Crafting a Canvas for Creative Connection

by Travis Whitt

Teaching young people how to creatively write through the last two years has been a fever dream. Or nightmare, I can’t decide which.

As a teacher and a coach, I pride myself on my ability to bring people together. When we left school in March of 2020, everything just stopped. All the momentum, all the excitement, all the creation, all the connection just ceased to exist. Though this was not a unique problem, it has certainly been the most crippling moment of my career.

Everything just stopped. All the momentum, all the excitement, all the creation, all the connection just ceased to exist.

The repercussions of a year of loneliness are still vibrating through my classroom. I teach differently than I used to because my students learn differently than they did pre-pandemic. The act of teaching has lost the personability and connection that it used to have, at least for now. Students are not as willing to be open and build relationships because they’ve seen just how easy those connections can be severed.

So, imagine my excitement when, for the first time since the pandemic, I sat down face-to-face with a brand new group of creative writing students and saw the fire in their eyes that has been missing from my classroom for far too long.

Sitting around a table in the middle of winter is one of my favorite things to do. Especially when those that share the space with you are just as hungry to create and connect with their community. This moment in my classroom was a catalyst for a nostalgic flashback that I am still far too young to yearn for. Nevertheless, sharing this table with a collection of the most creative kids I have come to know transported me back to the winter of 2016.

In hindsight it is incredibly clear to me that I needed to lay off the caffeine. It was late, but I was fired up. Most likely coming from my favorite professor’s night class, I made an exasperated call to my editorial team with an invitation to a meeting in Anderson. For some reason, still unbeknownst to me to this day, they all showed up, notebooks ready for whatever I had to say.

I didn’t realize it then, but those nights with my team were some of the most influential moments of my life. Cloe Gray, Sean Hanson, and Rebecca Higgins listened with open minds and were willing to do the work to change our publication, then Pipers In- Depth, to something much different. When we took the magazine over that year it was established as an award-winning campus magazine, but it felt like a pamphlet created by the admissions department. It covered a ton of impressive people on campus, but to me they were not the people who made my dayto-day life on campus interesting. I wanted to shine a spotlight on the artists and weirdos that did all the cool stuff that motivated me to create. I shared this idea with my amazing editorial team and they were on board immediately.

I wanted to shine a spotlight on the artists and weirdos that did all the cool stuff that motivated me to create.

I am incredibly proud of the publication we created together. However, I couldn’t tell you the details of a single issue or the story of a single feature we did. What I do remember is our late-night meetings and the hours of hard work with the shared goal of creation. We fed off each other’s excitement to shed light on all the things that made us love Hamline. All the great people doing super interesting things that we were lucky enough to share a campus with. It is easy to see now that my motivation to create came from the connection I had with my team. The joy that came with solving problems and making things with these amazing people is what defined my Hamline experience.

Even in a post-pandemic world, when I sit down with a group of amazingly talented students, I am reminded how exciting it is to create things with other people. It is no secret that teaching through a pandemic is difficult, but it is connections like these that make the tough days palatable. When I sit down with a group of young writers or artists or musicians and bask in their potential for creation, I feel renewed in my profession. I am transported back to 2016 to that private room in Anderson at 1 am. I can smell the shit food wafting from upstairs, I can hear the voice in the back of my head contemplate using the last of my declining balance on another caffeinated drink, I can feel the energy that Cloe, Sean, Rebecca and I shared when we thought about the possibility of creating something together.

That, to me, is the value of an education. Not the individual skills and facts learned along the way, but the possibility of connection. The opportunity of shared creation. The experience that can later be shared with others. The hunger to do it all again and again and again.