Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Sim?es
I spent the middle part of August volunteering as a camp counselor at a creative writing summer camp for teenage girls. The camp, called Girl?s Ink, was based at a secluded retreat in the woods on Whidbey Island and co-sponsored by women writers? org Hedgebrook. My fellow staff members were a hodgepodge of Northwest artists and performers at varying stages of their careers including a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a Stranger Genius Award recipient, and a rock star. Basically, for eight days, I hung out in a beautiful location with a bunch of super artsy girls and like-minded grown-ups and talked about writing.
Sounds pretty cool, right? And in a lot of ways it was. But it was also an experience that reminded me how ethically complex the teaching of writing, particularly to young writers, can be.
The organization that ran Girl?s Ink is called Power of Hope, a Seattle-based non-profit that puts on a variety of camps each summer as well as after school programs during the year. Power of Hope camps are open to anyone who wants to attend (well, only females in this particular case), but their target demographic are kids who come from less-than-privileged backgrounds. Their overarching mission is to empower these kids through the arts. This means using art ? be it music, drawing, dance, writing, whatever ? to help participants see the ways in which they have a voice and can make meaningful change in both their personal lives and in their communities.
This is a mission I agree with 100 percent. All young people should feel empowered, heard, and capable. And I?m totally onboard with the notion that the arts are a great vehicle to impart that knowledge and tool set.
But here?s where things got difficult for me at Girl?s Ink. Can writing still be a liberating experience when you are put in a space where the only acceptable kind of writing is the kind that speaks to your own liberation?
For eight days, the facilitators of Girl?s Ink talked with the 36 campers almost exclusively about empowerment. It cropped up in morning meetings, in songs, in games, in crafts, and also in the bulk of the writing workshops offered. Campers were asked to write poems about times when they?d felt their freedom had been taken away from them. They wrote songs about coping with peer pressure. They performed skits about how to get along in a community. Political correctness was at a premium and expressions of gratitude and self-awareness were highly prized.
I should note that not everything the girls were asked to write fell inside the scope of this liberation narrative. One afternoon, another staff member and I led a workshop on humor writing that degraded pretty quickly (and happily) into an exercise in fart jokes. Novelist/memoirist Rebecca Brown gave the campers under her guidance the assignment of writing fairy tales, which definitely provided the opportunity for some levity as well as a chance for the girls to experiment with genre writing (oh my goodness, do teenage girls ever love genre writing). These sorts of activities were few and far between though, and at the camp?s end-of-session open mic, the vast majority of pieces read or performed dealt with overcoming personal challenges and/or making social change. Many of these stories, poems, monologues, and songs were beautiful, powerful and spoke to a level of talent I except from my peers writing at the graduate level. But I worried that by pressing its ideology (as nice an ideology as it may be) down so heavily on its campers, Girl?s Ink had succeeded in severely limiting their creative capacity.
This is probably not a good thing to have happen at creative writing camp.
Because while it is an important lesson for young people to learn the ways writing can be empowering, liberating, and unifying, writing can also be so much more. Writing can be angry and cruel. Writing can be obscene. Writing can be hilarious and fun for fun?s sake. Writing can be intoxicating. Writing can be broken and stupid and wrong. Writing can be the way we change the world, sure. But it can also be the fun we have in the world. Or even the trouble we cause in the world. These are important lessons too, I think.
I wish the campers at Girl?s Ink had been given an opportunity to see writing as all these many possible things rather than just one single thing. Of course, no one was walking around camp telling the girls they had to write a certain way, but the topics offered up and the atmosphere created made it pretty clear what sort of content the facilitators were looking for. And the girls were great at it. They caught on fast and rose to the occasion, eager and talented writers that they were. They seemed happy with what they wrote. They seemed to have a fun time at camp. So maybe I?m overreacting. Maybe there is no ethical quandary here.
Still, I worry that in trying so hard to convince these girls that they have a voice, me and my fellow staff members may have effectively squelched a number of voices because they weren?t speaking (or, in this case, writing) the ?right? things.
Source: http://thebarking.com/2011/08/teaching-y
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