One hat I wear around the Review is as an instructor in their Young Writers Workshops–blissful employment, one that hits my head and heart in the proper proportions. I’ll update the experience over the next five weeks. Here’s the opener:
So–2007 Young Writers at Kenyon, underway. The gang’s all here. The core group of teachers for the past few years has wandered back to Gambier (a truly beautiful place) for another go-round, freshly focused by a curriculum review before this first session began (we felt pretty good about what we do) and looking foward to the future as the program continues seek ways to do what it does best–take a group of high school students on a two week tear straight through the heart the written word. We do it without helmets, with or without the Muse. It is intense, it is draining, it is challenging–and this is just for the teachers.
Imagine the writers.
It also can be Rilke-esque (read: life-changing)
I’ve had my first two days with my charges–there are twelve of them, and I lead them with a teaching fellow who works with me. I’m impressed with them all–they are willing. We’ve written about things they’ve left or brought with, in the literal and figurative sense, about families, written fictional autobiographies, and countered that with true fictions. We wrote poems about (or to) dead people–one writer wrote to the person who invented cement (!). We’ve done a lot.
But we’ve hit a roadblock as a workshop group, one that comes each year. Namely: the point at which they stop writing like they did before they arrived in Gambier, and start risking something-anything. It’s a criticial crossroads, and one where no clandestine deals are necessary–though it may first appear so–rather, just some faith in themselves and that something will come of the risk. It’s imperative.
Every year, it is clear to me how terrifying this is for most of them.
And every year this is the early point where I often feel like this experience is helping them most.