Chip's Writing Lessons #104
Newsletter
In this issue:
Writers Speak | John Cheever on a writer’s ultimate usefulness
Interview | Four Questions with Linda Rief
WRITERS SPEAK
“Writing is for me a means of communication. It is for me my ultimate, as far as I know, usefulness. It is talking with people whose company I think I would enjoy if I knew them. And it is speaking to them about my most intimate and acute feelings and apprehensions about my life, about our lives.”
-John Cheever
INTERVIEW | Trust the gush | Four Questions with Linda Rief
Linda Rief says whatever she knows about writing and reading she learned from her students. She left the classroom in June of 2019 after 40 years of teaching Language Arts, mostly with eighth graders. She misses their energy and their apathy, their curiosity and their complacency, their confidence and their insecurities, but mostly she misses their passionate, powerful voices as readers and writers.
She is an instructor in the University of New Hampshire's Summer Literacy Institute and a national and international presenter on issues of adolescent literacy. She is the author of Whispering in the Wind, The Quickwrite Handbook, ReadWriteTeach, Inside the Writer's-Reader's Notebook, and Seeking Diversity; she is co-editor of several books, including Adolescent Literacy (Beers, Probst, and Rief).
What is the most important lesson you've learned as a writer?
I faked my way through any reading required in high school (to a friend in the hallway on the way to class: “So briefly—and quickly—tell me what this book was about.”) or used Cliff Notes, as I never considered myself smart enough to unravel what the teacher knew the novelist, the poet, or the essayist was meaning for the chapter essays and quizzes we inevitably were given.
I never understood how I was hired to teach Language Arts in our middle school. I am forever grateful that I was hired, even though it surprised me that no one asked what I was reading or writing at the time. I wasn’t doing either. Until Corbe, one of my eighth graders, asked me: “Have you seen The Crucible?” When I said no, she asked: “Have you read the play?” When I said no, she asked: “Who hired you?” I have been reading—and writing—ever since.
The most important lesson I’ve learned as a writer and teacher of writing: I must be what I teach—both reader and writer. For me, and for the students.
Read as a thoughtful human being. I read to enter other worlds, other lives, other stories. I read for all the experiences that writing brings to mind for me. Where does that writing take me? Where does that writing surprise me? Disrupt me? What do I think and feel and learn and wonder as I enter that story, that essay, that poem?
And I read like a writer. How does this writer engage me? How does this writer keep me reading? Whether it’s poetry or a novel or an informational piece, I pay attention to the craft moves made by the writer. How’d she keep me reading, how’d she craft a lead, an ending, build a character, move through time and place, foreshadow what was coming, use point of view, connect the happenings and her big ideas? I read with pen or sticky notes in hand.
When I asked my students at the end of each year what helped them the most to grow as readers and writers, they often said, “You read with us and you wrote with us.” Doing what I asked the students to do most certainly helped me grow as a reader and writer also.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
The biggest surprise ever was being awarded one of two national fellowships in 1988 from The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as a writer. I spent a month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, focused on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial designed by Maya Lin. I spent days at this memorial wall. I interviewed veterans, watched documentaries, wrote under the mentorship of poet Roland Flint, was given voice lessons, and read my writing in performance at the Kennedy Center, later broadcast on NPR.
That I actually had something to say as a writer, that somebody else might find value in and want to hear, stunned me. It gave me the confidence to write my first book Seeking Diversity (based on Don Murray’s belief: “We should be seeking diversity, not proficient mediocrity,” in a talk he once gave about standardized testing and teaching) and to constantly try to find audiences beyond the classroom for my students.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
I am a perfectionist. I vacuum. I stack towels with the folds all on one side. I have been known to drag our vacuum cleaner outside to touch up the concrete driveway or suck up cobwebs from the barn. A friend believes I lean ladders against trees in our yard to clean out the birds’ nests. My colleagues once gave me a level to use when hanging kids’ work on the walls in our halls.
I have to get over that as a writer. I have learned from Tom Romano and Walt Whitman to “trust the gush” because writing is messy. I have to trust that in the mess of words and sketches that wander all over the pages of my notebook, I will find the surprises of ideas and wording that haven’t been sucked up with the dog hairs, cookie crumbs, spider webs, and broken shells of hatched baby birds.
As a writer, I work hard at relishing the messiness.
What's the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
I don’t think Don Murray ever said to me, “You must keep a daybook,” but the simple act of seeing him with his daybook, wherever he was, whenever it was, was the only advice I needed about being ready to jot things down in a place that captures what we notice, think, feel at the moment. Checkbook stubs and receipts don’t work well. I needed a place, a notebook, to capture those moments that vanish if not snatched and written down. I can trace almost all of the writing for any articles, chapters, or books that I’ve written back to those notebooks. On August 6, 1986, I wrote: “Inspired by Don Murray’s Daybook, I begin my first Writer’s-Reader’s Notebook.”
Staring out the window. Staring into space, wondering what to write about, gets me nowhere. Writing comes from writing. I have to put words on paper daily—a place I can go back to—to see what I want to say.