(Fred Arroyo, Hayan Charara, Nan Cuba, Ellen Meeropol, Achy Obejas) Creative writing students compelled to write about social justice may be intimated by the challenges of shaping art, craft, and social forces in their writing. How do teachers encourage students to explore political inequality and injustice, while crafting narrative art? Panelists discuss specific pedagogical approaches and techniques that both respect students' backgrounds and beliefs and encourage their exploration, examination, and literary engagement with our complex world.

Published Date: July 20, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Fred Arroyo, Anne Rora, Nan Cuba, Ellen Mi, and AKI Obejas. You'll now hear NAND Cuba provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Welcome to our panel Creative Writing and Resistance in the Classroom Teaching Social Justice Speaking. On behalf of my impressive colleagues and presenters, we thank you for coming. I really appreciate it and this has got to be the largest room I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (00:00:56):

If you're comfortable, it might be wise to maybe move. This is the school teacher in me, move closer up to the panel. My name is Nan Cuba and I am very grateful to you and also to the A W P Committee for hosting this amazing conference and for allowing us to share what we would like to talk to you about regarding social justice. In preparing for today's presentation, we decided that what we wanted to give you as a context was to say that our interest is in encouraging our students to write about serious world issues and then to try to find techniques and ways to show them how to accomplish that. So that's the context for all of the presentations, but I would like to introduce our panel members now and then they will each come up on their own to make their presentations. So first sitting here to my right is Achi Beja.

Speaker 2 (00:02:02):

She is the author of the acclaimed novels Ruins, days of Awe, and three other books of fiction. She has translated works from English and Spanish by Juno Diaz, Wendy Ra, FG Hagenbeck, Eduardo Hoffen, and many others. She is currently the distinguished visiting writer at Mills College in Oakland. Now I'm going to give you the context for the teaching of each of our presenters. She's currently the distinguished visiting writer and co-director of M F A in translation at Mills College in Oakland. She teaches graduate and undergraduate workshops and graduate craft courses and translation. She has a very strong focus on craft and gives a lot of time to strategies for representing the diverse multicultural world in which most of us live and I'll be the second presenter. Again, I'm Nan Cuba. I have published a novel body and bread and co-edited an anthology called Art at our Doorstep.

Speaker 2 (00:03:09):

I am the founder of a nonprofit literary art center called Gemini Inc in San Antonio, and I am the writer in residence for the MA M F A program in Creative Writing Literature and Social justice at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. The next presenter is Ellen Mepo. She teaches fiction workshops in non-academic community settings, libraries and bookstores, community literary art centers and nonprofit organizations. Her students range from octogenarians to adolescents whose parents have been targeted and harmed for their progressive political activism. Here is her bio. She's the author of two novels on Hurricane Island and house arrest and the Dramatic program Carry it Forward. Her short story and essay publications include the Writer's Chronicle Bridges, the Cleaver Rumpus, and Portland Magazine. She is a founder of Straw Dog Writers Guild. The next presenter is Fred Arroyo. He has taught at several universities, St.

Speaker 2 (00:04:21):

Louis University, Drake University, the University of South Dakota, mostly undergraduate and graduate fiction and creative nonfiction courses and workshops. He's serving for the second time as a fiction mentor in AWPs writer to writer mentorship program. His presentation today is meant for undergraduates and his official bio. He's the author of Western Avenue and Other fictions and the Region of Lost Names, a novel, a recipient of an individual artist grant from the Indiana Arts Commission. Fred is completing a book of lyrical and astic essays and is at work on a novel set primarily in the Caribbean. To my far left is Hayan Ra Hayan teaches two courses in the Honors college at the University of Houston, a year long course called The Human Situation, which focuses on texts from antiquity in the fall and texts from modernity in the spring. The course is divided into lecture and discussion sections.

Speaker 2 (00:05:33):

In lecture, he is one of eight, eight to nine lecturers. Each has three or four lectures a semester on more than one text. Usually these are old school type lectures. They talk for 50 minutes in front of about 250 students. In discussion section, he leads 15 students in an hour plus conversation about the lecture or text. He also teaches a course he designs or else a course called Poetics and Performance, which focuses on aesthetics and questions about aesthetics in poetry, literature, art, music, architecture, cooking, medicine, politics, et cetera. This semester he's teaching a course of his own design called Representing Islam, art Literature and Ideology in the Age of Terror. And this is Heins official bio. He is an n e A fellow and University of Houston faculty is the author of three poetry books most recently something sinister, a children's book. He's the editor of Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contemporary Arab-American poetry and a series editor of the Atel Adnan Poetry Prize. So welcome and here is our first speaker, ACHI Obejas.

Speaker 3 (00:07:07):

What I wanted to talk to you about today is about an exercise that I like to do in most of my creative writing classes. It's something that I've done with grad classes and undergraduate classes and I've also done it at community workshops. I find that it works best with grad classes, but it can be done with undergraduates as well, especially if there's a lot of preparation and context, which I tend to do a lot with this particular exercise. Anyway, anyway,

Speaker 3 (00:07:40):

It's an exercise that teaches point of view as well as challenges, assumptions, and what it is is a recasting of Ernest Hemingway's early story Indian camp because it's about as canonical as it gets in Western Lit. You're probably familiar with Indian camp nonetheless, I ask your indulgence for just a few minutes. Published in 1924. It was one of Hemingway's earliest stories and featured a very young Nick Adams, though his age is never quite specified. The story is in Nick's third person, P O V, except for a brief passage when it defers to his father's third person, p o v. The text is a mere 1,478 words, which is about four to seven pages depending on the edition. The story begins when Nick and his father, a doctor, are called to a nearby Indian camp to assist with a breach birth accompanying them as Nick's Uncle George.

Speaker 3 (00:08:38):

Two Indians as Hemmingway refers to them, paddle the trio across a lake and a pair of canoes and lead them to the camp. When they reach the shore, George gives out cigars to the Indians. The outsiders are greeted at the door of a shanty by an Indian woman holding a lamp and led inside where the pregnant woman is lying on the bottom bed of a bunk bed. She is screaming in pain above her. Her husband is also in bed, smoking a pipe and nursing a cut foot. We're told it smells bad in the room though Nick's dad has been called here to perform a medical duty. He is curiously unprepared. He has not brought his bag and is forced to use a hunting knife and fishing line to perform a cesarean. An Indian woman, perhaps the same one who held the lamp or perhaps the second woman boils the instruments.

Speaker 3 (00:09:31):

Nick's father also enlists the boy, encouraging him to watch and refers to him as an intern. At the moment of the incision, George, the two Indians from the canoe and a fourth up to this moment completely identified man, presumably Indian as well. Hold the pregnant woman down. She's screaming still and in full resistance she bites George and he hurls a racial epithet at her. The doctor cuts and extracts the baby who appears to be healthy while Nick and the Indian woman take the newborn and the instruments away, George complains about the bite on his arm and Nick's father congratulates himself on a job well done. That's when Nick's dad realizes the Indian father hasn't said a word. He steps up on the bottom bunk, appears under the man's blanket and sees that he sliced his throat from ear to ear. Blood is collecting under him.

Speaker 3 (00:10:27):

Nick's father demands that Nick be immediately taken out of the shanty. Though the boy has already witnessed a suicide, George disappears. The story ends with Nick and his father alone in a canoe paddling home and contemplating life and death in a very Hemingway esque way, Nick declares that he felt quite sure he would never die In his usual elliptical and understated style, Hemmingway leaves many questions for the reader to ponder. Just stop the top. Why does the Indian father kill himself? Why is the doctor so unprepared? Why does he bring his son into such a charged situation? What is George doing there? Why does he vanish at the end Significantly, although there are perhaps as many as seven Indians in the story more if you count the men down the road, which the visitors pass on arriving at the camp and the Indians carry the weight of the story, none are named and none speak in Hemingway's texts.

Speaker 3 (00:11:28):

They're described in the briefest ways, just the woman with the lamp, the young Indian or by implication in the case of the ghostly fourth man, the one who helps George and the rowers hold down the pregnant woman so she can be cut in context. This makes a certain amount of sense. This is Nick's story as such a child feeling tension and danger in a room full of strangers would focus the spotlight, his spotlight on the two people whom he feels close to. As such, all of Hemingway's dialogue takes place between Nick and his father and his father and George, but could that possibly really happen that way? Does it seem conceivable that seven people who know each other well, this is an Indian camp after all, not even big enough to be called a reservation. How is it possible that these people who are probably related intermarried, intermingled with a lifetime's worth of history with each other, not utter one single word, are so much as grunt during this terrible visit in which one of their own is on the threshold between life and death and then another unexpectedly hurls himself through it?

Speaker 3 (00:12:39):

What I ask my students to do is to reconsider the story, to respect the events of the story that is the passage of time, the setting, the lake crossing, the receiving of the visitors, the cesarean, the suicide, but to recast it to write the story and the p o v of one of the other characters with the exception of Nick's father and George. That means that there are anywhere from seven to eight Native American characters with a story to tell questions such as why the father kills himself take on different possibilities. When considered from the p o v of a wife or a brother, a member of this community would have knowledge about George's relationship to the camp. He seems to know people in Hemingway's story and thus would have an opinion Why George vanishes at the end matters more once we leave Nick's childish perspective.

Speaker 3 (00:13:38):

Indeed, the adult drama buried in Hemingway's subtext becomes much more that text in the p o V of any of the other characters, all adults with history and the capacity to interpret adult behavior even when there are no words to complete. This assignment requires empathy, but it also demands imagination and a certain amount of courage. Most of us cannot identify directly with a plight of any of these characters. Most of us are culturally and racially outside of this world, especially because it's a world almost a hundred years ago in my classes in the last 20 years, I've only had one student who did this assignment who identified as native and she chose to write from George's point of view to put yourself in someone else's shoes, especially one who is so different from yourself also requires assuming certain responsibility. In addition, because this assignment demands that we get out of our demographic profiles, it can often be a little scary.

Speaker 3 (00:14:40):

I've had students resist more than one student has told me they don't know anything about Native Americans and feel paralyzed. I once had an African-American student tell me I should rather examine the work of other writers of color instead of devoting so much time to reading between the lines of the work of another dead white man. But I do think it is critical, super important actually to question canonical texts, especially those written by white men. No one has to do the assignment of course, but at its core is a challenge to write outside of our personal demographics. I know the mantra about writing what you know, but I think resistance starts with a different consideration. That is to ponder both what we know and what we do not know. This is how we can measure what we need to know and thus to allow ourselves to grow.

Speaker 3 (00:15:32):

This is how we gather what we need to question the dominant narrative. In the case of Indian camp, this is not a generic community that Hemmingway is writing about. It's a specific tribe though he never names it to have their own language and their names would reflect that. What is the name of the woman with the lamp of the young Indian? What do they call themselves? That's a huge first step in humanizing and personalizing a character. What do they do for a living? Hemmingway gives us clues. How is their community structured? What is this shanty where the action takes place? It doesn't feel like an individual home. Why are they in bunk beds? Critics have long tackled this story, but these have been overwhelmingly white critics. They have suggested over and over some version of the Indian man's suicide as a result of being overwhelmed by his wife screaming by the tragedy of his life that will now be inherited by his infant son.

Speaker 3 (00:16:30):

In essence, they suggest a man killed himself because this is a terrible racist world. Students frequently come back and suggest this in their versions, usually their first draft of the story, but frequently this racism as they present it is much like the critics, an odorless gas that plagues the Indian camp not routed systematically through an institution or expressed in any social or personal gesture. And the task of racism is why the man kills himself is to if not directly show at least know why this individual has made this decision, how the racism has manifested in his life to lead him to this conclusion. Critics sometimes also suggest that the man kills himself because George is the biological father of the child and students frequently pick up on this too, which raises questions Hemmingway wouldn't dare consider beyond the framing of endangered masculinity such as colonization and white domination, conditions for consent of rape culture, women's control of their own bodies, and thus their own destinies.

Speaker 3 (00:17:32):

I've never seen a critic consider what it means for George to pass out cigars on arrival at the Indian camp in the context of history, how the cigars now essentially gift wrapped tobacco are made from a plant indigenous to the Americas and George's gesture replays white dominance in the historical erasure of natives, but students have and the moment a throwaway in Hemingway's story has then become a central allegory. I've also never seen a critic consider what for violently holding a woman of color down on the orders of a white man might echo, but I've had students see that scene quite differently and understood the violation at levels that Hemingway's story barely suggests fundamentally would rewriting Indian camp. A foundational text of the American canon does is question the reliability of the text. How do the so-called facts of any story, whether it's hemmingway or the newspaper, a police arrest report or witness testimony weigh in the lives of different characters, especially when the characters are not favored by the dominant culture. Whenever we do this exercise, the stories that come out are mind blowing. My hope always is that we have expanded our way of looking, our considerations and our writing universe.

Speaker 2 (00:18:59):

Most of my university students come from our west side San Antonio neighborhood or towns bordering Mexico. Recently my English department launched an ma m f a program that focuses on social justice, so my students don't need encouragement to tackle political issues. In fact, my challenge is to reign in students' voices and guide them to create art while writing about their world. Robert Boswell's essay Politics and the Art in the novel found in his excellent collection of craft essays called The Half Known World has become a Touchstone. This is a quote that he says The best political fiction does not aim to explore merely the immediate and topical issues, but the underlying human traits that churn through the pages of history. Like a locomotive intelligent questioning is a subversive act and much of any writer's motivation to write should be to productively undermine conventional beliefs, the readers and the writers.

Speaker 2 (00:20:10):

Everyone should find the work subversive, not just the people with whom the writer has political differences. Boswell says writers have three responsibilities and these are ideas he cu from a g Noam Chomsky. Essay responsibility number one, speak truth and expose lies. This is accomplished by telling both sides of an issue by acknowledging the full range of possibilities. Number two, ask the reader to change how she sees her culture. Don't reiterate or embody an existing ideology. Responsibility. Number three, set events in a historical perspective. That way the writing continues telling a truth and contributes to the issues history. Next, Boswell offers strategies for accomplishing these responsibilities. There are four of them. Number one, first strategy right from the point of view of the other.

Speaker 2 (00:21:19):

This will more likely permit you to find the full human dimensions of both the victim and the aggressor, and consequently you avoid moralizing melodrama. The reader cannot stand above and condemn our character's actions. Rather the reader's compassion for both the victim and the aggressor is enlarged. He gives as an example, the fictional memoir this way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen by Du Borowski. Strategy number two include contradictory action. Select as your protagonist, someone who shares your political beliefs, but who is forced by circumstances to act in a manner contradictory to those beliefs. Both responses make sense and both are somehow right. His example is Roselin Brown's novel before and after strategy number three, place culturally accepted lies in opposition to each other while giving a historical context analyze the things that each side takes for granted. The unexamined beliefs, all that is usually overlooked or considered a given.

Speaker 2 (00:22:39):

Engage the material until you shift your own understanding of the issue and your premises become more complicated. His example is the OJ Simpson trial and the issues he raises are the cultural lies, racism, police, violence, celebrity, and athletics. Strategy number four, expose a moral dilemma. A protagonist must make a decision in any of the choices has clearly a negative outcome. The examples Boswell uses are Billy Bud Sailor and Sophie's Choice. Scott Cheshire's Story Monsters, which was posted September 30th, 2015 at Catapult illustrates each of these strategies. The protagonist, Peyton is a 35 year old woman who majored in Byzantine history but has become an interrogator for the office of intra intelligence, a militarily specialized department similar to internal affairs. Her job is to investigate agent misconduct in the field and review suspicious agent behavior. The story takes place over a couple of hours inside the shabby hotel room that belongs to Peyton's father.

Speaker 2 (00:24:01):

He has been an agent for 30 years now retired, and she is there to find out if years before he participated in the torture of a Saudi woman, her interrogation is an intervention. Otherwise a judiciary board would handle it. Payton's parents are divorced. Her father is a reformed alcoholic who left Peyton's mother. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, his behavior could be described as cold and neglectful. Here's how boswell's strategies apply. Number one, right from the point of view of the other, the point of view and monsters is third person, but the perspective is patents allowing some emotional distance but ensuring the reader's identification with her, especially since she's the one who's battling evil. Here's her description of herself. She was smart. She'd always known that and so did he. She was also competitive, ruthless if she had to be, but it was her conscience.

Speaker 2 (00:25:05):

Oddly enough, her insistence on moral justice, his phrase that let her burrow belly deep in the agency, so this doesn't seem to be from the point of view of the aggressor who is obviously the father since he's the suspected torturer, but we've been told that Peyton is competitive and ruthless qualities that throw her integrity into question. She says the reason she joined the agency was to break her father's stinks like demeanor once she broke the wrist of an interviewee who dared to reach across the table and touch her arm and she was never again surprised by her physical instincts. Still she explains that her motivation for pursuing this case is that she hoped to come to know her father better, know his soul, maybe, maybe even her own. She tells him that she hopes he's not guilty, that she wants to believe him, but when he pleads for mercy, she feels everything that makes her human leaving her body, which horrifies her.

Speaker 2 (00:26:15):

Here's a spoiler alert. At the end, she fantasizes cracking his head with her sidearm, putting her pistol in his mouth, breaking a bottle on his skull. She recognizes the savagery of her feelings but confesses that she doesn't want them to stop. In other words, Peyton is a combination of victim and aggressor strategy number two include contradictory action. Peyton is obviously bitter about her father's neglect and his treatment of her mother and she's committed to successfully accomplishing her assignment. After all, her father has been complicit during an act of torture. We expect her to get revenge by turning him into authorities, especially since we've seen her darker tendencies. But at the end of the story, she fluctuates saying she won't turn him in because you don't condemn your father and it seems he's doing a pretty good job of that here all on his own. Then she shifts enjoying fantasies of hurting him.

Speaker 2 (00:27:21):

Peyton has two choices. She could be the daughter who reluctantly turns in her father because that's the morally correct decision, or she could be the professional who decides not to turn him in because a child should be merciful toward her parent. Either outcome would be a reversal, but the story leaves that open-ended strategy. Number three, place culturally accepted lies in opposition to each other while giving a historical context Peyton's skill at interrogation, including her physical instincts and her fantasies about brutalizing. Her father dispel the notion that women are not prone to physical violence. On the other hand, a person who fantasizes about brutalizing, her father can also be the sole caretaker of a mother with Alzheimer's. Her father's capitulation and apologetic description of his unhappy marriage show that an emotionally distant parent can still love a child. On the other hand, a man who empathetically rationalizes that soldiers repeatedly listen to a scream from a metal rock album because the song makes death more palatable for them can also condone sadistic interrogation tactics for 30 years.

Speaker 2 (00:28:43):

The historical context for the subject of torture is given when Peyton says the business of intelligence was making great strides, great humanistic strides, the president was watching, the world was watching. Strategy number four, explore a moral dilemma. Payton says that torture is a black and white issue that has no gray area. She has been tasked with determining whether her father is guilty of such an act. She explains that she has a conscience and insistence on what her father calls moral justice, but which decision would be morally correct. Her father is old, retired alone, living a meager existence, reviewing his life, finally begging for mercy. He's her father and she's in some ways very like him. If she turns him in, would that be a heartless betrayal? If she doesn't turn him in, would she be complicit in the act of torture? The story is about her trying to choose this analysis of chester's monsters is an example of the kind of discussions that I have with my students moving them beyond melodrama or propaganda to a reflection on human traits that underlie serious world issues. That way readers not only comprehend the psychological complexity of an aggressor, they also recognize the possibility of being culpable. Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:30:25):

I am Ellen Pol and my experience teaching in non-academic settings is pretty different, but in any setting it can be intimidating for seasoned writers or for students to try to shape narrative art around issues of injustice. Just to reiterate, so I teach last summer a workshop, a free writing workshop in a library where students ranged from a 15 year old with mild developmental delay to an 80 year old who'd been writing stories for decades. I lead write Your Story workshops for a nonprofit that brings together young people whose parents, whose families were targeted and harmed for their progressive political activity. So these young writers have very intense experiences and some pretty complicated emotional reactions to their family's situations. Sometimes I offer workshops called fiction for social change or writing across borders, and in this case, writers have self-selected. They explicitly want to write about this kind of material, but across these various settings, I find that there are two categories of writing exercises that can help students figure out how to shape their work. The first category I think of as en large, the fictional world. Many of my students have never considered writing main characters of a different race or culture or religion or political opinion or gender from their own. So the first thing that we need to do is to ask them to challenge their own assumptions about the world, about the assumption of whiteness, of straightness, and to consider their characters as possibly being another.

Speaker 4 (00:32:47):

Of course, if you're going to do this, you have to also talk with students about the risks of doing this kind of character development and ways to minimize the risks, and this is where we start talking about reading really widely because many of these students haven't read outside their own experience, their own race or a culture. We talk about re-imagining historical figures and using them to explore justice and injustice in the past, and we talk about what right we have what responsibility, if any, to the historical record, knowing how untrue the historical record often is or to the descendants of the people we fictionalize in our work.

Speaker 4 (00:33:46):

One exercise to get at this enlarge the world idea is called dig Behind the Headlines and in this, students are asked to think about a recent political or social conflict, a front page headline if you will, or if they'd rather a historical conflict and write a scene set in a very dramatic moment In that story, they're encouraged actually unlike what you talked about, achi, to ignore the facts and extract the drama from the situation. The critical part of this exercise is to crawl behind the headline and approach the material from an unexpected perspective, often that of a minor character and to avoid the obvious, the television soundbite response. A second exercise in this category is called subvert Your Story, and this involves changing a major element of the piece They're working on the place an important decision, a character makes age or gender of a main character. Essentially the purpose of this exercise is to ask the student to argue with or change the dominant version of the events in their story of whatever they've been accepting as reality in their fictional world.

Speaker 4 (00:35:30):

The second category I call clashing points of view as a reader and as a writer, I love the use of multiple narrators in fiction and I think it's particularly useful if you're writing fiction about hot button issues. First of all, it's a good way to lessen the possibility of being too didactic if you are building characters with clashing, disagreeing belief systems as you talked about as well, Nan, if the clashing characters have family ties or other close ties, the resulting emotional conflict can be especially strong. It also opens up the conversation of the novel and invites the reader in to participate in that conversation. As part of these workshops, we discuss excerpts from books that do this multiple point of view. Well, one book I like to bring excerpts from is at Witch Dande Kat's book, the Do Breaker about the Val's ton Maku, the death squads essentially in Haiti and especially the story in which a young woman discovers that her father who has claimed to be a victim was really a leader of these squads, very similar to the story that you were talking about. A second text that's really useful is called, it's a novel called Burnt Shadows by Camilla Chassey, and this takes the reader from Nagasaki in 1945 to India during partition to Afghanistan right after nine 11 to New York City and finally Guantanamo all through the points of view of a number of members of three families.

Speaker 4 (00:37:51):

The exercise that I like best with this clashing points of view if students are writing in a workshop is called Liberate the Mic, and it's a way for students to experiment with different narrator voices, narrators who disagree, who clash, maybe even hate each other. It can be done as a follow-up to the behind the headlines exercise, asking students to give voice to each character in that scene that they created or it can be used with material from outside the workshop. In particular, students are encouraged to write from the of view of a character who holds very different opinions from their own about the scene, about the story, about the headline. What I've discovered in these different workshops using these techniques is that students often find a much more compelling way to tell the story that digs beneath the surface to a more layered and a more nuanced expression. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:39:26):

Good afternoon. My name is Fred Arroyo and I'm going to talk about point of view, narrative stance and walking around the story subjects that have been talked about in some ways. One of the things in thinking about my role in this or just putting together some thoughts for the panel was how in writing about Latinos and migration and class and work and exile, how often my work is characterized as having some form of societal forces or social justice involved and the sort of complexity of not really having that in mind when I sit down to write because I think of writing as really ultimately an act of discovery and not wanting to have that weight or responsibility. So that sort of has some context to what I'm going to focus on and I'm going to begin with two anecdotes that relate to that and they come from recent visits to universities where undergraduates had to read my book and I gave a reading and met with the class.

Speaker 5 (00:40:33):

One anecdote is in the voice of a student and the second anecdote is in my voice reflecting on that visit anecdote number one, the piece that was most inspiring and helpful to me this semester was Fred Arroyo's first love. The idea of silence carried throughout this piece was not only eye opening for personal reasons, but also for reasons that helped me improve my writing. On a personal level, I deal with my own silence that I too have created among me and my father. It's ironic that we would be reading this piece this semester because for the first time in 10 years, I'm now in contact with my father trying to break my own silence from a writing standpoint. This piece taught me that having a person's stories told from another individual can be extremely powerful. Magda tells Ernest's story in a way that I don't think Ernest could have ever touched.

Speaker 5 (00:41:33):

There is a sort of honesty that comes across that would've been hidden inside Ernest if he were the one who have told it. Having Magdalene Magda tell Ernest's story allowed the story to have many dimensions and Magda needs Ernest's story to understand her own. Just as anyone in life may feel the need for someone else's story to understand their own anecdote. Number two, professor E asked me if I might sign a book for a student, and when the book arrived and it contained a small note, the student expressed that in reading my stories, especially first love, she better understood the possibility of one character telling a story that wasn't solely their story. This student, a non-Latino, shared how her father was a supervisor in a plant where many Latinos worked. The student felt that although a life or story like her father's is not often included in the story of migration and immigration and labor, she now felt there was a way to tell or express her father's story.

Speaker 5 (00:42:53):

These students were expressing that point of view, offered them an empathetic vision to experience other characters and a facet of their lives and stories differently. They highlight the importance of point of view and narrative stance. Who tells the story? Where does the narrator or character stand in the story, whether writing fiction or nonfiction, what is our narrative stance? What process of mediation, meditation, research or invention influences that stance? And they also help to highlight the importance of offering student writers occasions where they can imagine, explore, and discover point of view and narrative stance, not just who's telling the story but how and why they are seeing and narrating the story in particular terms. Student writers need to walk around their stories so they can imagine various perspectives, see multiple facets of the story.

Speaker 5 (00:43:59):

The very notion of social justice implies an attitude, a perspective, a stance towards a particular situation. This attitude is confined by specific experiences and perceptions. It's fueled by emotions, ideas, and biases, passionate biases. There's often a statement, a demand the writer brings to a situation. As a teacher of writing, I hope to help students use their writing to explore and discover more about their desires and find the widest light they can to tell their story, the widest light to cast across the whole story. So I'm going to turn to a particular writing prompt, and in the class we're just beginning to start our discussion of Adriana Paras looking for Esperanza, the story of a mother, a child lost, and why they matter to us, which received the 2011 venue press, social justice and equity award. In creative nonfiction, para's writing is compelling graced by emerging of storytelling and witness as she becomes immersed in the lives of undocumented farm workers in imo, kli, Florida and the picking and sorting of tomatoes.

Speaker 5 (00:45:26):

There's much poverty in this story, hunger and need, pesticides and birth defects, lost childhoods work and migration disappearances, and there's a great amount of dignity because para's empathetic and honest writing, she's not afraid of trying to influence her readers. It's a story I hope will provoke students to think about the places and their communities where they may be overlooking the possibility of social justice. So I have my students take out their journals. We do a lot of in-class writing and I have three photographs and I'm not very inclined to work with technology. So I was going to describe the photographs kind of easy or I think it is. There's three photographs that I put up one after the other. The one is kind of an iconic one by Sile Salgado, a black and white photo of a truck that's turned over in a ditch and the men are all dead, the truck is all smashed up.

Speaker 5 (00:46:36):

A few of the men are hanging out the doors out the broken out windows, and you see a lot of their tools and their water on the ground. So it seems like they were migrant workers working, going to a field. There's a field behind them. The other photograph is just a stock photograph of a mall in America, it's Christmas time. There's lots of red, white, and gold, and there's two escalators very much like the a w p out here, but everyone's carrying Christmas presents and there's just thousands of people, very rich moment. And then the third photograph is another kind of iconic photograph by Paul Strand and it's two, I think Hungarian peasants and their wife and husband leaning against the fence. There's a big wide field behind them. He's in a jacket with a white shirt and a hat tip back, has his arm around the wife and she's got a gypsy brocade clothes on.

Speaker 5 (00:47:37):

She's much dark skin, another black and white photograph. So all that they do is they start doing a lot of free writing on each photograph. They try to just vocalize on the scene, the who, what, how, when, what's going on here just to kind of create a word picture or story there. They start to focus then on the composition of the photograph, how is it approached? What's the relationship of lightness and darkness? Is there any kind of special perspective? What's the atmosphere or mood inside the photograph? So just trying to get at the composition. We do a little bit of writing on the faa, so just the basic story material once upon a time and then no causality added to it. So we've got the photograph in that one moment that we've written about. So let's imagine what happened before this moment and then what happened after the moment.

Speaker 5 (00:48:35):

So they really write the larger story. And then the very last thing is they go back and reread everything that they've written. And then the last entry that they do is in six words or less, they provide a caption or title for each photograph. What would they title or caption that photograph. So it becomes a real metal level interpretation, if you will, by creating word pictures and stories and interpretations of these photographs. Students begin to create a language, images and ideas and various purposes for how they can approach experience. They begin to note how they write experience, what details and particulars they vocalize and how and why they are inhabiting or even exploring a narrative stance. Our writing and discussion now returns to rao's writing with greater purpose and possibility. The stories and narrative students begin to compose, create a dialogue with what they've now read, whether or not it's actually present in looking for espanza for language and silence, perspective and meaning begin to take on greater subtleties.

Speaker 5 (00:49:54):

Say for example, I remember a specific student writing a story about the Christmas scene and all the seemingly joy and happiness of going out at Christmas and shopping, and yet underneath the surface of that, the kind of worry and stress of that time period and then being able to create the dialogue because in looking for Esperanza, they're out working in tomato fields and they live in these terrible trailers that have hardly no floors or running water and seeing poverty and wealth because of being able to write about that photograph that had to do with Christmas shopping because of time constraints. I'm going to end here and I don't have much of a conclusion today, but I hope to contribute to some more perhaps in q and a, but I want to suggest that all of us can foster spaces like these in our creative writing classrooms. We can share writing moments when students have occasions to invent, explore, and discover a point of view and narrative stance that underwrites their sense of social justice in new terms. And as a result, student writers can begin shaping art, craft and social forces in their writing in more creative and meaningful ways. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:51:23):

Recording is

Speaker 7 (00:51:23):

Working. In 2006, I became much more aware of the challenges or resistance in the classroom to writing about political inequality or injustice. That year with two poetry books already published, I returned to school to earn a doctorate in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. As a student there, I experienced a particular kind of resistance. Some people kept telling me any number of puzzling things about my political poems. First and foremost, that they were indeed political poems. I understood this to mean that they meant the poems were bad or propagandist or that somehow through my political poems, I was hoping to get my readers to vote one way or another for this or that political issue, or else to, I don't know, run for office picket, the home of a corrupt politician or business leader boycott at t. I really didn't have a clue what some of the people in my program were talking about, especially this business, about these so-called political poems I was writing the reason for my being so puzzled.

Speaker 7 (00:52:39):

While I knew that like most other poets, I often obsessed over two or three subjects, I thought mine were personal. I thought for sure that I would be told to ease up on the dead mother, the shitty father, or else the dead and shitty city. I called my hometown and this way I thought that my poems were quite American and nonpolitical. Or if they were not evidently American or nonpolitical, then they must obviously at least be personal. This of course, wasn't is the problem. For many people, the personal is inseparable from the political. A poem about a family going shopping can be a poem about inequity or about the way social forces shape our lives. A poem about picking a dandelion could be political if the dandelion is plucked in Detroit outside the Arab grocery store where he's being robbed, called the camel jockey and is life threatened?

Speaker 7 (00:53:42):

It's political. What I'm getting at is that some people live lives that are inescapably political, their actions, thoughts, and identities, their very beings are politicized on a regular basis. So here's where I'm going to quote myself and I'm told it's okay to do so in la quote, one of the hardest tasks for an Arab to accomplish is to live non-politically plenty enough times when an Arab experiences grief or loss politics play a role when questions arise about his place in the world, in his own country, among his own people, whether in the United States, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, France, the UK, or wherever, I would bet the farm that US foreign policy plays a big part. At that point, the separation between the personal and the political gets blurred or at all together, erase, disappears. This is true in far too many ways for too many other people.

Speaker 7 (00:54:46):

This disintegration between the person and the political though is not entirely realized, understood, or accepted by an even larger number of people, poets and writers and teachers among them. I stopped teaching traditional creative writing courses around three years ago. I teach now in a program at the University of Houston called the Center for Creative Work. The course is created and offered in the Center for Creative Work are multidisciplinary. There are no creative writing workshops. Instead, students take courses that integrate creative projects, critical study and cultural research. There are many reasons for this approach, good ones, one of which is that all the craft talk in the world isn't going to help someone see a carefully crafted poem as a carefully crafted poem. When that person sees a political poem, meaning a bad or propagandist one, overcoming this, let's call it an obstacle, requires a particular set of skills and craft is necessary and significant, but it doesn't always possess the skills needed not for this task.

Speaker 7 (00:56:03):

In the creative courses I teach the creative project itself, whether a series of poems or a short story or some other art is only one among many goals and maybe not the primary goal at the end of a semester, for example, I'm more concerned with the knowledge, the insights and perspectives that my students have gained and the shifts in their way of understanding and approaching each other than I am with whether or not their poems or stories are as good as they can be. If they're serious about being poets and writers, they'll work on their writings long after the course is over. Those writings, I believe will be better served if they're approached with a deeper understanding and awareness of what it means to create work shaped by social justice or inequity or what we may more broadly call the political. What this understanding does for the poet and writer as well as for his or her readers and fellow poets and writers in the classroom, teacher included, is to make a parent that such work is in fact dignified.

Speaker 7 (00:57:12):

When people label a piece of work political or lump it into the protest or social justice categories too often they mean primarily to impoverish the work to empty it of meaning. The poet Fadi Juda is a good friend and a neighbor of mine in Houston. He says that he doesn't feel he has a responsibility to write political poems, rather he feels a compulsion to address that line where the universal is the personal and the personal, the universal. He believes, and I think he's right, that this brings about a humanization of the poems subject. It dignifies the subject, and the logic also applies to the classroom to dignify and humanize what we otherwise tend to call political writing. And in doing so, humanizing the writer and her speakers without, as fatty puts it, stripping them from the right to speak their narrative, or maybe more importantly, imposing on them are narcissistic projections as righteous poets or novelists or teachers or readers. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:58:37):

We're ready for questions and I'm sure you're burning to ask these talented intelligent peoples some questions. What would you like to know? This is your chance, I'm sure there're teachers in the, or maybe you have something you could share with everyone that has worked in your classes. Question. Oh, I'm sorry. Couldn't go ahead. Yes. Well,

Speaker 8 (00:59:00):

As you're talking aware exercise they written,

Speaker 2 (00:59:13):

For those of you who couldn't hear, I'm going to try to badly paraphrase what he said. He said that in his classes, he has students who will be self-deprecating in the beginning, that they don't really have the confidence to speak for themselves with confidence. And so the idea of requesting that they begin to write from a different perspective, from a perspective that's not their own could be intimidating, very awkward. And he uses a Russell Bank story, Sarah Coleen, a type of love story because there is no moral ground there, but it's hard to pin down. So there's a suggestion for you. Does somebody else have a question or a suggestion or comment? Yes. In the back

Speaker 9 (01:00:06):

Rhetoric

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):

In her class, which is a rhetoric, a class on rhetoric, she has made the assignment that students write about a social justice issue, but it's a term they're not familiar with. So how would we define the term? Would anyone on the panel to take that?

Speaker 7 (01:00:27):

Well, one strategy I would recommend is there are a lot of essays out there for a class like Rhetoric and Composition. I wouldn't say suggest an anthology, but those are out there as well that get at social justice theories at these sort of, I dunno what they're called, but they're like the Beginner's Guide to Social Justice. I mean, there are essays like that available and articulate to someone who may not know what that means to people who practice it and who work in the field. And I think that's just a good place to begin. Part of what I was focusing on is this lack of knowledge that sometimes people have, and that makes a huge difference, knowing not only what you're writing about but who you're writing about. I love the idea of taking on the voice of other people and what it can create for a person is an opportunity to actually engage with those people, not just in the writing, but actually go out there and talk to people and meet them and read about them in their own voices so that your character, that it's not entirely imagined and yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):

Okay. Anybody want to add to that? I would say in my M F A program, we talk about social justice being an attempt to achieve a universal human dignity. It's a striving for equality and an emphasis on dignity. Actually would like to respond to the questioner over here. She's thought of something to say. Yeah, you were saying that oftentimes you find that at the

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):

Beginning of the semester your students come in sort of intimidated, and the idea of asking them to write from another point of view seems like it might be daunting. It took me a minute to just sort of sort through that, but I realized that it can actually be very liberating to write from another point of view. I think it's all about how you set it up and how much guidance you give. I think if you just say, whoa, you can write about any point of view, then they're going to be swimming in the deep end of the pool and probably not doing well. But I think a certain amount of guidance and sort of just controlling the choices, let's say, can be very useful. I think what Allie was talking about using articles and asking people to come at it from an unexpected point of view, I think one of the reasons that Indian Camp works is because you only have nine choices and the actual is already taken care of. So I think if you give them guideposts that it can actually be a very illuminating exercise to free them to a certain extent from having to create these people wholesale. If they can just sort of inhabit a body that's already in existence and then animate that body, I think that might be easier, more comfortable, more of a learning experience than the certain paralysis that would come from just creating somebody out of the blue that they have nothing in common with. Just

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):

A thought.

Speaker 8 (01:03:55):

I have a comment for the rhetoric social. If you read those two books yourself and then pick and choose what to share with your class.

Speaker 2 (01:04:07):

Suggestion to use in the classroom is a book called Reading for Diversity and Social Justice From Rutledge. From Rutledge. And the second is Reading Teaching. It's teaching for Diversity and Social Justice. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Well, I just

Speaker 8 (01:04:26):

Want to add, but when you're teaching anything social justice, I think it