Mineral Hall, Hyatt Regency Denver | April 8, 2010

Episode 23: Writing on the Margins: Community Outreach in Shelters and Correctional Facilities

(Christopher Arnold, Ross Carper, Ryan Downey, Nicole Piasecki, Sami Schalk) This panel offers strategies for expanding outreach programs to shelters and correctional facilities. Coordinators from University of Notre Dame, The Denver Writing Project, and Eastern Washington University will speak to the rewards and challenges of working with these traditionally under-served populations, and share procedures for launching similar programs. We share the philosophy that creative writers can affect social change by bringing literature to the margins of our communities.

Published Date: July 20, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Denver on April 8th, 2010. The recording features Christopher Arnold, Ross Carper, Nicole Piasecki, Sammy Schalk and Ryan Downey.

Chris Arnold:

My name is Chris Arnold and I am the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University. Our panel today is called Writing On The Margins: Community Outreach in Shelters and Correctional Facilities. Really, we're all fortunate in this era of so many rapidly expanding MFA programs to have so many schools who are involved across the country in expanding their community outreach programs.

According to the AWP Director's Handbook, one of the hallmarks of a successful creative writing program is "a strong positive presence" in the local community established through deliberate outreach. This outreach is taking place in a number of programs nationwide. And so by no means is this panel alone a representation of all the wonderful work that's being done. Just to include some of the other schools that are doing such great work, programs such as Arizona State University; University of North Carolina, Wilmington; New York University, University of Houston; University of Alabama.

The sorts of programs that we're talking about today are really starting to expand across the nation. And so the wonderful distinguished panelists that we have here today are just a small representation of all the great work that's being done. Essentially, what these programs do is help bring writers closer to their communities, allow writers to make contact with readers and writers in all sorts of varied settings, hospitals, retirement homes, public schools, community centers, and in the case of today's panelists, correctional populations as well as homeless shelters.

Without further ado, I just want to introduce our distinguished panelists today. Ross Carper is the former director of the Writers In The Community program at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers. During his time in the program, he taught in venues as varied as K-12 classrooms, prisons, retirement communities and homeless shelters.

Presently, he works as writer and editor for the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he also teaches writing to college students on science internships and continues to seek out creative writing teaching opportunities in juvenile detention centers.

Nicole Piasecki serves in multiple capacities on the Denver Writing Project's Leadership Board. She works in a grassroots capacity with the homeless community in Denver by attending and subbing for the weekly writer's circle at the Samaritan House Homeless Shelter. She is currently in the process of writing a proposal to get other Denver writing project teachers more involved in the local homeless community. She's a full-time writing instructor at the University of Colorado at Denver, where she teaches undergraduate courses in writing and rhetoric.

Sammy Schalk is an MFA candidate in creative writing and poetry at the University of Notre Dame, class of 2010. She received her bachelor degrees in creative writing and women's studies at Miami University of Ohio. In addition to her writing, Sammy is a feminist activist, a young woman's program faculty member at Women Writing For a Change in Cincinnati, and a co-coordinator and facilitator of community workshops at the South Bend Center for the Homeless and the South Bend Juvenile Correctional Facility. This fall, she'll be attending Indiana University's PhD program in gender studies.

Finally, Ryan Downey is an MFA candidate in creative writing poetry at the University of Notre Dame. He's published an eChat book titled Poems From a News Ticker from Scantily Clad Press and has placed poems in Lamination Colony, [inaudible 00:04:17], Word Riot and elsewhere.

His work has also been nominated for a Pushkart Prize. And in addition to writing, he's also a co-coordinator and facilitator for writing workshops at the South Bend Center for the Homeless and the South Bend Juvenile Correctional Facility. Please join me in welcoming our distinguished panelists today.

And so to set the stage before we get into our conversation today, I just want to set the stage for the discussion we're going to be having by talking a little bit about two populations that are very much on the margins in America and have been for some time.

First of all, our homeless population and in particular our youth homeless population. And so I just want to share a few figures that might illustrate how writers can be involved in making and improving the lives of homeless populations in America. Just to start out with, this may be a little grim, so please stay with us.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, 1.3 million youth are homeless at some point during any given year. On any given day such as today, 200,000 youth are homeless. One third of them have a major diagnosable medical disorder.

This situation of homelessness occurs disproportionately among people of color. And so the issue of homelessness is a complex web that weaves in issues of race, class and mental health as well. We have some questions for each of our panelists today. We'll begin just by asking, they've already begun to do this, but we'll start with Nicole here and maybe you could tell us a little bit about the origins of your program and the mission of your program and who some of who your volunteer writers are as well as who some of the participants are.

Nicole Piasecki:

All right, thanks Chris for setting this up by the way. This is great. All right. My name's Nicole Piasecki, and like Chris said, I'm a full-time instructor at University of Colorado, Denver, a walking distance from here. My initial involvement working in homeless shelters or a homeless shelter in particular started when I was actually working as a writing consultant at the University Writing Center.

At that point, one of our staff members decided she just really got interested in this work and I got lucky to have it fall in my lap, which is now what I'm trying to do for other people, I guess, is trying to generate programs where opportunities to volunteer with writing within the homeless community can fall into people's lap, through me facilitating those.

It started off where we started a writing workshop at a... It's a Section 8 housing facility where all of the residents are formerly homeless. And we just started doing this really grassroots type thing. We made connections with the director of this facility and we started a writing workshop in the basement and we did this every two weeks. We kept getting a really interesting group of writers coming in.

As that started to dwindle, we decided we wanted to do more in the actual homeless community. We connected with the Samaritan House, which is a homeless shelter here in Denver, but it's not any old homeless shelter. It is a transitional housing shelter, which means people really have to follow through certain steps to be able to stay there. The goal is to get everybody from being homeless to getting back out, having a place to live, having an income and all of those things.

What ended up happening is one of the guys from our initial workshop who is formerly homeless himself ended up being the leader and taking over as the primary contact at the Samaritan house, which was really neat.

He's been doing this for over three years now and I come in now and do substitute work for them. I can just drop in on the writing workshop, which I've been doing quite a bit lately, and writing with people. So it's been a really rewarding experience. That's the first half of it.

The second half is I'm trying to get involved with some more experiential learning situations for my own students, service learning type things. Right now, I'm actually in the process of coordinating new workshops at the Samaritan House as well to get more people involved, students, other faculty that I work with, people who are involved in the National Writing Project initiatives and things like that.

There are so many opportunities out there, and what I've found is all you have to do is find somebody who's in charge of one of these facilities and say, "I want to help." And they said, "Tell us how." So that's been my experience.

Ross Carper:

Yeah. So our program, just to give you an idea about what writers in the community is in any given quarter, we have 10 to 20 MFA candidates out in the community teaching in really varied settings from K-12 classrooms, alternative schools, afterschool centers, homeless shelters, teen homeless shelters and then the correctional facilities, juvenile detention centers and then the prison in our area too.

And then the Women's Prison, Pine Lodge, we've had some teaching out there as well. I think I left off retirement communities. Basically anywhere where they want to have someone come in and work with their residents or students or whoever. We try to just match up on a case by case basis. Our graduate students who want to get out there.

The students earn credit, we earn credit for teaching as an internship credit program. It's been going since the early nineties, I believe. People say it was the first of its kind. I don't know if that's really true and who cares really? But yeah, it's a dual purpose. It's like Chris said, to have our MFA program have a really visible service presence in the community.

Meeting a need serving underserved populations with creative writing instruction and partnership. And then the other purpose is to give our MFA students great experience teaching, especially students who don't earn TA shifts and aren't able to be in a classroom all the time, it really equips them with marketable skills in teaching, event coordination, community organization, you name it. You can choose your own adventure with the skills you want to develop through writers in the community.

We just form partnerships with people who want to partner with us and put people in the right place. I know today is focused on shelters and prisons and those have been our most successful.

I don't know how you measure that, but some of our most vital connections is Brandon and I both taught for over a year each at a Crosswalk, which is a Volunteers of America teen homeless shelter in downtown Spokane. We've had students teach for two years, for four years, if they're doing their MFA on and off in the prison, the Airway Heights Correction Center close to our program.

Those have been some of our best settings and out of that has grown great stuff and we publish a book every year. We put on big poetry slams. This is called Inroads, and it's a book of the year's best writing by our writers and the community students. And it's just really fun for them to get their work in print, work with an editor, do all those things. And that's a big project. We partner with the Get Lit Writing Festival in Spokane as well. So I'm going to quit talking now, but that's what we do.

Sammy Schalk:

Our two programs are pretty different. Ryan and I co-coordinate both of them, but they're fairly different. At the Center for the Homeless, our workshops are weekly and the participation really varies. The residents are... Some of them stay longer, some of them are in and out. And our volunteers for that are our peers in the MFA program who are here, our volunteers, and we take turns each week, different people leading different exercises.

And so it's very flexible on who attends, who doesn't attend, whereas the correctional facility is a little more structured because of the facility setting. Our volunteers are myself and Ryan and one other student because you have to commit to that time and go through all the volunteer processes. Our students, the way that we have gotten our students at this point is that they were recommended by either a teacher, a counselor, someone else in the facility as someone who has interest in writing, who has high behavioral levels and then is also someone who will be there for...

We do 10 to 12 weeks. And so someone who will be there for the bulk of that to try to keep a little more consistency. Currently, the young men in the facility are 15 and 16-year-olds, but when we started, the facility housed 12 to 18-year-olds. We had a much larger age group, but right now it's just 15 and 16-year-old young men.

Chris Arnold:

So maybe now each of you could share about some of your program's most successful activities, either events that you have or individual exercises that you may go through with your participants.

Nicole Piasecki:

One of the things that I started thinking about when you were talking about the 10 to 12 week sessions is at the Samaritan House, you can't ever guarantee that you're going to see someone again. So you have a limited ability or limited timeframe to work with someone. And it's generally one hour once a week, and like I said, you may never see that person ever again. You may see that person every week or every couple of weeks for up to four months. You just never know. That's the maximum amount of time they can stay is four months. What we tend to do at the Samaritan House, which works I think very well, is we keep it really simple and we hand out a little worksheet each week with just some really fun writing prompts on them.

Usually, maybe the first half of a simile with a line that's basically fill in the blank. Another one that we've done is we'll put the last letter of a word and they have to come up with the word that ends with that last letter. And then after they come up with those five words, like one that ends in X and one that ends in K and one that ends in B, they end up having to just go in and write a story using all of those words. It really gives them an opportunity to decide how much personal information they want to disclose and how much information... They just want to have a good time, which is usually what happens. People write funny stories. We laugh a lot, these prompts that you'd start off with thinking, "Oh, what's going to come of this?"

Even as someone who considers herself a writer, I walk away from those workshops having written some stuff a lot of the time and I'm like, "Wow, where did that come from?" And the same thing with some of the people at the table. So I think in my setting, in the once a week type of situation at a really transitional situation, especially where literacy levels are, and I'm sure everyone has something to say about that, but literacy levels are...

There's such a wide range. Keeping it really simple and giving people opportunities to just be creative. And then the way that we always structure it is we sit around a boardroom table and what happens is each person, we write on these prompts and then we just go around the table and we share. The sharing piece is really important. We don't necessarily say, "Oh, you have an option to share." Even though if somebody says, "I don't really want to." We say, "Okay. That's your one time to get out of it." It's a joke and then we keep going.

And so people know when they come to the writer's circle that they're going to be sharing the work that they've written. I think it gives a sense of social recognition. One of my graduate professors said at one point, "Social recognition leads to self-confidence." I think in a sense, that's really one of the things that's happening. Through this laughter, community building is happening and through this social recognition of, "Oh my gosh! That was really good." People get excited. And then the word at the Samaritan House is, "Hey, we're telling everyone about this. This writing workshop is so fun."

It just starts with a half sheet of paper with maybe some fill in the blanks on it, and then we go from there. That's generally how we run it every single week, but it's always different worksheet, different people, but always a really good time, a lot of laughter.

Ross Carper:

That sounds great. Yeah, going off of what Nicole said, I mentioned some of our big event oriented stuff, partnering with the Get Lip Festival. We put on a youth poetry slam, a teen poetry slam, and then we put out Inroads. That's a huge process. We have a big Inroads release party. It's this packed out coffee shop reading, and we have monthly readings. Brandon's calling them this year, The Broken Open Mic. So that's one of our big...

It's a partnership with the Spokane Poetry Slam, which already has a great thing going on. But we spread it out to all kinds of creative writing. So it's not only slam poetry that we focus on all the time. But aside from the events and things like that, just as Nicole was saying, just on a week to week basis, the most successful thing we do is get out in the community and in places like prisons and homeless shelters, a lot of those people aren't going to be the people that for one reason or another show up at our events, whether they're confined or whether they're just in fluxed in a lot of ways.

Our most successful thing is just getting the right person in the right place and just to make it on a practical level, what we do is since we are receiving credit for this, when we go out, you have to really... You can't just go out and say, "Hey, we're going to do something today," And have open season on free write. We can be lazy. So we tend to want to do that, but it goes better if we have a formal lesson plan.

Just to get real practical here, we make our interns write a lesson plan, goals, objective procedures. And then the best thing is on the very bottom here, after you go out and have your visit for the week or twice a week or whatever it is, you sit down and you write how it went. Did this actually work? Which parts of it worked? Why? Is there a cool story of how a student really connected with the craft element that you were trying to teach or the poem that you brought or did they perform. At Crosswalk every week we would have some time to write something, whether it's two lines, we would perform our work every single week, and it just became a tradition around the table.

And then these just live in a binder where no matter what setting you're in, what place you're teaching at, you can go and look at these resources where every time we're out in the community, we're taking a snapshot of what we're doing and trying to improve what we're doing by saying how that went.

You can learn from people's funny stories and mistakes about when they brought a poem that was completely irrelevant to the crew that was involved that day. Just being out there every week is our most successful thing.

Ryan Downey:

Thanks for coming again. I think something that's come up that's interesting is when we're saying what are some of these programs most successful activities and events, the question of how to measure has come up already. So how to devise a metrics for something that's largely immeasurable.

We can't really lay down statistics or numbers. Just say, "This is the..." Okay, I'll start with our events. We have a reading for the center of the homeless at the end of each year where we curate an anthology, we collect work as the residents are ready to submit it, and we have a reading at the end of the year where they come to the Notre Dame campus to try to facilitate better town and gown relationship, but also try to facilitate better relationship between us as the student facilitators and our participants and let them know when you come to this university and read your poems, it's no different than when we read our poems here. This is a space where all of this is useful and all of this is what we're about.

We don't always have the greatest attendance. I think last time we only had three or four of our residents that came because it can be... It's hit or miss the attendance in the first place, but it can be even spottier when you ask the residents to come onto a campus like that for something that's intimidating.

If we had a standard metrics where we said, "Only three or four people came, this isn't a successful event," we could work that way. But I think what's important is that the people that do come and this translates to the correctional facility as well, the people that do come, whether it's one person that week or 25 people, we have people that this does make an impact in terms of how they see their own ability to put words on paper or out in the community or express themselves to their peers, to us, to their families, to whomever.

I think that's how we measure success. Those events, they're all successful in that respect. At the correctional facility, we also curate an anthology every year where we collect the boys' notebooks, we give them notebooks up front and they write their poems in it every week, and then they submit them, they mark whichever ones they want us to type up.

We type them up, collect them, and then we distribute them at the end of a year party. There's a sheet cake and there's Kool-Aid. It ain't much, but it's delicious sheet cake and it's delicious Kool-Aid and they're both loaded with sugar and they start bouncing off the walls by the time we leave them and usually get sick afterwards. But it's a good time where we distribute this anthology and we sign each other these things. It's like a yearbook almost. It's like we graduated, this is something positive we did together this year. We sign it, they sign ours and it's a good communion type experience.

That's one of the most successful events. On the week to week level, what's successful? Well, I think at the Center for the Homeless, what's successful is drawing a fine line between allowing them to be able to express their own preoccupations with what's happening with their family or their addiction or their personal history, but not allowing it to move too easily into just strict personal journaling.

We set up a prompt such that they can write about what it is that most interests them, but we don't want it just to be a confessional mode. We want them to start seeing the craft of what they're doing and thinking of their words as being able to shape to these different forms what it is that they've experienced. I think that's what creative writing does for these populations, and that's what we try to do.

In that respect, we try to make the prompts delineated enough, but not too restrictive. That's very vague, but I'm sure you can understand what I'm saying there. In terms of the correctional facility, the way that we've had successful classes is that we have, like you were just showing, we have an agenda upfront and we make it structured because the young men need structure.

We have them read four or five poems that I think work around a theme. We're trying to talk about family, mothers being incarcerated as a subject they really actually love to write about, which we were hesitant to approach at first. And then we all write together and then we all share, but there is an option to pass. Otherwise, I think we might have less success because these boys sometimes want to withhold in the right things that they might not have written had they thought they were going to share. And part of the sharing process that makes it also more successful is that we do a thing called a read around, whereas each person is reading their work, you write down lines that might've struck you, words, fragments, maybe a whole paragraph, if you can write that quickly while someone's talking.

And then at the end in a freeform organic thing, we all say back the lines of the other people that resonated with us and this way they hear their words coming from someone else. They know they were heard, which is something that these boys don't always know and we know we're heard. Everyone gets this good feeling of this was a community endeavor and I'm appreciated and there's no applause and there's no cheering for anyone, boy, which could lead to feelings of isolation, which is something we don't want.

That's how we maintain successful class dynamics.

Sammy Schalk:

You mentioned those are all women writing.

Ryan Downey:

And those are principles that are taken from Women Writing For a Change, which is the program that Sammy has been affiliated with in Cincinnati. And so afterwards, if you're interested in these practices, you can come talk to us about that plug.

Chris Arnold:

Well, one thing that I just want to point out is, and this goes back to what Nicole was talking about, about the importance of social recognition and you'll notice this recurring theme of publication and sharing and community building that is so important.

Going back to what Ryan was talking about about metrics, for some of you who may be working in a department or a situation where you are asked to prove the importance of your program through quantifiable means, I would just recommend that if you're ever asked to demonstrate the vitality of your program and in a situation where you might not have quantitative proof of that, I would just recommend that you invite that administrator or that person to witness the event or the workshop for themselves.

Because I think that anyone who's witnessed some of these events firsthand, it's really hard to deny the power and the value of that afterwards. And so I think Ryan said it best that whether you have metrics or not, all of these programs can be really successful. Although they might always make it, they always might not seem that way just on a numeric or a quantitative basis if we look at things like attendance and so forth. I'm wondering though, and we've touched on some of the difficult experiences that some of these populations have gone through, and what training do you offer for your volunteers so that they feel prepared to be successful in these situations? And I like that we've talked about the idea of having concrete lesson plans beforehand, but what other sorts of training do you offer for your volunteers?

Nicole Piasecki:

Well, as I mentioned, our program at this point is really small, really grassroots. But as the program that I'm working on developing right now is coming together very rapidly through connecting with program directors, it seems that from a service learning standpoint, I'm going to be doing a lot when I develop the curriculum for my students to go out and do this work, my actual undergraduate college students to do this.

Mainly just the idea of being qualified to teach or facilitate in general and to have an open mind and not necessarily feel the need to be in control. I think just practicing the art of facilitation is absolutely key. And then in addition to the material, the course I'm developing is related to business writing, so we'll be learning how to do resumes and cover letters and all of those kinds of things in class.

And then the students will be going out and then applying those skills to help people at the Samaritan House actually apply those skills to their own job application materials. In that context, there will be quite a bit of training as far as both content and facilitation. As far as other people who are getting on board with this initiative, most of them have experienced facilitating workshops. Their instructors themselves are very serious writers, so I really don't necessarily know that they're all adults and we're working with adults as well.

I don't necessarily foresee any really large training curve or learning curve other than observing the workshop and seeing how it works. And then again, deciding how to develop their own lesson plans based on the needs of that particular unique group of people

Ross Carper:

As far as recruiting, training, getting people ready to go in our program, it is part of our MFA program and it's an option for people to take internship credits with writers in the community.

The director, who is a second year MFA student, it's like a GSA position assistantship, that person is encouraged to pretty heavily recruit the incoming MFA crowd and try to retain the folks that were involved the year before. The way that we do this training, recruiting, getting people out there so that we don't waste the first two weeks of a 10-week quarter, which is the system that we're on.

My only direction, if you're doing a program like this in an MFA program is don't start with a four-hour orientation in your meeting lounge. Get people out there because if they concretely see... It's like good writing. You have to have the concrete details and really to feel the setting of what's going on.

If people understand, if you organize before classes begin, some afterschool program with at-risk youth, it's not hard to do an afterschool poetry day at a youth center or something that you already have a relationship with or to develop one the week prior to that and just get people out there. And then as far as training in big groups, our program is so varied that it would be like giving a book report on a choose your own adventure book to try to bring everyone together and train.

Brandon's liking it to language learning. You have to immerse yourself. It's really key to just have people who are involved at the setting that you want to teach in. The prior year, go with the person, team teach and have some good overlap and just have the director, if they've taught in that setting, be really involved on a one-on-one basis on how you can make a plan, make some lessons, but also the first time you go, you should team teach or watch someone else teach. That's how it goes.

Ryan Downey:

At the Center for the Homeless, I think getting people out there is an interesting thing and I think that's the right way and that's the way we go about it. Something I didn't mention before is at the Center for Homeless, we do rotate facilitators, but it doesn't mean they're the only person that come and then they just teach to the resident population there where you can sometimes have five, six, seven MFA students there riding along with the residents and just one of them is leading the prompt for that week.

So we might have five residents, five MFA students and then one leading the prompt. So we all write together, we all share together in a freeform way. Once people have attended a couple of the weekly workshops for the Center for the Homeless, then we start asking them, "Would you be interested? Do you have a prompt in mind having seen what we do?" Usually if they're newer as the coordinators, we take it as our role to vet the prompts of the newer people. So they might say, "I want to do this prompt." We've had an example where it was one of our students wanted to write...

He wanted to have the prompt be like, "Write the worst story. Write a bad story on purpose, try to write something bad." Just because he wanted to show that there couldn't be a bad story, there'd be something intrinsically good and all things. I didn't catch it right away. When I told Sammy about this, Sammy pointed out that we don't even want to set up the notion that there could ever be something we designate as a bad story. So that's something that had we taken in and said, "Write a bad story." You might have people that say, "I always write bad stories." Or felt bad about even that idea.

It's just simple things that you have to think about in terms of approving whether something will work or not. Also, whether they're very complicated or simple or not, we have different levels of difficulty that we try at different times. For the juvenile correctional facility, we bringing a new person to pass on the program as we leave because we are leaving. And so we want him to keep facilitating. So what we do is we had someone that we've gauged throughout the beginning, early time meeting him, could be someone that was compassionate enough or someone that was invested enough in this to show up weekly and to not bail on our students.

Once we got him through his paperwork and so forth, he attended two or three classes with us before we said, "Hey, are you ready to try to write your first agenda?" And we gave him example agendas for different themes that we've done and we worked to work on the finer points of that. So that's maybe my long-winded way of saying some very simple things, which is if you have experience, help the people that are inexperienced and everything will be fine.

Nicole Piasecki:

I have a question for you guys actually, for everybody else on the panel, are your students required to go through the volunteer training of the actual facility itself that you're working in and how grueling is that process?

Ross Carper:

That's why I said not to do a four-hour orientation because especially at the shelters, not so much Crosswalk, but definitely at the correctional facilities, you're probably going to have something like that. So as far as getting them acquainted with the culture of the place, who knows how good those orientations are, but they do have them. And yes, everyone has to go. If the facility requires it, as a volunteer, you have to go through those processes.

Sammy Schalk:

With the Center for the Homeless, anybody can show up. You just sign your name to the visitor log and that's about it. But with the correctional facility, especially because we're working with youth, there's fingerprinting, background check, all those things. We actually can't just let someone sit in on one class to see if they want to do it because even to get in as a volunteer, they have to go through that.

When Ryan said we're gauging them, it is because you have to go through all the background checks and stuff by the time you go through that and sit through, if you decide you don't want to do, it's a lot more process for us to find someone else. So it's little more work on our part to decide who to bring in. But I think we made a good choice. Hopefully it'll keep going.

Nicole Piasecki:

Yeah, the same is true with my work. Unfortunately, they only offer the volunteer training once a month, so it's really hard to get people in there. I've tried to get them to forego that if I'm the supervisor when I bring in students or bring in other people, and they've said maybe one time for that sit in just to see.

But aside from that, everyone has to go through that training. They have to go through... Actually, it's through Catholic Charities, so they have to go through an orientation, they have to go through another Catholic Charities type of program, that's a couple of hours. And then they also have to get a TB test and results and fingerprints and all of that because there are families with children living at this facility. It does definitely create a little bump in the road, but if people are really committed to doing this work, then they'll be willing to go through those processes.

Chris Arnold:

Thinking about the steps that people have to go through to become involved. And back to this idea of recruitment among your volunteers. I'm wondering when you're speaking to people who, as those of you who are in MFA programs know who have quite a few of their own responsibilities, be it teaching or their writing or their family and home life and so forth, how do you compel somebody to take that step and really commit to doing that, if it may require them doing a background check and fingerprinting and so many of these things that may seem like obstacles or excuses not to do it.

What do you say to someone who's on the line. The person who might say, "Oh yeah. That sounds really interesting, get back to me next week." And next week turns into next semester and next year and so forth. So what are some of the ways that you compel people to really commit?

Nicole Piasecki:

It's actually a really great question. I think we all probably come in contact with that question, just trying to get people involved. I think when you're getting actual MFA credit for doing it might be a little easier to keep people involved.

In my situation really, I mean, I'm never getting paid for this. I'm never getting credit for this. It's just something that I really want to do. What I continue to do is I just keep telling people in my department, everyone that I meet, I tell them what an impact this has had on my own life and how even though it just fell into my lap, it ended up being what I can see as a lifelong commitment to doing this as a volunteer.

Just asking people, "Give me two hours of your time, just go through this training. That way you'll be prepared. If you ever do want to do it, you'll have everything in place. I'll go with you. All of these kinds of things." And they don't have to actually make a commitment. And I think that's the hardest thing for all of us who have busy lives. The creative writing workshop that I'm going to be starting up in the next few weeks at the Samaritan House, I'm just trying to tell people this workshop is twice a month. I'm going to go each time.

Anyone who's interested is welcome to get their volunteer credentials and to just come along and observe. I've had a lot of people interested in just seeing what it's all about. I think people are genuinely... People I know that I work with are genuinely curious about what it's like to go out there and be in the community and be writing and to be making these connections and friendships with people that maybe we don't come in contact with every single day. I just continue to try to tell my own story as much as possible, which is another reason why I'm here.

Ross Carper:

I just think you have to tell the stories of what's gone on in these places. Just try to... Don't just throw them the opportunity and say, "You need this professional experience to teach. You need to do community service so that you're not just self-focused while you're working on your thesis and all this stuff."

All those things are totally true. But in Inroads, for example, we have these little letters to students. Before the section for Crosswalk for example, the teacher that worked with these students and got these submissions and helped them bring these poems along or stories, they write a little letter. Just having little snapshots available that shows the relational aspect of what has gone on really helps. I'll just read one of these.

"The students at Crosswalk are energetic, insightful, and unapologetic learners and writers. They're sharp listeners and storytellers whose ferocity for living and creating things was an invaluable contribution to my experience as a teacher." Molina Rudder. And so we would put Molina in touch with a person that's thinking on the line about Crosswalk and Molina would have a great conversation over coffee with that person about Jennifer, the person who they never thought they would get to say one word around the writing table. She ended up creating this art project or just some crazy story because it happens.

I could just go through and read these things. But just getting that tradition of what has gone before you to show the real relationship that you'll gain from putting yourself out there in a way that most writers maybe don't.

Sammy Schalk:

Yeah, I think just echoing that, telling the stories of our students is really important, showing how it impacts them. Also for us, I mean I know for Ryan and I both also have part-time jobs while we're doing this and going to school. And sometimes it's the only chance we get to write during the week.

So it guarantees you, it forces you because we write with our students, it forces you to have that writing time. I think that can be beneficial. I think for the Center for the Homeless, at least for us because it is open, you don't have to volunteer. We can tell our peers that show up once, show up twice, whatever you can do. We don't ask them to commit to anything other than if they say they're going to lead the work for that week than to show up for that week.

With the correctional facility, it is a little more difficult. I think with the person that we found to take over it, Ryan and I both just feel a connection, I think, with our students and with the situations that they come from that get them into this space. There are certain people I think, that have those connections that are more inclined to do that. For us it was more finding someone that we thought had his own history that would connect with that. I don't know if that's your feeling as well.

Ryan Downey:

Yeah, that's generally my feeling. It's an interesting question and it's one that you wrestle with if you're trying to do this work but I don't think you can instill that kind of commitment or that desire to spend your time doing this in anyone. And I'm not sure it's a worthwhile pursuit for me most of the time to try to convince anyone at the Center for Homeless, it's good.

People can come in and experience it on a smaller basis and maybe they'll build to wanting to do more long-term work one day. But you find the person that has either that compassion or... You can't give anyone any time they don't have either. We can't give time back to anyone. I can promise any time or anything like that, but I can promise it's a use of your time that might be inadequate or better than adequate substitute for a lot of the things we use our time on. That's all I have.

Sammy Schalk:

Just another thing, I think it would be... Our program does not give credit for this. We get nothing. We get a little bit, we have a separate organization at Notre Dame that gave us some funding to print, but other than that, so I think if our program had the ability or develop the desire to give us credit for this thing, it might be easier to recruit students just because there would be more consistency. But I mean, we don't know when we leave in May, how much longer these things will last. And that is something that when it's student-led and purely student-led, that's a danger in it, but we hope that it will continue with the roots that we've put down.

Chris Arnold:

So that brings up the really interesting point of transition in these programs and in so many capacities if being run through graduate programs, there's a sense of transition every two years or every three years. What are some of the ways, and Ross, you're probably an ideal person to speak to this, how does that handoff work in such a way that you feel confident going forward that those roots that have been established aren't going to disappear?

Ryan Downey:

We really focus on really pouring into the partnerships that have bore the most fruit, I guess. There's certain schools and especially Crosswalk and Airway Heights Correction Center, we absolutely fill the holes so that there isn't a break between WITC interns. You do have to work with the volunteer coordinator, the activities coordinator, the teacher. Just find your all-star in those organizations that are going to tell their staff that hey, we need to keep this going and then try to do a good job of...

Like when Brandon was taking my position, he wasn't just a new person for the people at the schools and places that have really been the most beneficial on both sides. I don't know. Yeah, we're very lucky to be able to offer credit for this. I don't know. That's an unrelated point, but I just developing long-term partnerships, you can do that when it's something that the university stands behind as we don't have a huge budget. It's one assistantship and then $1,000 to print these books for the whole year. The assistantship is obviously the huge financial thing.

But sharing some of those stories with your dean as something or whoever, the powers that be are can bear a lot of fruit. I don't know. I respect you guys a lot for being out there and probably a lot of you are doing some of this as well. And so I just want to encourage you to keep those partnerships with people, with organizations that are already doing great things in your community and that will help your program survive so that you're not always reinventing the wheel.

Chris Arnold:

Especially as many of us might know, some of our universities might not have the resources that they did two or three years ago. I think it is important to emphasize that really in terms of material funds and so forth, it can really be an inexpensive endeavor to put an anthology like this together. And sometimes when you try to share that with people at the administrative level, perhaps they might imagine...

The figure that comes to mind when they imagine a program like these might be much larger than it is in reality. Again, just if it's something that you're trying to find support or funding for, asking more than once, being persistent, inviting people to the events themselves when possible. I think those are all great ideas. I want to make sure that we have a chance to take questions from the audience.

And so we'll try and just first of all, just to get a sense of who's here, how many of you are already doing work like this in your programs? How many are trying to start something like this? Okay, good. So we've got a mix. Any questions from the audience? We'd love to... We'll start on the left and we'll wave from left to right. My left, I suppose. There you go.

That's a great question. To repeat the question is, in preparing a printed anthology, given the different literacy levels among the participants, how do you approach copy editing, editing and so forth?

Nicole Piasecki:

For us, with the correctional facility, we type up their work for the most part, we leave it as is, especially because they use a lot of slang and word processors going to tell you that it's wrong. But we know what it's saying. We really only change things if there's something dramatic that alters your comprehension of what's being said. But we also then give them copies before we print it so they can say, "No, I want this like this."

Or some of them will say, "Is this spelled right?" And then we'll let them have that opportunity. With the Center for the Homeless though, they have access to computers and a lot of them will type it up already, so we leave it as they give it to us. Even we had a man last year that gave us all of his poems included clip art, so we included clip art in our anthology. It was pretty cool.

Ross Carper:

For Inroads, it's a first year MFA student who is the managing editor of Inroads. That process is owned by that person as far as they'll run an editorial board that includes the teachers who are out in these places and they go over the submissions.

In the same way, if a punctuation error seems like an intentional part of what a person's doing with a poem or something, then of course you leave it because it's part of what... It's a part of their craft. In a lot of cases, you can tell that it's not and the teacher has a relationship with a student and they know that the student won't be disappointed if we do something. But it's a hard thing. It's a sensitive thing when people turn something in and they haven't ever worked with editors or anything like that.

If you have a hundred or 120 works that you're going to publish, you don't necessarily have time to go back and forth with people if you're trying to run your normal classes and do all that stuff. There's been probably one or two times, to be totally honest, where a high school student that was mad about an edit, but we were able to relationally work that out. It wasn't where we were changing content, it was just...

But you have to be very sensitive and let whoever's owning the project see where they're going to draw the line and see what the editorial board thinks of it. If those people have relationships with the students, they'll know if it's going to bother them or if the students will even remember or things like that.

Chris Arnold:

Other questions, right here in the middle. Okay. So the question is, how do you work with participants who might have different desires or ability levels as opposed to just being there to write or genuinely trying to improve their craft, so to speak?

Ryan Downey:

We run a creative writing class and so we're not as... We have students actually that come in because they're trying to get their GED in the correctional facility and they want to learn how to improve their essay style or just their overall literacy.

I think by giving them poems to read, reading with them and just writing every week, whether or not we enforce corrective measures on anything, I think just they become more familiar with language. It facilitates their use of it just through practice. We don't really aim any specific efforts at our students that are writing more for just the pure experience of expressing themselves and those that have higher goals because in the correctional facility, they attend school high school every day, and they do have people that do work with them specifically on their writing.

We do exist primarily more as just an extracurricular outlet, but I do think it's a valid point. And we have had highly divergent types of levels of literacy and writing. And I think the most important thing is for those that are at the lower level, that you don't let them feel boxed out by the other people that are presenting or you don't let people make fun is a silly way to say it, but you don't let people call them out and that you say you try to create the equilibrium in the class and check that. That's all we really know how to do.

Sammy Schalk:

We also have not as much at Center for the Homeless, but definitely at the correctional facility. We like our students, so we tell them, "If you want to talk to us after class, we'll stay and we hang out." And sometimes they do want feedback, feedback, feedback. We had a student who had written a, god, like 200-300 page teen Sci-Fi novel, like handwritten and that was a little bit overwhelming because we're both poets and we don't know what this is.

But sometimes it's also just, "Will you read this poem that I didn't feel comfortable reading in class?" And they just want us to say, "That's really great. I would like to hear more about that." So we do open up that feedback, not really criticism, but if students want a little bit more than what we do with the Read Back Alliance, we do just hang around after class.

Some of them will stay and ask us to read stuff, and that's where we can do a little bit more. But I do think just by exposing them to variety, like Ryan said, we have on each agenda anywhere from I'd say four to six poems and we try to get a lot of styles. And sometimes styles that are challenging for them, but it lets them see what the options are. Even that, I think lets them say, because a lot of our students in the first week will say, "This doesn't rhyme." Why is this a poem? And even just that step is something for them to realize what else is out there.

I think that is useful for writing to be exposed to things that are different from what you're doing right now.

Ross Carper:

Yeah. All I can add is that it's a total challenge because especially if you're working with adolescents, some of them will not really want to become great writers. But they might get something. I think, Ryan, you were mentioning, they might want to just write about one thing one time and it feels like they're expressing something and that's great.

As you get into those communities and those classrooms, you can gauge who the students are that you can challenge a little bit more. I would always position myself as... I revise all the time. I come up with really crappy first drafts. We want to make writing accessible, but we want to emphasize that if you want to take it seriously, you can go down that rabbit hole a little more than just put someone on a page, perform it and you're done. That's not what creative writing really is.

That's one aspect and it can be, but yeah, look for opportunities and present opportunities and say, "Hey, would you want me to take you home or take that..." Not take you home. Whoa! Whoa! "Would you want me to take your poem home and mark it up like I would mark my own up? Or should I just call out some of the lines that I like the best? What would be the best way to give you feedback?" Gosh, that was sketchy. All right.

Chris Arnold:

The great question. The question being then, for those organizations who aren't affiliated with MFA programs, how can perhaps programs better facilitate those relationships with MFA students so that they are relating with the participants in a more productive way and not necessarily expecting every student to want to become the next great American novelist or something?

Sammy Schalk:

Well, Ryan and I, the way we came across the correctional facility was actually because a couple of years before we got to Notre Dame, there were students who did it and we got this binder they left behind and they actually set it up as a classroom. They got homework, they had punishment if they didn't get their homework, they kicked kids out of the class. And we were like, "Whoa!"

Other than using the contact to find the educational director, we use nothing that they had done. I do think that... In MFA program, we're used to workshopping and sometimes we're in workshops that we're supposed to tear each other apart, which is not what I like to do but that's what some people want us to do.

I think part of it is for me, concentrating on content. It doesn't matter how poorly it's written, if someone's writing about their father that left them or being raised by their grandmother, that's powerful. I don't know. For me, it's asking people to concentrate more on getting content out of someone and getting them to just tell a story however they can tell it is important. But I don't know. For me, it's a personality thing too.

Ross Carper:

Just a two-second thing is always build some checkups into your program or whatever, accountability. If you're team teaching, you can call someone out if they're just being weird or being irrelevant to the setting, that as a colleague, you do have to tell people and we make it clear that we call the teachers that they're teaching, we call the volunteer coordinators, call the teachers who are there when they're teaching and ask them how it's going. We get good feedback and we go from there. And if people are bringing stuff that's way students' heads or not being able to facilitate in a way, or just being way too traditional with the way they set up their classroom, then we can try to work through those issues.

Sammy Schalk:

I think also we check in before every class and afterwards. Also, because we ask our students to write on index cards, the good thing about the day and the bad thing about the day, just so we can see how they're feeling.

That is a good space. If you check up before and after every class, it corrects little things before they turn into big things. One of the examples that we had thought about mentioning is that one of our peers that led with us in the previous year in one of our classes said, "We're going to write about people, but you can't write about anyone who lives here."

One of our students said, "Nobody lives here." And later on in the class, she still said, "But remember, not about anyone who lives here." And so after class we had to say, "Did you hear what they were saying?" "No one lives here. They're here and they stay here, but they don't live here. This is not their home."

And so little things like that that if you can catch it early and have a good enough relationship with your co-facilitator or co-teacher to say those things because that's not a comfortable thing to say. Or if you call someone by the wrong name to correct them, but I think that can help catch it, nip it in the bud quickly, does that make sense? To check in every single class?

Chris Arnold:

It sounds like a combination of communication and feedback, both.

Chris Arnold:

I suppose there was another question from the woman right behind Victoria there? The question is then looking at some first steps for trying to get a program like this started.

Nicole Piasecki:

I can't necessarily speak to the MFA program part of it, even though I am affiliated with the university. I think that the most important thing and our experiential learning center on campus would say the same thing is to not go in and say like, "Oh, I'm with the university and we want to come in and we want this program."

Because in that sense, it feels intrusive. What we've tried to do with starting these programs and creating networks with different facilities and different types of programs is to come in and say, "Hey, I really want to help. And what is it that you need? What are you already doing?" They gave me a schedule at the Samaritan House, for example, of all of the different classes that they offer.

I went in to meet one-on-one with the director and I just said, "I need to know what your needs are, first and foremost." So it makes it more about them and in a sense, I think makes them really wide open to saying, "Oh, these people really want to help."

If you come in already with this idea of I want to have a creative writing workshop this many times a week, and this is how I see it running, I think sometimes people can be a little bit more resistant to that. So I think you just have to be really flexible with what you're willing to offer. It may even be coming in with a more specific question of what are your needs at this facility in regards to literacy?

What are you already doing in relation to literacy? Can we add something to that program? How would you see that playing out? And then going from there, so that it's really their idea and you're fulfilling some need that they have.

Sammy Schalk:

I'd also say you can take an arts angle and not just literacy. We're considered an arts program at the correctional facility. We're considered literacy and education at Center for Homeless. We do similar things, but a lot of places right now don't have arts programs.

If you are going in as a volunteer and you're not asking them to give you any money, you're just saying, "I'm going to do this." They're looking for arts. We are the only arts program in our correctional facility. When we went in, they were like, "Do you know anyone who plays the flute who wants to come do painting?" And we were like, "We don't know." But they really want arts programs that just so much has been cut out. I think people don't always think about writing as art, but it is. You can sometimes use that angle as something different that you're offering as well.

Ross Carper:

Yeah. I agree with everything, especially getting yourself out there because returning phone calls of the person who wants to add to the program when someone's already so busy with volunteer coordinating, activities coordinating, teaching, get out there and say, "Hey, see if you can meet with them one-on-one so that it's not just a phone tag thing." But other than that, I agree with, with everything. Take the arts angle, take the technology angle and what can we add to what you're already doing to help people?

Chris Arnold:

One thing that I'd like to add is to also just explore what other partnerships might already exist on your campus, be it through the School of Education, criminal justice program, a public administration program. Oftentimes, there may be partnerships that have already been forged, and it may be helpful for you to help find a bridge through another program on your campus that might help facilitate getting things started more quickly. I have a sense that there's much more to talk about, and thankfully there are more and more each year of these sorts of panels taking place here at AWP.

I just want to encourage you all to continue the discussion and the dialogue beyond this afternoon. And again, thank you and for staying here through our shaky takeoff. Please also just give one more warm thank you to our wonderful panelists today.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website at www.awpwriter.org.

 


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