Those who can, teach
From a video of Alvin Pang reading his poem ‘Candles’, which I used in a workshop earlier this week. I grew a lot too, from Alvin’s workshops!
Someone remarked the other day about how, with things opening up again, creative workshops for schoolchildren seem to be back with a vengeance. Certainly, the number of invitations I’ve received to teach writing workshops – in person! – has gone up over the last month or so, even if (for work reasons) I haven’t been able to say yes to all of them. I’ve always relished swapping the office for the classroom. Something comes alive when students start to grasp how they can frame their own worlds and ideas in literature, and it’s so rewarding to see even the most listless class sitting up a tiny bit straighter when a poem that speaks to their experience is read aloud.
I owe a great deal to writing workshops myself. At school, I had my first encounters with “SingLit” through teachers who not only found ways to add a sprinkling of local poems to the syllabus – but, on occasion, to bring their authors into the classroom. Some ended up coming in on a regular basis to walk us through writing our own poems and stories. But what made more of an impact than any single piece of writing advice was the opportunity to see people who looked and sounded like us being introduced as “writers”, and lending warmth and personality to the words on the page. Thanks to them, I dared to think that this could be me, too.
The experience I’ve just described, though, is one that will – sadly – sound alien to many students. In the years since I was a student, organisations like Sing Lit Station and the Singapore Book Council have done remarkable work in bringing writers to a wide range of schools (and non-school contexts, too!). The Ministry of Education has followed suit with its Creative Arts Programme, and each year that I’ve gone back to lead a workshop, the room seems to fill up with more kids from more different backgrounds. But for the vast majority of students, I suspect, the opportunity to hear from a writer (and more importantly, to try their hand at putting their own imaginations down on paper) is one that remains out of reach.
I’m generally wary of arguments that studying creative writing, or the humanities writ large, necessarily makes us better people: not least because there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. I’ve also been teaching for long enough to know that precious few students in each class – if any! – will flourish as writers later on, or even pick up the pen again. But those of us who’ve fallen in love with teaching this discipline (and yes, it is a discipline) do so because creative writing adds some pretty powerful resources to the student’s toolkit for life, such as:
The confidence to name and express your own lived experience, while learning to wield the permanence of the written word in a responsible way;
The humility to listen and empathize, not only to shape compelling narratives and characters, but also to welcome and make room for narratives and characters that don’t sound like your own;
The self-awareness to know that your words can benefit from exchange, critique, and a fresh pair of eyes (if not always your teacher’s!), and that you won’t always know the best way to tell a story; and
At the heart of all writing, I think, the patience it takes to observe life as it is lived, all the while imagining how different things could be.
(Etc.)
For even the best writers, the task of nurturing and using these resources will always be a work in progress. But it’s a joy to find at least some of our students (and sometimes, ourselves) growing in these traits, learning to deploy them in and out of the classroom, and sharing them with others. Beyond paying it forward for all the workshops I was fortunate to attend, it’s why I go back so often to teach – and, as far as possible, at schools that don’t usually get to bring writers in, for cost or other reasons. More than growing, one could say, it’s the work of growing up.