Writing Project Honoree Speaks in D.C.

By: Connie McDonald
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 11, No. 2
Date: 2006

Summary: Teacher-consultant Connie McDonald, who over the years has had an extraordinary number of her students named as winners or finalists in the River of Words poetry project, was honored at a formal event at the Library of Congress; this is her acceptance speech.

I’m so happy to be a part of this special celebration of student writing and art. The River of Words contest has been an important part of my school year for the last ten or eleven years. From the moment I spotted it on the website, I knew that it was a contest Louisiana students should get involved in. Many of the students we teach grow up along coulees and bayous; they fish and hunt and play in rivers and woods near their homes; they help out in their paw paw’s gardens or crawfish ponds. I immediately broadcast my news about the contest to my colleagues in the Acadiana Writing Project.

My writing project friends and I were (and still are) in a constant state of seeking and sharing good writing ideas that we’ve gathered from Louisiana poets who have worked with us in our classrooms—Darrell Bourque, Sandy Lyne, Sue Ann Owen, and Anna West; novelists and editors like Robert Owen Butler and Ann Brewster Dobie. We also get ideas from our favorite poets who model ways for us to look at and write about nature: Robert Hass, Mary Oliver, William Wordsworth, Basho.

We like chances to get our students outside and writing—we tell them to ‘unplug.’

This past February, Harriet Maher organized an overnight nature-writing retreat. She called it the “Dead (of Winter) Poets’ Society Nature-Writing Retreat.” Five teacher-consultants from the Louisiana Writing Project took eighteen students ranging from seventh grade to their first year in college down to the banks of the Bayou Teche in Leonville. That night we built a campfire, roasted hot dogs, and made s’mores under the stars. The next morning we roamed the banks of the bayou and the woods surrounding it, and wrote and wrote and wrote. Ms. Dixie made us a steaming pot of chicken and sausage gumbo, and after lunch, the poets sat around in a circle and read us what they had written. Ms. Harriet encouraged all the writers to polish their pieces and get them in the mail for the ROW deadline; three of those Dead of Winter poets placed as finalists in this year’s contest.

We like chances to get our students outside and writing—we tell them to “unplug,” as Ms. Harriet says, to “extinguish their cell phones,” as Ms. Caroline says, and to “let nature be their teacher,” as Wordsworth says.

Another bit of advice we like to give our students is something we learned from poet Georgia Heard when she came down to New Orleans one summer to do a writing workshop. She reminded us that poems hide and that we sometimes have to look hard to find them. She read us a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called “Valentine for Ernest Mann.”

Nye says “. . . poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, / they are sleeping.” Her poem teaches us that even things that seem ugly at first might have poems hiding within them.

In Louisiana right now, we have to look extra hard to find the poetry because there is so much destruction from the recent hurricanes. I live between New Orleans and Lake Charles; both towns were hit hard by the winds and water of Katrina and Rita. Much of the landscape in both towns is ruined: Louisiana is a damaged place.

Friends and family in New Orleans reported for a long time that everything in the city was an eerie gray: the yards and houses and debris. Garbage was (and still is) piled high on almost every street. The birds were gone.

Yet in the last few months, we’ve begun to hear about signs of recovery. A fellow teacher’s parents sent word that “the green is coming back.” Some residents mowed their lawns for the first time last week! The beloved purple iris is blooming along the Creole Nature Trail and in the Barataria Reserve. Folks are hearing birds again—no squirrels yet, they say.

In the midst of all the chaos, there are signs of hope and renewal.

My husband Mike and I spent Easter morning with Lucianne Carmichael, an educator, artist, and environmentalist. She and her husband, both in their 70s, tend seven acres of hardwood bottomland in Lower Algiers, which is a ferry ride across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. Off River Road, runs alongside the levee, down a winding gravel path, is their forest and artists’ workshop called “A Studio in the Woods.”

Lucianne met us at the gate, and the first thing I saw was a 100-year-old pecan tree that had been blown down, its gigantic root system tipped up. A few yards away lay a tall water oak that had fallen across the edge of their pond. Lucianne explained that the day she returned to the woods after their forty-one-day evacuation, she found what appeared to be total devastation. The canopy of trees—pecan, hackberry, and water oak—was gone. Twisted and fallen trees and limbs littered the property. She said it looked like a graveyard. Yet the magnolia tree next to the house was in full bloom, way ahead of season. At first, she thought the magnolia was confused, but after roaming through the property with her husband and their gardener who is a botanist, she realized that many plants were blooming like crazy, scattering their seeds far ahead of the usual season. With the dense canopy destroyed, the smaller plants, some decades old, had shot up over six feet in the month or so the couple had been gone!

It was as if the forest somehow knew exactly what to do. Lucianne says that what happened in the woods holds important lessons for humans about recovery from and compensation for what we’ve lost.

The Carmichaels decided to leave every tree exactly as it fell. Lucianne says “These trees are our dear friends, and they deserve to be honored and studied. They have not finished their work in the forest.” She envisions environmentalists and artists and poets going to the woods to study, sketch, reflect, and find lessons in many forms, from public policy to poetry, in the fallen trees and the astonishing new growth.

As I left Lucianne at her gate, I thought about the poems my students found this year as they wrote about damaged places they knew. Susan wonders what has become of a piece of her grandmother’s lace she last saw tucked in a drawer on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. Billy’s poem is about an oxbow that formed along his uncle’s property near Chalmette. Jamie remembers a rickety wooden rowboat embedded in the mud of the Atchafalaya River Basin. And Kathryn West finds poems on the wingbeats of birds.

Here’s Kathryn’s poem “Hidden”:

Poems can hide,
Waiting in the shadows dancing under the trees.
Poems can take flight,
Alighting on the wingbeats of a bird.
Open your ears,
They hide in the rain’s gentle requiem.
Take care and listen close,
They hide in the heart’s hidden song.
Look close,
They write themselves in the soul.
Watch,
They hide in the colors of the sunrise.
Poems can hide,
Finding them can be hard.
Put yourself in their way,
They are waiting.

Thank you.