Activism in Academia: A Social Action Writing Program

"Try telling yourself you are not accountable to the life of your tribe the breath of your planet..." "My work is rooted in the notion -- Adrienne Rich that art can provoke social change." -- Willie Birch "You are the soothsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues on fire." -- Gloria Anzaldua "Witnessing is especially necessary when the reality of a lived experience is denied by the culture at large, the culture to which the witness is brought." -- Judith McDaniel "I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time." -- Robert Hass "THE LIFE OF THE TRIBE." "TONGUES ON FIRE." "WITNESSING." "SOCIAL CHANGE. Writers' voices, invoking justice and peace. The Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) honors and teaches this kind of writing. We come by it honestly, as my mother used to say. It is in sync with our origins as a university. Since 1994, we have transformed CSUMB from a military base into an educational one. With the guns gone, we brought out the books and committed ourselves to "diversity, particularly low-income, working-class, and historically underserved students." We regard social action writing as an act of critical inquiry, the domain of academia. Social action writing teaches students to break silences, to witness their lives, to be engaged and responsible members of their communities, to bring together craft and critical inquiry. The Program is now six years old, and if I were to choose one word to describe its evolution - the vision, implementation, impact - it would be collaboration. Everyone who has been involved with the Program has contributed her or his own lived experiences, skills, creativity, and commitment to social action. For each of us, the collaboration began long before we came to CSUMB. In this essay, I will tell my part of the story, about the evolution of the vision for, and the founding of, the Creative Writing and Social Action Program. And I will tell you stories of some of the process of building the Program, our Institute, and the university, as well as stories about our students, and what you can do at your university if you are interested in social action. Evolution of a Vision for a Creative Writing Program Committed to Social Action Though I could not have known it, for 13 years before coming to CSUMB in 1996, everything I was doing was training me for this work. Let me begin with a story. It is 1986, and I am about to teach my first creative writing class. I have spent years learning the craft, and I am here to teach students how to write poetry and fiction - rhythm and meter, metaphor and simile, how to create characters, how to develop setting and plot. I am set, right? "What shall I write about?" a student asks. "I have nothing to write about, nothing ever happens in my life." This is a central question, asked by many students in the class. Students are moving toward writing well-crafted poems and stories, but anemic ones. I try every writing exercise I know, yet students are still not inside their work. Many words, many pages, and they are silent within their words. Where is the passion, the energy in their writing, where is the "duende," as Federico Garcia Lorca (1973: 93) said, when "the blood burns like powdered glass"? The nothing-ever-happens-in-my-life student becomes my teacher. After several visits to my office, she writes a story about her two brothers she has lost to suicide within the past year. All this is going on in her life at the same time as she is saying she has nothing to write about. …