Writing program helps Shawnee students shine a light on their lives

One afternoon in August, when most of the students of the Academy @ Shawnee were still enjoying their summer vacation, eight soon-to-be seniors sat around a table in the library of their high school.

One of their instructors, musician and writer Joe Manning, gave them a writing exercise. The students dutifully scribbled in their notebooks for 10 minutes.

“The idea of writing exercises is to write as rapidly as possible, to eliminate your internal editor,” Manning told the students after they finished. “Sometimes, you come up with clichés. If you just pound it a little bit longer, you’ll get to things that aren’t clichés.”

These students were part of the Louisville Story Program, an initiative aimed at giving Louisvillians the skills to tell their own life stories.

The Louisville Story Program isn’t part of these students’ school day — they aren’t getting a grade. But they continue to meet after school during the fall semester, and their work will culminate in the publication of a professionally designed and printed book in the spring.

Darcy Thompson, the founder and one of the program’s instructors, expects that the book written by the Shawnee students will give Louisvillians an opportunity to hear voices that often go underrepresented in media.

“They’re producing books that will instantaneously be the richest and most authentic portraits of the neighborhoods in which they live,” Thompson said. “We don’t have books like this in our community, and we desperately need them.”

The power of narrative

A former teacher in the Mississippi delta, Thompson works in Louisville as a researcher for Teach for America. But he missed being in the classroom, and was looking for a project that would replace that sense of immediacy and community involvement.

The idea for the Louisville Story Program came to Thompson on a work retreat last November in New Orleans. There, he learned about an organization called the Neighborhood Story Project, which publishes nonfiction books and oral histories documenting that city’s neighborhoods.

“They’ve helped facilitate the publication of 40 new authors in New Orleans,” Thompson said in an interview in his Fourth Street office. “Neighborhoods that maybe had never known a published author now have neighbors who are.”

Thompson returned to Louisville determined to help out similar efforts here. He didn’t find any, so he decided to start his own.

“I believe in the power of narrative to change people’s perspective on things and to change their hearts,” Thompson said.

To help teach the class, Thompson brought on Manning and Brian Weinberg, a novelist and creative writing instructor at the University of Louisville with more than 10 years’ experience. Thompson approached Keith Look, who was then the principal of the Academy @ Shawnee, about working with high school students.

“It’s always important for me as a principal to create unique opportunities for students,” Look said. He and Thompson already knew each other, and he knew of Thompson’s teaching background.

Look also thought the program could help students work through difficult experiences. “A writing experience like this allows teenagers to externally process things that are internal,” he said. “Writing becomes that way of reflecting with safe space.”

Administrators from the school invited juniors to apply to the program, and selected students who seemed most likely to benefit.

Some of the students already knew they wanted to write, while others hadn’t given it much thought. Nala Winemiller liked writing stories, but hadn’t tried nonfiction. “I wanted to do something else besides fiction writing and get out of my element,” she said.

The Louisville Story Program also offered the authors payment — $500 — in the hope that they would take their responsibility to the project more seriously if they saw it as a job.

“I never do anything during the summer, plus it was a way to get paid and would help with college,” said Callie Comer, one of the students. “It was all around a good deal.”

Difficult subjects

Beginning this summer, the authors-to-be met twice weekly for intensive writing instruction — in-class exercises honed their craft, while round-table discussions helped them learn how to give and receive constructive criticism.

Guest speakers like journalist Anne Marshall and National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney gave more specialized lessons in telling true stories.

Toward the end of the summer, the students started conducting interviews of family members and neighbors. “I was nervous going in,” said Devante Urbina, who plays on the Shawnee football team. But he found his footing during the process. “Usually the best part of the interview is after the interview is done, when you have no tape recorder.”

Now Devante casually interviews customers across the counter at the McDonald’s where he works, according to Thompson.

Each of the students is tackling a subject of central importance to him or her — Callie plans to write about her mother, who died last autumn. Devante, who lives with a foster family, plans to write about his experiences and those of others in foster care.

“A lot of people don’t know what goes on in foster homes,” he said. “People tell you it’s bad, that they lock you up … but I’ve never experienced (that).”

In 2012, the Academy @ Shawnee ranked among the bottom 1 percent in the state, and its students are among the most impoverished in Jefferson County Public Schools. Many of the authors in the Louisville Story Program plan to write about difficult subjects like family members’ drug abuse, mental illness and gang membership.

“It’s not ‘What I did on my summer vacation,’” Weinberg said, acknowledging that getting the students to open up and to trust that their stories are worth telling had been a challenge.

“We’re asking them to do the thing that really courageous writers do, which is write things that are of consequence, where there’s something at stake, which often requires you to be open and vulnerable in ways that are scary,” Thompson said.

So far, the experience has helped several students improve their performance in their regular classes. “I didn’t speak out loud in class — I used to stutter, and I would get all sweaty,” Callie said. But the Louisville Story Program instructors “make us talk, they make us write, they make us bear our souls and speak it out loud.” And now, Callie said, she feels more comfortable raising her hand in school.

For Devante, who already wrote poetry, the program has sharpened his writing. “It makes you analyze things,” he said. “I’ve become more observant.”

According to Cecilia Omdal, an administrator at the Academy @ Shawnee, the book, once it’s completed, will reach readers far beyond the boundaries of the students’ neighborhoods.

“Any student, no matter where they live, will be able to find themselves somewhere in these stories,” Omdal said. “Every grown person is able to look back and find their younger self in these stories. That will make the program continue to live.”

Reporter Matt Frassica can be reached at (502) 582-4502 or on Twitter @mattfrassica.