Crocheting, Creating, Writing

Here's a blog post I wrote back in July. Just now posting it. I know, I'm a procrastinator.

Last night I realized that I love teaching people how to do things that I love to do. I taught my coworker how to crochet. I had so much fun watching her get excited about making her own hat, and I loved encouraging her every step along the way. I love making gifts for people, whether it’s hats or origami flowers or bracelets. I used to make Christmas presents for my friends in junior high and high school. Even though it took a while to make them, I still enjoyed it. Part of the fun was in the process, I guess. And now that I’m making a blanket and hat for my nephew, it’s even more exciting because I think about him and Amanda as I’m working on them.

Writing is another kind of craft, a creation of something beautiful and artistic out of something as small as words. Words strung together, looped around my fingers and hooked into sentences and paragraphs can become something beautiful and so much bigger than the sum of their parts. Words alone seem ordinary, like a skein of yarn, but under the right care they can be transformed into something entirely new and different: a blanket, hat, gloves, scarf. I want to stitch words into fabric, wrap myself in a garment of words or give them as gifts to others. I want my words to be useful, meaningful, to bring delight not just as a story to wile away an hour but to take with you on long trips, to keep you company in times of need, to be treasured and taken out and read over and over and loved. Have you ever loved a story like a favorite piece of clothing? You turn to its pages when you’re sad or upset or just because you love that one line that seems to encapsulate exactly what you feel in the perfect combination of words and poetry. You read the story again, recommend it to others, quote its best lines. It stays with you and speaks to you when you’re quiet. I want to write stories like that.

Words are powerful. I already knew this, but I was reminded again this week. Another coworker had a birthday, so we gave him a huge poster with personal messages signed all over it. He said he loves giving gifts, but our words meant more to him than any present we could have given. I smiled because I know what he means. I appreciate words of affirmation, encouragement from others, the satisfaction of knowing that what I have said or written matters deeply to someone else. That may be why I love it when someone compliments a story; they’re showing me that the words I have woven are important to them too. Words are threads connecting us. Words are meant to be shared between people. It’s how we communicate. Language exists to express ideas and convey meaning among people. Can we even think without language? Which comes first, the idea or the words? I’ll leave that question to be debated by philosophers. All I know is, words are powerful. And I’m glad I chose them as my artistic medium.

I have often thought that writing is both a skill and an art form. You can master the basic rules of grammar and sentence structure to create perfectly adequate–but sometimes a bit mundane–sentences and paragraphs. But the real beauty of writing comes from spinning the words over on top of each other, looping and connecting them. Taking out words that don’t work and substituting others as if stitching and re-stitching a row of yarn. My first goal as a teacher of writing is to help students master this first basic step, to ensure they know how best to convey their ideas and communicate with their audience. Because writing that fails to communicate effectively is useless. One of my college professors once said, “The ability to communicate concisely in prose is more important than knowledge.” He explained that if someone could fathom great mathematical or philosophical concepts but couldn’t share them with others, then that knowledge was useless. I want students to learn how to share their ideas and see that writing is relevant to all aspects of their lives; it’s not just some exercise they have to perform to get a grade. My secondary goal as a writing teacher is to help students see the beauty and the poetry in language, to see it as an art form. This goal is more applicable to a literature-based composition class, in which students read and study poetry, short stories, and plays. I don’t want them to just squeeze “the meaning” (as if there’s only one) out of every poem, but also to enjoy the musical qualities of a poem, to hear it and feel it and sense its images. Then finally, in a creative writing class, I want students to play and experiment with language, to pull loops of words through other words and stitch them into an entirely new pattern, a new garment that has never been made before. This is not at the expense of meaning, of course, because writing that experiments too freely can sometimes fail to communicate anything besides the author’s remarkable skill in wordplay. Like an intricate pattern of lace, such writing may wind up being useful as nothing more than a doily to be put on a table or framed on the wall. But maybe that admiration of words is itself a kind of usefulness.