Hal Blythe

Creative Writing and an Overlooked Population

As a regional institution, our universitys historic mission is to train area teachers who must operate under the auspices of the Kentucky Educational Reform Act, which mandates extensive writing portfolios in Grades 4, 7 and 12. While these portfolios may include as much as 50% creative writing or work employing creative writing techniques, a recent survey of teachers responsible for guiding students revealed that not a single teacher had ever taken a course in creative writing pedagogy and only a handful had even had any formal training in creative writing. We suggested that this lack of teacher training was one reason the majority of K-12 student portfolios had plateaued at the lowest ‘Novice’ level, unable to move to ‘Apprentice,’ ‘Proficient’ or ‘Distinguished.’ To address the problem, we created and team-taught a graduate course in creative writing pedagogy. This highly popular course consisted of an exploration of the various theoretical approaches to the discipline, demonstrations of these approaches, and each students creation of a Planned Unit of Study that integrated theory and practice at a particular grade level. Our observations, exit evaluations, and follow-up discussions with teachers after they had actually returned to the classroom pointed to the courses success.

Lawrence's the Odor of Chrysanthemums

Critics have always been cognizant of D. H. Lawrence’s overwhelming foreshadowing of Walter Bates’s death in “The Odor of Chrysanthemums.” The author also, early in the story, foreshadows the key insight of Elizabeth Bates’s concluding epiphany. In the opening paragraph (so admired for its realistic detail by Ford Maddox Ford), Lawrence uses detail to set up his story’s ending. At the paragraph’s end, he describes what lies outside the mine’s entrance, the “pit bank” (1802), which is a mound of waste materials extracted from the mine and separated from the precious coal. Although the detail no doubt contributes to the verisimilitude of the locale, it also adumbrates Elizabeth’s discovery at story’s end. In the story’s final scene Elizabeth must confront her dead husband’s naked body and the naked truth about their relationship. She realizes that “[tlhere had been nothing between them” (1815) except carnal knowledge of each other. Their entire relationship had been based on sex, and as a result, her unborn child “was like ice in her womb” (1815). Later, she admits that John and Annie “had come, for some mysterious reason, out of both of them” (18 16). Just as Walter, a nameless and faceless laborer, was dead in the wombcave where he worked and is brought out of the mine as dark and as dead as the materials in the pit bank, the child in her womb feels cold, dead. The children, born and unborn, are basically unsought by-products of Walter and Elizabeth’s sexual encounters. In short, the entire family’s naturalistic existence has made them all into the pit bank, the waste materials. The true worth mined was the coal or the sex, an insight that the foreshadowing helps establish.