Are We Romancing Writing?

Abstract

He came in the form of an urbane, witty, sophisticated lieutenant, fresh from the Italian campaign, who could do everything. He could drive a car, fly a plane, and operate a dial telephone. When he drove the eighty miles from Denver to my little town bearing whole five-pound boxes of Whitman's Samplers or armfuls of apricot gladiolas, my cool evenings on the porch swing were transformed. No longer a mere skinny kid in a green broomstick skirt and huaraches, I became Ginger Rogers flowing in ostrich feathers across a white marble floor. Before he burst into my life, I was a pimply movie-struck pubescent sitting countless hours in front of my ruffled vanity table with my bright red lipstick trying on my version of a sultry look. My lieutenant rescued me from this lonely fate and showed me for the first time that I could be someone who could delight a man. This discovery changed me forever-not because our relationship ever came to anything beyond the exaggerated glow of romance, but because the experience left me with a new sense of my self. Even I could be delightful. How I resisted the urge to give in to my twentysix-year-old lieutenant's pleadings to marry him, I'll never know, but somehow my parents' good advice won out, and I decided to commit myself to the dull task of finishing high school instead. My lieutenant went back to Denver and within the year was married to someone else. (Those were the days when good girls didn't shack up and even when we did, we didn't tell anyone.) Because I've not seen my lieutenant since, he's not lost a hair or gained a pound-he's still firmly the dashing romantic lover in my mind. He didn't stay long enough to find out that I would never be able to keep track of the checks I wrote; I never knew him well enough to ask how he learned to say, Ti amo, so passionately in Italian. The question didn't occur to me until later. The fairy tale is wrong. It's not the frog we see first and make promises to; it's always Prince Charming we take to our bed. The frogness comes out later. Are teachers currently experiencing writing as I did my lieutenant-something bursting into their lives and transforming them? Are they having an experience that will help them discover something central and powerful? Will this discovery be embraced and enjoyed and then dropped for a new love, or will it be an experience that will transform them forever? Is this affair with writing a passing educational fad, a transforming romance, or perhaps even the beginning of a commitment? No one can deny that something is happening. The pitcher of Aquarius seems to be spilling over to nourish that personal ground where, as Ira Progoff would say, dreams and powers within us sprout and grow. 2 Writing conferences, seminars, workshops, and institutes are everywhere. Last summer, over eighty projects were spun off the model of the highly successful Bay Area Writing Project. Over 40,000 teachers have already been BAWP-ed, as teachers trained in the Bay Area-type projects sometimes call it. That is, they have been part of the combination of pep-talk, personal writing, and pedagogy begun by James Gray in 1974 at the University of California at Berkeley. This program, funded by the Carnegie