Literacy Memories

Welcome to Verselove, a place for educators to nurture their writing lives and to advocate for writing poetry in community. We are gathering every day in April to write– no sign-ups, no fees, no commitments. Come and go as you please. All that we ask is that if you write, you respond to others to mirror to them your readerly experiences — beautiful lines, phrases that resonate, ideas stirred. Enjoy. (Learn more here.)

Our Host: Kate Sjostrom

A former high school English teacher, Kate Sjostrom is a teacher educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago and writer-in-residence at the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in RHINO, Changing English, Teaching/Writing, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, English Journal, and elsewhere. She is also a proud contributor to the Ethical ELA publications Rhyme and Rhythm: Poems for Student Athletes and  Just YA. Kate is the co-editor, with Brian Charest, of Unsettling Education, a collection highlighting teachers’ work to resist standardization and center students’ humanity in the classroom.

Inspiration 

It is commonplace to ask pre-service English teachers to write their literacy autobiographies so they might consider the potential impact of formative experiences on their professional practice (Smagorinsky & Whiting, 1995). At the university where I work, this assignment lands in the writing methods course I teach. For the past couple years, I’ve asked my students to write their literacy histories as a series of free-verse narrative poems, hoping the assignment can perform double duty: get students reflecting on the baggage they bring to the classroom AND lessen students’ and pre-service teachers’ well-documented fear of poetry (Certo et al., 2012; Hughes & Dymoke, 2011; Linaberger, 2005; Nobles & Azano, 2016). As this is the first unit in our course, I am also hopeful that the attention to detail students bring to the writing of poetry will carry through to other writing. In completing this assignment alongside students, I’ve found myself writing about different memories than when I completed this exercise many years ago, bringing me new insights and classroom goals. It is my hope that this stroll down literacy-memory lane is similarly interesting and fruitful for you.

For further inspiration, here is one of my class’s favorite literacy memory poems: “The Spelling Bee as Foreshadowing” by Carole Oles. Notice how the poem ends with a lovely, haunting image.

Process

Select a formative literacy memory. Memories you might consider:

• a fond reading or writing memory
• a moment of struggle in writing
• a moment of connection to a character
• a moment of breakthrough in writing
• a moment of accomplishment in writing
• a moment from a memorable English classroom
• a memory of being read to
• a memory of being in a space sacred for reading or writing
• a memory of sharing your writing
• a memory of being misunderstood in writing
• a moment of connection to another reader or writer
• a memory of being encouraged or corrected

Tell us the story of that memory! As you do so, consider the image that stands out most to you in the memory and see if you can let the image show some of the memory’s import, as Oles does at the end of the poem linked above and as I try to do with the orange in my poem below. 

Kate’s Poem

Foreshadowing by Kate Sjostrom

I’d rushed to get to the classroom first
but my crush was already there
and so I whispered to my teacher
what I had to do fast: remove my story 
from the packets he was about to share.
My mom didn’t want the neighbors to hear.
Luckily, mine was the last in each stack, 
but the removal was slow, staples snagging\
my eyes catching on the details of the story
I’d been ready to tell, the details my mom
wanted to keep: the bloom and collapse
of her marriage, my dad’s pained confession.
As I tore my story from the others
my crush was performing his usual trick:
peeling an orange in one go so he could 
re-wind the rind, fool everyone with the hollow 
orange sphere on his desk. I raced against that
unraveling.
The last students filed in and my teacher
stalled for me, reminded the class of deadlines that 
everyone already knew. Then he asked me to 
pass out the packets, as if I’d been handling them
just for that purpose, and told us to get reading. 
When my crush offered me a slice of orange,
I knew he’d heard it all. 
I ate the piece of fruit slowly, trying and 
failing to focus on the words before me, fictions
I couldn’t summon care for. When the final bell
finally rang, my teacher handed me the copies
of my story. On the top he’d written nothing
about its content, just a note that I should have
left seeds for the reader so they could have 
sussed out my dad’s secret on their own. But 
wasn’t that the point? That I never could have 
guessed? Wasn’t that the big story? That you could 
meet a boy at fifteen and love him all your life
only to find that nothing, nothing was as it seemed?

Your Turn

Now, scroll to the comment section below to write your own poem. (This is a public space, so you may choose to use only your first name or initials depending on your privacy preferences.) Not ready? That’s okay. Read the poems already posted for more inspiration. Ponder your own throughout the day. Return later. And, if the prompt does not work for you, that is fine. All writing is welcome. Just write something. Oh, and a note about drafting: Since we are writing in short bursts, we all understand (and even welcome) the typos and partial poems that remind us we are human and that writing is always becoming. If you’d like to invite other teachers to write with us, tell them to subscribe. Also, please be sure to respond to at least three writers.