Writing Class

I have met Gwendolyn Brooks twice. She was a great African American poet from Chicago. Her autograph, dated February 26, 1981, is inside the back cover of my second journal. Both times I met her at Iowa Wesleyan College.

The first time was in the chapel on campus. It was in the evening and I was one of very few Caucasians in attendance. After it was over I went to the stage to shake her hand. When I did she held onto my hand and looked me in the eye and said “Why are you here?” I said she was a great poet and I came to hear her. She said, “Langston Hughes is a great poet. I am just a writer.”

The second time I met her I was teaching a writing class through Southeastern Community College. The class usually met at the high school in my old English classroom. I am sure some of my former English teachers would have turned over in their graves if they had found out I was teaching a writing class. The evening Gwendolyn Brooks was reading at the Iowa Wesleyan College library we met there instead, and the class listened to her poetry. I loved it! I am not sure the class did?

The first time I taught the class with another person. After that I taught it own my own. That first time the guy teaching with me missed many of the classes and never came prepared. I figured after that that if I was going to do all the work I might as well get all the money so I taught it on my own. The other guy made it easy because he moved to Colorado.

I, too, struggled with the class. There are only so many activities you can do and then they need to get down to writing. No writing means no sharing and discussion, which translate into a boring two and a half hours.

I was always disappointed that some people would just show up and expect to be entertained the entire time. In a class like that the writing of the participants becomes the contents of the course.

I asked everyone to keep a journal. I assured them I would not collect them and never ask them to share anything they didn’t want to share. Sometimes I would give them long diatribes on why they should be writing things down. If they wanted to be a writer they had to write and one of the easy things was to write about what was going on in your life.

One participant was going through a bitter divorce and took my encouragement to heart. At the beginning of one session she told everyone about how many pages she had written in her journal and how cathartic it had been for her to get that stuff down on paper. Later, though, when I cautioned the group about no writing anything down they wouldn’t share with their mother or their children that same person opened her journal and tore out several pages.