In the Company of Writers 2002: Meadow Brook Writing Project Fellows

By Marshall Kitchens

In the summer of 2002, teachers from the greater Detroit area came together to share their knowledge, experience, and creative expression in Language Arts and instruction, with an emphasis on writing, as fellows of the Meadow Brook Writing Project. In the Company of Writers 2002 is the result of their collaboration. All participants, from pre-kindergarten through university, returned to their classrooms in the fall, inspired as writers and ready to inspire their students to become writers.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 25, 2004
• ISBN: 9781469794396

Marshall Kitchens

In the summer of 2002, teachers from the greater Detroit area came together to share their knowledge, experience, and creative expression in Language Arts and instruction, with an emphasis on writing, as fellows of the Meadow Brook Writing Project. In the Company of Writers 2002 is the result of their collaboration. All participants, from pre-kindergarten through university, returned to their classrooms in the fall, inspired as writers and ready to inspire their students to become writers.

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Contents

Foreword

Another Foreword

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

Movin’ Out

Bidding You HOME

Begin THE Songs

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

Foreword 

Writing is usually a solitary activity. During the summer of 2002, teachers met on the campus of Oakland University to learn from each other and to write together. Teachers from kindergarten to the University level wrote, critiqued, revised and composed the poems, stories, plays and essays which are here presented. The act of writing—what Dylan Thomas called my craft and sullen art—became for a happy, hard-working and intense month a little less sullen. We found we had many experiences in common. We made a collective, ecstatic, regressive journey back to childhood and made up lines for poems, each choosing a word with the same initial consonant. I remember one about a slimy, slithery, sensuous snake, for example…

What we discovered during this immersion in words and writing was just how central literacy is to making us who we are. And we learned how writing, reading, thinking and selfhood are inextricably linked. Writing is difficult because it challenges the writer to make a whole out of what were previously the inchoate fragments of experience. But out of that struggle with the word comes a sense of completion, a kind of therapy in which the broken self is put back together, is composed, is shaped into a pattern which momentarily redeems the frequently mad senselessness of the world.

That is perhaps a lofty way to put it, but that is indeed what the Meadow Brook Writing Project aimed at and ultimately accomplished: a reaffirmation of the ultimately sublime purpose of reading, writing, thinking—the making of more creative, integrated and joyous human beings. I would like to thank Ron Sudol, Mary Cox and Kathleen Reddy-Butkovich for making it possible.

David Stephen Calonne

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Another Foreword 

A great thanks to all of the contributors and participants in the Writing Project. A double thanks to Kathy Lawson for her generous assistance in the later stages of editing and to Cliff Lawson for permission to use the cuneiform graphics. Three cheers for sentences that make sense even without a main verb.

This second edition of In The Company of Writers makes some demands of you the reader. OK, maybe it’s more honest to say that I’m making a demand of you the reader. It is this: read the whole thing, and try to imagine the interaction of the minds behind the writing. On the printed page, the contributions are isolated, yet they could not have arisen without a roomful of teachers and writers inspiring and challenging each other.

Once you imagine this constructive cacophony, you will be closer to the experience that produced not only the sample of writings that follows, but also the many undocumented effects that followed in classrooms from pre-kindergarten through college. In this way, the Summer 2002 institute has left its lasting, if invisible, imprint.

Dave and I hope that you’ll be moved to add your own teaching and writing to that lasting imprint. But before you can join that parade, read the whole thing and imagine.

Clark Bradley Iverson

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CHAPTER 1

David Calonne

Magic Writing

This may be a bit like a Jorge Luis Borges short story or a Twilight Zone episode: the weird sense that I am in a writing workshop, talking and thinking about writing and now trying to think of something to write about and deciding I’ll write about writing. Writing is magic. Another word for writing is sacred, and I first titled this Sacred Writing, but that sounded pretentious and pious. Magic is a bit closer to my intent, for magic suggests a transformation, an awareness of the mystery of the existence, of the freedom of the self to create something out of nothing, or create itself in fact through language.

I suppose we all became teachers of reading and writing for a simple reason: because we ourselves enjoy immensely reading and writing. Perhaps we had parents with a literary bent who had books around the house or perhaps we drifted into libraries to escape the world’s terror and found there deeply-needed solace: books, print, authors, voices to answer our own yearning spirits. The natural thing to do then is to want to spend one’s time trying to convince other people—students in our case—that writing and reading are a way towards pleasure, joy, even ecstasy.

A cliché is a cliché, but there are also true clichés such as: you write to find out what you want to write about; you write to find out what you have to say.

Composition comes from Latin componere: com-ponere, to put together. In a very real sense, we magically put together a self on the page. Writing integrates and makes whole that which before was inchoate within us: good writing makes a temporary truce with the constant war that is human experience.

One is moved by writing, by poems, by plays, by essays, by literature, by words put in the right order. This is the aesthetic aspect. Writing also gives us access to knowledge, to a wider world of thought, feeling, imagination. And now am I writing about writing or about reading? One cannot discuss one without the other. Yet first comes speaking. As an infant, one cannot speak: Latin infans=not talking. Thus the Romans defined a baby by its relationship to language, by the fact that it could not speak. At the beginning of time first there was sound, speech; then I suppose the telling of stories, the invention of epic poetry and narrative; and then the invention of writing.

The ancients tell us that writing is magical, is sacred. In Egypt, Thoth possessed great powers. Garth Fowden writes in The Egyptian Hermes: An Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind: to him [Thoth], as divine scribe, inventor of writing and lord of wisdom, the priesthood attributed much of its sacred literature, including, for example, parts of the Book of the Dead…he came to be regarded as the lord of knowledge, language and all science—even as Understanding or Reason personified (p. 22). Plato spoke in his dialogue on poetic inspiration Ion of the winged words of the poet and ecstasy of poetic creativity. In the beginning was the Word," the Bible tells us.

And we sense this feeling of something holy breaking through as human consciousness first grasps language, the word, writing. As a child makes the first holy scratches on the page, discovering anew what the Sumerians did with their lovely cuneiform on clay, making a first mark on the world. and I was at My Grandmas house and I Let My dog out and my Grandmas dog out to they saw a schwerl and ran After it. (From an elementary school pupil’s paper presented at MBWP). A magical moment: the beginning of the self in the world, the self seeing the world, celebrating the world, celebrating itself in the world.

X-X-X-X-

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem entitled Men Made Out of Words

Perhaps I too am made out of words

Words always in the head thinking

Is thought made out of words?

Words are not writing until they are written down

Thought word writing

Parmenides said thinking is the same as being

Can one be without words?

What would it