In March of this year, the NYSEC board hosted its inaugural spring virtual writing retreat: “Teaching Dreams: Nourishing the Teacher”. The event was created for NYSEC members, friends, guests, and folks from partner organizations like the Capital District Writing Project to hold space for generating and celebrating writing in multiple forms. Sessions included focuses on gratitude and letter writing, playing with parenthesis in poetry, writing and instructional strategies, writing about and within place, and exploding a poem. These sessions invigorated participants to share these practices in their classrooms and other professional environments, while also providing time, space, and communal support for cultivating their own written works.
After introductions, two Capital District Writing Project members, Christina Pepe and Chelsea Goodbred, led participants in a whole-group poetry writing activity. We read and observed Doug Gonzalez’s poem “Plan Wheel”, and selected words that resonated with us, which then served as the catalyst for us to lead ourselves in a stretch of free-writing. After the writing block ended, participants were encouraged to come back together as a group and to share a section of their writing. The result was powerful. Participants copied and pasted snippets of their writing that, as a result of the Zoom chat’s flow, unintentionally read like a spontaneous collective poem. Below are excerpts* from that creative moment:
You can return to anything…
Mistakes are not only inevitable, but necessary for a fulfilling life.
Imagine never making any.
Never feeling the twinge that leads to improvement.
Never feeling the satisfaction of reaching a goal after wading through the mire of doubts, fears, challenges.
What kind of life would that be?
Like compass points:
Can you doubt?
Birds chirp. Breeze cools. Dog snores. Floors creak.
Can you know?
Reassemble. Recalibrate. Rediscover. Remember.
Can you pray?
We are all reading in different ways.
We are all seeing from different perspectives.
We are all part of this circle. Together.
Can you hope?
You can.
You can.
You can.
You can.
Rediscover. Know.
Two words.
Each one complete on its own.
Put side by side they hold so much weight.
I am (Re)discovering myself.
Knowing myself in new ways that are really old ways that I forgot somewhere along the way.
They were buried under the weight of the pain of The Passage.
I came to this session to write, to learn, to know;
writing is a way of knowing, learning;
I believe that,
And believing and doubting,
I’m scared for the future.
Will I be able to do what I set out to do:
climb Mt. Everest
so to speak?
The power of community writing spaces cannot be overstated. It’s important for educators to remember that personal development can and does have a positive impact on our professional practice, too. When we nourish ourselves, we revitalize our strength to nourish others. The NYSEC board and its partner organizations encourage you to find– or even start!– a local writing group where you and other writers can support each other in your creative endeavors. The results are breathtaking.
The following workshop participants gave NYSEC permission to publish their contributions in this blog post as a collective poem:
Stanza 1 author:
Libbie Chadwick, English teacher, Ichabod Crane High School
Stanza 2 author:
Bonnie Winchester, English teacher, Early College Educator through
SUNY Adirondack, Hartford Central School District
Stanza 3 author:
Vivett Dukes, NYSEC Board Member, Educator, Doctoral Student at
Teachers College, Columbia University
Stanza 4 author:
Mike Avery, NYSEC member, Jefferson Community College, Watertown,
N.Y.
Holly Spinelli is an advocate for inclusive, antiracist, anti-oppressive education. She cultivates community-inspired work as an English teacher at Monroe-Woodbury High School in Central Valley, New York, and as an adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at SUNY Orange County Community College. She recently led a Primary Sources rationale writing cohort in partnership with NCTE and the Library of Congress (2024-2025). Holly looks forward to continuing to work for and with others in the pursuit of intellectual freedom. She enjoys writing, running, backpacking, and grooving to music that moves her soul.