Monday, November 30, 2009

Building Community and Encouraging Creativity among International Women

by Lucy Green, with Emily Anderson and Sarah Maloney

In Korea, during the first snowfall of the year, couples meet outside and walk together in the lacy air. In Turkey, people own Van cats, know for their excellent swimming ability and almond-shaped eyes of different hues—one blue and one green. In China, women who split from their boyfriends or husbands will often wear their hair curly instead of straight as a symbol of their freedom.

Over the past two months, our creative writing group for international women has evolved into a place where women not only have the opportunity to write and creatively express themselves in English; it has become a forum for cultural exchange, candid discussion, and the development of an open and supportive community.

Nine women of four nationalities have attended our creative writing group for international women, about five of whom have become regular attendees. Our struggle to recruit more women and to publicize our group has been ongoing, but we’ve made some encouraging strides in the creation of writing activities.

Upon the request of one of our group members, we started sending out assignments before meetings and asking attendees to bring photographs and other items that could serve as inspiration during our writing activities. This has had several positive effects: our members can spend time brainstorming outside of class, they can translate words they might need from their own language into English, and they can use visuals to share their cultures with others in the group.

Another breakthrough was inspired by Marian MacCurdy’s essay “From Trauma to Writing” in Writing and Healing. MacCurdy talked about using right brain visualization to allow access to traumatic memories for the purpose of writing about them in order to heal from them. She reported that these activities enabled her students to write stories with “sharp imagery, clear sensory detail, and thematic sophistication.” We were curious whether we could achieve these results by using visualization—not just in describing emotionally charged events from the past, but in creating memoirs, poems, even fictional stories.

We were delighted by the results of two visualization activities which we conducted in our group. During the first, we asked everyone to visualize a room that belonged to a relative—a grandmother’s kitchen, an aunt’s living room, a brother’s bedroom. We took time to close our eyes and evoke memories from that room for each of the five senses. Then we wrote down what we saw, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt. We told the women that they could write in English or their own languages, and everyone wrote furiously after each segment. Afterwards, we shared some of our memories, which contained some of the richest imagery the women had created so far. For the second activity, everyone chose an animal that she thought represented her home. Then, while listening to a series of questions, we closed our eyes and imagined those animals transforming into ourselves. Afterwards, we wrote descriptions based on our visualizations. All of us greatly enjoyed discussing the cultural mores surrounding pet ownership and learning about Van Cats, rhinoceros beetles, flying squirrels, anoles, and grackles.

We have also had success designing our meetings around a theme. We held two meetings around the theme “What is woman?”, which led to both thought-provoking conversation and beautiful writing. We were fascinated to learn about the different conceptions and expectations of women in the different cultures that were represented in our group. We began by sharing what kind of womanhood was demonstrated in our homes growing up. Gender roles in all of our cultures have changed from our grandmothers’ and mothers’ generations. We also talked about how wonderful women are—how they can multi-task, balancing work, home responsibilities, and family. Still, tension exists for us all in trying to balance these roles. We discussed the women we see as role models—our mothers, professional athletes, politicians. We even talked about the way that hair styles communicate a certain persona, and how over the course of history, cutting a woman’s hair has evolved from a symbol of shame and powerlessness to a symbol of empowerment. This conversation was the kind of conversation that teachers strive to inspire among their students, that academic colleagues strive to have with each other, and that friends long to feel safe enough to share. It was honest, open-minded, full of thoughtful questions and genuine insight.

Out of our discussions came some incredibly perceptive writing. We each selected pictures of two different women from magazine clippings and wrote imaginative personality profiles of these women. Then, we constructed split-voice poems: poems with three columns, the left and right containing separate descriptions of the two women, and the center column containing statements that were true about both women. Many of the poems captured the tension between having a career and being a mother. All of them employed powerful and evocative images. Two of these poems can be seen on our group blog http://www.personal.psu.edu/sbm162/blogs/the_speaking_self/writing/ .

We still have to work hard to overcome language barriers and the accompanying self-consciousness, but the trust that has developed within our group has taken us long way. Every week, we (as teachers) learn from our failures and rejoice in our successes. Every week, we (as writers and as women) leave enriched by a community that finds beauty in differences and solidarity in similarities.

1 comment:

  1. I love the imagery-rich writing you've been able to gather from these women--it's so loaded with cultural details, and ripe for discussion/analysis. I'll be curious to hear, as the group continues, how the images turn into poems, and how the language barrier you've encountered influences the accessibility of these images and the students' writing.

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