Passion, Fire, Hope 101

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I asked each student to hand in a couple of pieces composed in forms of expression other than writing. Many brought in food, some paintings, a few tape recordings of their own music. A chef from Kuwait cooked us a seven-course meal and showed us pictures of his country. Another student brought a videotape of himself doing technical rock climbing.

It took us a couple of quarters to realize that something was still missing. Experience. It’s madness to think all learning comes from putting pen to paper. What about life itself? We decided that people would get check marks every time they did something they’d never done before. People went to symphonies, rock concerts, Vietnamese restaurants. They watched foreign films ("That Akira Kurosawa guy can be pretty funny"). They got in car wrecks (not for the check mark, but, since it happened, they might as well get credit). They got counseling (I hope not as a result of the class). One fellow told his father for the first time that he loved him (a big baseball fan, he watched the movie Field of Dreams over and over that day to psych himself up).

Something else was missing. I still had too much control of the class. How to let go more? I didn’t know. Finally I broke them into groups and asked each group to run the class for one two-hour period (we generally met two evenings a week). They could do whatever they wanted. One group wanted to play Capture the Flag. I thought, "What does this have to do with writing?" But we did it, then wrote about it, and I felt closer to that class after our group’s physical activity than I had even after intense emotional discussions (besides, my team won).

Next class period we talked about the relationship between shared physical activities and feelings of intimacy. Another group had us eat Popsicles and watch cartoons, then draw pictures from our childhood with our opposite hands. In the same group we played Duck Duck Goose and Hide and Go Seek in the basement of the near-empty building.

Many of the people were continuing education students, and thus were older. Looking back, I don’t know how anyone could possibly say that he or she had successfully run a writing class without having played Hide and Go Seek with overweight old men, 20-year-olds, middle-aged mothers of five, and a half-dozen men and women whose native language is not English, all of them dead serious about finding or not being found.

One group taught us how to do the Tush Push, a country-western dance. This was especially difficult for me, a confirmed nondancer. Because the room was too small, we did this in the building’s central courtyard. Midway through one of our tush pushes, a couple of the department’s most humorless administrators walked by. I smiled and waved. Even this class taught me much. I had been working on letting go in my writing for years, and I sometimes became frustrated at the baby steps many students were taking toward manifesting their passion in words. But when it came to dancing, I suddenly comprehended their inhibitions: I would push my tush only three or four inches, while many who were too shy to open up in words were wildly swinging their hips (including a 50-year-old sheriff’s deputy I never would have pegged for a tush pusher).

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