you come upon a central metaphor that works for you, even better; let it inform your language." And then we scheduled meetings where they reviewed with me what they intended to put in each of those six boxes.

I also reminded them that everything they write for me has to be as true as is humanly possible, that we're in the business of writing nonfiction, not fiction.

This past Wednesday, they turned in those memoir pieces. We started talking about the first of them in workshop on Friday.

I've read and graded most of the pieces now, and I think by Jove I think they've got it! This is going to be more fun than you can imagine!

Oh! I've forgotten to say how much I've learned about writing creative nonfiction from trying to teach it. An amazing amount. That may be the subject of some future post. Imagine: I get to do something I love, I get paid for it, I learn a lot. You have to wonder at that kind of good fortune.

Comments

[Siona]

Oh, please write more about this! I don't think I'm speaking only for myself when I say that I would love to hear more about your experiences in the classroom, especially when it comes to what you've been learning about writing and teaching.

Congratualations, though, on your connection with your students. I can't say I ever doubted you'd have any response but this; still, it's nice to be right. I wish I were in your class!

[dave]

Ditto.

[Tom Montag]

Siona & Dave--Yeah, maybe I will write some more about this. I have to maintain an appropriate level of privacy for the students, of course, but maybe there are lessons I've learned that I can bring outside the walls of the classroom. The first thing I learned? When I was in college, I was nowhere near so advanced as a writer as these students are.