The Write Stuff
SU’s Writing Program fosters self-expression through community engagement, service learning

When David Meinhart ’12 became a college student, he didn't think he was headed for prison, but that’s where you’ll find him most Thursday nights. Meinhart tutors inmates at the Auburn Correctional Facility, Central New York’s maximum-security prison, and directs a program offering free literacy training to prisoners who are attempting to pass the General Education Development (GED) exam and otherwise improve their lives. “Research has shown that most prisoners are uneducated,” says Meinhart, son of a professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. “It’s easy to forget that these people are humans. There needs to be more emphasis on their rehabilitation and less on the punitive aspects of prison.”

Meinhart inherited the director’s position last year from founder Eli Braun, now a mental health advocate in Cincinnati. While the program has no formal name (Meinhart affectionately calls it the “Group That Does GED Tutoring at Auburn Correctional”), it does have a reputation. In the three years since it was launched, it has swelled from six volunteers to 20, and earned a handsome grant from the Clinton Global Initiative Foundation. Some 200 Auburn inmates have put their names on a waiting list. Beyond Meinhart’s moxie and the dedication of volunteers, the program’s impressive success is testimony to The College’s commitment to civic engagement, a basic part of the University’s Scholarship-in-Action approach to education. Perhaps nowhere on campus is that commitment felt more strongly than in The Writing Program.

Founded in 1986, SU’s Writing Program was launched at a time when the study of English was undergoing disciplinary transformation. Departments across the country were restructuring to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student body, and this opening up of the curriculum was especially welcomed at SU, where the new Writing Program afforded students opportunities for innovative self-expression, separate from the English Department. The attraction to both fields endures for students like Meinhart, a double major (writing and rhetoric; English and textual studies) who has interests in everything from civic engagement to poetry and journalism. “There’s this false perception that creative writing, or writing in general, doesn’t serve people,” he says. “But when other people see that you write, they get inspired and want to write, too.” Meinhart, who works part-time for Say Yes to Education and teaches a cooking class at a local elementary school, is sorting out his career aspirations, which include joining Teach for America and becoming a college professor.

Eileen Schell, right, with SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor at the 2008 Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement and Scholarship Dinner

Eileen Schell, associate professor, as well as chair and director of The Writing Program, believes Meinhart exemplifies a new breed of students with a penchant for social action. “Writing isn’t only about correct sentences and paragraphs, although those things are important. It’s also about instilling a sense of civic responsibility in young people,” adds Schell, who advises Meinhart on the Auburn project and has added it to The Writing Program’s internship list. “Students like David are part of a civic society that’s taking us places we can’t imagine. Twitter, Facebook, and all these new technologies that he and others are using are changing the way people communicate and create community. They’re doing it materially and virtually.”

Literacy, in its many forms, is central to SU’s Writing Program. In addition to functional literacy (which includes the abilities to read, write, speak, and listen), the program stresses civic literacy (informed participation in community, government, and politics) and academic literacy (familiarity with how knowledge is gathered, understood, absorbed, and used). “Writing is about being heard,” says Schell. “It’s blogging, sending a letter to a congressman, or signing a petition—using language to convey knowledge and information, as well as needs and wants.”

Candice Celestin ’10 has made civic literacy a focus of her education. An intern in the regional office of the New York State Attorney General, she helps disadvantaged people in activities ranging from resisting eviction notices to planning wills. Communicating the meaning of complex legal jargon is crucial to her work. Drawing on a variety of skills learned at SU, she translates legalese into lay language, burning the results on CDs or DVDs. “This is a prime example of why writing matters,” Schell says.

Prominent examples of academic literacy in The Writing Program can be found in “Practices of Academic Writing” (WRT 105) and “Critical Research and Writing” (WRT 205), courses emphasizing reading, writing, critical thinking, diversity, and community. Karen Oakes, who has taught both courses since 2002, notes that service learning emphasis in select sections enhances student learning in these courses.  “Service learning is a way of employing community service as a part of our pedagogy,” says Oakes, who doubles as The Writing Program’s service learning facilitator. “It provides students with real-world experience that allows them to see academia as not being separate from the world.” For hundreds of students taking WRT 105 and 205 each semester, service learning means interacting with a variety of groups, including first-year students, the Whitman Service Learning Community, and Syracuse residents. The emphasis is on applying skills of observation and analysis to people and situations and writing about, with, and for the community.

Sade Muhammad ’12, an entrepreneurship major in the Whitman School, recently fulfilled her WRT 105 service-learning requirement at the Martin Luther King Community School on Syracuse’s South Side. Twice a week, she volunteered at an after-school program, leading kids in games, activities, and homework. She found that most of the writing she did focused on the kids’ self-esteem. “There was a sorority who volunteered with us, and I noticed that many of the kids who were African-American were fascinated with the Caucasian girls’ hair,” she says. “They were so intrigued and wanted so much to braid it that the teachers had to say, ‘No touching.’ It was interesting to see students fascinated with people other than themselves.” Muhammad is no stranger to service learning, having done a fair share while attending a Quaker school in New Jersey. Still, she says WRT 105 got her “out of her element,” and that was very helpful. “It grounded me because I got to communicate with people I might not otherwise meet,” says Muhammad, who plans to transfer to the Newhouse School. “I think it’s important for all first-semester freshmen to get off campus and to see another side of Syracuse. For me, [WRT] 105 wasn’t only about building student-teacher relationships—it was about building friendships with kids.” Because of the experience, Muhammad hopes to take more writing courses, and maintain ties with her site school, something that about a quarter of service-learning students do. “I think it’s important that SU connects with the South Side. We need them as much as they need us.”

Thanks to a close partnership with SU’s Mary Ann Shaw Center for Public and Community Service, students can select from nearly one hundred schools, agencies, and community centers for service-learning experiences. These include The Levy School, where Oakes runs a peer-tutoring program for seventh- and eighth-graders, and the Groove restaurant on South Salina Street, where assistant professor Adam Banks engages local residents in reading, writing, and discussion groups. Service learning opportunities in The Writing Program are not limited to WRT 105 and 205. They are integral as well to upper-division courses, the writing minor, and the Ph.D. program in composition and cultural rhetoric. “Professional Writing” (WRT 307), for example, is a practicum offering students hands-on training in both print (brochures and manuals) and digital communications media (web sites and videos). Recent projects include creating community outreach materials for the American Red Cross, wellness brochures for Nottingham High School, and user-guides for intensive-care unit patients and their families at SUNY Upstate Medical University Hospital.

The “Peer Writing Consultant Practicum” (WRT 331) features private instruction and weekend workshops at various locations across the city, including Hillside Children’s Center, Nottingham High School, Danforth Middle School, and Blodgett K-8 School. Instructor and Writing Center Director Jason Luther says these experiences are mutually beneficial to students and attendees. “I think it’s important for kids, especially in the inner city, to do something that’s productive and is a positive outlet for them,” he says. Luther recalls a recent workshop at Blodgett, where musicians taught kids how to rap. “My wife [Writing Program Instructor Emily Luther] brought in a bunch of newspapers, from which kids wrote socially conscious lyrics,” he says. “Some drew from personal experience. One girl wrote about the death of her uncle; another, about basketball.”   

The Writing Program typically offers 10-12 service learning sections per academic year. Oakes estimates these programs have touched the lives of more 30,000 people during the last decade. “This is a relationship that is mutually beneficial,” she says. “We not only go out and serve in the community, but this work helps us understand what we can do for the community and how to fit in.” Jason Luther agrees. “You have to know the community before you rush in and start thinking you’re going to save anyone,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is to ask people what they need, provide it, and then build something that helps them and our writing majors.”

Jason Luther works with a student in the Writing Center, the public face of The Writing Program

Luther, who joined the staff in 2005, directs what many consider the public face of SU’s Writing Program: the Writing Center (WC). Located in a modern, glass-encased facility on the bottom floor of H.B. Crouse Hall, the WC provides free writing instruction for SU undergraduates. Luther oversees a team of 40 consultants (not to mention six iMacs) who aid students in the writing process. “Our mission is pedagogical,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s not so much to get them an ‘A’ on a paper, as it is to provide strategies and ideas for academic writing. It’s all about process, not product.” In addition to face-to-face appointments, the WC offers 24/7 assistance via e-mail and instant messaging, and sponsors weekend writing workshops. Business is good at the 20-year-old center, which touts friendly, reliable service. Luther says the turnaround time for online queries is 48 hours during the week, 60 on the weekend.  The Writing Program also oversees the Graduate Editing Center (GEC), which specializes in dissertations, master’s theses, scholarly articles, conference presentations, and grant proposals. “I think we’re improvisers, to an extent,” says Luther of his employees. “We don’t know who or what is coming through the door, so we have to be careful not to enable students, but to empower them.” Luther’s leadership is paying off. The WC is something of an anomaly in that it is not a “learning center” and has no affiliation with a central division. “We’re lucky to have the support of our faculty,” he comments. “I think the University sees that and values it.”

Studs Terkel once said that he wanted a language that spoke the truth. Like Terkel, Eileen Schell has spent much of her career searching for truth in oral histories and writings of everyday people. The concept of the historical narrative—sometimes called “history from below”— is a vital part of Schell’s pedagogy and a calling card of SU’s Writing Program. For more than a decade, Schell has led an intergenerational writing class at The Nottingham, a senior living community in nearby Jamesville, where people write memoirs and autobiographies. “For people who don’t necessarily feel the impulse to write, an oral history can be a great way to sketch a life,” Schell explains. “This is why Studs Terkel was so successful with his books. When people start talking, they discover things about themselves and say things that fit into patterns in society. This information helps people like me better understand where our culture has been and where it’s going.” Schell says oral history projects have increased in popularity in the past few decades, thanks in part to the availability of cheap, portable recording devices. As a result, many universities, cultural institutions, and even local and state governments have been scrambling to capture the stories of aging veterans of World War II, the Great Depression, and other events and movements of the 20th century.

Schell’s work took on an added dimension a year ago, with the passing of her uncle, a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She immediately felt called to do more work with vets, especially those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. “I’m not a psychologist or a counselor, but I am a writing teacher who wants to see that our veterans are heard,” says Schell. Toward that end, she hopes to establish partnerships with the Syracuse VA Medical Center and local VFW chapters over the next year. “At a time when a lot of our civic contacts are moving online and into virtual spaces, it’s important that we, as a society, are not ‘bowling alone,’” she says, referring to Robert Putnam’s 2001 best seller about the state of American community. Schell’s work engages people of all ages and backgrounds. She offers the story of a former World War II soldier she works with at The Nottingham who trained bomber pilots in the South Pacific to use radar for bombing missions over Japan. This same soldier developed a fear of flying later in life. Improbable? Calculate the odds on this: In the 1970s, he found himself on a plane hijacked by the PLO. “This sort of thing comes out in these settings,” she adds. “It’s about where we’re going, where we’ve been, and the nature of the human struggle.”

Stephen Parks, founding director of the critically acclaimed New City Community Press

Stephen Parks, an associate professor of The Writing Program and co-director of its new rhetoric and public advocacy minor, echoes Schell’s sentiments. More than a decade ago, he founded New City Community Press (NCCP) at Temple University with the goal of helping communities represent themselves by telling stories in their own words. Fifteen titles and 25,000 units later, the organization is self-sustaining, making profits that go back into its operating budget. “The idea of the community press is to develop writing communities that cross boundaries,” says Parks, who divides his writing and production duties between Syracuse and a primary residence in Philadelphia. “We create projects that bring different kinds of people together—students, teachers, city officials, blue-collar workers—and get them to tell their stories.” Each NCCP book originates in a small group of volunteers. None write professionally or on a daily basis; Parks calls them “basement writers.” He edits their narratives, helps select illustrations, and oversees layout and design. “Whether you’re a student blogging in the hallway between classes or a union worker taking photos of your construction site, your seemingly small moment becomes part of a big book that, in turn, is a reflection of a city.”

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Parks did his graduate and undergraduate work at the University of Pittsburgh, with the steel industry collapsing around him. “Everyone in my working-class peer group had to drop out of college.  At the same time, many steel workers and their families tried to hold on to their homes and to their way of life,” he recalls. “As a graduate student, I began to wonder what the university’s role was in supporting the local community’s economic and educational rights.” From that experience Parks founded the NCCP, which he runs with the help of SU students and Syracuse University Press. (SU Press puts up part of the $4,000 budget needed to produce each title and serves as distributor.)  “What we do is provide information that we think we have but don’t know we’re missing,” Parks adds. “For instance, we hear a lot right now about unemployment. We hear it from the ‘talking heads’—the business leaders and the politicians—but not from the people being laid off. Our organization tries to give people a voice, so they are heard and can help steer public debate.”  

New City publications overseen by Parks since coming to Syracuse include Soul Talk: Urban Youth Poetry (2007), which captures the experiences of local public school children, and Free: Great Escapes From Slavery on the Underground Railroad (2006), produced in a partnership with Third World Press. He also serves as editor of Reflections, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to scholarship on writing, service learning, and community literacy.  

Parks crossed boundaries of several kinds when he sent a cohort of SU students to the United Kingdom to collaborate with a group of working-class writers. Two years later, the collaboration continues online. “Both parties got the sense that they were part of a greater tradition than they realized,” says Parks, who is raising money for a new publication growing out of the project. “In a way, each cohort no longer sees itself isolated.”

Beyond encouraging academic writing, memoirs, and essays, The Writing Program offers opportunities for hybrid varieties of writing. Minnie Bruce Pratt, professor of writing and women’s studies, is an expert in feminist theory, as well as an award-winning poet. “I strive to discover what is hidden within and under the ‘knowledge’ that we have been taught in forms distorted by oppression and the politics of power-over,” she wrote upon her arrival at SU in 2005. “Central to my work and to my teaching is a tracing of the process by which we attempt to transform ourselves, the culture around us, and social institutions into more just, humane, egalitarian, and loving entities.” Her 2003 poetry collection, The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the prestigious Lambda Literary Award.

Gwendolyn Pough (a.k.a. Gwyneth Bolton) uses her success as an author to inspire writing students

Gwendolyn Pough, like Pratt, is a gifted writer and feminist theorist. When Pough is not researching black popular culture, she is writing romance novels under the pseudonym Gwyneth Bolton.  To date, she has written seven best sellers for Genesis Press and Harlequin’s Kimani Romance, popular African American imprints. “I always used to read romance novels,” Pough confides, adding that, as a kid, she used to sneak off with her mother’s Harlequin Romance books. “The romance market is kind of open—it’s the one place where you don’t need an agent—and so I started writing my own books.”

According to Pough, the formula is pretty standard: 70,000 words and a happy-ever-after ending, and she can pound one out in about two months’ time. With such delicious titles as The Law of Desire, Make It Hot!, and I’m Gonna’ Make You Love Me (a four-time Emma Award winner), it’s clear who her audience is. The real challenge, she says, is the storyline. “I like to see how an author spins a story,” she says, referring to such plot devices as “friends to lovers,” “rivals to lovers,” “arranged marriage,” and “secret child.” These formulas, although tried and true, are not enough to make a book. “My goal is to take a story and make it my own,” she says. Pough sells 30,000-40,000 units per title—respectable by Harlequin standards—and receives dozens of fan letters and fan postings on MySpace and Facebook. (“Oh, you had me crying,” confessed one faithful reader.) She is convinced that her achievements as an author translate into success in the classroom. “I tell my students that the best way to finish a novel is to start writing one,” says Pough, who just launched a book club for young black women through her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. “Even my graduate students, who are working on dissertations—I tell them to sit their butts down and to do it and to keep on doing it until they get it done.” Pough is currently preparing to chair the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communications, one of the largest annual academic meetings in the world.

Carolyn Hanlon ‘71, who teaches in The Writing Program and at Onondaga Community College, is a successful Harlequin author as well. Writing under the pen name Cara Summers, she will publish her 34th romance novel in December 2009. Hanlon writes three books a year, an output requiring between five and 10 pages a day. (“The most I’ve ever written in a single day is 22 pages,” she says, “but I couldn’t keep that up for more than one or two days.”) Like Pough, Hanlon subscribes to a proven formula. “I employ the same one that Shakespeare and Jane Austen used. I tell love stories,” writes Hanlon, whose novels reach readers under Harlequin’s Temptation, Duets, and Blaze imprints.  “The heroine and hero meet, are attracted to one another, and, as a result of falling in love and learning about one another and overcoming some obstacles, they change. I always have some sort of mystery going on in the stories, too.” Hanlon’s heroines are strong, smart women who start out with goals—none of which are to get a man. They find true love because of their strength and intelligence, and they remain determined to achieve their other goals. Hanlon didn’t discover romance writing until she was married, had three children, and was teaching high school English.

The decision to pursue genre fiction was born largely of practicality—publishers were acquiring new writers at the time. Hanlon thought it would be easy to master, but her judgment was a bit premature. Three books and five years passed before she landed her first publishing deal. Since then, Hanlon has written a series of trilogies that have brought her industry-wide recognition. Romantic Times magazine, for example, named Hanlon “Series Storyteller of the Year” in 2007. A rock star among romance novelists, Hanlon believes teaching and writing are mutually beneficial. “My own writing has enriched my teaching in countless ways,” explains Hanlon, who has taught WRT 105 for eight years in the Whitman Service Learning Community. “As a working and learning writer, it puts me in my students’ shoes. Working with editors on over 30 books has taught me the value of revision. The best way to learn how to write is to actually write and rewrite.” Hanlon’s “don’t-give-up” mantra, echoed repeatedly in her correspondence, is perhaps a suitable rallying cry for The Writing Program. Whether one is a convicted felon, war hero, or suburban mother of three, the ability to write effectively is as important as ever.

“More and more, we are writing each other, and using technology as a conduit for information and knowledge,” Schell says. “We don’t have the luxury of sitting back and saying ‘Do this’ or ‘Don’t do this.’ We’re in it.” For students at SU and throughout the community, now is the time for the “write stuff.”