Practicing Art in Community

How community circles, my students and Mary Oliver helped me reframe achievement

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose. A special welcome to some new readers, a few seniors who graduated yesterday. Congratulations! This week’s pocket is about community. I was inspired to write it after reading Benjamin Gucciardi’s poem “The Rungs” on Poetry Unbound and listening to an interview with Ross Gay. Communities are lighthouses, beacons when we are lost in the dark. Thank you for being a part of the pocketful of prose community. This space delights my heart. If it delights yours, please click the heart at the bottom of this post or consider sharing with someone who is part of your community.

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

E.B. White says it is an exciting time “when you are waiting for something to hatch.” How thrilling then, when things actually hatch. June is a hatching time for high school students and their teachers. We published our 5th high school literary magazine and celebrated with a release party and reading at our local bookstore.

Savannah Gordon, senior editor, and I Savannah designed this year’s Voices cover

Wishing Tree Books is pure delight. Located in the Perry District, it was once an old, beautiful house. It is still an old beautiful house, but it has been transformed into a pastel dream with carefully curated books and toys. It emanates joy. If that weren’t enough on its own, it is owned by a parent of a former student of mine.  I was excited to host the party but nervous beforehand, fearing that perhaps no one would show up. But the evening was a huge success. We had to keep bringing out more and more chairs as students arrived along with their family members and members of the community.

Support Local Bookstores

I decided to start North Central’s creative writing workshop six years ago because I wanted to establish my own writing practice. At the time, I didn’t really have one. I figured I would heed Natalie Goldberg’s advice, which is that writing doesn’t need to happen alone. We don’t expect athletes or musicians to practice alone. In the same way, we don’t have to practice our art alone. We can do so in community. As Goldberg says, “kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. We suffer anyway as human beings. Don’t make it any harder on yourself.”

I advertised the club and to my great pleasure, students showed up to the first meeting. Well, two students showed up, but you got to start somewhere. Because of the seeds that were planted that day, we are now publishing our 5^th publication of Voices, showcasing the art and writing of hundreds of students. Our creative writing club meets regularly. It has dozens of members who have now had their work published in Voices, In Roads, a university publication, and the Spokesman, our local newspaper. If you would like to support our community of readers and writers, you can do so here.

This is the Spring Publication of In Roads published by EWU’s Writers in the Community. It features the work of several of our creative writing students including my daughter Anna. Cover art by Aimee Brooks

Ross Gay author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy says “joy” rises in the moments when “alienation from people —not just people, (but) from the whole thing — goes away.” In these moments, “everything becomes luminous.” Joy is community.

Ross is sometimes criticized as focusing on light in a world full of so much darkness, but Ross’ work, is not light and fluffy. It is based on the notion that we all share a “foundational” experience “that we are not here forever,” and that we can connect with one another through our shared experiences of life, death and grief.

In my classroom, I host community circles regularly. Community circles are spaces for intentional communication to establish values, share experiences, and build relationships. When we first started community circles, my students hated them. This was our first full school year post Covid, and the lack of social skills was palpable. My students entered my classroom preferring to keep to themselves, opting for individual work over group work. I don’t force students to share in community circles. Students are allowed to pass, and believe me, they embraced this option. But I continued to offer opportunities for community building, be it by forming teams to see who could create the tallest tower out of a marshmallow, ten strands of spaghetti and a short string, by playing a quick game of Mafia at the beginning of class, or by inviting students to come join us for book club after school with the promise of homemade cookies.

I went into our final community circle questioning what I had taught my students this year. June is a time of hatching for teachers and students, but it is also a time of reckoning. In June, it is clear where my teaching has fallen short, where I have fallen short. I went into our final community circle, a little deflated because in reviewing my students’ final papers, I realized I had failed to teach them some important tenets about basic structure and format. But because of the poet Mary Oliver’s wisdom and my students’ reflections, in that final community circle, I experienced that moment of luminosity that Ross describes. I experienced a moment of being in community with my students where the world was briefly illuminated. 

I would love it if you would join us for some conversation in the comments. What resonates with you? Community has been challenging for many since Covid. What is your experience of community?

I’m going to close this pocket with a poem I wrote to express my gratitude for our final community circle and my students. There are a few references to Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” which you can check out here if you don’t know it.

Photo by Jojo Wang on Unsplash

Community circle

In our final community circle, we go around and share our feelings

tired, tired, tired

Excited!

Graduation is Saturday

I also say tired but it’s a half-truth

I am actually a little deflated

like a helium balloon post birthday party

Reading my student’s senior research papers before bed last night

I worry that I have failed them

It is a bit of a mess

There’s much confusion over a Works Cited

what exactly it is and if what it is counts towards the page count

It doesn’t

but they think it does

Some are missing works at all

seeming to misunderstand the research aspect of a research paper

Why must I always learn by mistake?

Why couldn’t I have pre-empted these gaps in their learning?

Why it is only now at the very end that I’m teaching Isabelle how to cite correctly

in the loud gymnasium as we await field day

I have failed them

And yet, at our final community circle,

We all sit facing one another

and I realize, they actually want to be here

which was not the case in September

or for many months after

when it felt like they would give their left kidney

not to have to utter a word to another person

let alone their thoughts and feelings

In this final circle, there is not a mute mouth

Everyone has something to say

about Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”

and whether she is talking about attention or ambition

I, of course, want them to recognize she is talking about attention

the doorway to devotion

but they surprise me

Maybe she is talking about both, they say

Maybe the very definition of success needs to be turned on its head

Maybe we can still be ambitious

but we can change what we hunger for

We can stop counting the pages

and the days and the grasshoppers

and instead notice this one grasshopper

and realize it has been eating sugar from our hands this whole time

No one passes when it is time to share

what they will do with their “one wild and precious life”

Isabelle tells us she will travel to Canada this summer

and also to see her mom

Denise is excited to see what happens when she devotes herself to college

Becky and Raven are looking for an apartment together

Luke is ready for his new gig as an auto mechanic

I write the location down- as I might need to call in a favor

Only this week, I lost my keys when I placed them on the hood of my car

and managed to drive away using my husband’s keys

Why must I always learn by mistake?

But I feel better because when I recount the story in this circle

Even quiet Luke smiles kindly and laughs out loud

We always close the circle with gratitude

Rebecca thanks April for being her only friend all year

a friendship formed in this field

A few of them thank me

for creating a class

that didn’t suck as bad as the rest

for making a space where they felt safe enough to share

I think only a select few learned how to write a paper in MLA format

how to properly cite evidence with an internal citation

but they all learned how to be part of a civil conversation

how to be in a circle with people who don’t travel in the same circles

how under the right conditions

where you are encouraged to listen with your heart

people can surprise you and even support you

They push the chairs back into groups of three and four

and wave goodbye as they head for the door

I clean up Dorito crumbs and collect the remaining M&M cookies

so the room resembles what is was before