When I lived out west, there was a night where, about seventy miles north of town, a fire had gotten out of control and was storming through the wide open prairie. The people I was staying with thought if we drove far enough we could see the light from the flames on the horizon. "Your first fire," they told me, like it was a coming-of-age ceremony. So of course, we drove.
We never saw the fire (it was farther away than we truly wanted to go so late at night), but we stopped on a side road and took in the stars for a few solemn moments. Fires out of hand were hardly a good thing, and last we knew, it was heading straight toward a town. One of us remarked that before people populated the west -- as it is, it's scarcely populated compared to the east and west coasts -- fires must have blazed on and on for years. "Can you imagine a thousand year fire, just going in this dry climate without anyone or anything to stop it? Can you imagine what that would have been like? And when the pioneers did come, what a sight that would have been?"
I tell this story because when Linda Christensen writes about "fire" essays, and Kati Macaluso of poetry and how it requires writers to "engage in the labor of finding language 'for that which cannot be put into words," I also think of Anne Carson's words, "If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it." I think of the tenacity and spirit needed to write an essay with the opening, "Lazy? Wrong? Improper? Stupid? 'Some slang shit,' as Lamont 'Big L' Coleman said? To correct Big L and others, Ebonics is way more than slang" as student Ryan Halverson does. I think of Anna Hereford's "buttoned up end" of a paper, "From that one clipping, one image, [Toni Morrison] was able to compile enough rage to fill a book." I think of the fire that rages on without bending to humanity's moral compass of right and wrong -- it is just fire, after all. Wild and free with a purpose unto itself.
To say the least, this week's readings opened my eyes to what teaching writing should be. As Christensen points out, "When students write for the teacher instead of writing out of a compelling need to speak out, the writing is often tedious, not worth writing, and not worth reading." Let students choose what to write about. What strikes at their hearts like flint? What inspires them, what angers them about a book, or a question, or an image?
When we try to control something in its entirety, like the fire out west, like getting the exact math down of what an essay must be, bad things can happen. Students lose hope in their voice. Writing becomes a chore, a step toward a grade, a foot out the door. All that is learned is how to obey and follow directions. "If nothing else, that diploma/degree you have means you can be compliant!"
I would rather all my students be angry at the book I chose for us to read and passionately write about why it is wrong, than have them be lukewarm and indifferent for the year. I would rather they burn down the fields of scholarly thought than remain content to be small and shaped in the hands of others.
Christensen provides a map for how to encourage that thoughtfully and carefully. And it begins with listening to the students and the stories already living like lights in their eyes and minds. Don't streamline them toward a smaller purpose, contained in the classroom -- let them branch out into the world we all live in.
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