One spring day nearly twenty years ago, I found myself in front of a class of bored eighth grade students, scrambling for whatever key I could turn to ignite their imaginations. I had walked into their school that morning with the assumption that I could easily run this class—that I could quickly engage these kids and get them thinking about their home landscapes: the places nearby that they considered special, and how those places affected their lives. Ha!
Early that morning I had slung a backpack full of papers and books into my car for the hour-drive from our home on Roanoke Island, over two bridges and three islands, past fields of rolling dunes and glimpses of blue-green surf, to the Cape Hatteras School, grades K through 12. I was teaching in the school that week through a visiting writers’ program sponsored by the state of North Carolina.
Normally I loved this kind of assignment. It gave me a chance to connect with young people—to spark a little creativity even in students to whom the idea of creative thought seemed utterly foreign. But for the previous few years I’d been teaching workshops with college students and adults. I was (I realized belatedly) badly out of practice working with students this young.
The assignment I’d given them had always worked well in the past: Write a few paragraphs about your favorite place in the world. Maybe it’s somewhere you can comfortably be alone. Or maybe it’s where you hang out with friends. What’s special about that particular place? How does it make you feel? I stood in front of the class trying to hide my deer-in-the-headlights surprise that my request was falling so flat.
I changed tacks and asked the students how many of them planned to leave Hatteras Island after high school. Twelve hands shot into the air. “I don’t know where I’m going,” one boy volunteered, “but it’s outta here!”
“It’s too boring here,” another boy said. “There’s nothing to do.”
“What about the beach?” I asked. “Any of you like to surf or fish or hang out there?”
Most of the students nodded, if reluctantly.
“Okay,” I said, relaxing slightly. “We all have places we love, even if we live in the dullest spot on Earth. Think of where you like to hang out with your friends. Those places may not be anything special to anyone else, but they’re where you feel at home. Right?”
A few of the students nodded; a few others looked thoughtful. These kids were so young! But for their guarded expressions I would have guessed them to be in fifth grade, not eighth. Most were looking down at their desks, but two or three shot furtive glances toward me One girl with incredibly smoothly combed hair, wiggled a pen between her fingers and stared coolly and directly at me.
I asked the students to take out a piece of paper and sketch a simple map of the places on Hatteras Island that they most loved. “Maybe start with your house, or even your bedroom” (I hoped they had bedrooms) “and go from there.”
This seemed to do the trick. Heads down, they went to work. After ten minutes I asked them to choose one of the special places they’d drawn and describe it in three or four paragraphs. Several of the boys groaned loudly. “That’s almost a page,” one complained.
“Just try it,” I urged.
In a few minutes they were bent over their papers, writing, their brows creased. Occasionally one would pause, as if working through how to describe a thought with words. Only one boy, a youngster with very short, dark hair, wasn’t working. He sat alone at a table on the side of the room, his legs and arms sprawled as if he were dumbfounded by the assignment.
This was Josh, who seemed to have no intention of complying with my request. I made my way to his desk and stood in front of him. “What’s up?”
“I can’t do this. I can’t think of anything to write about.”
“Do you ever go to the beach?”
He shook his head.
“Do you skateboard? Is there anyplace special you go with your friends?”
“I don’t have any friends.”
I crouched down so we were eye-to-eye. “What do you do after school?” I asked quietly.
“Nothing. I just go home.” His chin rested heavily on his hand.
“You stay inside all afternoon?”
“My mom makes me take the dogs for a walk.”
“Write about that,” I said, trying to hide my annoyance. “Write about walking the dogs.”
He curled his upper lip distastefully and let his hand collapse on the desk.
I hurried across the room to answer a question from another student. When I glanced back, to my surprise Josh was writing.
At the end of the period I asked the students to take their pieces home and finish them overnight. I’d collect them the following day. As I watched them stuff books and papers into folders and backpacks, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Josh. “Look,” he said, thrusting a paper into my hand. “Look what I wrote.
It was three-quarters of a page about his two dogs and how he loved to take them out to romp in an old campground. “I don’t know where to find adventure,” it said, “but they do. They follow their noses, and I follow them.”
The next day, when he handed in the paper, he had lengthened the piece and titled it, in curly script, “The Smell of Adventure.”
The teacher was astounded. “I’ve barely been able to get him to string two sentences together,” she confided.
All week I had similar experiences.
A sixth-grade boy who swore he hated to write turned in a story about his favorite hideaway beneath a bridge over a marshy creek.
An eighth-grader composed a beautiful passage about a live oak she often visited, and the solace she found in its sinewy branches and textured shade.
After a particularly silent-and-surly ninth-grade class, where students refused to acknowledge my simplest questions, a girl turned in a story about her father, who had once encountered a humpback whale on an offshore fishing trip with friends. The whale swam around his boat, coming frighteningly close. As the amazed fishermen watched, it stuck its head out of the water to reveal a fishing net wrapped tightly around its mouth. It couldn’t feed. Reaching carefully for his knife, looking all the while into the whale’s large, liquid eye, the girl’s father cut away the net. The whale remained motionless, watching. Once it had been freed, it sank out of sight, surfaced a final time, and was gone.
I read the story to the class.
“Cool,” said a tall, pretty girl in the back, looking at the floor as she spoke.
“That’s supposed to be true?” asked a wise-cracker boy.
“The ocean’s a mysterious place,” I told them. “Strange things happen there all the time.”
I read them another story, one of my own, about a Hatteras woman whose husband had vanished in a fishing accident. Months after his disappearance, the woman heard him calling to her. She made her way, as if led, into a nearby marsh and immediately found his body, where a high tide had washed it, perhaps the previous day.
“These are the kinds of stories that define our communities,” I said. “They remind us why living by the ocean is so special. But they’re not getting told anymore. Everyone’s too busy watching TV.”
By the end of the week I was exhausted. When the alarm went off at 5:20 Friday morning, I pulled myself out of bed, wondering how our school teachers manage to keep going.
My class load was lighter that day, and the hours passed quickly. I drove north again in a buoyant mood, past fields of shining salt hay and stunted cedars, over bridges and across the blue, blue waters that defined my home. I had no illusions; I hadn’t changed anyone’s life that week. But I’d introduced them to the concept of landscape and story, and I’d reminded myself that all people—even the problem students who never, ever crack a book—have immense capacity for creative thought. It’s a lesson I hope I’ll carry with me all my life.