Unique Voices

Whose voice comes through me now?

So begins the poem "Graduation," written by acclaimed poet and Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Women's Studies Minnie Bruce Pratt. The question the poem poses is one her students know well. Pratt sets an ambitious agenda in her classroom—first helping her students identify issues that are crucial to them personally and then urging students to realize that their own experiences are essential to how they respond to those issues in their writing. The goal is to discover their own unique voices, then cultivate and amplify them.

Pratt is an accomplished writer herself and an internationally renowned poet and feminist scholar; she has published six books of poetry and received numerous awards for her work, including a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Crime Against Nature was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, an annual award given for the best second full-length book of poetry by a US author. Her poem "Cutting Hair" was recently published by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser as part of the American Life in Poetry project. Pratt also recently edited Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism, a collection of essays that examine the questions raised by ongoing American military initiatives, with Robin L. Riley and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Pratt's co-authored book with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives On Anti-Semitism and Racism, has been adopted for classroom use in hundreds of college courses and has become a feminist classic.

In the Writing Program, Pratt works with creative nonfiction, a genre that has recently become more visible and more integral to the program's work. Creative nonfiction can't be defined in a sentence or two—and that complexity is part of the point of the genre, which, according to Pratt, "rejects either/or, and demands both/and." In doing so, it "offers a unique space in which writers can use personal experience and a self-aware, historically-aware 'I' to focus on larger issues."

Lee Gutkind, an expert in the field and the founding editor of Creative Nonfiction, explains that this "I" is an important distinction of the genre: writers are encouraged to become part of what they are writing.  "The personal involvement," Gutkind says, "creates a special magic that alleviates the suffering and anxiety of the writing experience; it provides many outlets for satisfaction and self-discovery, flexibility and freedom." But that flexibility doesn't mean that writing creative nonfiction is easy. Writing Program Chair and Director Eileen Schell says that the genre can seem deceptvely simple: "Just write about yourself or what you have observed—right?  Wrong. Creative nonfiction is a rigorous genre that often involves research, fact-based writing, and interrogation and reflection on one’s views, beliefs, and perspectives.”

In "Stranger Than Fiction," a version of the creative nonfiction course that emphasizes texts and themes from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives, the issues that students take up revolve around gender and sexuality. The course, which will be offered again in Fall 2010, includes texts by LGBT writers as a way to help students learn the arguments, research, and vocabulary that they need in order to develop a more nuanced understanding. Although most students in the class don't identify as LGBT, the course allows them to express aspects of their own complexities with gender and sexuality that they didn't have words for in the past.

But Pratt explains that creative nonfiction isn't just about those who write it: paired with the necessity of developing a unique perspective is the need for students to engage in a larger discussion, to take those personal concerns to a public audience. Pratt's Advanced Creative Nonfiction class, which will be offered during Maymester this year, attracts undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and community members, and she notes that there is wide involvement across disciplines as diverse as business and religion, law and anthropology. Part of what she sees as her role is moving people out of a specialized academic approach in both genre and language, and instead creating something that is accessible, engaging, and popular. This includes allowing dialogue, storytelling, characterization, poetry, tall-tale-telling, and other variations and forms. "Anything can be a piece of creative nonfiction," says Pratt, and it is this flexibility that makes it both appealing to writers and challenging for them as they seek to find their own direction, rather than write to someone else's specifications.

Schell notes that the genre and Pratt's work within it have been important to the work of the Writing Program.  According to Schell, creative nonfiction "allows student writers to experiment with and explore different styles, topics, and voices.  Creative nonfiction allows for the important work of truth-telling, analysis, and representation of different perspective and realities. Increasingly, creative nonfiction is going digital and mixing blogging, social media, and video.”

Pratt's students explain that she has had a tremendous impact on their development as writers and thinkers. Professional Writing Instructor Immy Wallenfels, who took the advanced class, highlights the way that Pratt "models and shows her students not only how to use personal experience and research to forge effective narrative, but also by her courage demonstrates how writing can and should contribute to a more richly varied American experience." Rob Smith, a former student who is a freelance writer and veteran of the US Army, is currently working on a memoir about his experiences as a gay soldier in America and Iraq. He says that Pratt's creative nonfiction course helped him begin to unlock his potential as a writer: "I was able to write and share things that were deeply personal to me in a nurturing, supportive environment without worrying about being judged or looked down upon by her or by any of the other students in the class. I'm currently embarking on a larger scale creative nonfiction project, and when this project is completed, I'll know that the first real work on it was started in Minnie Bruce's class."

Smith notes that Pratt's class didn't just help him as a writer; it also inspired his view of the world and his place within it. That awareness and understanding is part of Pratt's vision for her students. "My primary concern," Pratt explains, "is to help students figure out what their work in the world will be: What are they going to do? Who are they going to be? I tell students to go toward what they need to do; it will carry them and bring them a life worth living."

—story by Emily Dressing