Newsletter 2021-2022
In the spirit of love and validation, we’ve put together a newsletter celebrating MFA instructors* who create exciting and holistically supportive writing environments for their students. Consider it a counter to the empty diversity lip service that so many institutions love to sling.
With this newsletter, we’re hoping to introduce early-career writers in our communities to instructors they may be especially excited to work with or learn from in future. If you’re one of our current or former readers or applicants, we want your input!
Introducing Sheila Black
What is essential for you to create and steward a safe, fruitful workshop/writing space?
An agreement—whether spoken or unspoken—that we are all there in a shared spirit of listening and curiosity. No one knows everything; we all know something, and, most important, we all genuinely want to hear and truly listen to each other’s work—and benefit from each other’s experiences and history as writers.
What kinds of craft conversations have you been excited to have in some of your more diverse classrooms/learning spaces?
There are so many aspects of craft—and so many ways to talk about it! I’m very much of the mind that a poem is in some sense a living thing—“a machine of words,” as William Carlos Williams said, that is also a kind of bird.
What is hardest in revision is that you change a part, you change how that machine works, and so productive conversations about craft tend to be allied, for me, with conversations about content— the intent of the writer; the impact on the reader—and, thus, thinking about questions of feeling, honesty, voice—the truth of a particular voice.
In a workshop setting, what are your goals for the individual writer and for the group as a whole?
I’m going to give a short answer here—more confidence, more pleasure, more passion for forging ahead. I would like each individual writer to feel her/his/their vision is understood; the group is committed to help make that as translucent as possible for the reader.
How does this differ in non-workshop learning environments?
I’m not sure it does—except that non-workshop learning environments can perhaps be more focused on generative activities—offering information, exercises that gift new strategies to the student poet or writer.
What does it look like to advocate for students from historically marginalized groups within exclusive spaces (e.g. academic institutions, publishing)?
Being open, not thinking you know it all, listening, and—at this time especially—not assuming that what you’ve done so far answers the problem but asking the question: “What would it take?” and being willing to follow up on what you hear with concrete action—even, or especially, when you get pushback. If you are a white cis teacher, it means moving out of your comfort zone and being willing to shift paradigms, embracing the excitement of a landscape changing.
How has your pedagogy changed over time? What catalyzed those changes?
I learned to listen more. I think—like many of us—as a young teacher I was overly anxious to show what I knew. To be honest, I’m still a little too much like that—I’m a talker, for sure. But I love this recent quote by Joy Harjo and I think it applies to teaching as well:
Poetry’s really about listening, everything really ultimately is. But it’s really, it’s about an art of listening so that you’re able to write or think beyond words. And that’s the great irony, it’s the great paradox, is like you’re using words, it requires, poetry requires skill with words to make it work right. But that’s all to get beyond words.
(indiancountrytoday.com/news/poetry-is-about-listening-says-poet-laureate-joy-harjo)
You don’t want to instruct your students, then be the judge of how they absorb that instruction. You want to listen instead. You want to be alert for the moment when they do something wonderful, and then use the knowledge you’ve gained to tell them why, perhaps be able to give them some pointers or strategies for growing what they are already doing. You want to be the most alert listener possible.
You also want to be someone who simply provides new avenues for them. I don’t think I did that enough when I was starting out. I think I was too quick to make judgments, propose edits—try to shape student work into something I recognized as “good.” I learned not to do that through hard experience—simply observing what worked for my students and what didn’t.
What does truly inclusive (or re-centered, destabilized, radical) education look like to you?
This may be counterintuitive—and definitely comes out of where I see things now—but I think inclusive, re-centered, destabilized, radical education is produced by ongoing acts of care, caution, attention, and listening—a willingness to slow down, examine our assumptions and be open about our experiments in unmaking them. For instance, what about the books on our reading lists? How do our students see those books? What about the craft principles we learned? How many of those might be seen as reinforcing, say, patriarchy or ableism?
It is a tough time—we’re so far from a truly inclusive or recentered world. It is a lot to expect that we can easily come up with a truly inclusive educational system without asking so many hard questions, but opening the space for those questions is a start—and, in particular, being honest about how these questions relate to the social construction as a whole. We can’t forge a truly inclusive educational system without including how the larger society shapes our students’ experiences. For example, a student who has to work two jobs to afford being part of a workshop is not able to focus on his/her/their writing in the same way as a student who is able to be “just a student.” What do we do with that?
What role does mentorship play in your writing life?
Mentorship is like air or water. I don’t think much happens in writing without the work of many. It’s a much more collective art than we generally acknowledge. Think of any writer you know. Someone else reads and comments on that person’s work. I once met Douglas Bruster, a “world expert” on Shakespeare’s handwriting, and he said what struck him in his research was that the Elizabethan playwriting scene was so collaborative—people scribbling all over each other’s drafts, suggesting lines, images, revisions—helping each other, in other words.
For me, a host of mentors have been important at every stage. At a certain age (I am at that age!), you almost naturally slip into the role of being a mentor in some way or another; you do it because it provides a sense of meaning, a sense of this is one art we’re all engaged in—a kind of field or meadow to use an image my friend, poet Dan Vera, once came up with—and who knows where or how new and beautiful things will arise from it.
Sheila Black is the author most recently of a chapbook All the Sleep in the World (Alabrava Press, 2021). Her fifth collection, Radium Dream is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, The Birmingham Review, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She works for AWP and lives in San Antonio, Texas. Born with XLH (X-Linked Hypophosphatemia), she is a co-founder of Zoeglossia, a non-profit to build community for poets with disabilities.