My Voice

This month, Congress voted to end funding for the National Writing Project (NWP). So it goes with everything good in education. Never in my life had I imagined that teachers and the work we do would be so vilified in the court of public opinion, but that is fodder for another day and another blog post.

I participated in the Greater Kansas City Writing Project's Summer Institute in 2007. To say that I was intimidated, timid even, about writing is the understatement of my life. Having spent the first seven years of my career as a history teacher then moving to English in 2005 at the request of my administrators, I hurried to work through a Master's program in Liberal Arts/Literature, and was chosen to participate in the GKCWP. I was not a writer so how could I encourage my students to do what I did not do? Let me explain.

When I was a senior in high school, I got pregnant. Faced with the only choice available to me in those days, I married but it didn't last and we were divorced before we saw our first anniversary. During those short months of my first marriage, I took an English class at a local university. A paper I wrote about my unborn baby was put in the university newspaper. I was so amazed and complimented when I got the call asking to publish my essay that I immediately and emphatically said, "Yes!"  I had no idea of the consequences.

The essay I wrote was inserted into a feature on the rise of teen pregnancies. My essay had nothing to do with the tragic blight exposed in the feature. I was simply a young mother wondering what her baby might be. What she might become. I was horrified. To add insult to injury, by the time my essay was published among the rather trashy statistics and condescending tone of the university newspaper,  I was in the midst of a divorce. My mother-in-law, at the time, worked for the university, read the paper (of course), and took offense. Her son and his attorney threatened to sue me for my slanderous essay. Over the course of twenty-five years, I have never understood what was offensive about my essay, albeit, I understood it's placement in the context of the paper's feature story but what could I do?

This is what I did: I called my attorney. He asked me if I wrote other things like stories or journals that might be subpoenaed. I told him no and laid several notebooks full of poetry, short stories, journals, and sketches in the fireplace and lit a match. Outside of what was assigned in classes, I never wrote again. I didn't write for twenty years. I began to write again in the SI 2007 and rediscovered my childhood dream to call myself a writer and maybe, someday, an author. The GKCWP changed my life. It changed my teaching it life; it changed me. It gave me a voice.

Since that summer I have often wondered how many of my students feel that they have no voice? How many more feel that they have no right to a voice? How many of them fear writing? As I teach students with written expression disorders, most of them do not write. All of them wish they could, but they are afraid.

In the four years since I participated in the GKCWP, I have worked diligently to allow my students a voice, room to write outside of whatever box they put themselves in, and to say what is important to them. Personally, I have written poems, short stories, and outlined two novels. My students have entered writing contests and some of them have won prizes. Despite all the little successes, ending funding for the National Writing Project feels very much like it did all those years ago as I shredded and burned my writing notebooks--like everything I think, feel, and believe is not even worthy enough to be marginalized. It must be stricken from the record.

By ending funding for something as important as the National Writing Project, something proven to directly and positively impact teachers and their students, Congress has said we have no value in this culture and neither do the children we teach. There is nothing more tragic than that.

Dear readers, please call, write, call and write again, your Representatives and Senators at every level. Let them know how important the National Writing Project is and demand that they re-fund it immediately.