Creat(ing) Writing using PicLits

When I was a high school English teacher, I often tried to incorporate creative writing into study of contemporary poetry. I think creative writing is an important end-in-itself, but I also   believe that as students struggle with and enjoy crafting poetry or short stories, they might attend with more care and appreciation to the details of other textual landscapes. Good reading assists good writing, but the reverse is true too.

Students are often worried that they will have nothing to write about; they think their lives, experiences and imagination are not an adequate reservoir for great writing. I saw my task as a teacher to show students that in the ordinary and everyday are resources of beautiful writing.

My favorite example of turning the everyday into an occasion for poetry is William Carlos Williams’s poem: “This is Just to Say.” There is a fun backstory to this poem, and I like to think that it’s true. Williams was a physician who often didn’t return home until late at night, after his wife had gone to bed. One such night, he entered his kitchen and, opening the icebox, found two plums – his wife’s usual breakfast. Hungry and tired, Williams ate the plums and wrote the poem as an “apology”:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

In the spirit of Williams, I asked students to write about ordinary things and events, to find the possible stories and meanings about what was before mundane. They told stories about old family jewelry, stored pictures on cell-phones, old journals used for personal writing. We discovered and crafted together the meaningful stories and important relationships that ordinary and sometimes forgotten objects announce.

If you’re considering doing something similar in your classroom with creative writing, the internet has resources to help with this imaginative work. PicLits is a site that has an archive of photographs of daily life – old cars and butterflies, for example – which can spark a great poem or short story. Students can select photos from a healthy archive and type in their own script. Plus, when they finish composing, they can save their work for later printing or share it with friends via email.

I enjoyed using writing portfolios with my students. Here they would create a scrapbook of sorts that included a collection of their own poems or stories; found or drawn pictures that illustrated or sparked their work; literature and poetry that we had studied along with their responses and criticisms of it.

Assignments like this collect students’ engagements with and interpretation of the world and other writers in one place. PicLits might be used to facilitate such a project as students can choose and respond to images with writing. In my view, the English classroom has become overly objective and concerned with stable definitions (What is a symbol? A round character, etc…). Instead, we might use reading and writing to help students engage with and interpret the world; to help them see their own experience and imagination as resources for ideas. PicLits can help with this important responsibility.