By Janet Hommel Mangas
Oh, sweet mothers of Montaigne, Philip Lopate and Annie Dillard — I just read 19 high school personal essays/memoirs that were remarkable.
For the second year, I served as a writing juror for the 2018 Central and Southern Indiana Region of the Scholastic Art and Writing.
Basically, I get to read the works of Indiana students and help identify talented young writers. An added bonus — although some of the judges braved the snow and drove to Butler University last Saturday — was that I elected to meet the deadline for my writing adjudication by reading the submissions at home in my Curious George pajamas, sipping Monkey Picked Oolong hot tea.
Make no mistake, these entries were not the elementary five-paragraph format — like painting every wall in a house with white, mundane paint. These were well-developed New York Times-like written pieces that told the personal stories of a student’s foreign adoption, or horrific car accident, or living through family abuse, or living with an alcoholic or fundraising for a high school and meeting an Alzheimer’s patient.
Dinty Moore, essayist and professor of nonfiction writing at Ohio University, describes how I was moved while reading their essays: “The best writing provokes an emotional reaction, be it laughter, sadness, joy or indignation.” “… Truly reaching your audience and offering them something of value — is perhaps as good a definition of successful writing as I’ve ever heard.”
Reading through 19 essays, I felt like these students personally handed me a piece of their lives to experience. When I started one, I couldn’t look away.
A few times while my husband and daughter were in the same room, I spouted: “Who are these students — and who taught them to write so well? I didn’t know how to write a segmented essay until five years ago!”
And how is it possible that they can write so well, when some of their lives have been in total upheaval since they were young — how can anyone learn in an environment like that?
Steve Fox, professor of English, directs the Central and Southern Indiana Region of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in addition to the Hoosier Writing Project. The Hoosier Writing Project, founded in 1993, is a vibrant, teacher-centered, professional community working to improve writing and learning in schools throughout Indiana. The project is a site of the National Writing Project, the nation’s premier professional development network for teachers of writing.
The Hoosier Writing Project, located in the English Department at IUPUI, features an annual Summer Institute, where teachers learn new classroom approaches to more effectively engage their students and improve students’ writing and reading skills. The institute also provides teachers time to write, research and enjoy the invaluable support of colleagues, believing:
- Teachers learn best from other teachers.
- Teachers of writing should be writers.
- Teachers can learn by examining their own practice.
One can only wonder if there is a direct correlation between the quality of writing I noticed and the fact that more than 300 teachers have gone through summer institutes (in addition to at least one rogue newspaper columnist).
The 2018 Scholastic Writing Awards and National Medalists won’t be announced until March, but I can soundly say congratulations to these young Indiana essayists and their teachers.
Janet Hommel Mangas grew up on the east side of Greenwood. The Center Grove area resident and her husband are the parents of three daughters. Send comments to [email protected].
