A Gentle Way To Spark Creativity
By Vanessa De La Torre, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Jun. 17–WEST HARTFORD — – Sam Slate sat on the floor of his language arts classroom at King Philip Middle School on a recent Friday, eyes closed, smile forming, ruminating peacefully.
A few feet away was Kate Callahan, a folk singer-songwriter who has played to packed houses across Connecticut, finger-picking a melody on her acoustic guitar for Sam and his sixth-grade classmates. The kids sat in a circle, quietly listening.
“What is the sound of this?” Callahan asked in a soft voice, like a hypnotist. “What does it mean to you? Where does it take you?”
Sam spoke first. “I see, like, brown and orange,” the 11-year-old said. “Like the colors of autumn on the leaves.”
“For some reason,” one girl offered, sheepishly, “I see sunflowers.”
The visions that Callahan’s music had kindled on this day — a prairie, Mom cooking pancakes in the morning, wind — were all considered right answers, because the point of the exercise was to pique imaginations. Then, with pencils and journals in hand, the kids created stories and poems on paper.
The Ellen Jeanne Goldfarb Memorial Charitable Trust and the Foundation for West Hartford Public Schools funded the program this academic year, called “Music and Mentoring as an Approach to Creative Writing,” with a combined $7,000 in stipend money to hire Callahan as an artist-in-residence at Hall High School and King Philip.
During the first semester, Callahan met once a week with Patrick Gustafson’s sophomore English class at Hall, using music as a “spark” to get students to write freely, as Callahan put it. In the second semester, a group of Gustafson’s students served as writing mentors for sixth-graders in two language arts classes that Callahan visited over five Fridays.
This month, on the last Friday of the program, the children gave dramatic readings of their work — mostly poems, though one girl wrote a song. The performances were videotaped and students in the classes will receive a DVD and a printed anthology of their writing this week.
“It’s less about demanding that kids read out loud and share,” said Callahan, a West Hartford native who was educated in the town’s public schools. “I can’t emphasize this enough: It’s more about creating, over time, an environment that’s non-judgmental, that’s comfortable.
“I was shy in the classroom,” Callahan said, “but I definitely broke through that in the arts. It’s that simple.”
The program began at Hall seven years ago. Gustafson had read a newspaper article about Callahan’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury suffered in a skiing accident, and was soon in the audience of a local benefit concert where Callahan was performing. The red-haired musician didn’t just sing her songs, she shared stories about them with the audience, he said. Afterward, Gustafson approached her about working on a creative project with his class.
“Before I even finished saying it, she said, ‘I’d love to, just tell me about it,’” Gustafson recalled.
Teachers spend much of their time preparing students for state-mandated tests, he said, and students write five-paragraph essays with the focus of getting a grade.
“And the thing that kids at Hall discovered when they worked with Kate is there’s no right, there’s no wrong … it kind of frees them up to cover the page and to have some confidence in what they really feel and think,” Gustafson said.
After Callahan finished her melodies that recent Friday, Sam, the boy with the serene grin, wrote lines upon line in his journal:
The wind now taps into the last reserves of its strength,/ And with one mighty flourish/ A beautiful flower is introduced to the world/ Its petals open up/ And unleash enough happiness/ To equal all of the darkness/ Of all the evil/ Of all the world …
“I like poetry because you can say what you’re thinking exactly, but you don’t really have to say it out loud,” Sam said.
“You can just put it in your notebook and have it there for you.”
Courant photographer Shana Sureck contributed to this report.
Contact Vanessa de la Torre at vdelatorre@courant.com.
For video of Kate Callahan using music to teach students about creative writing, visit www.courant.com/callahan
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
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