Early on, two of our teachers—Jeanne Patrick and Allison Lowe—shared a standout moment from the written conversation they’d just had. Jeanne had written about the importance of finding ways to make her students feel safe so they could then take brave risks in their writing. We all nodded in agreement. For risky writing to take place, there must be safety.

Risky writing is the brave, truth-telling stuff through which we do more than poke dead things with sticks—we wrestle with why they died; we take a good, close look at the effed-up fact that we will all, someday, (today, maybe,) die too; we lay them to rest, eulogizing worms and birds, and the dark stuff bubbling up in the children who abuse them, with an empathy achievable only through deep consideration and an acknowledgement that the First Thought might not be the right one. Risky writing does not pose easy questions or provide simple answers. It plows past platitudes and kisses complexity. It dives right into the depths of “I don’t know,” the only sure thing being that some discovery will be made, that the heart of the writer will be changed.

In New Orleans classrooms, we regularly encounter students whose lives are not safe in very real and immediate ways. Yesterday’s shooting at a second line was a reminder of that. Today there’s an image being circulated on the Internet of the shooter, and within it is a child of maybe four running for his life. He will be in someone’s class this fall, as will the two ten-year-old children who were grazed by bullets—“grazed” being far too impotent a word for it, as the writer of this piece on the shooting points out. (Note the question the writer poses—one with no easy answer: What kind of animal shoots up a Mother’s Day parade? It’s one we have to take seriously if we are to have any hope of building safety for our children. It may require a second thought, too—that ‘though he may be an animal, he is also a son.)

I’ve gotten many dear messages in the past twenty-four hours—inquiries from friends who know that I love me a second line, that I could have been there. I wasn’t. I was at Tickfaw State Park with my son and his maternal grandparents. I was encouraging him to climb on the back of a giant plastic frog, to play with the girl who’d invited him to join her in the fountain, in spite of the fact that his first thought was “I don’t like her.” I was walking along a boardwalk through a cypress swamp, bristling after a nod from a man in a fluorescent yellow T-shirt that read “My Guns, My Country.” His kids pounded the planks with their feet. His youngest son told me he wanted to find some animals. I said he’d need to be quiet for that to happen. Animals get scared when we’re loud. I didn’t yet know about the shooting.

Today I’ve been reading other voices and looking at that picture again and again. The first thing I notice is the shooter—the first thing I feel is a version of WTF. The second is that boy, and then WTF becomes a kind of despair. I want to wail. My third thought and feeling is more complex—tangled, really. It wonders what kind of animal shoots up a Mother’s Day parade. It wonders whose were the loud voices in that son’s ear as he grew up, and on this Mother’s Day morning, and just before he made this choice on this day. It worries that we teachers can’t simply write it on the boards, whisper it in the ears of our beloved students, you are safe here, you are safe, if the whole world isn’t outside screaming the same at the top of its lungs, and meaning it, and making it true: YOU ARE SAFE HERE! YOU ARE SAFE! YOU ARE SAFE!

I spent last weekend blowing bubbles with armadillos and getting in touch with my student-heart.

Allow me to explain.

Last weekend, GNOWP wrapped a year-long series of workshops at Carolyn Park Middle School. Saturday’s goal: revising and reflecting. To launch, we closed our eyes and imagined our yards covered in armadillos. Yes, armadillos.

When we opened our eyes, we listed five things we’d do with the armadillos. Next, we listed five more. And then five more again.

Our first lists had us shooting, shooing, cooking, and otherwise ridding the yard of armadillos. By the third go-around, we were doing yoga with the armadillos, conducting food-preference experiments, calling in a team of consultants to conduct a thorough armadillo-analysis. It was good, giggly fun, this armadillo exercise. And through it, we saw how the first thought may not always be the most imaginative one. In debriefing, we agreed that our students would love the activity. They, like us, love the fun stuff, if not armadillos.

Soon, however, things got decidedly dark. I asked the teachers to get out a piece of writing they’d been working on over the past several weeks and months. I handed out scissors. The teachers knew what was coming next, and they didn’t like it. Not one bit.

Heather wanted to know what she’d be doing with the pieces before she would dare take scissors to her draft. Margeonna’s piece didn’t have paragraphs yet, so how on earth could she be expected to cut the dern thing apart? Treva—dear Treva who up until this moment had thrown herself into every activity, every writing strategy we’d shared—resisted. Why did she have to cut it up, she wanted to know.

“Part of the reason for cutting up your essays is to divorce yourself from the first thought,” I said, “from that initial draft whose writing can seem so heroic, but which, let’s be honest, may have some issues.” In cutting the dern things apart, we can look at them differently. We won’t just be shooting the armadillos. We’ll form armadillo support groups. We’ll take the armadillos on a road-trip with opossums to Lollapalooza.

We cut. We lay the parts out before us and moved them around. We amputated whole paragraphs. My essay lost an anecdote about my mother which had hurt her feelings when she’d read it. I’d felt the piece needed the story then, but now that I’d isolated it, I realized the remaining parts were more focused, not to mention kinder, more true to my heart.

In sharing that fact after we’d finished, I cried. And then it was Treva’s turn, and she was crying. “You know,” she said. “This activity put me in touch with what it’s like to be a student.” How many times have we asked our students to do things they don’t want to do in service of some purpose we either neglect or fail to explain? “I have a tendency to say, ‘Because I said so,’ but all year you all have taken our resistance seriously, and I’ve realized that I need to do that for my kids. So thank you.”

Then, of course, many of us were crying. And when Faith played a video her students had produced—a series of six-word memoirs that just punch you in the gut with truth and emotion and This Is Who I Am, Me—we all shed tears of joy and admiration. It. Was. Awesome.

I’ve been thinking about this experience all week. I’ve had trouble writing about it. I’m two days past deadline. I cut all but a few sentences of my first draft. And I’m finding it hard to say what I want to say without bringing in the Big Guns via scholarly writing. Because the truth is, in the face of so much formalized, standardized, skill-drill-kill writing instruction, I fear my claims that something fricking awesome happened last Saturday will be dismissed as flowery or woo-woo, as little more than armadillo psychotherapy.

Robert P. Yagelski argues that writing is “an ontological act”: “When we write, we enact a sense of ourselves as beings in the world.” In getting silly and later taking scissors to our work, we became our students. And in doing so, we recognized a truth that’s at the heart of GNOWP’s work: if we believe that writing has the power to transform, then we need to focus on students-as-writers as much as (or perhaps more than) we do on our students’ writing.

There’s been lots said lately about the negative influence of the Internet on students’ ability to write (to read, to think, etc.) And yet, what I appreciate most about the potential of the Internet as a tool for strengthening writing is its capacity for connecting students to outside-of-the-classroom audiences (often referred to in education-speak as “authentic audiences,” although I would argue that a teacher can, indeed, be an authentic audience). It’s also got great potential for collaboration with other writers—writers at desks across the country, on the other side of the world. Dead writers.

Wait, what?

A new Google gadget allows the writer to “collaborate” with famous authors like Shakespeare, Dickins, and Poe. Through one of Google’s algorithms, edits culled from the work of famous writers get inserted into your draft as you write. Here’s a link to a demonstration of me drafting while Shakespeare, Dickins, and Poe chime in from beyond the grave: http://goo.gl/kTC3y.

It was a strange experience, and I think you can probably see it from watching the preview. When edits from Poe’s writing appeared, I had to contend with a description that didn’t fit my subject. I felt hijacked, at times, and yet the truth is, it was fun.

And isn’t that the point? Writing is fun! Or at least it most certainly can be. The Google toy presents writing as fun, as Nick Carbone put it on the WPA Listserv (an awesome resource for writing ideas and current scholarship on writing instruction.)

Try it! Share your collaborations with your students and with us on Facebook.

What I wanted to be was a Real Writer. And real writers, in my estimation, didn’t teach. They wrote. They published. They got rich. (Right? Surely there would be some rich-getting in my writerly future.) No, real writers didn’t teach.

One of the reasons for launching this blog is to disprove that falsehood. Real writers DO teach. Or perhaps a more accurate way of putting it is this: real teachers DO write.

What I’ve come to know in my ten years of teaching writing and my many, many years of writing, is that, actually, it’s possible to be a great writer and a pretty lousy teacher, but you can’t be a great writing teacher and not write, yourself.

To borrow again from the great mind of the late National Writing Project fellow and teacher Donald Murray:

Teachers should write so they understand the process of writing from within. They should know the territory intellectually and emotionally: how you have to think to write, how you feel when writing. Teachers of writing do not have to be great writers, but they should have frequent and recent experience in writing. The best preparation for the writing class, workshop, or conference is at least a few minutes at the writing desk, saying what you did not expect to say. If you experience the despair, the joy, the failure, the success, the work, the fun, the drudgery, the surprise of writing you will be able to help understand the composing experiences of your students and therefore help them understand how they are learning to write.

I did not expect to say that I was once so young, so foolish that I thought I’d get rich from writing. I did not expect to say that I once looked down upon teaching in part because it was the work of my (amazing and wonderful) mom. I fear that I’ve failed in doing what I set out to do—launching the blog of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project in a way that will dazzle, inspire, amaze, and draw you, dear reader, back to us.

But I have written. And I’ll continue to do so here on this blog as a way not just of understanding the composing experiences of my students, but also of sharing the work of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project and of the National Writing Project—a network of real writing teachers who write.

*I don’t want to sugar-coat the difficulties of choosing the life of a teacher, as they are many, and they can’t be written into submission—at least not in this blog entry. If you care to be depressed, read this MetLife survey illustrating the precipitous decline in teacher morale, or this resignation letter from a teacher, or this caution against choosing to teach at all. Part of what I want this blog to do, however, is to create a space where the work of our teachers can be celebrated through writing. Let’s write!