Carmen Kennedy
The entrance point to writing is for some of us not academic, but expressive, and the door to greater perspective and scholarship opens when we write. So, why does it seem that that door requires special access, or that there is a narrow entrance through which only a select few can squeeze?
I was looking at YouTube reactions to This is America, a video produced by Childish Gambino, the alter-ego of Donald Glover (Editors). Glover is by all accounts, even his own, an unconventional thinker—a creative—and therefore not thought of as an academic. But his video has bent critics, folks respected for their academic analysis and yes, scholarship, into contortions, as they seek to peel away at its layered meaning. Glover has caused a lot of buzz, compelling audiences to “read” both him and his creative work as it challenges perspectives and seeds debate. Glover’s creativity exceeds one medium, writing, to inhabit another with provocative images. And his approach to mixing mediums has caused me to rethink the relationship I have had with writing for nearly four decades.
I started calling myself a creative when the term artist seemed limiting, mitigating what I might produce, and restricting my media choices. I was not unlike Glover, exploring my options, and experimenting outside my two-dimensional foundation. I excelled at drawing. My grade school paintings won ribbons. I was praised for that and called artistic. I internalized the fact that people liked my art, and because of it, me. I went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts from San Francisco’s Academy of Art. The point is that I grew so see my potential shaped by feedback, comments given me by my parents, teachers and schoolmates. I saw my potential shaped by the singular way in which grade schools and high schools handled young artists; that is, they offered art class. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bit myopic considering that art is seldom given the same attention as reading, writing, and arithmetic—the three “Rs”—subjects that are also taught in a singular fashion, packaged separately, and presented without showing that they have creative application and/or integrated application. But let’s stick with writing.
Writing is presented to grade school students as an academic exercise. It is taught in the context of grammar, spelling, and syntax, and these are only the technical or mechanical aspects of writing. We start teaching writing very early in this way. Kindergarteners learn to read simple sentences and begin to write subject and verb sentences. “Jane runs.” Adverbs are then introduced to first and second graders and they soon understand how Jane runs. Students learn to build and decode complex sentences. “Jane quickly runs to catch the bus.” They begin reading simple chapter books around this time. A student’s sight reading, vocabulary, pronunciation, and language skills advance rapidly during their first few years of school. The ones who retain this information and can demonstrate what they’ve learned, are naturally rewarded with good letter grades and praise. They internalize that praise and their confidence grows strong as they grow larger. They have the potential to see themselves as authors.
Reading and comprehension are taught together, and both are precursors to writing. Comprehension is a test of reading, and composition (writing), is a test of comprehension. We also base composition on the mechanics of writing; for example, is the student able to create a thesis, compose an argument in the body of the work, and wrap everything up with a conclusion? Writing is evaluated on its adherence to this formula. Students who excel at this are rightly given praise. They are groomed to write and recognized by state funded programs like the Accelerated Reader Program and the Young Author’s Faire. These programs were designed to reward grade school children who excel at reading, comprehension, and writing. These are the students who are eventually at home in a high school or college English department.
Other disciplines, like science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, also find ways to compartmentalize students and reward them. Athletics does this; the performing arts does this; and visual arts does this too. There are benefits to compartmentalizing subjects by discipline; it makes it easier for teachers to create lesson plans and quantify them. After all, testing is a big part of formalized education.
We’ve tossed writing in to a compartment called English, at the grade school level, and at the university level, we’ve tossed it in to the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Rhetorical, academic, and creative writing in every genre are all curiously tossed in the same compartment with one another too, even if some of this writing defies categorization and leans toward pure expression, experimental texts, poetics, and/or artful prose.
But creative writing is like a cousin once removed from rhetoric and the writing of academic articles. It wasn’t until late in my schooling that I learned to write with more freedom, and I still have difficulty with this quite honestly, because I tend to edit as I go along. I learned about stream-of-consciousness writing at about the same time I was learning to “let go.” These writing approaches forced me to do a complete 180. I couldn’t believe that there were actually folks that were able to read their writing after such an exercise and have it make sense. Were these the same folks who had excelled in writing, in composition, as grade schoolers? Had they so learned formulaic writing as to be free of the actual formula and write confidently? Perhaps. I was suddenly faced with un-learning perceptions I had of writing and the narrow framework through which it had been presented to me. My changing perspective turned writing in to an accessible new medium, and as an artist who had grown to be a creative, I craved all sorts of media.
My talent (drawing) and the feedback I received when I was in grade school, led me to see myself as “picture” smart. This was gratifying, especially when teachers had assured me that I wasn’t “math” smart, and when I thought I was only moderately good at writing. I never dreamed I could develop my writing. I didn’t realize, to develop my writing and writerly craft, all I needed was greater freedom and more time to put writing to practice. One might think this is a given, but not so when you’ve seldom been encouraged to write creatively in school. And when this is the case, where does one find the courage to approach writing playfully instead of purposefully? I didn’t get the memo that said writing could be fun and creative!
Howard Gardner, noted developmental psychologist, and proponent of the theory of Multiple Intelligences wrote, “It’s not about how smart you are, but how you are smart.” The notion of coupling “smarts” with aptitude is not new, but it is false, because we can be smart at a lot of different things by varying degrees. We can quite simply mobilize our intelligences as we see fit (Gardner, 4). I just needed time and a place to nurture the smarts I had in other areas, and writing was one such area.
My writing muse took a little while to materialize. She was different from the muse that inspired my art, all beauty, gratitude, and grace. My writing muse was long in the tooth, a little bitter, and working through some sh#t. She forced me to purge some of that poison I’d consumed from a half-century of living by prescribing me a reliable emetic: reading. I discovered how important it is to read diverse bodies of work by contemporary authors, and not just selections from the English literary canon.
My library is bursting with books written by psychologists and sociologists, and personal narratives or memoirs that inform my writing: Dani Shapiro, Margo Jefferson, and most recently, Tressie McMillan Cottom. Cottom, like Jefferson, is a cultural critic, but she also holds a Ph.D. in sociology. This extra tidbit makes her writing fool proof, literally; meaning, her arguments shut down all species of troll: racist, misogynist, and miscellany “ist.” In Cottom’s latest collection, Thick, there is an essay titled, “The Price of Fabulousness”, where she sets out to clear up the confusion between respectability politics and respectability: the two are sometimes detrimentally conflated. Cottom writes, “…my grandmother and mother had a particular set of social resources that helped us navigate mostly white bureaucracies to our benefit. We could, as my grandfather would say, talk like white folks. We loaned that privilege out a lot” (Cottom, 162). With the latter she was referring to instances she used her privilege as an educated woman to help others.
Then one day when I found myself in a similar situation. Someone with more education than me, wearing a business suit, accused me of playing respectability politics. I didn’t respond immediately. “Respectability rewards are a crapshoot, but we do what we can within the limits of the constraints imposed by a complex set of structural and social interactions designed to limit access to status, wealth, and power” (Cottom, 166).
Ok, that is politics, but not of my own making. Perhaps, more than my counterpart, I must negotiate certain situations to survive, meaning sometimes I code switch, dress to impress, or as with my accuser, try to give an informed response.
The space I am trying to enter as a writer sometimes feels uncomfortable, the students who are at home in the English Department, my colleagues, have a head start on me, and my efforts to catch up with their level of academics and praxis, is at times overwhelming—I’m constantly humbled by how little I know. In my attempt to rectify this, I have discovered that a lot of my discomfort has to do with those perceptions seeded in early education and those blasted compartments that stifle imagination. I am an outlier, a creative who writes. Writing has led me to discovery, research and academic exploration, where it has been the inverse for my counterparts, the students who are well-read and started out with a strong foundation in English.
My journey has brought me to criticize the framing of writing as academic and the door to academia as closed. The problems inherent in this system are many, but let’s go back to the way writing is presented to early learners; that is, writing as academic, as one of the three “Rs,” essential and protected. I would not propose to take any of this away; in fact, writing is essential. But art (and its many disciplines: music, dance, theatre) is arguably essential too. I had a lightbulb moment then, and thought, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to expand the way writing is presented in grade school; in fact, it could benefit art, support for the arts, and encourage funding for art. Imagine writing presented as a medium. We work with paint, pastels, clay and other media, in our art classes, so why not with pen and paper too? Imagine students examining famous works of art, like “The Starry Night” by Van Gogh, with its dappled cobalt currents and bright yellow swirls. They are asked to recreate the painting with watercolor in one lesson and in another they are asked to recreate it with adjectives or as a short story. In this model the student gets to experience the subject first, react to it, and research it further. Their muse is their experience with the painting, and their artistic expression inspires further inquiry or scholarship.
By using this model, writing is also given opportunity to appear in more than one compartment, its exercise exposes students to its greater applications. For example, lyrics are written in a music class or a screenplay is written in a theatre class. Perhaps, giving perceptions of writing some breadth in this way and affording writing more than its staid academic position, helps to shine light on the arts. This kind of interdisciplinary approach could bring the essential status and protection of writing-as-academic to the notion of writing-as-art. In other words, writing could bring salvation to school art programs.
Too many grade schools have a tentative relationship with their programs in the arts; in fact, art is often the first thing on the chopping block when it comes to budget cuts. This creates equity issues regarding education and opportunity. Schools with more money have access to more resources and their children are better served with both the arts and academics, while schools with less money are losing their programs and resources. It is important to remember that creative space and time are both resources. However, economics can make resources a thing of privilege. I refer to this type of resource as “A Room of One’s Own,” reminiscent of its namesake book by Virginia Wolff. We happen to forget that writers, especially young writers attending grade school, deserve the proper amount of time to write and the proper amount of classroom space for it—time unimpeded by distractions and other subjects: quality time. This, like other learning and exercise, would require a child’s basic needs be met, that they are safe and not hungry. This is the social justice aspect of supporting art and writing, artist’s spaces and an artist’s work. And this is the mandate given to us as educators and allies making an entrance to writing for creatives.
Works Cited
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. Thick. New York: The New Press, 2019. Print.
Editors, Biography.com. Donald Glover Biography. 11 February 2019. Website. 02 April 2019.
Gardner, Howard E. Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.
Biography
Carmen is a Creative who cajoles words into blog content, brandfomertials, and bodacious ideas by day. By night she is pursuing a MFA under the guidance of her university’s illustrious writers. You can find her writing in the Themis Journal, as she anticipates other published work late in 2019.