A Peter Elbow Prompt: A Time When the Writing Went Well

I'm co-facilitating a group of twenty wonderful teachers who have come together in a Writing Project Summer Institute. We're using the Peter Elbow book Writing Without Teachers as our common text and using some of his prompts to guide our daily writing. Today's prompt was "Write about a time when writing went particularly well or badly. What was the topic, and who was the audience? Try to tell in detail how you went about writing and what happened. What can  you learn from this example?"

Back when I was a young wife, I did some freelance writing. My steadiest gig was writing a newspaper column about living simply; I wrote pieces about a woman who milked a single cow for the family's needs, a family who had no TV, how to shop for Christmas in the local town, and so on. I had a small following of devoted readers, but I did not consider myself a writer.

When my children got older, I returned to the classroom. I was a teacher who wrote occasionally with her students. It took my own experience in a Summer Institute to convince me I was a writer, and after the summer of 2009, I started identifying myself as a writer who teaches.

I quite vividly recall the evening when I decided I could write. I had just finished some required reading about writing episodic fiction. I have no talent for writing fiction, but I was interested in telling my story. My life certainly felt like fodder for a made for television movie--husband falls for another woman and wants to love us both. I couldn't sustain a long running narrative, but the idea of writing episodes appealed to me, so I curled up on the couch--my favorite place to write--and started writing with the purpose of discovering why I was attracted to alcoholics. Since I was raised in a non-drinking home, I thought that writing the story of meeting and marrying men who disappointed me would offer me insight.

I could not tell the story in prose; instead, writing my story in compressed lines that fell on the page like poetry came more readily to me. What emerged on the page was a poem that recounted what my father had said about the men who spent time in the local tavern. And it occurred to me that these men who could relax in the afternoon offered a stark, and appealing, contrast to my workaholic father.

I was pleased with the first poem and went on to write many others during the four weeks of the Institute. In the safety of our group, I shared poems about events of which I had never spoken and felt the power of writing as an agent of healing. The director of the Writing Project was kind enough to encourage me and helped me get the attention of the director of creative writing on campus. He read my work and called me witty.

Witty! That word was so far removed from any words I would have used to describe myself: calm, organized, trustworthy, reliable, steady. Witty opened the possibility that I could imagine myself as someone who was creative and joyful--qualities I had longed to claim as my own.

I have come a long ways from the meek and under-developed poems I wrote four years ago. Now my poems have sharper edges. I make no apologies for writing about living with an alcoholic. My husband struggles to maintain his sobriety and works his own program, and I have found that writing poems enhances my own understanding of the Twelve Steps. (My sponsor is an English professor and requires that I write my way through the Al-anon program.) I have shared my poems in the safety of another small group of women who study the Twelve Steps together. With their encouragement, I am considering writing a book with the working title A Poet Walks Through the Twelve Steps.

Today I shared a poem with my writing partner. She responded with "Wow!" Enough said. I'll keep writing.