Remembering to Write: What I Learned Teaching Creative Writing at Odyssey Youth Movement

From WITC Intern Kirsten Van Zee

This spring quarter, I had the privilege of teaching a Creative Writing class at Spokane’s Odyssey Youth Movement. Odyssey is a non-profit drop-in center focused on providing resources, support, and programs for local queer youth. This was my first time working with Writers in the Community and with Odyssey, and during my course I learned quite a bit about creative writing.

As a member of the MFA community at Eastern, I like to think I know a bit about writing fiction. I’ve been doing it for years, I have my Bachelor’s degree in it, and I spend several hours a week in class with other MFA students discussing writing. We have dedicated workshops where we sit and analyze each other’s works; we have craft classes where we spend hours dissecting novels and short stories. The MFA cohort is a pretty serious group when it comes to creative writing, and I’ve learned so much about writing in those classes.

So I felt pretty equipped to teach at Odyssey. I drafted up notes about story and conflict; I planned to lead discussions on perspective and characters. And when I arrived at Odyssey, I realized very quickly that I would have to shift a lot of my plans. The youth at Odyssey were excited to sit in on my class, but they weren’t there to think so explicitly about the craft choices they were making in their writing. They were excited to write!

I started to shift my plans to be more prompt-heavy, with smaller discussions. One week we did a prompt that was basically a reverse Mad-Libs, where I had everyone write down random words to fill prompts, and then write a story based on the words they got. They liked this one because it was interactive and had them think outside the box. At the end of the lessons, I would sneak some craft elements in—ask them what they learned about their characters through the perspective they used, or if their setting played into the story’s conflict. Sometimes I could the gears whirring in their eyes as they got what I meant, and sometimes they would just shrug. And both were okay, because regardless of whether they started to think about their work on a deeper, craft level, they all came away with having spent a good chunk of an hour writing a story.

I also came away from each session with a bit of a story, because I spent that time writing with them. I think that was my biggest takeaway—not the stories themselves, because they’re more like snippets of scenes, but the casual writing I got to do. We went analog style, pen and lined paper, something I haven’t done in forever.

Like I said, in the MFA we’re a pretty serious group. It was nice to go out this quarter and remember how to write just for fun, with no stakes. At the end of each class I reminded my students that they could keep what they worked on and continue it on their own, or they could toss it in the shredder. I wanted the focus of the class to be on that time spent writing for the sake of writing.

And that’s what I’ll be taking away from the class, too. In the midst of analyzing novels and critiquing short stories, I don’t want to forget why I write fiction in the first place. I’ll keep setting aside time for me, a prompt, and a piece of paper.

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