Creative Written Expression for Children -- by Heather Mandell

“The limons [sic] are my babys [sic]. If you hurt them, I will hunt you down and kill you.” Alex* read his surprising response out loud to the group. His rotund face raised up towards me with questioning eyes as if to ask, “Was my writing okay?”

“The tree sounds like it is a mother,” I replied to his questioning gaze.

“Yep. It’s a mama protecting her babies,” Alex said.

We were approaching the end of a creative written expression session that focused on a poem called The Tree Is Older Than You Are by Jennifer Clement, a poet and novelist from Mexico. I developed CWE (Creative Written Expression) workshops for a five-month, pilot program in an underserved elementary school near San Jose, CA. Alex’s third grade class consisted of 20 children with a demographic breakdown of 90% Latino, 5% Filipino and 5% Caucasian. Most of the children who participated in the workshops spoke Spanish as their primary language. Some of the poems were written in both Spanish and English to ensure comprehension. The Tree Is Older Than You Are was one of those poems.

Alex had responded to a writing prompt that invited him and others in the group to imagine what a tree might say if it could talk. Although Alex’s last sentence was written in an aggressive tone, he wrote empathically from the perspective of a tree as if it was a mother paying attention. It was the first time that Alex paid attention during the writing group, which was drastically different from the previous two workshops when he could barely sit still. Alex’s emotional writing is interesting because of his infamous reputation as a class bully and disruptive student. He spent much time in class making strange noises with his mouth, throwing things, and touching his neighbor on the head or poking the girl who sat on the other side of him. He was quick to get into a fight and was often reprimanded. He was one of those kids who always had to stay in during recess. During many of my creative written workshops, Alex’s disruptions were clearly annoying to the other children in the group. Often his writing was illegible and he made it clear that he was not interested in participating.

At one of the final sessions, I noticed a change in Alex. The day’s topic was on coping with bullies and the group read a poem called Stanley The Fierce by Judith Viorst. When we began our discussion about bullies, some of the children in the group pointed out that Alex was a bit like Stanley and that sometimes he hurt their feelings. In response, Alex raised his hand (this I had never seen him do) and disclosed, “Sometimes I get angry and I don’t know what I am doing.”

“So, it sounds like when you get mad, you stop thinking,” I responded

“Yes, that’s it,” he said frowning a bit.

“How do you think it makes others feel when you say mean things about them?”

“It makes them feel bad and mad?”

Alex tested the waters to find out if his response was appropriate. He remained quiet after sharing. It was the first time Alex asked others in the group about how his behavior made them feel. I looked to the members of the group and invited them to answer Alex’s question. Most nodded and Randy* told Alex that he felt bad and threatened by Alex’s bullying. Randy later wrote about bullies, “This bully tries to threaten me. Sometimes he makes people bleed but sometimes he looks scary. He always makes me feel so bad and so sad.”

Alex became very quiet during the rest of the workshop and he had a remorseful look on his face when Randy read his writing out loud. I invited the children to draw a comic strip about a bully, which Alex did without a word. It was the first time I had ever seen him quiet, sitting in his chair with his hands in his lap. He shared his comic strip and told the group that the bully in his drawing was scary and that the boy who was being bullied felt very bad.

Perhaps it was the first time that he had spoken out loud about making another person feel bad. It seemed that Alex was thinking about his behavior during the workshop. His behavior indicated that he was troubled in some way and writing gave him a small window view into how to act empathically rather than acting out in anger.

For children who have lived through or are living with distressful situations, writing can be a tool to express thoughts and feelings. Many children want to tell their personal stories. Most of the children participating in the pilot CWE workshops shared stories about fathers in jail, brothers that beat them with brass knuckles, communication problems between racial groups, dreams of going into the military or of becoming rock stars, and dreamy summers eating watermelon under trees in their homelands. When given an opportunity, the children shared many of their thoughts and feelings related to emotional events. I developed the workshops to increase the children’s emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and communication skills. My role as facilitator was to model listening and respectful communication. The poems’ metaphors did the rest of the work for me. During the bully workshop, Alex had the chance to look into a mirror and learn how his own behavior affected others around him. He was able to do this through the eyes of Stanley, a character in a poem. Alex’s peers bravely shared the challenges they faced when dealing with real bullies in their lives.

When I was a child, I too wanted to feel safe enough to tell of the challenges I faced as a child witness of domestic violence and alcoholism but instead, I turned to my journal, a safe place where I shared my stories with the blank page. It is for this reason that I am drawn towards work that furnishes an outlet for children to share their personal narratives if they choose to do so. I believe that children who experience various types of distressful events are in need of emotional expression and the long-term consequences of silence can be dire if no outlets are available.

The possibilities are many but there are also limitations that should be pointed out. Children who are appropriate for creative written expression workshops need to be distinguished from the children who are diagnosed with serious psychological disorders. Children in these circumstances should be assessed and treated by a licensed therapist or child psychologist. This creative written expression model was developed for use with developmental groups and may not be appropriate for children who are in crisis situations in which their lives are in jeopardy. For the child who is victim to ongoing physical or sexual abuse, the focus should be on providing a safe environment and crisis counseling first before group written work can take place.

The stories that are shared during CWE workshops are especially relevant for educators, counselors and social workers who take an interest in children’s well being. For counselors and social workers, the model can be used to determine what is going on in a child’s home. It is a process that uses metaphors to help children easily express thoughts and feelings about themselves. In addition, the model can help educators determine why a child might display disruptive behaviors in the classroom. The workshops may also be modified for use in group homes, domestic violence shelters, or other organizations that provide services for underserved or at risk youth. These are the children who can benefit from talking and writing about their lives.

In these times of fear politics and buzzwords such as “Axis of evil” and “Terrorism”, we need more than ever to model for our children how to listen to one another. It is critical to teach them to communicate with words rather than fists, guns and bombs. This is the time to teach non-violent ways of communicating. This is the time to nurture our children’s voices. They have much to say and we adults must be willing to listen and give them the space to speak.

This is the work that will unlock children’s minds and hearts. These narratives open our eyes to the silences behind closed doors. Writing is about sending words out into the world and children without voices need those words to bring the dark, untold stories into the light.

Author’s Note: Names that have been changed are marked with an asterisk (*) next to them. The children’s writing is reproduced exactly as they wrote it. I obtained written consent from each child’s guardian(s) to include their writing in public documents.

Heather Mandell recently graduated from Goddard College with a Master’s degree in Transformative Language Arts. She works at her county library where she enjoys performing baby, toddler and children’s story times. Through a local non-profit organization, Heather currently facilitates creative written expression workshops for children and young adults who have witnessed domestic violence. She lives in Northern California where she enjoys kayaking, hiking and writing about her experiences.

Writing Myself Into Life -- Suzanne Montz Adams

I distinctly remember in fifth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Walkow, asking our class to draw a representation of what we wanted to be when we grew up by creatively using the word for our chosen profession. I used different colored markers to spell “writer,” using the “w” to form two elongated pencils with sharp points.

As a child, I was a voracious reader, a sporadic diary writer, a budding short story writer, and a very lame poet. Words fascinated me. I often wonder if this had anything to do with the fact that I was a very quiet child, a girl who rarely found the right words with which to speak, choosing instead to formulate her thoughts and opinions on the page. Writing was so important to me that I once gave colorful ink pens to my friends as gifts. Reading their disappointed, confused expressions on opening the gift was my first clue that other people did not view writing paraphernalia as treasured possessions the way I did.

But by ninth grade, I was more concerned about my hair, makeup, and clothes than anything else. I no longer visited the library every week, reading less and less as the years went by and my writing virtually stopped.

By the time I entered college, I was certain that I needed to study computer science or business in order to reach my fullest potential. Girls were being supported in these fields as never before and I felt an expectation by parents, teachers, and friends to become a businesswoman. I became a CPA.

But as fate would have it, I was asked to write an essay for our company newsletter in my first year as an employee of a large accounting firm. One of my co-workers teased me when the newsletter was distributed: “You missed your calling,” he said. And despite the fact that he didn’t mean it literally, that one comment broke through all the years of denial. I had learned rather quickly that accounting was not my cup of tea. But after all the education and training and license requirements, I couldn’t walk away and acknowledge the waste.

A few days a week during my lunch hour, I closed my office door and wrote the beginnings of short stories and novels, completed essays, attempted poems. For the first time in over a decade, I felt I was being honest with myself, that I was aligned with my desires. I had opened the door and found that long-buried love affair with words waiting there, a little worse for wear, but enticingly attractive and staunchly persistent. My body instinctively responded. Slowly, ever so slowly, like a shy girl on her first date, I stepped across the threshold, embraced the words, and began the long journey back to myself and my first love.

I attended evening writing classes and read every book on writing I could find. Several years later, when two of my three sons were in school, my first essay was published and I felt ready to embark on a new career with writing more central to my goals. But to complicate matters, my husband, Brian, was offered a new job that required extensive travel. Within six months of Brian’s acceptance, it was painfully clear that my goals would be simmering on the back burner for a while.

In those silent years, I had lost precious hours of becoming better acquainted with all the nuances of my beloved words—how they held up under pressure, how they performed in various settings, how they were perceived by others, how I could improve them. Even though I had more demands on my time than ever before, I was determined not to relinquish my dream so easily. Perseverance became my constant companion as I struggled to learn how to write well on my own along with a creative writing class thrown in here and there.

My first published essay was a reflection on the difficulties of reconciling my full-time motherhood with my personal aspirations—a theme that would thread its way through my life for the next ten years, frequently tying me in knots and blinding me to the ways I could untangle myself and break free. During those ten years, I was convinced by cultural expectations, the community I lived in, and my own insecurities that I couldn’t possibly have everything I wanted. I thought that by spending time and energy in pursuing my own goals, I would be sacrificing my sons on the altar of selfish ambitions.

More years passed as I played with my words until the assistant editor of a national parenting magazine read a submission of mine and called me to enthusiastically compliment my writing. Over the course of the next eighteen months, she published several of my essays. My love and I had truly gone public. We were out in the limelight together and I was ecstatic.

Then we hit the wall. Privately, I was still in love, but the public affair floundered. Interest waned. Publication was a ghost I chased for many years after and in my defense, I wasn’t submitting very much material and I didn’t understand the game very well. I had little imagination or energy to give to my writing when my life as a virtual single mom to three little boys left me depleted beyond words. I blamed myself for not being talented enough, prolific enough. I was incredibly busy, but why couldn’t I find time to write when other women seemed to do it so effortlessly? How could I argue for the time and right to work on my writing when I was not being paid to do so? What was I adding to the family’s welfare? In my husband’s mind, and to some degree, in mine, when writing, I was engaging in a selfish activity with no apparent benefit.

I knew that ignoring my ambition was not inherently right or fair or even justifiable, yet until I could prove my worth as a writer, I also couldn’t seem to wholeheartedly engage in it. Although I thought writing might be my vocation, the doubts were continuously fed by the lack of publication and the problems I encountered in the act of writing itself. My affair had seemingly become toxic to my sense of self-worth.

It was not until I turned forty that my anger became too great to contain and I began to insist on my right to write and in my writing, to fundamentally “see” and portray even greater truths. Anger can be a motivating force for positive change.

I have also learned the power of self-motivation. And in the writer’s world, little can be accomplished without it. Yet, every now and then, I paddle down the River of Doubt, lamenting that my completed novel manuscript might never have a Library of Congress catalog number. Then I always snap out of it and jam that paddle into the muck where it belongs, but still the river laps at the edge of my consciousness.

I will always feel as though my life and my creative work are meant to expand beyond my own imaginings. So I hold onto my love affair, occasionally lonely and weary, but most often, fully and richly alive. I am writing to inhabit my life, to leave more of an imprint than a notation in someone’s Daily Planner, to think and feel in abundance, to be silent not because I am pressured to be or because of the constraints in my life, but because I choose to be in order to write. I am still the eleven-year old girl making a pictogram of her dream, silently writing myself into life.

Suzanne Montz Adams has published essays in Diving in the Moon, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, BrainChild, and Family Life. She recently graduated from Goddard’s IMA program with a concentration in TLA and is currently marketing a novel for representation, writing a spiritual memoir, and facilitating creative writing and art workshops for adolescent girls.

The Emergence of Transformative Language Arts by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

A CALL TO TRANSFORMATIVE LANGUAGE ARTISTS

You tell stories or help others tell stories because you need to, because you know that the story can grow in the listener, and sometimes even the teller, new shoots of understanding, branches of connection, and a canopy of healing. You write because you found that the shortest distance between yourself and where you need to go is across the lines on a page. You do spoken word performance, help others craft community plays, or write and perform songs for the moment you might reach someone. You organize debate for underserved, inner-city youth, conduct anthropological studies of the spoken word, record oral histories for families, or recite poems into the wind because you know there is something that our words hold that can transform the teller and the listener.

This kind of transformation is what a new academic field and emerging profession, Transformative Language Arts, is all about. Transformative Language Arts (TLA) is a meeting ground for those involved in social and personal transformation through the spoken, written and sung word, facilitating work such as storytelling with people in prison, writing workshops for underserved youth, dramatic monologues for elders, or collaborative theatre for community building.

TLA draws perhaps most obviously from literature, creative writing, education, psychology, mythology, and social welfare. TLA looks at the roots of the oral tradition; the pedagogy and psychology involved in effective group facilitation, individual coaching; social change trends and movements related to spoken, written and sung words; and literature and creative writing to create avenues of voice for the voiceless. It also honors the traditions of storytelling, Playback Theatre, poetry therapy, narrative therapy, songwriting for social change, stand-up comedy for diversity, debate and forensics for empowerment, dialogue as a vehicle for drawing diverse voices into civil exchange, healing stories and more.

For those of us who love the spoken and written word, TLA provides a framework to explain what we do without having to shave off what doesn’t usually fit into one box or another. By naming this field and calling people together, those who facilitate, perform, educate and lead can find each other, and through such a discovery, learn more of who they are and what possibilities exist for their work in the world. By sharing the collective wisdom of storytellers, writers, actors and playwrights, activists, community leaders and healers, we can learn more about recovering and celebrating our selves, forging and keeping connections with others and the earth, finding and naming what gives our lives meaning. Such wisdom encompasses how we create our livings and our lives, including everything from facilitating workshops to grant-writing to the ethics of our work to the art of self-care.

In the classroom or board room, at the clinic or retreat center, TLA also bridges organizations, training programs, and models of workshop and coaching delivery that often evolve without the benefit of cross-pollination. There are many valuable educational and training opportunities such as Goddard College’s Transformative Language Arts MA concentration – the first TLA program of its kind, founded in 2000, or Amherst Writers and Artists training and affiliation; and organizations such as the National Storytelling Network, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, and the Writer-in-the-School Alliance. The newly-created TLA Network, a professional organization for TLA, focuses on networking and right livelihood through TLA. Already, TLA-focused courses and essays – such as the ones here – are coming into being, very evident at the annual TLA conference – “The Power of Words”conference – held each fall at Goddard College through the gathering of storytellers, writers, activists, community leaders, artists, healers, therapists, spoken word artists, actors, and singers. Performing, facilitating, organizing, creating and teaching are all life-long arts with life-long learning curves, and we benefit greatly from each other’s company.

In coming together, we gather questions, ideas, experiences, studies, challenges and possibilities for those who are changing the world, one word, one story, one performance, workshops, or coaching session at a time. We also break through the artificial boundaries between the spoken word and the written word as well as between the too-often compartmentalized literary, psychological and political arenas. To paraphrase singer-songwriter Cris Williamson, we each are the changer and the changed, the ones who witness and are witnessed by the stories that change our lives.
excerpted from The Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Reader.