The Wisdom of Following a Strand

By: Richard Louth
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 8, No. 3
Date: May-June 2003

Summary: Louth, director of the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project, describes four sessions that focused on "voice" during the NWP Rural Sites Spring Retreat in Tucson, Arizona.

With 18 workshops to choose from at a retreat, what do you do? Once upon a time, I might have wasted valuable workshop minutes wondering where to go and hovering outside rooms. But not long ago, a kind soul revealed her strategy. "Follow a strand," she said. She told me that following a strand had two benefits (besides handling indecision): it gives you a focus, and it puts you in touch with other "stranders" who attend the same sessions together.

The National Writing Project Rural Sites Spring Retreat in Tucson, Arizona, included a handy "Strand Index" listing six different strands: place, voice, site development, technology, host site, and NWP. It didn't take me long to decide. The voices at Lynn Nelson's opening night presentation and in Tom Romano's keynote session were so powerful that they put me in the mood for more on voice. And when I saw that the first session on voice dealt with Rick Bragg and Lee Smith, two of my favorite southern writers, I had no second thoughts. My day was planned.

Harriet Williams, of the Santee-Wateree Writing Project (South Carolina), was the presenter of "Rick Bragg, Lee Smith, and Dori Sanders: Southern Literary Models for Developing Students' Own Voices." Williams's was a model presentation: personal, yet based on theory; full of interaction; full of writing; full of voice. She began by telling us the story of her own Southern upbringing, and she balanced that by introducing us to Robert Scholes's ideas on responding to literature in Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (Yale University Press, 1986).

In the workshop, Williams focused on three kinds of response to literature: responding within a text, upon a text, and against a text. Then, using recordings and excerpts from texts, she led us through ways to respond to Bragg, Smith, and Sanders with our writing. Using a line from Bragg—"I know that"—I "wrote within" his work, producing the following short pattern piece: "I know that when you leave your family and are all alone in the city, you are not really alone even though no one knows your name or seems to care and that the maitre d' in the fancy restaurant looks at you an extra second, looks over your shoulder, thinking maybe your wife is coming from the restroom, for you don't look like you should be alone."

Williams brought us through two other writing activities that helped us listen critically to the voices of other writers as well as to our own.

My next stop was at "Blending Voice and Place with Literature," a presentation by members of the Sabal Palms Writing Project (Texas) concerning their recent Rural Voices Radio program. Kay Baughman and Paula Parson explored the reading-writing connection, showing us how they brought the writing of classic and contemporary authors into their classrooms and letting us hear their Texas students' voices in response. We worked in small groups to analyze Texas poet Vassar Miller's "The Farm," and then wrote our own pieces on a favorite place using some of Miller's techniques.

As volunteers read their pieces aloud, I noticed that some were fellow "stranders," and this sense of community led me to read aloud my piece about "Bucket Man":

I want you to see a tall black man walking down a dark street swinging an industrial sized plastic bucket by his side and hear him when he pulls it over his head and sings the blues, sound pouring out like a symphony. I want you to see the keys dangling on the chain around his neck as he stops you to ask, "What do you think?" And when you tell him you are a teacher and he asks, "What did you learn?" and when you tell him you are a writer and he asks, "Have you put yourself in danger?" I want you to see his finger pointing at you when he says, "You are going to write about this, you must."

For 90 minutes, as the Rio Grande filled the room, we listened to children bringing Beowulf and Keats into their own worlds, words, and voices.

From the Rio Grande, a group of us paddlewheeled over to the Mississippi River to experience a presentation by members of the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project: "A Continuity Project Blending Voice and Place: The Learner as Person." George Dorrill, Tracy Amond, and Karen Maceira described their writing group's continuity project to create a radio program based on teachers' voices and teachers' classroom experiences. As Tracy said, "It's all about giving teachers their voice." We heard a recording of Melanie Plesh describing her life as a teacher that was part of the raw material this group is in the process of studying and editing, and we heard Karen read a piece about the problems of being a teacher in the state where she grew up. But the majority of the time was for our own writing. How nice to have 20 minutes of pure writing time in a session, enough for me to fill four pages with reflections on my own teaching. And then time to hear each other's voices on this subject.

Following this strand on voice, I'd been to South Carolina, Texas, and Louisiana without even leaving Tucson. In the process, I met some new friends, picked up new teaching strategies, read new literature, and wrote till my pen ran dry. Even as the names and faces of those I met for the first time begin to fade, I believe I will remember their voices, and how good it was to have a chance to explore my own.

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