Pop 89: That Came Out of Me?
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Every year around this time, I teach writing to teens. Initially, we met in person, in a room at the Swift Current library, but now we meet online. The students come from all over the province. They live in both cities and remote areas. They come armed with stories, ideas, favourite words and an urge to write. And the urge does not die down over the week. In fact, despite the heat, the long hours spent sitting and listening to others read and, above all, spent scribbling whatever rises up in their passionate minds - the urge to write increases. A crack in their armour of coolness allows a waterfall of worry and wonder to break through.
All day long, they wrestle with language, dreams, secrets and themes. I don’t know adults with this much drive. Or is it need? Either way, they want to be here, and they want to be with each other because they already know that writing is a lonely business.
Some of the gang are return students, some I’ve known for over five years. I’m thrilled to see them grow along with their characters. The older ones feel like guardians of the space; they set the tone, keep the focus. They may not know this, but their presence is felt.
I recall something my mom told me as a voice teacher to young people: “The greatest thrill is when a student practices and practices and then one day they sing something so exquisite the look on their surprised face says: What?! That came out of me?!” Yes, I say, that came from you. You have drunk from a mysterious source of power greater than yours alone, and because you sit here, day after day, sweating over a line and a phrase and an illusive image, the reward of your hard work shows in the words you read to us. Yes, you wrote that. Our art is more than us; it is our prophet, running ahead of us, lighting the path, I say. You might like something you wrote but can’t say why. Write it down anyway, I say. It will make sense to you in a day or year, or decade. Just show up. Fully and completely, ie: bravely.
That it works, I believe, has something to do with the group. We sit like tale-tellers around a campfire. A lot has been written about crowds and power - mostly negative warnings about how easily swayed a group can become. But there is much to be said about witnessing in groups- an ancient practice among congregations bent on making the whole greater, in spirit and intent, than the sum of its parts.
“That was brilliant,” one young writer says to another. “Yeah,” adds one more. “I didn’t see that coming, the twist at the end, the way he made you think someone had died when actually they had just been set free.” “Really, you liked that?” says the writer, not sure, “I thought it might be corny.” “No way, it was a fantastic ending.” And, buoyed up by the response and support, the young writer lets the story live and grow.
As I watch these teens, I remember my days as a teenager. I was full of self-pity and fear. I believed I saw things nobody else saw. I suffered from a case of terminal uniqueness, but then what teen doesn’t? What I could have used was a group of others like me, passionate about reading and writing. But instead, I isolated myself in my room with cups of tea and books I could never finish and a typewriter I could never make talk.
Every generation has its own “comportment, a glance, a smile of its own, “ wrote Charles Baudelaire, a nineteenth-century poet. I think every generation gets a little smarter than the one before it, too. I don’t mean they can add numbers faster in their heads - because they have calculators on their phones for crying out loud. I don’t mean they can ever know what it feels like to get old any sooner than it takes to get old because getting old means having hundreds and thousands of days and nights waking up and going to sleep and blowing your nose and getting your heart broken and losing hair or your looks or your memory. That’s body wisdom - it takes as long as it takes.
What I mean is: we don’t let them be naive or innocent or carefree for as long as we did when we were young. They know there’s no Santa far too early. I am shocked at how many have already decided there’s no God. They feel the pressure to go it alone so soon. Because they’ve been catapulted into an adult world from the moment they discover their opposable thumbs - their phones assault them with images and ideas about sex, violence and consumption that normalize extremes before they enter their double digits.
Remember when we watched Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote? Remember when someone decided maybe all those anvils falling from the sky on Wile E’s head and those steam rollers flattening Sylvester were pointlessly violent? Well, welcome to a whole new level of violence. The intricate ways young writers describe eliminating drunken parents, schoolyard bullies, and evil interplanetary forces is breathtaking. There is a cocky, sarcastic imagination at play that catches on like a match to a dry grassy field. Every year I talk about gratuitous violence- what one screenwriter describes as “gorenography”- as not a valid way to advance a plot.
Sometimes it just takes a reminder that a careful, original depiction of a perfectly made sandwich, or the way the light comes bursting through the trees, will stick with a reader far longer than (yet another) over-the-top, lurid description to total obliteration. And then, look out, they’re off, making something miraculous. “Hey, I wrote that,” they laugh. “That came out of me!”