Creative Writing Group for International Women -- Introduction

by Emily Anderson, with Lucy Green and Sarah Maloney

Will we approach and present writing as an act of self-expression, to the exclusion of form and stylistic convention? Or will we approach and present writing as a rhetorical act, a way of engaging with an audience, to inform, enlighten, entertain, and emotionally impact? How will we present the vocabulary of creative writing to groups that have never learned that vocabulary?

Ten weeks ago, before our first class meeting for The Writer in the Community, I asked myself those questions. I was not sure how we as a group, or how I personally, would approach the teaching of writing in community settings.

Together with two of my classmates, I am teaching creative writing to a group of international women; they are a mixture of the wives of graduate students and students themselves. We chose to work with this population because they tend to be a rather invisible group here in State College, particularly those women who are married to students or faculty rather than directly affiliated with the university. Often they have come to this country knowing no one but their husbands. We hoped to offer the women a chance to express themselves through writing, to improve their English skills, and to make friends and feel part of a community.

One of my classmates lives in Penn State’s graduate student housing, and she was able to reserve a room in the community center of the graduate housing complex for our weekly meetings. Before our first meeting, we put up fliers around the complex, in some campus buildings, and in a few locations around town, namely the international grocery stores and one supermarket. We also set up a free webmail account and included the email address on the fliers. We got a few emails, and three women attended the first group meeting. For that first meeting, we started with a couple of introductory questions and talked informally for a little while, and then we did a writing exercise from a photograph.

We passed out copies of a photo from a magazine; it was a picture of an immaculate room with a single pair of shoes in the middle of the floor. As a group we discussed the picture, pointing out different items and features, trying to provide some vocabulary so that everyone could write about it. Then we all wrote about the picture, giving the option to either describe it or make up a story about a person who lived there or something that happened there. Two of the three women were willing to share their writing; although the overall level of English knowledge may not have been what we expected, we felt like the first class went well.

For the second class, we decided to do a food theme. Our introductory question asked everyone to describe a favorite meal; this worked better for some people than others – one of the women told us she didn’t know the English words for the ingredients. Then we did a poetry exercise based on the William Carlos Williams poem “This Is Just To Say.” (A template for this exercise is posted separately.) We read the poem aloud and discussed it, focusing both on the vocabulary and on the meaning of the piece, then we each wrote a poem in that same vein. For our second exercise that day, we listed all the items we could think of that were in our refrigerators, and then, picking one, wrote about a situation in which we would use that item.

After this second class, we asked the women what they’d thought of the exercises, and one mentioned that it was really useful to talk about everyday sorts of words, like those pertaining to food and cooking. We took this as a direction for the next few classes and decided to focus our themes on everyday situations and vocabularies such as family, weather, animals, etc. We will write more about other exercises in a future blog post, but we hope this gives an overview of the type of community in which we are working. In most of our meetings, it has often felt more like a peer group than a teacher-student interaction; although my classmates and I have initiated discussion and led writing exercises, quite often, and quite pleasantly, it has felt simply like a group of women sitting around a table talking.

In spite of the generally positive tone our meetings have had, we have had some difficulties, and we have been forced to re-examine some of our expectations and goals. The first issue we encountered is simply how to deal with a wide range of language abilities; our participants range from those who are fluent in English to those whose familiarity with English is very low. We have attempted to keep the instructions for our writing prompts simple but open-ended, and we have also found that talking extensively about the prompt has really helped to provide some vocabulary and to let everyone start thinking about the topic. In addition to a range of very different language abilities, we have also struggled with attendance; our group meetings have averaged only two or three attendees even though we have received emails of interest from many others have had several women attend only one or two meetings. We have tried to think of ways to raise our numbers, and we’ve definitely tried to analyze what we can do to get the women to come back every week.

Finally, we are constantly revising our expectations and what we hope to accomplish in the group. When we first started planning, we’d thought it might be nice to put together a small booklet at the end of the semester or possibly do a small public reading; while that may still be a possibility, our expectations have evolved to focus less on a goal and more on the process. Each week we learn more about what exercises are effective, what topics are interesting; and when we plan for the next week, we incorporate those lessons. We have also shifted our aims slightly. We see real social benefits to the group, and we’ve also received positive feedback as to how the group is helping the women with learning English. Because of that, I think we’ve grown less concerned, and less stressed out about, producing a certain type of creative product. As MFA students, my classmates and I are used to focusing intently on the craft of writing; each week in our group meetings we get a chance to step back from that and just enjoy talking and writing with a group of women.

In looking at the questions I had asked myself at the beginning of the semester, I feel that we are approaching the writing we do each week in this group as a rhetorical, communal activity. The Writer in the Community experience for us has become much more about the community than the writer.