A few years ago I created a class about creative writers, identity and race in the Twin Cities. Forty students of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, race, and ages sat at tables dragged into a big square in an underground room in a building next to the train tracks midway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. None of us knew one another.

On the first day of class, in late August, I gave them all a writing-from-life prompt. They wrote quickly and in silence, then some of them read their passages aloud. Months later, in their final paper for the class, some of the students wrote about that first day.

I had no idea that we would all be so comfortable with each other so quickly, especially since it was such a big class. There was a woman who talked about how she missed home and she started crying. To me, that was when the wall sort of came down for everyone and everyone was much more willing to share.

I remember that in just one day, there was one man who talked about how his roommate had killed himself on 9/11 and there was another man that talked about how his father killed his mother. These are major life events that they were sharing to basically complete strangers. That was the most open conversation I’d ever had with other students. These are things that we suppress and don’t want to admit to ourselves, so for people to tell a room full of people that, was amazing.

Sharing personal stories is the most immediate form of human connection, at least in my life, and teaching the art of creative writing is a deeply humbling experience. Alberto Rios’s beautiful lines in the poem below about how We give because giving has changed us make me think about my students, and about all the classrooms I’ve had the honor to sit in.

When Giving Is All We Have, by Alberto Rios
 
One river gives
its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
we have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
but we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
what you did not have, and I gave you
what I had to give—together, we made
something greater from the difference.

For more information on Alberto Rios, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter