Angelina Botticelli, Age 9, ZUMIX
ZUMIX Studio Kids
This past Fall I had the pleasure of serving for the third year in a row as Writer in Residence for Northeastern’s Honors Department. For the third year I taught the the seminar class I created for the department in 2008: Non Fiction Writing and Social Justice Issues.
Every year, some students who enter my writing class have not previously been in “seminar” classrooms. The circle set-up and casual tone of the class can throw students off, at first. But they get over it when the pizza arrives. In seminar we arrange chairs into a circle, and we talk (and sometimes eat pizza). We talk about writing, focusing on the elements of “voice,” tone, structure, the role of vulnerability in this type of writing, of being able to “go there,” and of humor. We talk about social issues and efforts to deal with them. And we visit community-based organizations working specifically on poverty, crime & violence, and youth development. We talk about how these issues have been represented in various genres of non-fiction writing: memoir, straight journalism with omniscient voice, personal journalism (using first person singular “I”), and opinion pieces. We do writing workshops in class, two-page take-home assignments, and allow students to read their work aloud when they’re ready.
Ultimately each student works toward a term paper of his/her design. Each year the semester begins with students being very protective of their positions on social issues, and of their writing . By the end of each semester, though, every student I’ve had has created an incredibly moving, generous, and empathic piece of writing. And most tell me they will carry their paper further into their lives, whether through writing or by being engaged in the social justice issues that surround all of us. The most important goal of the class is to bring an understanding that social justice issues are not “over there,” or only relevant to “them”; rather, they are all around us and impact all of us. Additionally, that everyone has a role to play. This understanding and consequent openness in the writing happens, I believe, as a result of the seminar process and the comfort level and trust attained in the classroom. But mostly it has to do with our exploration of what’s going on in the communities surrounding Northeastern University, and our own place in the bigger picture. I like to say that, ultimately, this class is about empathy: the key to social justice understanding and the key to good writing.
Most of the growth I’ve seen in classroom discussion and on the page has a great deal to do with our visits with people and organizations working for social change in Greater Boston’s neighborhoods. In the past we’ve visited ROCA, a youth organization that works with the hardest to reach court-involved young people in Chelsea. This Fall we went to Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, where we attended one if Boston’s premiere fundraisers (Men of Boston Cook for Women’s Health, where I was one of the “men if Boston”) and came back the following week for a tour and presentation by one of Boston’s most powerful community organizers, Bill Walczac, founder of CSHS. We also got to have an in-depth conversation with Meg Campbell, founder of Codman Academy High School (the only high school in the world located in a health center). Later in the semester we visited the youth outreach music program, ZUMIX in East Boston, where founder Madeleine Steczynski took us on a labyrinthian tour of recording studios where kids were writing, singing, and drumming their hearts desires (see video). We were also treated to a live stage performance by young people for their families.
Finally, as happens each semester, our most moving community connection, Janet Connors, whose son Joel was murdered, came to class. Janet speaks not only of her loss, but also about her powerful and hopeful work to bring peace by engaging in truth-telling efforts with victims and perpetrators, with the goal of making our communities more whole. It’s these exposures to the issues and to the amazing change agents working all around us, in every community in Boston, that invariably spurs at least one student (after each community visit) to tell me that his or her entire perspective has shifted: on poverty, race, class, and social justice. And each year, when I get through a semester’s worth of term papers that are well-written and deeply empathic, I too must confess that my life has changed.
Michael Patrick MacDonald, Writer in Residence, Author of All Souls and Easter Rising
