There are plenty of grad school horror stories of gimlet-eyed young literary critics humiliating people who ought to be their friends and colleagues. But I've been fortunate in my mentors. I learned workshopping in the Quad-Cities at the Mississippi Valley Writers' Conference, where educator and biographer David Collins has fashioned a wonderfully supportive experience for novelists, story writers, poets, geneologists, photographers, and writers of all kinds of commercial fiction and children's literature, as well as interested amateurs. So when I designed a creative writing course for SCI, I knew it was possible to bring together a community of writers who respected and supported each other's gifts. It was a riverboat gamble.
Teaching always is.
But I wanted to try. At first we didn't know each other, and the first couple of classes were edgy. I remember talking a lot about the unique gifts each of us has to share, and the value of poetic license, of weaving a little fiction into a poem in the interest of a larger truth. I tried to phrase my comments as questions. I got in the habit of banging out poems, too, bringing mine in to read on the same schedule as the students.