Writing With Students, Day 1
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This is my second year to teach a middle school creative writing elective. (School started last week.) All that I learned from last year’s students has me feeling excited about this school year’s possibilities. Our first bit of writing revolved around the theme “summer’s end,” and we used Pat Mora’s poem “My Rock” as inspiration. Reading David Epstein’s Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better has sparked a commitment to using constraints in writing projects.
This first assignment’s constraints include: 1) Use one word from our school’s mission statement; 2) Use a wild-card word chosen by one person in each class (which gave one group “amaze” and the other group “music”); and 3) Include a question in the writing, as Pat Mora does in “My Rock.”
Students turned in some cool stuff! Here’s my own writing, which I revised this afternoon.
August Morning, Farmers Branch Recreation Center
by Stephanie Ledyard
I have come to swim laps during senior citizen water aerobics. Work starts back next week. The instructor’s shouts loop with a pop version of “Play That Funky Music White Boy,” as I drop into an empty lane. I tighten my goggles, then bob. Chlorinated humidity sends me back 50 years, to my best friend and me hogging the lane and chatting as though we’ve been apart. We grip our boards and kick-kick-kick. Like flicking June bugs off your toes, Coach has said. His shouts of “Go!” ring every few seconds as swimmers launch. Splashes fill my head like loud rock music.
Water aerobics done, two ladies talk and dry off nearby. One likes the other’s teal Birkenstock slides, they match her coverup. More low chatter, a laugh as they walk out together. Old friends? New? My chest aches with something hard to admit: The summer has been lonely.
I push off from the wall, settle into freestyle. My arms reach and pull. Purposeful. Each breath brings me rectangles of sky, windows filled with clean white clouds of childhood. I’m amazed. So hot outside. How lucky to be in water. Here I go. Kick-kick-kick. Like flicking June bugs off my toes.
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