The Spring fire.

I've been sensing in myself a creative impulse, particularly toward writing. I haven't given much thought to writing in months, since my last (quickly) doused effort at the National Novel Writing Month endeavor. I even have a few vague notions and shadowy characters tiptoeing through my mind. I wanted to say "lurking," but these characters seem innocuous and kindly, perhaps slightly misled and slightly bitter at times, but people with good hearts and intentions. I'm not sure. And I'm not sure when I'll ever have a chance to write. Anyway, it may be too early for that. I may just be in the kindling phase, and if that's the case too much movement might smother the fire.

One solution that I've been toying with is to re-direct all of my classes to a creative writing path. As teenagers, they are necessarily apathetic and uninterested in whatever I choose to teach anyway, and, as the principle said when he dropped nine more students into my last class of the day, "At least the writing test is over." Of course, the implication is that once the state tests are concluded, it doesn't matter what I teach the students or if I even bother to teach them at all. I've, in essence, been given a blank check, so why bother with all of those pesky objectives? Why not re-structure the class to my own creative needs? The kids might even like it better. Certainly, they'd prefer creative writing to essay writing.

Each day when my students come into class, I have a prompt posted for them to respond to. During essay writing times, they are often quotes or serious thought-provokers. Now, I've begun to use prompts like, "Pretend you are a sandwich. What kind of sandwich are you? Why?" or "The black dog barks..." They look at me as if I'm crazy before opening their composition books to write. The invariable barrage of questions begin. "Does it matter why the black dog is barking?" "Does this have to be a true story?" "Does it have to be a sandwich on loaf bread or can I be a hoagie or a gyro?" At first, I attempted to answer these questions, which I perceive as their pitiable reliance upon adults to activate their creative thinking centers. Then I stopped. Someone has to break the co-dependency. I put my hand up and shake my head. The only advice I give now is: Don't write about the first thing that comes into your head because it's probably the first thing that came into everybody else's head. Think beyond your first thought and embrace your second or third thought. For example, yesterday's prompt, which came from an old writers' calendar, was: It's 3 am. You hear a bang and then glass shatter. I asked students to raise their hand if the first thing they thought about was someone breaking into their home. 98% of the class raised their hand. Point proven. It was my first thought, too, but I went with my third thought: a fish being busted out of an aquarium by animal rights activists. I was impressed with their second thoughts.

Camellias.

I've never noticed camellias before this spring. For some reason, I think I'd even convinced myself that I didn't care for them. But this year...I don't know why...they seem so remarkable and vivid. I've seen several varieties, some with pale, blushing blossoms that make me think of ballerinas or dreams of ballerinas that I had when I was a little girl. Others bloom like ivory froth in the nest of dark leaves. The leaves are what make the camellias so beautiful in this late stage of winter barreness. They are dark, glossy malachite, stiff and imposing, imperially refusing to loosen their hold on the branches, in spite of sleet or snow or wind or rain. Dark, black-green. Not even especially attractive, but when the buds swell, large and robust even in infancy, clenched tight like tiny fists, and then when they suddenly rupture and over-spill their tight floret corsets, they become miraculous. The red - the true red - camellias, a red that I cannot adequately describe, the red of red cellophane enveloping red foil heartboxes on Valentine's Day, the red of shocking behaviour, the red of red dresses and outbursts of passion, these red camellias, encamped in the malachite forests, glow. They glow. There is no other way to describe them, and I take a different path home to pass them, to slow and to stare and to wonder at them.