A User's Guide to the Internal Screen.

What right do you have to teach writing? After all these years I can still see this exact moment in my mind. Glenn, one of my favorite and tallest students, looks down toward me. In the past he readily accepted my credentials to teach him Spanish. He can't figure out what I'm doing in charge of his Advanced Creative Writing/Composition class. I sense he's not being rude with his question. He's bright and curious and wants to learn. Yet he's not convinced that I know anything about teaching writing. I worry. He may be right. I may not know much about writing. The next day in class I provide him and the others with several pieces of my own writing. He's satisfied with that short answer. But in the twentysome years that followed, I've wrestled with various forms of his question. What can I do as a teacher to help students improve their writing? A parallel question for me came from attempts to wrestle down my own writing process. How to write better-that became the inquiry. Over those years I've written and published poems, short stories, and articles. Two years ago I earned my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. During the school year I now work as a visiting poet in the schools through the Arizona Commission on the Arts. I've paid a lot of attention to my own process as a writer. I've carefully watched what I say to students that helps them improve their writing.