Writing Community

Connexion, Spring 2016, p. 7. Print. (article)

In the fall of 2003, I had the greatest job ever – teaching creative writing to third and fourth graders. My small groups of students got excited about lie poems, wish poems, stories, and everything else.  We wrote poems on crowns about when we ruled the world, we wrote stories on mobiles about flying things.  We told each other what we liked about each other’s poems and how we thought our stories could be improved. We suggested endings and titles and helped each other when we were stuck.

I was impressed by the community feeling in those little creative writing groups. At the same time, I felt a little isolated, teaching small groups in a corner far away from the rest of the school.  In trying to integrate my little writing groups with big ASFG, I hit upon the idea of a literary magazine.  And thus Strange Spaghetti was born.

The first issue of Strange Spaghetti was financed by me (I got reimbursed for most of it later.  I think).  We printed the text at the copy center but the cover had to be printed at Office Depot. I took the title from part of then-fourth grader Luly Godinez’s poem:

They made me a welcome party

With clowns and strange spaghetti

My husband printed a background of some strange-looking spaghetti for the cover.  We were only able to print about 50 copies – enough for the writers themselves.

We worked very hard on it, but I didn’t know if anyone else would be that excited.  But my students and their families were delighted.  “Do you have another copy so I can give my grandma one?”  “Could I get one for my big sister?” Other students and teachers asked how they could be a part of it, and I very much wanted to invite everybody and their grandmother into our writing community.  So I was really happy the following year when I got a grant from the Parents’ Association, which meant I could print more and open up submissions to all of elementary. I begged and cajoled teachers to find time in their busy days to send me their students’ writing. Most were happy to do so, and for several years Strange Spaghetti was a physical representation of the elementary school writing community.

There were many awesome and odd pieces in Strange Spaghetti. Students played with rhythm, as in Andrea Figuerroa’s Fish:

The title is fish

But there is no fish

Because there is no water.

I still read Juan Pablo Lopez’s My Little Baby Sister Camila to my 6^th graders as an example of a great favorite person poem:

She is the money in my pocket

She is my favorite TV channel

She is the ice cream of my dessert

She is the 10 on my exam.

There was a recurring series of stories — Rodrigo Andrade and Julio Huato’s wonderful Ketchup Wars:

Humans began preparing their armies to go to Ketchupland to fight with mustard, onions, and pickles.

When I began working in middle school, a MS literary magazine seemed only natural.  I didn’t have to spend much time convincing Mr. Markman about the idea. The first Amalgamation came out in 2007. It contained lune poetry and something we called jagged poetry, as well as the insincere apology which has become a time-honored tradition in Amalgamation.

There were contributors who contributed year after year, like Sofi Benitez who wrote about toilet paper for Strange Spaghetti in the 4^th grade, Chasing Rainbows for Amalgamation in the 6^th grade, and went on to edit Sin Fronteras in high school.  Juan Unda contributed every year of middle school, writing about his dog Brownie in the 5^th grade, and finishing up with a poem about Lars Ulrich of Metallica in the 8^th grade.

While Strange Spaghetti was very much about primary school concerns, Amalgamation featured a very middle school point of view, like in Jose Paniagua’s heartfelt “Pimple”:

So

ugly

so

big

so

red

so

obvious

so

hated.

Natalia Hecht’s tragic “He”:

Sexy

Cute

Handsome

Adorable

Nice

King

Generous

Honest

Sincere

I didn’t understand.

Or then-6^th grader Ana Paula Rueda’s jaded lune poetry:

Amazingly long day.

I don’t have fun anymore.

I’m too old.

This year, the last of my elementary creative writing students will be graduating from high school. It doesn’t seem that long ago that they were asking me hopefully what we would write about today. It makes me happy to think of them going off into the world to write all over everything, forging their own communities while always remaining a part of this one.