(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)
On this day
before the
first days
of school,
the dreamers
in us remember
long nights of
wonder and
worry, the
unknown spinning
us forward
into something
unfocused
and still a
bit blurry;
each year begins
with a single
step of pause,
then comes
the hurry
My good friend, Michelle King, introduced this concept of “scenius” (from music producer Brian Eno) to a three day gathering of educators, park rangers and environmental educational partners that I was part of. We were all on Zoom, alas, but the facilitators were thoughtful in the ways they used the chat as a generative channel for feedback, support and questions to be generated throughout small group presentations and discussions. The chatter flowed.
When someone mentioned how powerful that chat-side sharing was, Michelle (who was joining in as a featured guest poet/educator/creativity instigator) shared Eno’s term of Scenius to mean that a collective working together within a common theme or “scene” has an elevated power to it. Genius might refer to a single person; Scenius refers to many people, together, in a single “scene” with shared passions.
It’s a term that has surfaced through others, too, such as Austin Kleone, who has done a deep dive into the idea. In an interview, Eno explained that he realized that what he had learned in art school about individual genius working solo was more likely the result of the cultural scene that created the possibility for an artist to flourish. It didn’t likely happen in isolation.
What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. — Brian Eno
I am thinking how this concept connects to Connected Learning and Affinity Groups and other concepts in which the larger energy of creativity sparks individuals to raise their game, take a chance, and find others for collaboration. For me, I think of CLMOOC, and DS106, and the National Writing Project, and the organization that was hosting the gathering, Parks in Every Classroom.
Also, of course, I wonder how this conceptual understanding of how we learn within given cultural moments might translate into how educators approach learners in schools.
Robin Ha’s memoir of moving to America from South Korea as a child, and not knowing a lick of English, is a testament to not just perseverance, but also, to each person finding some way forward. Ha’s graphic memoir — Almost American Girl — is part of the new and appreciated wave of new diverse voices in the field.
Ha’s single mother brought her unexpectedly to Alabama when Ha was a child, and she knew no English or much about American culture, and so, she struggled with loneliness and language, until years later, when Ha stumbled upon a group of other teens making comics and stories at a comic book store. This changed everything for her. These scenes reminded me of the groups of young people I used to see huddled around comics at our local comic store when my eldest son was younger and we visited the comic store regularly. The clusters of kids I noticed there are also what encouraged me to integrate comic making into my sixth grade classroom.
For Ha, the connection to art gave her anchor and friendship, and her story reminds us, as teachers, that we need to find and nurture the passions of our young people, and show patience and compassion to immigrant students making their way through the American landscape.
One element that surfaces early and remains is Ha’s love and frustration with her mother, whose a strong personality for the most part but then Ha begins to see her mother with more compassion and fragility.This emerges in the story slowly but powerfully.
The artwork here is fine, and I love that Ha was able to bring some of the comics and graphic arts she made as a kid into the story.
(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)
The hurricane on Sunday and into Monday was not as bad as it could have been here, but we still had strong winds and lots of rain. The river down the street is raging. And, alas, a tree fell from a neighbor’s yard smack dab into our yard, right over our fence line.
I know this happens. It’s nature. It’s part of life. It was a storm. It could have been a lot worse.
We’re lucky it didn’t hit the house and we’re lucky that I moved a glass-top table we usually have near that part of the yard for outdoor gatherings. No one was hurt. It’s still frustrating because it was a lovely tree, providing some nice shade on summer days, and now I am calling around, trying to find a tree service who can help remove it.
I guess if we learned one thing last year, it is to go with the flow, adjust as needed, and keep things moving forward. I’ll be on the phone today again, with tree companies, and chatting with my neighbor about her lost tree and my damaged fence.
This (above) is where I ended up. How I got there began with the sharing of a morning poem in my email inbox from poets.org entitled “The Life of a Writer” by Jalynn Harris. I shared that poem inside a new platform for the National Writing Project, under a theme of teachers as poets.
My friend, Terry, read it and wrote about it, channeling both appreciation and resistance, and uncovering a sort of template in the poem itself that he worked to make visible through active reading. Read about Terry’s journey here. He called it a Defibrillation and Templatization. You can watch him deconstruct the poem and then rebuild it back.
Reading what Terry wrote, I went back to the original poem to read Harris’s explanation of her poem (which I had missed the first time through .. it’s tucked on the corner of the page). I realized that I also found another poem in there, in her writing of her poem. I used an online blackout poem maker.
Then another friend, Tanya, in the NWP space, used Terry’s template from the poem to write her own poem. I just found her poem to be so interesting to read, as a sort of echo of the original, and I admired how that process of response brought out other layers of appreciation. Even as we were pushing back against the confines of unexpected templates and design confines, we were also using those same concepts to make something new.
That led to me writing a poem this morning, on the theme of a poem that would refuse to be confined by any template.
I am,
listening –
som
onebent
thispoemtomakeit
fittomakeitslip
inside
theskinwhere
som
oneelse
beginstomake
wordssing –
Here I am
listening –
som
ewordswander
inresistance
withpersistence
consistentlytwisting –
Here I am,
still listening
But the text version didn’t do the trick for me. It was too static. Stuck. And full of red squiggles shouting at me to fix it.
So, here’s what I did to get the poem to twist its shape:
Wrote it and exported it as PDF (to get rid of the squiggles)
Screenshot-ed the poem, to make into image file
Used LunaPic to first bend the poem and then to filter it in a way to add outlines (symbolic of the template)
That’s what’s up top there. And that’s how I got there. Lord only knows what the original poet, Jalynn Harris, would think of all of this. I hope she’d be honored that her poem about writing sparked writing.
![Almost American Girl by Robin Ha [in Booklist] | BookDragon](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fsmithsonianapa.org%2Fbookdragon%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F10%2F2019%2F12%2FAlmost-American-Girl-Robin-Ha-BookDragon.jpg%3Fresize%3D530%252C800&f=1&nofb=1)
