"I'm a writer" by Susan Bistrican

It’s very apparent that Baca is a poet because he uses his aesthetic voice, even during an interview. He uses cheesy metaphors, like barking at the back door of language. But he also explains how literature changed his life, likening his experience reading Madame Bovary to altering his view of the standard of beauty. That was cool to me. For every sappy thing Baca says, he follows it with two more insightful and evocative ideas.

What stuck out the most to me was Baca’s view of himself as a writer and sharing his writing process. It’s very important for writers to talk about their methods of madness and equally important for students and other burgeoning writers to consider the advice. Baca mentions a few times of what it means to be a writer. He says that his goal in life was to be an English teacher (at the time of his prison sentence) and he wasn’t privy to the idea of sharing his work with others because he was trying to grasp language and didn’t consider himself a writer or a poet. I think it’s important for students to have a safe place to experiment with language—that place being the English classroom. Teachers shouldn’t tell students they aren’t writers; rather, teachers should use Baca’s idea that beginning writers are trying to harness language and aren’t expected to write on the same level as an “accomplished” writer or what have you. I guess my point is that students fear writing, as Baca also mentions, because they think they aren’t good enough to write. This is an idea I’ve come across many times while researching writing. Teachers shouldn’t lower expectations and say, “Well don’t worry, kid, you’re not a writer anyway so don’t try as hard.” I’m just saying there has to be a way to convey to students that it’s okay to be messy in their writing and as a beginning, fluency is preferred over correctness.

Baca talks about his “eclectic” and “eccentric” way of writing: “I’ll write ten minutes and get up, walk around, sit down, write five minutes, get up, walk around” (p. 155). I love that he mentions what I called his “method of madness” earlier. Again, it’s important for students to know how writers compose, down to how many breaks they take, what they like to do during those breaks, what they eat, what music they listen to (e.g., I hear Stephen King listens to AC/DC, as he notes in his book On Writing). Beginning writers need to know that writing is a process, and not the same Donald Graves process of prewriting, drafting, editing, etc. etc. The writing process is what goes in to composing a piece of written text, whether that is letting your cat sit on your lap, eating a sandwich (like Dr. Froelich said she does), or listening to heavy metal. Students need to know that writers are humans and writing is human.