Object Lessons - HB Magazine - Winter/Spring 2015

Hathaway Brown’s Young Writers & Artists Festival opens students’ senses to creative expression [ BY DAVI D GI FFELS ]

[ PORT RAI TS BY JAMES D O UGLAS ]

… white, like the pages of a gently used book, with only one small mark of imperfection, as though the reader had a speck of dirt lingering on her finger, transferred upon touch.

started with a wiffle ball.

Well, a wiffle ball and a Mr. Potato Head.

less o

This turned out to be enough.

Where it started was in the Senior Room, which apparently is sacred ground at Hathaway Brown. But I didn’t know this then.

What I did know, after two previous visits to the Young Writers and Artists Festival, is that the library at Hathaway Brown can feel chilly on a day like this: Halloween, overcast, drizzly, rough wind clattering the branches.

And when I learned that my group of 15 writers was assigned to gather in the library, and I began to lead them that way, past the regiment of cellos outside the music room, I asked the girls if they had any suggestions for a change of venue.

“The Senior Room,” one offered.

Can we? an underclassman asked, her furtive tone revealing the class divide that renders this section of the Upper School’s west end off limits to anyone under Grade 12.

I, ignorant of the rules, declared that, yes, we could go anywhere we wanted.

And so we changed course, settling into the cozy nook furnished with couches and padded armchairs. Then we began to talk about Mr. Potato Head.

I had come to the school to talk about writing, to explore it, to practice it. I was one of 10 visiting writers and artists here for the third installment of this growing, changing festival, an event that has become a highlight of both Hathaway Brown’s school year and my own teaching year.

Rebecca Weinberger ’15 poses with a graphic representation of her painting, Logos, inspired by the artistic techniques taught by internationally renowned painter James March at HB’s Young Writers and Artists Festival.

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OK: A wiffle ball, a Mr. Potato Head, and a universe full of chaos.

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Here was a chance to share one of my favorite lessons about nonfiction writing, one I stumbled across many years ago while doing some serious research-driven Googling on the subject of Mr. Potato Head. I found an essay by a journalist who suggested that a writer train himself to think like the old Hasbro toy. I told the young writers that morning about how I do this all the time, and that it always works.

You arrive at some new place or person or thing, with the intention of writing about it. Invariably, you feel lost, disoriented, overwhelmed, or uncertain. So you imagine yourself as the unadorned Mr. Potato Head, fresh out of the box.

Now: Open to a blank page.

First, put on Mr. Potato Head’s eyes. Begin to record everything visual about the scene before you. Only the visual detail. And concentrate. If you see blue, don’t call it blue.

Blue doesn’t mean anything. The sky is blue, and so is a new pair of jeans, and those two colors are as different as purple and green.

Look for shapes and misspelled wall signs, dust in the corners and odd grain in the woodwork. Get it all down, without worrying about what it means. That will come later.

Then put on Mr. Potato Head’s ears. Listen, I told them. If you weren’t thinking like Mr. Potato Head and I asked you what you hear here in the Senior Room when I stop talking, you would say, “nothing.”

But now, what do you hear?

“The lights,” one said. “Buzzing.”

“The wind outside.”

“Something squeaking.”

“A bird.”

Next, the hands. All the touch sensations— rough, smooth, rubbery, cool, wrinkled.

Then the mouth. Even when you’re not writing about food, there can be taste. A thunderstorm has taste. So does a roofing nail.

And the nose. We don’t do enough with smell as writers. If you can bring me into the scents of your kitchen on Thanksgiving morning when your dad is grating a lemon peel and your mother is sweating celery and onions, I guarantee I’m in for at least a page of whatever comes next.

That’s where we begin as writers. Not with ideas. Ideas are too hard; they deceive and elude. We begin with what the world gives us. What the world gives us first is chaos, and the way we wrestle that toward our ends is with our senses.

Go now, I told them. For 30 minutes, go wherever you want, inside or outside. School was not in session that chilly Friday, and we had the run of the place.

She looked at it. She looked at it some more. It had holes, of course. Holes, she determined, “the size of chickpeas.” And “a subtle seam around the circumference.”

She felt it. It was cold. And rough, yes, but rough was not exact. Writing “rough” is like writing “blue.” She felt it again. She determined that it felt like it had been “grazed over by low-grit sandpaper, leaving a matte, yet refined fluid shell interrupted only by the tiny sporadic craters.”

She pushed it off the table, and listened. … when it bounces, it emulates the dull empty thud of a hammer colliding with drywall and fades into the memory of a child touching the spinning foam propellers of a dollar store personal fan.

That’s where we begin as writers. Not with ideas.

Ideas are too hard; they deceive and elude.

We begin with what the world gives us. What the world gives us first is chaos, and the way we wrestle that toward our ends is with our senses.

Find a common object, I said. Something self-contained, and go all Mr. Potato Head on it.

Off they went, and I stayed, alone in the Senior Room, and it was quiet again. Except there’s no such thing as quiet. We knew that now. Because we were writers.

This is how Molly Sharpe ’16 found the wiffle ball. She and her friend Lizzie Poulos ’15 had wandered into the dim empty classroom of history teacher Kevin Purpura and began looking. Lizzie found a teardropshaped paperweight with swirls of blue inside. Molly found the white plastic ball full of holes, an everyday and uncomplicated object.

“I didn’t know it would be there,” she told me later. “It was random. It seemed so simple.

But I’ve never read about a wiffle ball before.

So I kind of wanted to challenge myself.”

She wrote and wrote, filling her notebook with detail after detail, half-formed metaphors, stretches of imagination. The time was up too soon for her, but the girls were making their way back to the Senior Room and Molly did too.

There, back together, they all began to share their findings.

McKenna Ritter ’16 had explored a coat rack. Sue Roy ’15 found far more humanity than one might expect in a trash can. Kacey Gill ’16 had begun with a guitar case but was headed somewhere completely different.

Continued on page 15.

TOP PHOTO BY JASON MILLER; BOT TOM PHOTOS BY JAMES DOUGLAS

To learn more, please visit www.hb.edu/writersfestival.

Inaugurated in 2012 with a comics workshop taught by Derf Backderf, the arts component of the festival has expanded to include a variety of artists. The 2014 workshops featured the return of Derf, as well as the addition of a painting workshop by internationally acclaimed artist James March, who creates stunning abstract geometric paintings that are shown across the country and throughout Europe. Students in both of these sessions produced work based on the style and methods of each artist, and the results are superb.

“I had a great experience with the workshop,” March says.

“The students were very motivated self-starters. I was amazed how they all just dove in using my painting techniques. Each had her own vision, and in the end, each made some truly remarkable art.”

PERSPECTIVE

Derf agrees. “It’s always a blast for me to teach comics to HB girls,” he says. “I’ve never encountered a more enthusiastic and receptive group of young writers and artists.”

Allowing high school students the opportunity to work under the tutelage of established artists is both a rare and exciting event. Because of the intensity of the tasks at hand and the extended periods of time the students had in which to work, the creative energy during these sessions was palpable; the art studios were alive with energy and purpose. The HB Young Writers and Artists Festival gives students an avenue to create art in ways that could never occur during the regular school day.

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Jamie Morse is Hathaway Brown’s Visual Arts Department Chair.

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The third annual Young Writers and Artists Festival was held at Hathaway Brown Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 2014. Developed by Osborne Writing Center Director Scott Parsons, the mission of the festival is to connect HB girls with talented and passionate professional writers and artists who are also dedicated to nurturing the creative spirits of students. The festival kicks off with performances and class visits so that participants can experience the talent and dedication of the workshop leaders: to hear music, experience spoken-word poetry, and be engaged by personal stories of the creative life of a writer. The heart of the festival is the full-day workshop experience, during which the girls can “go deep” and pursue a creative passion (or explore a curiosity). Through the workshops, they are able to take risks with their work, develop their authentic voices, and form more meaningful connections with their peers and workshop leaders. More than anything, the festival exists to inspire girls’ voices and to build an expanding community of encouragement and support.

visual arts portion of the Hathaway Brown Young Writers and Artists Festival is a perfect complement to the writing workshops in that students in both are encouraged to find their voices, and express themselves in ways that the traditional school arts curriculum cannot easily accommodate. During the festival, the campus is alive with sparkling creative energy. It is a moment in the school year during which HB students can feel what it’s like to be a working artist, clear their minds of all other tasks, and express themselves with an intensity and depth only this festival can provide.

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New York Times bestselling author Alexandra Fuller is the “patron saint” of HB’s Young Writers and Artists Festival. Always a popular and inspirational instructor, she has been a pillar of the event since its inauguration in 2012. This year, she taught a session called “Mindfulness & Writing,” during which she asked students to meditate for an entire day before crafting one significant sentence.

LEFT PHOTOS BY JASON MILLER; BOT TOM RIGHT PHOTO BY JAMES DOUGLAS

Now here is where the writer begins, I told them. The world gives us chaos. But it also offers us detail, and has graced us with both the senses to determine those details and the whimsy to wonder about them. We only need one little hook to get us going.

Henry James offers one of my favorite quotes on writing: “We work in the dark— we do what we can—we give what we have.

Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Another favorite lesson: Write the small thing big and the big thing small.

They scattered again, off to find quiet corners to write. I went in search of Mr. Parsons.

That’s Scott Parsons, director of the Osborne Writing Center and the founder of the Young Writers and Artists Festival. He’s the one who invited me here and the one, I soon discovered, who deals with a lot more than the poetry of young minds. At this moment, he was dealing with a tardy delivery of a very large Chipotle order, which is to say he

and Karin Bergquist, came from Cincinnati.

Acclaimed comics artist Derf came from just around the corner. He lives in Shaker Heights.

Parsons began teaching at Hathaway Brown in 2011. I first met him while he was in his previous position, an English teacher at Maplewood Career Center in Portage County, a much different environment where he nonetheless had been inspiring young people to write and to appreciate art and literature. He inspired me as well, with his passion for teaching and art, and his commitment to changing perceptions of vocational school education in relation to creative pursuits.

Renowned author Alexandra Fuller, the “patron saint” of the festival, came from her home in Wyoming for her third visit to the festival. This year, she challenged her students to meditate for a whole day, not writing until the very end—a single sentence. (Each time I sent my own group of girls down the hallways in search of wiffle balls and quiet places to write, I felt a little guilty, as if I was violating Alexandra’s intense concentration.)

He arrived at HB to direct the writing program with three main goals: 1. Build community 2. Make safe creative spaces 3. Foster authentic voices The writing festival, he told me recently, “was the main thing I wanted to do when I started here.”

The festival has grown from 60 participants and four visiting workshop leaders in 2012 to 87 participants and five workshop leaders in 2013, to 109 participants and 10 workshop leaders in 2014. The most recent festival included daylong sessions focused on fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, playwriting, songwriting, painting and comics, led by visiting artists from near and far.

Poet Jamaal May came from Detroit. Over The Rhine, an Americana band led by husband-and-wife duo Linford Detweiler

“Everyone who does it one year does it the next year,” Parsons says. “Now it’s the centerpiece of the whole year.”

The festival, and its effects, have transformed his notion of teaching and many of these students’ notions of writing. After the 2013 festival, for instance, a young woman described how the experience affected her work.

“She told me, ‘At the beginning of the year, in class, you kept talking about not writing for a teacher, but writing for a real audience.

It wasn’t until I did the workshop that I truly understood what that meant.’”

Another told Parsons it was the most important thing she’d done all year. “It’s not about thinking you’re talented,” she said.

“It’s about being you and knowing that’s enough.”

The festival has grown from 60 participants and four visiting workshop leaders in 2012 to 87 participants and five workshop leaders in 2013, to 109 participants and 10 workshop leaders in 2014.

The most recent festival included daylong sessions focused on fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, playwriting, songwriting, painting and comics, led by visiting artists from near and far.

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But I don’t necessarily agree with the madness part. I’m more interested in the task. Writing is process. Each of the young writers had a subject now, a small thing.

And each of the writers now had pages of detail to work with. The basic pattern of writing, for me, is to begin in the dark, and to find a small, clear thing, and to write that small thing upward toward meaning.

So that’s what I sent them off to do next: Take the notes and craft them into an essay that strives to find some meaning from this object.

was about to be confronted by the very real terror of a hundred hungry teenagers (not to mention 10 hungry visiting writers and artists).

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Each of these young writers had found meaning, some large, some small.

Molly’s turn came, and she read. In that unremarkable white sphere, she found metaphor after metaphor, ways of playing with language that gave an understated beauty and grace to, well, yes—a wiffle ball.

Her meditation on the object offered its own small, humble and yet satisfying answer to a question I posed to Scott Parsons: What is a writer?

“It’s someone who’s a risk-taker,” he answered.

“Someone who feels and thinks and is alive.

Someone who is a seeker and a questioner.

Someone who strives toward beauty.”

The results are remarkable, and not just anecdotal. In 2013, more than 90 HB students entered the region’s Scholastic Art and Writing Awards contest. Twenty-one of them won Gold Keys, qualifying them for national judging, and 60 percent of the regional awards went to Hathaway Brown girls.

“And there’s a hundred-percent correlation between festival participants and the competition,” Parsons says.

I left him to handle the Chipotle affair and returned to the Senior Room. The girls were coming back with their essays. We had enough time for an open reading of their work, and they began, one by one, to share aloud their writing.

I’ve done this before with groups of writers, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the results, but I am. Every time. I am surprised, and rewarded, and I learn again one of the truest lessons of writing: if you give yourself over to that chaos, and you work through the process, you will discover something you didn’t know you already knew. You will find the surprise—the delight—of your own insight.

“I think that anyone can be a writer whether they believe so or not. You don’t have to have an immense vocabulary or use insane metaphors to show people what you are feeling. Simply writing to get the words out of your head or to create something that you are proud of is what defines you as a writer. A writer is someone who writes simply because they love to write, not because they have to.”

And so she accepted the challenge offered by the wiffle ball. A risk of sorts. A challenge to think, and to seek, and to question. A challenge toward language and beauty.

The ball lays at rest until someone saunters by, each footstep shifting the carpet thrown over hardwood floors, giving motion to the ball once again. As it glides across the tight, roughly bound synthetic fabric, it composes the faint lull of a movie reel until it runs out of film.

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David Giffels is an assistant professor of English at The University of Akron.

After School Special

The 2014 Young Writers and Artists Festival featured a new component designed for parents and other adults in the community. Prior to the opening of the festival, on the evening of October 29, Hathaway Brown presented a special Writers Forum that gave attendees the opportunity to hear from and interact with an impressive array of professional writers, several of whom taught student festival workshops as well.

Writers Forum: Giving Life to Thought began with a panel discussion, followed by three rounds of breakout sessions, which allowed participants to speak with the writers in small settings. The opening panel discussion was a conversational roundtable about the creative process facilitated by Osborne Writing Center Director Scott Parsons. Panelists included Young Writers and Artists Festival instructors author David Giffels, poet Jamaal May, and singers/songwriters Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler (biographies on page 17). All of these panelists also met with attendees in breakout sessions. Additionally, breakout sessions were offered by New York Times bestselling author Alexandra Fuller, Pulitzer Prizewinning Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda, and former Yale University English professor and author Wes Davis. The evening event, which was free and open to the public and had more than 100 attendees, closed with an informal reception and group book signing. To learn more about the program, please visit www.hb.edu/writersforum.

TOP LEFT, BOT TOM RIGHT PHOTOS BY JASON MILLER; TOP RIGHT, BOT TOM LEFT PHOTOS BY JAMES DOUGLAS

He and I chatted briefly in the Anne Cutter Coburn Reception Room, where he had been trying to get a little writing of his own done in the quiet hours of the morning. But now, as will happen in a school, a collective energy—a new kind of chaos—was brewing.

Call it lunchtime.

I asked Molly, a junior who has now participated in two festivals, the same question.

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My Plate

[ BY NITYA THAKORE ’16 ] “Mumm some curry got on the potato!” I cry out. My mother shakes her head, disapproving.

“It’s okay for them to touch, Nitya.”

It’s not. The creaminess of the potato salad, the piquancy of the curry, and the crunchy zing of the celery just can’t mix. They aren’t meant to. Pouting, I use my fork, pushing the potato and eggs over slightly to make sure none of my foods touch. Even at that age, I had learned to compartmentalize.

Separation was only natural, after all. The green curry, dark and wintry-spruce, peppered with the spice of summer, was always eaten only with family friends; the ones that my parents met in college in India. The curry came along with fluffy white rice, golden lentil daal, and perfectly round flatbread roti that the mothers rolled out and heated over an open flame. In the kitchen, my aunts stirred murky red bean soup as they jabbered in Chinese in the kitchen.

As my grandmother shot rapid Chinese at me, I could reply only in broken phrases, stumbling and slow in an uncomfortable language that seemed to just roll off her tongue. We kids would grab the food and run downstairs as the parents laughed and chattered in the living room. In the basement, a Hindi film always rolled in the background; a beautiful woman in a sari danced, warbling a love song in a field of flowers as her lover playfully pulled on her scarf. I only ever understood snippets of the movie. As the others watched, I would stare down at the steaming curry, and rip up my roti into little pieces with my hands. The other kids laughed at humour that was in a language that I couldn’t comprehend, that I was excluded from.

I knew the rules. I learned what I needed to do in each situation. I compartmentalized. I struggled often with the pull of each, yanking me from one mode of being to another. While others sat so comfortably within the ranges of cultures they understood so well, I never belonged. I couldn’t speak the language, I couldn’t follow the customs, and I struggled often with cultural cues. I lived my life looking in from the outside. I was envious of those who knew where they belonged.

I only feel most comfortable at home, where the pressure’s off. My worlds collide here. Three different cultures float around my house, an eclectic blend. It’s strange and confusing; I am overwhelmed by the colors, the tastes, the cultures. Yet, it’s only here that I don’t worry about customs and languages; here, I do belong. I don’t need to compartmentalize. Can I eat the curry and fish with a fork and knife? Or try the potatoes with wooden chopsticks? Perhaps, now, it’s time to mix up the plate a bit. Let some curry accidentally splash on the potato. It’s me, after all.

Continued on page 20.

PHOTO BY JASON MILLER

ibid

a sampling of excerpts from student work inspired by the HB Young Writers and Artists Festival

Comic Relief [ BY EMILY IMKA ’15 ]

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The William McKinley and Jessie M. Osborne Writing Center Fund, the endowment that supports Hathaway Brown’s Osborne Writing Center, was established in 2001 by Virginia Osborne Charman ’41 in memory of her parents. At its core, the endowment is intended to support an atmosphere at HB in which student writing can originate and evolve. The entire school community is indebted to her and is grateful for the outstanding programming that has been launched as a result of her generous philanthropy.

Cultural Identity [ BY CHRISTINE ESPINOSA ’15 ] I made the active choice to be myself.

In high school I encountered people of all walks of life: black, white, rich, poor, preppy, and grunge. The more relationships I formed with various people, the more I accepted myself. I joined the Asian club, Israeli club, and Black Cultural Awareness just to name a few. Through these clubs I learned about several traditions, foods, and ideas. What resonated with me was how people could come together and host afterschool events such as our Chinese New Year celebration or pitch in to bake food for the Jewish holiday committee regardless of race and differences. These students inspired me to share my Filipino heritage with my friends and my American heritage with my family. Whether it is forcing my friends to taste my homemade empanadas, kicking off a fundraiser for Typhoon Haiyan victims, teaching my cousins slang words such as “swag” or introducing my cousins to my American friends, I discovered how to bridge my two backgrounds.

It amuses me that for the past 17 years, no one has been able to guess my ethnicity correctly on his or her first try. Chinese.

African. Italian. Mexican. I always say, “Good one, but I’m Filipino,” which is usually reciprocated with an, “Oh! That explains it,” and an occasional, “Uh, where the heck is that…?” It is disappointing that there will always be someone who cannot accept me, but frankly I am fine with this.

My piano repertoire consists almost entirely of Chopin, and hey, the King (LeBron) is back, so I’ll keep the jersey. People can judge me if they want to, but they do not possess the power to change who I am. I created my own cultural identity. I wear it with pride. I am different.

My mother called me the sunshine child. It was true that I was very happy. It is also true that I was alien, almost; I would make you blink if you stared too long. My aunt likes to tell this story: she had strapped me into a car seat when I was not yet two, and angry. I was angry, and as she strapped me in I

said to her, “Titi, Titi, you make me livid.”

Everyone laughed, she said, but when she tells the story her eye sprints back and forth as if she is still confused, still cannot make sense of a baby saying words like livid. But they all laughed, she said. And I probably sat there, strapped in, tiny and happy and sad and livid.

Boats

[ BY EMILY AMJAD ’15 ] As the dusks stretch longer and longer and the sun meets the moon later in the day, the boats coat the surface of Lake Erie. We are one of them. The waves crash into the bluff and sulk back out into the open water and I wonder what happens in the middle, when the going out meets the coming in. We stay steady for a few moments. The docks vanish, skyline fading. We are at the crossroads of life and nothingness. No one intends to sink to their demise in the brackish green, but for now we do. Letting the waves rock my body until my toes are ripened and I feel the toss of the earth even after I’m on solid ground.

I’m the girl afraid of open spaces, shying away from the unknown depths of whatever lurks near my toes under the cloudy surface.

But I know I was safe, though nothing concrete surrounds me.

My Son is Tamir Rice [ BY KACEY GILL ’16 ] I sat with one of my greatest mentors and looked her in the eyes as she broke down and admitted that the world wasn’t safe for us black youth, and that no matter how hard she tried, she doubted it ever would be. I listened to my own mother say how lucky she was to have had a girl and not a boy—because having a black son in 2014 is one of the scariest things she could possibly imagine.

Take Out Everything That Is Inside You [ BY BECCA LAMBRIGHT ’15 ] My mother was born in a country riddled with secrets and hidden history. She learned from the dirt beneath her feet that a Korean woman never gives up her pride, no matter what humiliation she is subjected to. My mother was raised by a father who had grown up in North Korea, by a mother whose sister had died from Japanese torture. She grew up without religion but she believed in the salvation from something better. She invested herself in American rock and roll and black market records and the English language. I think that she always dreamed of coming here.

In the way that humans look for their own face in inanimate objects, I constantly search for the face of my mother when I study history. I am hungry for her story but it never comes up except in the single sentence that ever mentions the name of the Korean War. In her absence, I see her wherever she isn’t. I see her in the revolutions and the wars and I always, always see her in the pictures of the Vietnamese women burning from Napalm. There is a reason I have never been able to look for too long.

I like to do my homework in the kitchen while my mother tinkers away over the mounds of insignificant memorabilia that makes up our home. Scraps of notes, paperweights, and bills create a shadow of a junkyard on top of our counters. She is the protector of anything that could hold sentimentality, a believer in the powers of memories long gone. Last night, the sky was filled with a haze of diffused moonlight, the fault of clouds trying to steal the spotlight that the moon takes nightly. My mother and I have not spoken for a few hours when she turns to me and says, “Take out everything that is inside of you and die empty.”