Last week, I had the enviable opportunity of watching and listening to our Bosque School 8th graders participate in the annual Writers’ Café. Every spring as a part of their English curriculum, these young men and women read aloud their favorite original poems. There’s humor as students share their love for pizza, their disdain for math, and their frustration with writer’s block. There’s also pathos, though, as they describe their anger at the injustice, poverty, and violence they see around them. Perhaps most importantly, the feelings and the thoughts they convey are their own, and the poems express who they are as students and as nascent young adults.
Writing poetry is rarely, if ever, easy; teaching students how to do so requires skill, patience, and love. Perhaps the most difficult component of teaching students to write creatively is helping them shed their inhibitions and their fear of failure. All too often when adolescents write, they emulate what they have read or heard from others, and they don’t know how to find their own voice. Like so much of what we do as educators and parents, our work in teaching students to write means helping them to find out who they are.
I thought of this again as I listened to the NPR: TED Radio Hour program recently. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, shared a story about the musician Tom Waits, who was driving when the words and the music of a song came to him. Understandably, he was annoyed that he could not write down the thoughts that came to him in rapid-fire fashion. Like many people who experience flashes of insight at inopportune times, Waits feared that he would lose the ideas. As Gilbert explains, Waits finally looked to the sky above and said something like, “Really? You’re giving me this now when I am driving?! If it’s meant to be, then I will remember it later.” Waits’ muse surely could have waited until the musician could park his car, couldn’t she? Later in the same talk, Gilbert refers to a muse as “that cockeyed divine genius assigned to you.”
As you may recall, the muses were the goddesses of inspiration for literature, science, and the arts. Many of us hope and wait for our muses to visit, so we can create something new and unique. Unfortunately, though, the business of life and the seemingly endless deadlines we face often prevent us from hearing the muses when they come to us. Whether creativity is something innate or the goddesses descend upon us from Delphi, finding inspiration and a creative spark is a matter of being open to those forces and influences that enable us to see things differently than we typically do. In these moments, our thoughts become literally “extra- ordinary.”
When my son and I went hiking through Petroglyph National Park for the first time, the park ranger explained that the centuries-old symbolic drawings show themselves to those who are open to seeing them. I thought we saw many, but who knows; maybe we missed some because we were not as open as we would have liked. Similarly, maybe the muses come to us more often than we realize, but they leave when they see that we are closed off to their influence.
Many years ago, the author Stephen King, in a book called On Writing, wrote of the relationship he has with his muse. He said, “There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”
Maybe the ultimate lesson for our students is that the muses will visit us only when they know that we are willing to put forth our own effort. Perhaps we need to help them believe that the muses have so many people to see that may they have to prioritize who they visit. They will come, but they require some pre-work on our part. However, this is part of the fun, and we can help our students learn this. As Samuel Goldwyn once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
