The Polliwog Journal

“Everything means itself and something else,” David Lehman told us in our poetry workshop yesterday afternoon at the Great Lakes Writers Festival at Lakeland College, Sheboygan, WI.  About 15 high school students (from several schools)  and two teachers were seated in a circle, Lehman one among us, and he led us in an exercise meant to engage our imaginations. He was generous, funny, and sincerely pleased to be with us.

His wife, Stacey Harwood, led the prose workshop, and my students who were with her said they enjoyed the experience tremendously. They emerged with ideas for how to improve their writing.

Our day at the festival began with an open mic session, where tremulous students pushed their fears out of the way and read their work with confidence. I could not have been more proud of our students. It is moments like this that remain in their consciousness forever.

We then assembled to listen to Lehman and Harwood read their work. They could not have been more gracious, these two New Yorkers who were literally in the midst of cornfields in rural Wisconsin. But far from being uncomfortably out of their element, they were grateful for having seen the moon the night before–a harvest moon of poetic legend, huge and orange looming almost ominously in the sky. In the Q & A session that followed the readings, they shared themselves with us even more.

For small town Wisconsin students to be able to connect with nationally known writers is one of the miracles of the Great Lakes Writers Festival, and each year as I come away from the experience, I am in awe of its effect–how simple and at the same time how immense. If I see myself through the eyes of Jacob, a 14-year-old writer who read his story at open mic, who submitted his story for workshop, and who, due to his willingness to share, engaged in conversations about writing with the writers, I know my journey as a writer has been catapulted in one day to a new realm of possibility. I imagine somehow that in one day I am no longer just a high school freshman who likes to write. I am actually a writer.

Everything means itself and something else. This day meant learning about writing from two people who live writing. It meant also that we, who live amidst cornfields and harvest moons and take them for granted, were also connected to the world of taxis, subways, books in print, and the urgency to read and write.

Thank you, Karl Elder, for always making this day so amazing!