Teaching Teachers, Graduate School

I’ve been interested in story for a long time. I’m thinking basically of stories about the writers themselves. Telling them is a means of learning, a digestive kind of learning which is so often ignored in schools. It seems to me to be the field of operation of most of the arts. So I want my students to move toward an art-like selection of the elements of their personal experience. The more sharply the form resolves the content, so to speak, the more sharply is it a digestive process. I try to interest students in writing both autobiographical and fictional stories and to find their way between the two. When I was teaching children I discovered that story writing was central to them. They all loved stories at an early age and they liked to write them when they got over the hump, the difficulty, of shaping letters and words in writing. They get over that hump better, I find, by writing stories than by reading them. I think that’s most applicable at a very young age, but it still worked when I was teaching eleven-year-olds. Barbara Hardy—who’s the head of the English Department at Birkbeck College at the University of London—came down to talk to our teachers once at the London Association for the Teaching of English. She said that telling stories is not a way an artist has of manipulating an audience, but something that is transferred from life to art. She says that narrative is a primary act of mind. Her article, with those words as title, was printed in Novel: A Forum on Fiction. She wrote: . . . We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social past and future. . . .