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Risk and Revelation:
Creative Writing in Theory and Play
Lisa Lusero
Denver, Colorado
You are given a random pile of paper scraps and a
blank piece of white paper. Make something having to do
with “natural disasters” using only the paper
you have been given. You can alter the scraps; you
do not have to use all of them.
This is the task that my co-teacher and
I asked of a group of 9-13 year olds to do at a small,
independent school for gifted kids, during an elective
class called “Manifestos,
Art Bombs, and the Avant Garde.” We all loved it.
Everyone could manipulate the medium in creative, pleasurable
ways and explore the concept of “natural disasters” in
the process.
But when I later gave them a sentence,
and suggested that everyone manipulate the words like scraps
of paper, the experience was like walking through glue.
I asked the students why the activity felt less fun, more
difficult, some students suggested that they had spent
years of schooling learning the “right” way
to use words so it was harder to break out of that constraint.
As T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets, “Words
strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under
the tension, slip, slide perish, decay with imprecision,
will not stay in place, will not stay still.” This
is the trade-off of literacy. We speak its paradox. Fixed
and living; so much more limited than scraps of colour,
yet so much more alive. To taste literacy you have to imbibe
the rules of language and in so doing, the process of tasting
is changed.
When I was six, I staged my first educational
protest: I refused to read. I remember my parents’ concern
and my teacher’s frustration, but I don’t remember
feeling particularly moved by either one. I knew how to
read. And I started it up again when I was motivated by
the Muscular Dystrophy Read-a-thon and the promise of a
red, electronic talking game if I could read one-hundred
books in time. I did. But I never intended to fall
in love.
I am just reeling. I am so excited it’s
like being in love. Which reminds me of a time I was
falling in love and I actually saw the green in the trees
differently. It’s like that. The way
love changes your seeing, but not just in your eyes but
your whole body. I learned so much yesterday I can almost
feel the physiological changes that are taking place
as a result. The sensation of love and the sensation
of learning… deeply akin? It feels like it. For
me, at least. Is love learning? Or is learning love?
There is probably some undiscovered neuro-chemical
implicated in language; like pheromones or oxytocin, chemicals
that change the way we think and act. Exposure to the flesh
of words changes everything. At the age of nine I had a
friend who wanted to be a writer. “How boring,” I
thought, but that was before language changed me.
I often think of my six-year-old self when exploring the
gooey consistency of language with my creative young students.
What could we do with language today if we had stayed in
that emergent zone, code barely broken, each letter rich
in sound and shape, day dream and language occupying the
same space?
Watching the birds fly from limb to
limb outside her office window left her with the familiar
feeling that her perception was not aligned with the
rest of the community. She
was aware that many people, if they perceived them at
all, saw the birds as “birds” and their flying
as “what birds do.” But for the fact that
she had learned certain coping mechanisms, she generally
perceived the birds (and everything else) as energy;
energy directly linked to her own energy, directly linked
to, what some would call, God. And the limbs too
were energy linked to her, linked to beyond. And in perceiving
this simple, daily occurrence she could see the textures
and general outline of the universe. Or if not see, exactly,
feel.
It could be breathtaking. It could be agonizing. It
could make her smile, or laugh. It could come across
as a blow to the musculature of her breathing. It could
lift her up until she felt the outlines of her own being
slipping. Slipping…
At that stage there’s less mastery, less fluency,
less meaning attached to words. But there’s something
else a six-year old can do, something that becomes sticky
and slow with the process of language mastery, fluency
and meaning and that’s play.
Which, was not okay.
If there was one thing she learned early on, slipping
away into the universe, was not allowed. In first grade
she did it. She’d been doing it all along, as far
as she knew, but it wasn’t until first grade that
anyone cared, or noticed. It was school that made it
a problem. There were certain rules in school and first
grade was the point where school became something other
than learning. There was no curiosity or apparent appreciation
for her engaged participation in the learning that the
universe was obviously giving her. Instead there was
that stern glare. That echoing voice that came from far
off and got closer and annoyingly closer until she was
forced to respond. Did I read Dick and Jane today?
No. No. It seemed such an unbelievably stupid
question that soon, she didn’t have a shred of
respect for this hovering gremlin of a woman. Reading?
If only I could tell her what I was reading, If only
I had the words. If only I could snap my fingers and
shift her own seeing for an instant… Reading was
a fun game at first, an interesting trick of symbols
that, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Thompson quickly
devolved into the mind numbing phonetic torture of Dick
and Jane. It was hard, no, ridiculous to prioritize that
languishing puzzle over her meditation on the nature
of the universe.
Sadly, her situation was not much different
today. Indeed
she was glad to have broken the code of reading, and
indeed she was glad to be reading far beyond the confines
of Dick and Jane. Still, her perception of life was more
of a burden than a blessing. Something she had to concentrate
on ignoring to succeed. And in fact, she had done quite
well in terms of how others viewed her success. And she
was happy with much of it. The only thing that
was heartbreaking on a regular basis was this feeling
that her greatest source of insight had no place in the
world where her success (not to mention her family) resided.
When I work with younger readers and writers,
especially the ones who are struggling with the code, language
is more like those colored scraps of paper. My four year
old likes to write the letters of his name, and he’ll
be going along in the tidy row we’ve taught him until
he runs out of space and the final “N” ends
up sideways and across the page from the beginning! This
is the dilemma: I don’t really want to read
and write as laboriously as we do when first breaking the
code, nor do I wish that on my students. So I rely on the
fact that there are other people out there teaching the
rules I like to break which allows me to focus on one of
my favorite approaches to creative writing and life, rule
breaking.
I take children outside and we write in
the snow, or the dirt. We find flowers and leaves and smash
them into phonetic shapes in our journals. We use crayons
and markers, write messy and large, we doodle and decorate.
We write publicly, we write privately. We write bumper
stickers and protest signs. We eschew spelling, savour
consonants, read aloud from the dictionary. Make fun of
words.
I read whatever writing of Gertrude Stein's
I can find in the moment, "It
was all so nearly alike it must be different and it is
different, it is natural that if everything is used and
there is a continuous present and a beginning again and
again if it is all so alike it must be simply different
and everything simply difference was the natural way of
creating it then." Toss sense and sytax to the wind.
I read Richard Brautigan’s two sentence short story, “The
Scarlatti Tilt”:
“‘It's
very hard to live in
a studio apartment in San
Jose with a man who's learning to
play the violin.’ That's
what she told the police when
she handed them the empty revolver.”
“How long does it have to be?” becomes a joke
instead of a question. We talk about discovery more than
character or plot, creativity more than structure. I try
to expand the boundaries, hoping, all the while that one
of these students one of these days will find a crack that
I didn’t even know existed and dislodge something
wonderful with words.
She was the blueness inside him, the colour
of his appetite.
Take this sentence, from Alberto Rios’ “Waltz
of the Fat Man,” and make as many new combinations
as you can on one page.
I always write with them. Model the fact that creative
writing is a practice you can commit your life to and
still be mystified. Experiment.
Next make it three dimensional, add sound,
emotion, shape. Find meaning. Make it matter. Choose four
favourite words. Assign a movement to each. Make a three
dimensional poem.
The problem is, it is risky, and tough
to measure, and messy, and unreliable, and impossible to
explain to visitors. And a lot of the time, it looks bleak.
And many of the children look green, like they’ve
been stuck on the Ferris Wheel for too long. And I can
tell that some of them already have language living at
the base of their skull right next to hunger and fear.
But they always find a crack. Someone,
every time, someone dislodges something wonderful with
words. Like the group of students who manipulated the words
of Alberto Rios’ sentence
until it became a monastic chant of consonants and vowels,
interrupted by the gleeful revelation “comma”!
Or the group that made an oral acrostic
of the sentence using colour words associated with their
props. “She,” became “Salmon,
Honey, Evergreen” which they spoke, one after another
as the sighted performer handed a coloured object to the
blindfolded one—who also happened to be feeling
lost and petrified, until she took the blindfold off, and
saw us staring back rapt and delighted, relieved and surprised.
Shit. I feel that seductive pull to write. My senses
are piqued. My memories are vivid. My observations are
lusty and tinged with pink. And then as I sit down in
front of the blank screen, “Your computer may be
at risk” a little bubble warns, and I think, “I
am at risk,” feeling naked, and not seduced but
hog tied and slippery wet with newness.
References
Brautigan, R. (1972). Revenge of the
lawn. New
York: Pocket Books.
Eliot, T.S. (1968). Four quartets.
San Diego: Harvest Books.
Rios, A. (1993). Waltz of the fat man.
In G. Soto (Ed.). Pieces of the heart: New Chicano
fiction. San
Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Stein, G. (2005). On
difference.
Retrieved September 11, 2005 from http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-general.html.
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