visiting writers

I don't know why I haven't hosted more guest writers in my classes. What a useful way to offer different perspectives to students. I find myself using a certain vocabulary for talking about writing, for example, and bringing in someone who uses a different vocabulary seems like a way to reach toward students who may not be responding to how I frame things. Readings, obviously, can go a long way toward diversifying points-of-view, but there's something about a fresh face.

This afternoon Steve Climer was visiting writer in my creative writing class (thanks for coming Steve!). Talking about his own fiction, he really championed the idea of divorcing the creative process from deliberate or forced emphasis on rhetorical elements like theme. He's all about telling a character's story without getting lost in other matters. We looked at a story of Steve's called "High Lonesome Road," a neat southern gothic tale about a little boy who is a victim of racism until a surreal encounter with the ghosts of a group of civil war soldiers and the woman who cooks for them.

Some of what Steve said echoed things I've emphasized during the past few weeks, but he used a different lingo and described these processes with ideas that sometimes ran counter to my own. The language and the concepts bounced around and I think students left the room thinking they had to find their own lingo, their own set of writerly values. Not a bad day.