Returning to the Promise of Writing
- Her Voice at the Table Team
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
At the start of each new year at Her Voice, we ask ourselves: What do we hope this space can be–for us, for our colleagues, and for our students?
The various answers always come back to a phrase that Kate offered in our first-ever post back in December 2020: “The Promise of Writing.” Writing, if we let it, holds many promises for us, more specifically as a source of discovery, joy, and healing. At the time, she wondered what a writing curriculum could look like if we more intentionally cultivated students’ relationships with writing: “There is an explicit connection between writing and wellness,” she wrote, and “focusing on the heart and the soul of the writing practice is building student wellness.”
Our students and their well-being have always been at the heart of this blog, and for the past five years, we have been writing, researching, and wondering about these connections between writing and wellness. It was no surprise, then, that when we re-assessed some of our big whys, our students were an essential part of each one:
Writing and publishing for a real audience reminds us of how scary and difficult it can be to write, allowing us to share with our students that we’re writing and putting ourselves out there, too.
Having a shared, collective space to record our thoughts about writing/ teaching has been a rewarding professional development practice, holding us accountable for our own growth as teachers and providing an academic outlet for our ongoing research on how best to support our students.
Sitting down to write is a perpetual reminder of thinking through what we want our students to do every time they write: What is my purpose? Who is my audience? And where do I even start?
These collective whys are what help us get unstuck when we struggle to write or make time for this blog because, truth be told, writing can be tough. Reminding ourselves of these larger promises are what help us to keep writing–and to keep encouraging our colleagues and students to write here as well.
Below we offer some of our more personal responses to what HVATT means to us, using the space to clarify our questions and our purpose for this school year. Last year, we considered the word encounter as a central, guiding term, thinking about how its sister words like attention, listening, and presence are essential in an increasingly disconnected, AI-generated world. This year is in many ways an extension of last year but with a clearer focus on process–seeing process as a joyful act of devotion, commitment, persistence. Process is the act of living. And that process, as messy as it is, is very much a human one that we love sharing with our students.
Kate
In her collection of essays titled Upstream, poet Mary Oliver ends her first chapter with a thought: Attention is the beginning of devotion. Devotion is a word I am intuitively drawn to—I even had it tattooed on my arm. Devotion to me means a regular practice, or returning repeatedly to a ritual, place, or person. Devotion is likely the opposite of a quick fix, rather the daily, unseen, unheralded, unpublicized work of love. In other words, devotion is consistently paying attention.
Devotion requires a focus on process and not product, and process work is the core of writing pedagogy. However, process work is in jeopardy. As a high school English teacher in 2025 I might as well assign a seat to ChatGPT in my classroom because of how much it (he? she?) impacts my lesson planning, classroom management, professional development, and overall spirit. ChatGPT (or other generative AI platforms) can do all the process work for my writing students, like a good study buddy or paid tutor, so I have a few questions as we start this school year: How can I pitch and sell process work as an essential part of intellectual formation in an English classroom? How do I translate decades of my experience constructing writing into an example of devotional love that looks like something appealing, and not just a time drain when my students could be practicing sports or on their phone instead?
I have no answers, but I do believe the only thing I have left to give at this point is myself. In other words, my attention. Therefore, to inspire my students to pay attention and engage in process work, I need to model what that looks like. As a creator—of lesson plans, curriculum, writing— If I am unable to pay attention and hear my own voice, how can I ask my students to do the same in our classroom and in their essays? My question this year is really the same as my question last year, and maybe every year since the invention of the smart phone: How can I model that gentle, slow devotional practices, such as daily rituals and quiet, are the roots of our authentic, human creativity and voice? And, how is creativity resistance?
Megan
In the final pages of Percival Everett’s recent novel James, the narrator James insists that he is “a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.” In other words, no one else can write his story but him. (Take that, ChatBot.) In this moment, James is in direct literary conversation with Mark Twain’s Jim, the enslaved friend of Huck from Huckleberry Finn. In that book, Huck told Jim’s story—or least as much of Jim’s story as he could, because as good-hearted as Huck might be, telling someone else’s story will always be woefully incomplete.
I first reflected on this quote while journaling with my American Literature juniors a few weeks ago. We had read James as one of our summer readings and were about to embark on our first close reading exercise: selecting a quote we loved and then looking at all the cool craft moves Everett makes. The first part of the process is to ensure we know what all the words mean, which requires actively flipping through the dictionaries on our desks: postcard-sized Oxford English Dictionaries that students almost unilaterally love (“Ack! These are so cute! Can I keep mine?!”). I sat there happily journaling, watching them giddily record new words as I myself considered “self-related” and “self-written,” writing as a way to model my expectations for them. By the end of the year, these junior writers will self-write their stories (or at least part of their story—the college essay), and it is a long, deliberate, process-driven road to get them to a place where they have the confidence, a sense of voice, and the necessary craft tools to do so.
Process is the key word there, and as we have written about many times here at Her Voice–and as Kate so eloquently notes above–process is messy, time-consuming, and almost never provides instant gratification (for either the students or the teachers). But process is–and always has been, even prior to the advent of generative AI–an essential part of any writing classroom. It is where thinking happens, where feedback becomes real, and where students can come to an understanding of their voice (both how and why they write). Celebrating process and taking joy in it (even if that joy comes from the world’s cutest little Oxford dictionary) must be at the pedagogical center of any classroom.
So, my hope this year is that I can continue to find and model ways for students to not just value but also take joy and maybe even a sense of pride in their writing process. To maybe come closer to believing me when I say that “writing is thinking.” To perhaps internalize that when we turn over our writing to generative AI, we are turning over our stories, ourselves–that we are complicit in being “self-related” and not “self-written.”
Caitlin
The start of this school year feels like one of transitions and instability. Maybe this is what the start of every year feels like? And in particular, I think this is bubbling up for a few reasons. At our school, we have new leadership and with that comes the articulation of a new vision and direction for the school. What changes are in the works? How will our campus look and feel different by the end of the year? In addition, I’ve been serving in an interim part-time admin-y role that at some point will shift into a more permanent structure, so what might that look like and how will I be involved? And more broadly–AI is still very much on everyone’s minds: how can students use this tool ethically and productively? How do we talk about this in our classrooms? And what do we as educators need to do to ensure our students still build skills and don’t use AI as a shortcut for learning?
These questions, combined with, you know, the general state of the world, means I’m not sure where to focus my attention and energies when so much around me is shifting. You know the meme of the dog sort of smiling while everything around him is on fire, right? I relate to this image on many days of the week. And in light of–and perhaps because of this–one question I keep coming back to is what does it mean to be a human right now, and how can I model this in a way that is helpful for my students? The school I work at is rooted in Catholic traditions, and one of our foundresses’s charisms has been on repeat in my head: to “let your example be a model and a mirror.” So–how can I be a better human both inside and outside of school? What can I do to ensure that I am a calm presence amidst the constant chaos and change of life, for my students, my family, and myself? Perhaps that will be my dedication, or in the words of Kate, devotion, for the 2025-26 school year. And it seems like a solid focus for life, too.
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