Writer in Residence

For five years I served (and am still on the roster) as an Artist-in-Residence for the Oklahoma Arts Council. In Oklahoma City and Putnam City schools, Norman, Lawton and surrounding districts, I stood in front of first-graders through eighth-graders and talked to the people I loved most about the thing I loved best.

With kindergarteners, I sat in a chair, and they on the floor. We learned the value of a four-line poem, its rhythms and its subsequent translation to construction paper and in crayon. Covertly, a special ed class made me a paper hat to wear. For my four weeks in that school, I never took it off. A hulking seventh-grader told me I’d make a good rapper.

While in residencies, I was sometimes a guest in a lovely home. Other times I slept on naugahyde-covered dorm mattresses and in cheap motels rooms. These were my choices. On one occasion, a hooker was shot across the courtyard from me, and in writerly fashion I hung out in the doorway, while crime-scene tape was strung out and sirens yowled, and took notes for a book. I wouldn’t trade any of it.

My mail goal was to make kids love writing. To show them how to communicate with the page – not on it, but with it. Then we took Fifteen Rules for Great Writing and cartooned them, poeticized them, fictionalized them, turned them inside out until they were second nature. We conjured up Nineteen Kinds of Details that we added to our stories for depth and intrigue.

In those five years I taught high-energy, ultra-creative writing to over 4,000 kids. I recommend the arts for all our children – painting, singing, tuba-playing, mask-making. I suggest choir and orchestra, string quartets and puppet-making. In these tough economic times, Parent-Teacher Associations can help make that happen. The cost is negligible compared to what children take away. Especially in writing.

A man or woman who can write can do anything -- CW