On the Podcast : Transforming Classrooms with Writing and Voice

Liz Prather:

I know you've done a lot of work as a teacher to assist and invite healing for your students. How has writing been healing for you? And I'm thinking in particular about Gay Poems for Red States. I read some early drafts of those poems, and they were incredibly real and raw and from the gut. I was stunned by the bravery of these poems. And am still stunned. Every time I go to hear you read, I'm always just like, this is the bravest thing ever. But sometimes bravery also leaves you exposed. Did you feel that way or do you feel as though this was a healing journey for you?

Willie Carver:

I would say I feel exposed and it's a healing journey. Vulnerability, and I can't take credit for this concept because I feel like drag queens have taught me this. Vulnerability is the biggest strength you can have because it says I'm so not afraid of you I will take off my armor right now. And when I first started this particular project, I didn't know I was doing it.

I was so angry because in a very short sentence, my queer students were being targeted by outside forces, and these rose to the level of threats, and these students actually had to be moved out of their households. And the school district refused to acknowledge that it was happening, refused to speak to the kids, refused to defend them. And I wanted to write an email to my superintendent. And in the two box of this email I suddenly start needing to write a poem.

Liz:

Wow.

Willie:

And it felt unlike anything even to this day has ever felt that first one, like a supernatural experience, like I have to say these words. And so I started writing. The first poem came out, which was a memory of being five years old, four years old maybe, and wanting a toy that I couldn't get without being shamed. And what I learned because this kid inside of me was very much there and he wanted to talk every day about these things to the extent that there was a moment, I was sort of letting him speak. And then I started to realize I'm writing a collection of something here.

One of the poems he says something really unabashedly bright and emotional, heart-wrenching. And I remember thinking that line is too much. You can't just say that. So I go to erase it and literally my finger was over the backspace button, and I could hear this little boy inside of me going, "Please don't erase me. Everyone erased me." So I wouldn't. And I said, "Okay, I honor whatever you want to say." And I think for me, this healing has been about advocacy. I've been thinking a lot about what advocacy means, and I mean, at its root ad means to or with, and vocal is the voice.

And I think there are those who don't have voices. And advocacy isn't about going and doing work, it's about staying with them and making sure that their voice gets heard by someone else. It's about being something else that is able to carry that voice. And so the healing for me has been I might have the lived experience and memory and soul that I share with a six-year-old boy who was terrified of the world and mistreated by the world, but I'm a big strong man. And so I can carry his voice and share it and sit with him while he tells me what's happening. So for me, that's been the healing aspect.

Liz:

So you offered that to yourself and that was an incredible blessing and just a grace. What an invitation to allow that young Willie to speak? As teachers, allowing the voices of all 100% of our students to speak and to nurture those voices and invite those voices to speak in our classrooms can sometimes get us in trouble. And it's absolutely necessary though that we do that work. Do you remember an assignment that you used every year that you noticed produce a kind of healing in students that allowed them to step into that vulnerable place and speak their truth? Did you have an assignment or did it just happen naturally?

Willie:

In terms of writing I realized to bounce right off that idea that sometimes we get in trouble for doing that. I approached my last five years in the classroom from a legalistic perspective. I took everything that I knew about public school law and applied it to how I would move forward because I knew we're not reading Ada Limón in this class, it's going to get banned.

We're not reading Toni Morrison, it's going to get banned. Were really only easily able to read straight white men writing from a Christian perspective, anything else would be banned. And so I said, "There's one voice in here they can't ban and that's my students." So I have this belief that if you show your vulnerable self to people, most people who are good will respond with vulnerability. And so I shared vulnerable poems with my students.

Liz:

Your own poems?

Willie:

As a matter of fact, every piece of writing I ever asked my students to do, I did with them. So poems about loving someone who doesn't love you back, nothing too dramatic. But I then invited them to write their own poems and then we published them in a class anthology, and then those became what we would read as our classroom reading for the entire [inaudible 00:06:58].

Liz:

So they became the textbook?

Willie:

Yes, they were the textbook. And you can't ban that textbook.

Liz:

That's right.

Willie:

And they were allowed to submit anonymously if they wanted. And the beautiful thing is that a good half of them would start out wanting to, and then inevitably. And I did not prescribe what they had to write about, I just said, anything that shows who you are. I don't care what that looks like. And it was beautiful to see what they would do.

Liz:

You recently published a poem. I don't think it was in your collection, Requiem for a Dollar Store Christmas Bear. That's not in your collection, is it?

Willie:

It wasn't. There's a story about why too.

Liz:

Yeah. So tell me the story of the poem. And then what has happened since the publication of that poem? Because I thought this was A, the most universal thing, but it was so beautifully couched in your life and your place in your geography.

Willie:

So Toni Morrison talks about this idea of the flood. That human beings look at something and say, "That's a flood." But it's rarely actually a flood. We take a river that knows where it's supposed to be and we try to push it somewhere else, but water knows where it comes from and water knows where it's supposed to be, and the water finds its way back and it's inconvenient when it does. And so we call it a flood. And so she says, "This is what the writer does." We flood back to that origin point and-

Liz:

Wow.

Willie:

... we feel it run across our skin and we-

Liz:

Wow.

Willie:

... can't escape it. And I think she's totally right.

Liz:

Yes.

Willie:

And my primal flood was this experience in my life of us being so poor that we had to leave our trailer and go live with an aunt and an abusive uncle who threw away the one gift I was able to get for Christmas. And I feel like 90% of the time that I'm writing I'm trying to process what happened in that moment, that moment of being so totally powerless. And I tried to write this poem. I actually, once I knew I was writing a collection, said, "Okay, this has to be in there." And I couldn't write it at all.

Liz:

Wow. Interesting.

Willie:

So I ended up sending this whole collection that was meant to be about that poem without it being in there. And so Ada Limón came to Mount Sterling and I was in the audience, and I asked her this question, what do you do when your flood wants to go there and you can't touch it? Her answer was very, very nuanced. But one of the things that she said was, "Maybe the flood's too dangerous to stand in, sort of, can you stand nearby? Can you pick something that was in that moment with you and write it instead?" And so I had tried to write this from my perspective, and I'm not saying that I wrote it from this bear's perspective, but I thought, I'm just going to write about the bear itself. And that was the way that I could do this.

Liz:

Right. What an incredible writing assignment for a student who is struggling with a trauma or a pain. You don't have to stand in the flood and face the oncoming waters. You can just stand on the bank. If that's where you can stand and just describe the tumbling water that's all you have to do at this point. And so you found yourself able to focus on the bear in that poem?

Willie:

Yes. And of course, she's so beautiful. Everything about her. The straightest I've ever felt was listening to her read because I thought, "I just want to put my head in your lap and have you read for me.

Liz:

What?

Willie:

Is that what straight is?"

Liz:

Right. Yes.

Willie:

But yet she said, "Maybe you can create an entire world where this is happening, and you can write about something happening on the other side of that world, and you can tiptoe your way to it." But yeah, I think it is a tool that I really want to try. Something I have noticed one, the reception to that poem has been so beautiful. And like I said, I think if you are vulnerable, people will be vulnerable back.

Edie:

Thanks so much for tuning in today. You can read a full transcript and find the other episodes from this series “Writing as Healing” at blog.heinemann.com.