learning, teaching spark, and handle!

I am sure now that I am going to apply for grad school back at CSUDH where I got my BA. I am going to go for the rhetoric and composition degree. I base this on conversations with my old professor, family, friends, and lastly on an article someone posted a link to that said basically no one can teach one to write creatively. I am a writer, a creative writer, a liar if you will, creating make believe and putting complex feelings into the shortest most vivid images possible. I can go to a creative writing program, where they will fill my head with different formats for poems, and suggest ways out of writers block, but mostly I would be put in a workshop with other people who think they can write, and probably they can, and we would all tear each other’s writing apart, or be too polite to say anything constructive at all. Workshops only work if the people in them are equally talented and are willing to both build up and tear down. Workshops don’t really work. I did the workshop thing as an undergrad, bleh! I learned more from reading other people’s work, published people, than I ever learned from some person randomly assigned to me in a group who has a writing style completely different from my own. I learned more in community college creative writing by keeping a journal than I learned from the teacher. Keeping a journal made me aware that I can spend hours writing alone in a room. Being able to write alone in a room for 8 hours or more at a time is when you make writing an actual job. I write every day. I don’t write because I want to, I write because I must. There are too many ideas in my head and not enough hours in the day to put them all into words on a page (or screen.)
So I know I can write creatively, but I also know I can write critically. I did it to get my BA and I did it with honors. I started looking beyond literal meanings of words and stories in the sixth grade when a student teacher taught us Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and made sure we knew that it was not a book about birds, but about people. It was not a novel as much as it was a philosophy. Richard Bach is often touted as a novelist, but his writings are philosophical and spiritual, and when looked at that way they become much more interesting. I digress. I know I can “lie” and make up stories. I know I can compress complex emotion into the simplest terms in my poetry. I know I can write critically. I am so very sure I can teach people to look past the literal meanings see of all the possibilities. I think one thing I want to teach is that it isn’t always what it means, but what it means to you that matters. No one really knows what an author or poet was thinking when she wrote something unless we are in her head, or we get to interview her. But then there is symbolism, and isn’t that fascinating, or motifs, and all of that other cool stuff that goes with critical reading.
I cannot believe I cannot begin to explain how excited I am to be getting back to school. I am excited at real challenges. Honestly I am not sure creative writing would have been the same kind of intellectual challenge for me. I plan to buy and read books on poetry writing, and to read other people’s short fiction, and creative non-fiction so that I can see for myself what is good, what isn’t, what fits my style, what doesn’t, where my talents lie, and where I fall short. In other words I plan to still get what education I can on how to creatively write on my own. I’m so freaking excited at the idea of classes and class discussions and arguments, not disagreements, arguments in the sense of debate.
Learning is so exciting! Why in the hell can’t I just make a living learning? But alas the closest I can get is teaching. I hope that in teaching I get to learn from my student’s ideas, their viewpoints, what they see and feel when they read. I hope that I have the talent and skills to pull these things from their heads. I really believe what Richard Bach says when he says, “Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others they know it as well as you. You are all learners, doers, and teachers.” He also says, “No one forces you to learn. You learn when you want to.” Teaching isn’t filling up an empty vessel it is pulling from the vessel what it doesn’t even know it contains. It is like everything they need to know is already in their heads, not the literature, but the insights, the ideas, the passion is in there simply waiting to be found and pulled out into the light. Seeing the light come on in a person’s face when she gets something for the first time, makes a connection to some concept she already knew, or sees something from a different point of view, a spectacular point of view where it had been a mundane view before, that is what makes teaching the most awesome thing in the world. Teaching isn’t teaching, it is making lights come on, it’s making connections, it is showing a new way to stack the blocks, arrange the letters, see, feel, smell, taste the world.
Right this moment I am seeing hope, seeing a future, feeling good. I don’t want to stop writing. I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to lose this. Tomorrow the darkness may be there again and nothing will make sense and voices will be telling me I’m stupid, or trying to remind of every time I ever embarrassed myself. Tomorrow I may be falling into the damn rabbit hole that is my insanity again. I don’t want to be crazy. I didn’t ask for this. If getting excited about learning and teaching can keep the black beast out of my damn head, then I need to focus on that excitement! Somehow I need that focus, that energy, that spark. I want more of what I have written here tonight. I have been writing all day, and I feel fantastic. I need to read. I need to reread Illusions, so inspiring me.
I wonder if college students would be interested in Richard Bach. I wonder if they would find the same inspirations, the same excitements I found on my first, second and fiftieth readings. There is so much in his writing to be inspired by. But then there is Salinger, and Lee, and so many other wonderful authors to find mysteries, inspirations, and insights in. I know I cannot teach Bach and only Bach, although I am sure I could write a paper on Jonathan Livingston Seagull that would actually be longer than the book is. There is so much in there. And Illusions, and the Messiah’s Handbook, companion piece to Illusions, I would never be finished teaching that book. I find new insights into life and into writing, and into spirituality every time I go back to those old friends. I put quotes from the Messiah’s Handbook on my Facebook every day, sometimes more than one a day.
Ah crap, I’m already losing the feeling. I am losing the flame the fire, the excitement already. NO, I will NOT lose this feeling. If I have to write it as a poem I will keep the fire. Teaching is an awesome thing. Teaching brings life and light to minds wandering in darkness, and the coolest part is they don’t know they are in the darkness. They don’t know until they read these books we assign, and we discuss them, and they find they do know the answers. I want to be able to move the desks in a circle every class so that there are no front or back rows. Everyone is part of the circle. I want every student to know that no idea is a bad or wrong idea. Insights can’t be right or wrong. Some insights might be off the mark in some people’s thinking, but right on for others, and all a student has to do to show off their insight is to show the rest of us in the text where they see what they see. If an idea can be supported by the text, if a student can make the argument with support, then it is a valid point, a true insight. That is where the lights come on.
I will soon be back in an atmosphere of learning. And soon after that I will be the one at the front of the room telling people to pull their desks into a circle. Soon I will be where I want to be, that is my future and that is where I will find my “handle” to hold on to, keeping me sane. I will hold on to learning, teaching and writing. I cannot die yet, I haven’t written all of my best stuff yet.
I am writing these entries to this blog in hopes that I can begin to know myself better, but also to let my friends know me. Funny how it seems the people I would most like to read my blog probably aren’t reading it anyway.
I have tried to let go, let my alters out to write, to see if they can write, if they write like me or totally differently. But I have also been put on a medication that is stifling them. Now this was the plan, quiet the cacophony in my head, keep the alters where I could be in control of the body and choose when they come and go. So far I have kept them out of my friend’s hair because it has been made clear to me that I am not believed. It has been made clear to me that I am not to allow them to contact my friends. But I am feeling stifled a bit too much. I need to let them out some time. I want to know them, know who I am talking to. Cindie seems to be able to pull them forward and I cannot.
Ok, it is time to try my hand at a little poetry. I haven’t written anything new in a few days. Some of what I write is such shit that it never makes it to the “save as” button, lol.