Even in my search for the right job (angels singing, heavenly light busting through the clouds), I recently landed a great gig as a Writer-in-Residence at Children’s Hospital. Sponsored by Seattle Arts & Lectures, who run the Writers in the Schools program here in Seattle, this pilot program has just begun. One other writer and I head to Children’s each week to work one on one with patients, hopefully helping them to craft poems and stories, and (at the very least) to get them excited about writing.
I’m honored to be a part of this program, but I’m also quite nervous. After one day in the hospital I think I may have already learned the most important lesson: be ready for anything. We never know who will be around or who will feel well enough to work. It might be a six year old or an 18 year old. They may already love to write or they may be afraid to. Every situation asks something different of us.
Day one, I strolled in with a bag of tricks—lesson plans, hands-on projects, paper, pens, etc.—a smile glued in place. I left having hardly touched the bulk of it. I ended up doing something I’ve never done before: writing spells with a seven year old. We got warmed up, the rhymes and rhythm of the words gaining momentum, until I suggested a form. Each spell would include the result of the spell before it as an initial ingredient. The game began to slip into a poem that turned over itself—one thing morphing musically into the next.
This role seems a hybrid of many types: teacher-poet-mentor-friend-listener. I can’t push a student the way I would in a traditional setting as there is already too much stress in the hospital environment. This program aims, at least in part, to offer some relief from that stress. The listener role comes naturally, and this helps with the notion of a mentorship, but how to teach writing there? How to teach writing anywhere? It’s a mysterious field and I’m doing my best to keep filling my bag of tricks with anything I can think of.
How do you prepare yourself for what you cannot expect?
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There will, inevitably, be more difficult challenges than what, or how, to teach. We may lose students. We may be witness to the hard life of others and have to bear some of that weight. And yet, these pieces don’t deter me at all. My only worry is that I won’t have enough to offer.
I can already see that the steep learning curve will take some time to grow through, but I’m extremely fortunate that the folks at Seattle Arts & Lectures work hard to create a community of writers and teachers—and the support is genuine.
Stay tuned for updates and wish me resourcefulness and the dynamic mind to react quickly to every situation.
