Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider

Craft is essential; I will work all my life at my craft.  But craft is not the same thing as art.  Craft is the knowledge of how to mix blue with yellow on my palette, but art is the courage to dip the brush into the paint and lay it on the canvas in my own way.  Craft is knowing when to revise a manuscript and when to leave it alone, but art is the fire in the mind that put the story on the page in the first place.  To grow in craft is to increase the breadth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone, to communicate what I and only I can communicate: that which I have experienced or imagined.

I read Pat Schneider's How the Light Gets In a few months ago.  The summer--or the beginning of it at least--is time for my writing, and I really loved Schneider's thoughtful meditations on how writing is connected to the inner spiritual life of the writer.  But fall is back, which means school is back, which means I'm returning to the more didactic Writing Alone and With Others to prepare.

Even though the book is instructional, not fictional, Schneider's style reminds me most of Marilynne Robinson.  Schneider's vision of the workshop is full of the same kind of generosity, borne out of a deep regard for the intrinsic value of people.  Schneider draws deeply on her experience leading workshops for women in housing projects in western Massachusetts, and while she insists that writing "isn't therapy," she sees it as a vital step in recognizing one's own voice.  "You are a writer," she reminds the reader.  She encourages her participants to reflect on the ways they have been writing their whole life, and on the power of their own voice.  I was touched by a story in which a black woman, highly educated, writes a poem in the vernacular of her close family, a voice truer to her childhood than the one which she has painstakingly learned, and says, "No one has ever wanted that from me before."  I have been thinking for the past few weeks about how those kind of moments can happen in the crucible of the high school classroom.

A lot of what's in Writing Alone and With Others gets developed more fully in How the Light Gets In.  There's a shorter version of the story in which her writing teacher tells her a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling of her impoverished home is "cliche," even though that's the way it really was for Schneider growing up poor in the Ozarks.  I was more affected by the personal touch of How the Light Gets In, because it gives a convincing model for how self-actualization can actually happen through writing, but the practical side of Writing Alone has already made it an invaluable tool for my classroom.  Among other things, she's convinced me not to give grades on writing assignments, and to allow students to deviate more from assignments when they feel empowered to.

Her collection of exercises is mostly pretty commonplace--write using a photograph, write to someone you haven't seen in a long time--but others are so bizarre I can't help but bookmark them for future use.  I like the one where she invites her students to imagine a person with whom they have unfinished business as an animal, and then themselves as an animal, and then they meet, as animals.  I also really liked the comment from a participant who relishes in simpler prompts, saying that they'd rather describe "God's hat" than reflect on God.  I'm excited to ask my students to describe God's hat.