The first time I taught writing, my students were little old ladies at the National Council for Jewish Women in Los Angeles. Maybe some of them were not so old, and certainly some of them were not so little. All of them, however, were NCJW members who for one reason or another wanted to take a class in writing. That I was their teacher was due solely to the fact that I had a part-time gig editing the Chapter’s newsletter. What I knew about teaching writing was what I had gleaned as a student in writing courses at Pitt—which is to say, very little. I was, as I usually do, flying by the seat of my pants. I don’t know if any of my students went on to publishing success. As I recall, they mostly wanted to write their memoirs for their grandchildren.
The next time I taught writing, I had been well-prepared in composition pedagogy by the English Department at Cal State Sacramento. I was a newly-minted Teaching Assistant with a newly-minted syllabus that had earned me an A in the Teaching Composition graduate course I had just completed. Book learning I did have, but after that first day in front of a class, I was, once again, flying by the seat of my pants. Learning about teaching and actually doing the job are two very different things, and my carefully honed syllabus bit the dust after a couple of weeks. It was lofty, but unmanageable. In the classroom, I was dealing with real people who tend not to work the way theory says they should.
Since then I have taught writing to: the scions of the upper classes in Pennsylvania; the sons and daughters of the middle-class in California’s Central Valley; the kids of Latino and Asian immigrants (legal and not) in East LA; not to mention, male felons incarcerated in a California state prison. I’ve taught creative writing, poetry, screenwriting, non-fiction writing, basic composition and remedial writing. I’ve had classes of as many as fifty and as few as one. And to tell the truth, I’ve loved it. Not all of it; true I hated the grading of essays. But breaking down the process of writing until everyone I was talking to “got it”—that I loved.
The simple fact is I know the power that comes from being able to communicate in writing. To commandeer one’s thoughts, to harness one’s emotions, to find the words and the syntax that drives them straight into a reader’s mind: it is, I believe, the ultimate power, far greater than physical prowess or financial. It is that power I had in mind when I started MidLifeBloggers. To empower those of us in midlife to recreate ourselves and our world by writing “about each and every issue–big and small, real and imagined–that any one of us is experiencing as we are wending our way through this period in our lives. If you’ve thought it, felt it, worried about it, wanted it, cried over it, laughed at it, feared it enough to write a blog post, then surely that’s a blog post the rest of us need to read.”
I knew from the outset that there would be those among us who were Writers with a capital W and some for whom the W stood for Wannabe. My goal was to do what I could as a teacher and an editor to meld the two groups together. Over the past year or so that MidLifeBloggers has been in existence, I’ve worked with a number of writers to that end. Now I’m opening the process up with the creation of the MidLifeBloggers Writer’s Workshop. As much as I can, I want to simulate what happens in a real-time writer’s workshop.
It will work this way: one part of the Workshop will be a series of posts I have written called What I Know For Sure About Writing. Each post will develop a specific theme in which I draw on my experience as a teacher as well as a writer. Here are a couple of the upcoming post themes:
- It’s just another form of communication. Unless you’re Emily Dickenson blissfully penning poems in your bedroom, there is some purpose to your writing. Know that purpose because all else follows from it.
- To learn to be a better writer, you need to learn what your process is.
The second part of the Workshop will be an on-going editing dialogue with a writer about a specific post that isn’t quite ready for publication on MidLifeBloggers. This will enable you to actually see the editing process, which will help you in editing your own writing. In addition, through your comments, you can actually contribute to the editing process. The first post up for editing is “Will You Still Love Me When I’m Sixtyfour?”
The third part of the Workshop will be a monthly writing prompt. Think of it as “in-class writing” that you then offer up to other MidLifeBloggers for their responses. The best way to learn about writing is by reading other writers and thinking about why something worked or didn’t work. The work you produce for the prompts may end up being published on MidLifeBloggers.
As with MidLifeBloggers, the success of our Writer’s Workshop will depend on you. I hope you’ll join us.
Jane Gassner
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