WHY I DON'T TEACH WRITING

Greg Hirst was one of my earliest students at Browning High School so he’s almost my age and has had a far more illustrious career as a teacher and curriculum developer.  In recent years he has been developing Blackfeet genealogy.  He has loved writing and teaching writing and advises me that I should offer a writing workshop at Blackfeet Community College.  I think about this quite a bit and have an accumulation of thoughts which I’ll try to list.

I intensely wish that Blackfeet would write but I find that they don’t know the books about Blackfeet, scoff at the spearpoint writer, James Welch, Jr, and never visit the nearest bookstores, which are in Great Falls more than a hundred miles away.  When they get to college, they are overwhelmed with class reading.  I’ve had my eye on some people who show signs of writing, but they always turn away to something less solitary, less demanding of a quiet place to work, less puzzling.  Maybe art.  Those who look for writing as a way to success will look for models they think are successful, i.e. make money.

Grammar is taught much more as “usage” than as analysis of sentence structure.  The emphasis is on propriety.  I was considered a poor English teacher at Heart Butte because I never corrected anyone.  This was supposed to be the function of an English teacher.  In fact, even I didn’t really understand the real power of “rhetorical grammar” until I found a college text recently.  Just knowing the parts of speech is the beginning, not the goal.  Only when a person can see that a prepositional phrase ought to be converted into an appositive, that an appositive could be condensed to one adverb, and that the phrases and clauses need to be presented in a different order so that this sentence flows from the previous one -- and do all this without losing the sense and feel of the subject -- that’s what grammar is for.  It ain’t a matter of not saying “ain’t.”  However, the last time I taught (in Cut Bank) both the other English teachers could not even correct the exercises in the grammar text.  They didn’t know the answers.

All writing rests on thinking.  Thinking skills are MUCH neglected lately.  When I was in high school in the Fifties, there was much emphasis on the rhetorical devices of propaganda because we were seen as in danger of being seduced by Russian communism.  If voters of today had had this training, they would vote MUCH differently than they do.

In any case, the assumptions of what is reality are so different now -- at least among the young and the sophisticated -- that I find it hard to talk to some older people who have lived quiet lives.  Their convictions about demographics, legalities, science, class definitions, and a host of other things are pretty “sorted” into categories.  But a lot of recent thinking has been category-blasting.  The animals who were sorted according to appearance turn out to be something else when their DNA is studied.  The disciplines of the academy morph constantly, with border-hybrids suddenly swelling up while other traditional subjects simply wither.

Probably the Internet is the biggest change maker for writers.  There are three aspects to this:  First, the way of writing is much faster, more fluid, more amenable to revision than it was.  People who email or blog or twitter write differently, which might be good or bad.  It’s easier to quote, to footnote, to link, to search for information.

Second, the actual publication of books is not in the least like it used to be.  Likely there is no actual book at all: just a PDF.  It is so easy to produce a book that the prestige has gone out of it.  Everyone and her cousin is writing a book, possibly pretending it’s written by her dog.  (Sometimes that’s easy to believe.)  But people are still susceptible to the lure of the bourgeois Brit idea endorsed by NPR that one can jump up a few class status notches by writing.

Third, the whole complex machinery that used to surround books, beginning with the editor who looks for quality and certifies it, has collapsed.  The warehouses, the publicists, the book reviewers, the bookstores (chain or not) are all imploded.  So are the borders between nations, so now American authors share with stunning talent from India (where they learn grammar and rhetoric) or South America (where they still have remote tribes).  The exoticism of being an American Indian who can write is GONE, baby, GONE.

But few of today’s rez dwellers are very disturbed about all that because there’s so much ekse to learn.  Business courses, science, math, tech stuff including computers -- that’s where the action is.  Browning hasn’t been a white town for a long time, so every service, every shop, is run by someone enrolled.  That’s in addition to the Tribal Offices, the BIA, and Indian Health Services.  They are too busy to write about it.

At 71 my time is getting precious and I have a LOT to write.  I’ve waited a long time to get to where I can sit here all day at this keyboard.  I don’t care about publishing -- that’s not my problem.  I do not want to use up my time teaching writing.   Sometimes I think it would be interesting to just go sit in a coffee shop with a tip cup in front of me and look at individual's work, offer feedback.  Not many would accept it.

The thing about writing is that if you write, that part of your brain thickens and complexifies.  Then you can write better and longer, so that makes your brain develop more.  Writing as much as I do, I’m just getting to the point where my awareness and skills can keep up with my aspirations.  Anyone can do that with no teacher at all.

Rather as an adjunct to that, since what most people know about writing comes from an academic setting, many do not have “inner permission” to write about things like sex.  (Strangely, it’s okay to write about hatred and violence.)  Partly because of my co-writer, Tim Barrus, that taboo is gone.  (I’m fairly circumspect on my blog but not on emails.)  Many Blackfeet Community College students could and should write about the verboten parts of their lives.  They are often in their forties, survivors.  But many people are afraid to let them write about abuse or addiction or anything else negative for fear people will think badly of Indians.  They are still invested in the old pretensions about what happened in the 19th century, which limits their futures and strait-jackets their writing.

I do not see the answer as a classroom at BCC.  I think Blackfeet writing will be someone scribbling in a spiral notebook or clicking away at a keyboard in the middle of the night without even telling anyone.  Just opening up a vein, as they say, and letting it flow.