My writer’s group focuses on how to tell their stories to the world, to find their subjects and voices. It is an extraordinary class, full of depth, ideas, energy and support for one another. It is safe place, a place to risk opening up and experimenting. There is no right or wrong in my classes, just figuring out what we want to say and how we want to say it.

Writing classes ought not to be about what we do wrong, but what we do right. From the first day we set food in a classroom, we are told we are not spelling right, using grammar correctly, forming proper sentence structure, that our spelling is poor. Writing too often becomes frightening and wrought.

We meet every Saturday morning for two hours.

In my class, we talk about what people are doing right. I guess you could call it positive reinforcement teaching, although we are open and honest with one another, we give precious feedback.

We are shooting past everyone’s fears and phobias about writing in my class. We do not speak poorly of our work. Not them, not me.  Today, beautiful stories about medicine, health care, idiosyncratic people in our lives, some poems, memories of loss and grief, tales of teacher struggle in the classroom. Beautiful times, we are making stories for a book we hope to publish next year.

Today Jen, a physician, talks about the difficulties doctors face caught in the tangle of modern health care, cost and insurance limits. Karen, a nurse-practitioner, talks about the frustrations of seeing smoking patients go on to get cancer. Cheryl is writing about the agony of a dedicated teacher trying to get help for a neglected child, Carol writes about the awful beauty of October, the month she fell in love, the month her great love died.

Stories of life, stories of our time. I am lucky to have students like this, lucky to get to teach them and try to help them, lucky to be gathering at Pompanuck Farm. A class like this is magic, and I hope to tell the story of it in photos.