our manifesto

Does this exercise resemble/reassemble the writing activities of more accomplished writers?

A freewrite on freewriting. We know how to do this; we teach students how to do this. But we don’t really do it very often or very freely. Have we become those teachers who taught (and privileged or made noises about valuing) a method we now would not practice? Now we could place ourselves among the long roster of teachers talking the talk but not walking the walk.

But no. First we talk: we say: let’s do a freewrite. And then we walk: around the room, humming or reading while standing up. Not writing. Free walking. That we can do.

We put the constraints on; we censor ourselves; we don't give “us” permission to write garbage. It's a class thing. In the Rust Belt, in the bayou, academic aspirations are reserved for Someone Else. Climbers are scolded that low is best.

Freewriting, alien among all other forms of writing in its utter aloneness. Is someone hearing us? Is there a point of contact in this? Is there an opening in the text that can veer off and meet up with others? We always want to know that what we write will meet up with something somebody somewhere down the road.

Many of us—most of us—wrote alone, when young: intense poems in little pink notebooks, under the bed covers with a flashlight balanced carefully, precariously, atop a shoulder, borrowing some assistance from the headboard.

somebody else's

Hatlen’s piece in Nothing Begins With N seems to reinforce the association between Elbow, expressivism and a privileged class of writers and teachers. By tracing and tying together Elbow and the projective verse poets of the mid 20th century, Hatlen suggests a kind of legacy of an American belle lettres tradition being passed along through freewriting. Where he claims a political congruence between them as both “react[ing] against a form of writing that they saw as dead, empty, ‘academic.’” Elbow is credited with extending the “anarchocommunism” or communitarian anarchism associated with the projective poets by offering a method of writing that attempts, via freewriting, to diminish authority over text production. But is this enough of a trade off? Is signaling to students that this particular TEN 10 TEN minutes of work won’t be read or judged enough to free some space in which they can be truly productive, safe, liberated?

What makes Elbow’s pedagogy truly revolutionary is his sublime confidence that everyone is smart: that the problems in our classrooms come not from dumb (or “ill-prepared” or “unmotivated” or whatever euphemism you prefer) students, but from pedagogical methods that are designed to “make students feel dumb.”

When Ken Macrorie introduced free writing in the 60s, free was a good thing to be, in a counterculture, subversive, free-to-be-you-and-me, love-thy-neighbor-as-you-would-(ahem)-love-thyself kind of way. Here in the 00's, the oughts, free is a bit more complicated. Free love has been dangerous, dead(ly) even, for as long as most of our students have been alive. As our universities embrace corporate, capitalistic models of education, “free” comes to signal that-which-we-do-not-value.

dialogues and exchanges

Me: do you have a few minutes to talk?

You: i think so

Me: how are you?

You: Good, nice day out. You?

Me: It's beautiful out. One of my students in the writing class made this really interesting comment . . . she talked about the diary she kept as a kid. She said, I remember it had a lock and a key, and I thought, wow, my thoughts must be so important-I have to lock them up!

You: I always found that phenomenon so odd . . . the diary that is

Me: Why?

You: Well pretending that your telling someone other than yourself a story about you. Sort of self-indulgent in a sweet way . . . but then making sure that no one else experiences it . . . should say something about writing as an outlet shouldn't it?