"What's the Use of Stories That Aren't True?"
A Composition Teacher Reads Creative Writing

Kate Ronald
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Writing a poem was one of my goals for the semester. I may not be a poet, but I won't be afraid to try this again.
--Margaret, final portfolio, 10 December

I fear [Haroun] is too much like the folks of this foolish valley--crazy for make believe.
--Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990

Salman Rushdie's first publication since The Satanic Verses and the resulting death threat imposed on him by the Ayatollah in Iran is Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a fantasy novel centered around the question, "What's the use of stories that aren't true?" In this novel, a young boy journeys from his own land where "sadness was actually manufactured" in mighty factories, across the Ocean of the Streams of Stories in order to restore the gift of story-telling to his father. In the process, he saves the Streams of Stories, threatened with pollution by the Chupwallas (quiet ones); in fact, he saves the Chupwallas and his own people of Gup (the gossips), too. As in all good fairy tales, Haroun saves the whole day, the whole world. How? Through stories. Rushdie's latest novel becomes an answer to its initial question: The use of stories that aren't true is that they make things happen in the world and they keep people together in communities. In Austin's sense, stories that aren't true are "performative," changing both tellers and hearers as they are created, revised, retold, remembered. Rushdie's novel is, of course, an allegorical answer to the madmen who are so threatened by his earlier "stories"; it is also a defense and a celebration of the sanity of being "crazy for make believe."

In this essay, I'd like to ask Rushdie's question in a different context. What's the use of stories that aren't true in a composition classroom, a class traditionally devoted to expository writing, to essays that argue, describe, explain, and sometimes, but not primarily, narrate? In composition classes, students traditionally read and write what's "true," using facts, observation, details from "real life" or from texts to advance and support their meaning and their purposes. I would argue, however, that in composition classes, we've always encouraged students, if not to "lie," then certainly to stretch the "truth" in their expository writing; composition teachers, like all English teachers and the folks in the Valley, are also "crazy for make believe." But first, I want to talk about why, over the last several years, I've not worried so much about generic distinctions between expository writing and stories in the first place.

Perhaps I should begin also by saying that I am a composition specialist, trained in a composition (not a literature) Ph.D. program, working in a large and highly specialized English department. I do not primarily teach literature courses or literary texts, although reading good writing, including literature, is a part of every course I teach. Perhaps I should also admit that, except for the occasional verse in honor of my mother and children, I am not a creative writer. But I do write a lot, every day, every week. I would like to think that much of my work is "creative," that at least some of it provides the kind of pleasure I associate with reading stories, novels, and poems. and I came into this profession largely because I was also crazy for stories.

I don't want to get defensive here; although, as Joseph Moxley says, the "walls" between composition and "creative" writing are "not easily scaled," it's also commonplace for discussions like this one to being with axiomatic statements about how "all writing is creative," and how distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, for example, are arbitrary. That's more true in some places than in others; in the middle and secondary level writing classes described by Lucy Calkins, Nancie Atwell, and Linda Rief, students are encouraged to write without regard to genre. The writing itself is the point. But higher up in the educational systems, the more specialized and categorized our thinking about writing becomes, and genres of reading, as well as genres of writing, are divided into separate areas of study, where, as Moxley says, the walls between creative, critical, and composition writing are high.

This essay is about facing the walls between creative writing and composition, and rather than scaling them, taking the long way around, with a different destination in mind. I want to describe here how I came to learn that the generic distinctions among essay, poem, and story are indeed real, and useful, but also how I learned to blur, even ignore, those distinctions in order to help my students write more confidently and creatively, in whatever genre. This essay is primarily about learning to respond to students' writing, to think and to read across boundaries, to adapt to my students' own reasons for writing rather than my own.

My goals as a writing teacher have shifted, to put it simply, from a focus on texts that my students write toward the students-as-writers. That does not mean that I ignore quality of student writing: but it does mean that I am least interested in the genre of that writing. It means more to me, for example, that Margaret in the excerpt above, will write another poem than if she had written ten well-organized essays that she would never return to again.

The Writing Workshop: Students Choose Their Own Stories

I picked this story because it's the first thing that I started for me, not because I had to write it for a class.
--John, final portfolio, 10 December 1994

"Where do stories come from?" [Haroun asked his father]. "From the great Story Sea," he'd reply. "I drink the warm Story Waters and then I feel full of steam . . . . It comes out of an invisible Tap installed by one of the Water Genies. You have to be a subscriber."
--Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990

The above excerpt from a final portfolio of writing from one of my last semester's classes reflects one of the most important principles of my teaching, that of choice. John "picked" the story he's referring to as part of his final portfolio section entitled "Best Edited Writing." This principle of choice, and its attendant responsibility for one's own writing, has become a central feature of all my writing classes. Several years ago, I changed my composition classes to composition workshops. I believe, with Berthoff, that naming is a powerful act of mind, and the title "Workshop" marks a tremendous change in focus for my students, their work, and mine.

Teachers like Lucky Calkins, Nancie Atwell, and Linda Rief have taught me the basic principles of writing workshops: (1) writers need time to write; (2) writers need to choose and be responsible for their own topics, forms, purposes for writing; (3) writers need responses to their writing in process; and (4) writers need opportunities to publish their writing for real readers. I won't dwell on each of these principles; the second one, about choice and responsibility, seems key to me, and it's resulted in this far-reaching change in my writing classes: I no longer assign topics, forms or reasons for writing to my students. I do all that I can to help them figure out what they want and need to write about, through many, many invention activities, and, through responses to drafts from me and other writers, students also have opportunities to discover and experiment with the forms of their ideas. Berthoff tells me that learning, first of all, is a "disposition to form structures," and that teaching composition

by arbitrarily setting topics and then concentrating on the mechanics of expression does not guarantee that students will learn to write competently, and it certainly does not encourage the discovery of language either as an instrument of knowing or as our chief means of shaping and communicating ideas and experience. (19)

In my workshop, then, students start the process of discovery and knowing by choosing their own topics and forms for writing.

and given a choice, many of my students choose to write fiction or poetry, two genres I regularly banned from my composition classes for years, telling students that our department has courses and professors devoted exclusively to fiction and poetry and that's where they belonged if they wanted to write in those genres. Mine was a composition course in expository writing. However, as one decision leads to another, and as walls once cracked do come tumbling down, I began to realize how very silly, arbitrary, and controlling my prohibition against creative writing was. If I change my focus from the writing to the writer, from text to author, I find that genre does not matter as much as I once thought it did. If my goal in a composition course is to help students find reasons to write, to see the place of writing in their lives, both personally and professionally, then I find that genre becomes much less important. Instead of my having an Ideal Text in mind as students write, and measuring their papers against that standard, I now respond more like a reader, giving myself over to the writer's Ideal Text, letting the writer tell me what her goals are for a given draft at a given time in the course.

Changes lead to more changes, as any writer or teacher knows. When my students stopped writing according to my agendas, I realized that I could not read or respond to their texts in my old ways either [1]. Since I had not assigned the topic, the form or the reason for writing, I did not have an easy, pre-set way into my students' drafts, a basis from which to respond, to tell them what I thought. I was reading in a vacuum and making vacuous comments. So, now I insist that every draft be accompanied by an "author's note," where students describe the genesis of the draft, their reasons for writing it, the effects they are aiming for, what they like the best about the draft so far, what they like the least, and what specific questions they would like a reader to answer or what specific parts they would like a reader to respond to, and why, and how. These authors' notes serve both writers and readers. For writers, they serve as a time and space from which to critically read, and re-read, and plan; often I find that students figure out what's wrong, how to fix it, and where to go next in their author's note, making my job as responder one of simply reinforcing what they already know. For readers, authors' notes provide an entry to a draft, a way to begin to read, and a blueprint for response. Instead of responding to a student text as an exercise in meeting my standards, my notions of why they should be writing and what "college writing" should be, I must now respond to particular texts in terms of the particular questions the author has asked, in terms of the students' agendas. All of them are "subscribers" to the Streams of Stories; and my responsibility for reading locally mirrors my students' responsibility to tell me, in their authors' notes, what their stories mean to them, and what they want them to mean to a reader.

and yet, it's not always easy to respond to the variety of texts my students write each week. Sometimes I'm at a loss, and I admit I find myself mute more often in front of poetry and fiction than essay, probably because I've been trained to read exposition critically and because I read fiction and poetry for pleasure. Sometimes I don't know what to say about a story that doesn't move me or a poem that I think is really pretty bad. Then, I have to remember that the form is less important than the forming. The next section of this essay will describe how I read and responded to three students in my 400 level composition Theory and Practice course last semester, a course in writing and writing theory for Education majors in the semester before they begin their student teaching. My overall goal in this course is to create the kind of writing workshop I would like these future teachers to run in their own classrooms; therefore, our focus is on their own writing, and I'm less interested in what they write than in that they write, less interested in the form than that they recognize the forming power of their own ideas and language, less concerned that John, for example, write for an "academic," invisible audience than that he understand, find and create his own readership.

Managing Responses: Does It Feel Like Star Trek?

There is a little more pressure on myself, because this is getting into what I really want to write. So, I'm more worried about getting it right. Will it draw the reader in? Is the action effective, or does it drag? Does it feel like Star Trek?
--John, author's note on draft, 18 November 1995

Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.
--Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990

In his first journal to me, John told me that he wanted to be an author. A secondary education major, John loves to read but also wants to write and write a lot:

I want to write, and feel compelled to do so. My goal is to become an author. However, so far, I haven't done much writing. I've read a few how-to books, and last semester I took a fiction writing class. My problem is motivational. I like to read and often do so when I could be writing. Staying current with what is being published is beneficial for an author wannabe. (At least that sounds good; basically, I just like to read.) Then, again, I think part of the problem is time. It's hard to find the energy to be creative when one is: a husband, a student, working a part-time job, in the National Guard. I am planning to use the required writing assignments for this class as a good excuse to get some writing done. (John, Journal, 28 August 1994)

When John realized that the only "required writing assignments" were drafts due every other week, he immediately chose to write a Star Trek short story. ("I hope you are tolerant of science fiction," he told me in his next journal.) One of his goals is to write a Star Trek novel, and he wrote his story "To get used to writing in the Star Trek universe, as this is where my first novel will be set" (Journal, 28 September 1994). The first draft of this story began:

The U.S.S. Republic has arrived on station at the Klingon Neutral Zone. The Republic will spend the next month patrolling this area. All ship systems are functioning normally.

Captain Willard R. Decker pressed the button that ended his log entry, and leaned back in the command chair. Things had been quiet along the Klingon Neutral Zone lately. However, Decker knew that was no reason to let his guard down. Command was a test, and the price of failure was all too often high.

Naturally, trouble soon surfaces in this quiet setting, and the story revolves around Captain Decker's command decisions as the Republic responds to a distress call inside the Neutral Zone, an attack by the Klingons, and Decker's decision to destroy his ship rather than be captured. At the end of the story, we find that this has been only a test, a simulation as part of Mr. Decker's training as a Star Fleet officer. Decker's "lesson" is that there's no fail-safe solution for real life.

In his author's note on the first draft, John told his readers that he "realizes this draft is very rough":

I know it needs a lot of work. In general, the story needs to be tightened up. I had originally planned to have Decker deal with his father's death, and the loss of his crew. After I finished this draft, I realized that these things don't happen to his father until six years after he graduates from the academy. So I am planning to change the emotional component of the story to Decker wanting to do well, so that his father will love him. But I haven't had time to add this element. I would appreciate any feedback about things that you thought work, and things you thought didn't. I plan to work on this part until I come to that mystical place where I decide that it's done. After that, I start work on my first book. (2 October 1994)

What struck me as I read this initial draft and author's note was the confidence John has both in his own story and in his ability to write. He was sure of his character and the world in which this story is set. My initial response was encouraging. I told him that he had managed to capture the tone, setting, language, and action of Star Trek faithfully. (Now, I watch Star Trek, and so I know this genre; another teacher would have had to ask more questions, I suspect.) I did tell him, though, that "given your new focus, should you back up in a few places early to let us see more of Decker, his life before this moment, especially his relationship with his father?" I also, on this first draft, cut a few words, an impulse I can rarely resist:

Even though Decker knew that a constitution class starship was more powerful than a Klingon D-7 attack cruiser, three to one odds weren't good. Still, it was their duty to try and rescue the damaged ship. "Mr. Keller, target the lead ship. If they fire on us, I want you to make sure they regret it." Decker knew that their only hope of rescuing the Maru lay in ending this quickly, before any more ships showed up.

"Aye, sir."

Almost as if triggered by the captain's words, the Klingon ships fired on the Republic.

I wrote in the margin next to this paragraph: "I'm cutting the sentences that tell us what the details show us much more clearly." But mostly I responded as a reader, enjoying the action and John's ability to put me on the bridge of this Starfleet vessel, in the middle of the action. I also asked for more background and details that would make John's stated theme clearer to me.

His next draft, now with the title "Final Exam," did not focus on Decker's relationship with his father, but more tightly on Decker's desire to succeed. In his author's note to this version, John asked about more technical aspects of storytelling: "Is the pacing effective? Is the ending satisfying--or to put it another way, are Decker's motives/actions believable?" (12 October 1995). I thought they were, given the limits of a short story and the universe of Star Trek where everything is solved in less than an hour. There was one final line at the very end of the story that bothered me, that I didn't quite understand: After the "final exam," Decker's Flight Captain asks, "Do you want to retake the test?" and John writes, "For the first time Decker looked Pike in the eyes and said, 'That won't be necessary, sir.' They headed off towards the briefing room." I knew what John was trying to convey here, that Decker has learned to accept his fallibility, but I just wasn't sure that these two lines were enough to show this change or why Pike would offer the option in the first place.

John never changed those lines, even though I wrote my questions about them next to every draft. That may seem stubborn, but it shows me quite a lot about John's reasons for writing, which extend beyond the class and my opinion, and his belief in his own sense of audience and purpose. I have to admit that I worried about the purposes of a Star Trek story in this class; at times I had trouble believe that working on this short story had much connection to the kind of writing that the academy values or to John's own classrooms down the road. However, John showed me the connection when he sent this draft off to several friends, "also trekkies," for the kind of specific feedback he needed. Here was a student, working as a writer, finding real readers and real purposes for writing; I realize that his Star Trek fiction, his insight into writing, and the teaching of writing, were indeed connected in ways that I would not have seen if I had remained focused on and fretful over genre.

Margaret showed me these connections perhaps more clearly than any other student last semester. She had been writing a variety of drafts, from an essay about teaching her nephew to write his name, a description of her grandfather sleeping which was really an argument about respect for old people and the pain of loss, and "The Valedictory Speech I Never Delivered," a scathing attack on the small-mindedness in her high school. But, on the last day of class, Margaret brought her favorite finished piece to class to show me and her small group. We ended up passing it around for everyone to see. It was a poem titled "Daddy's Girl," and she was giving it to her father as a Christmas present. In her cover letter to her final portfolio, Margaret described this poem:

I have chosen to include in my "best pages" section my poem titled "Daddy's Girl." I have worked extremely hard on this poem to create my final product. My effort is evident when looking at the many drafts I have composed. Some of these drafts saw many significant changes, like line breaks. On other drafts, I changed only a few words. I do not consider myself an expert on poetry, but I do like this poem. (10 December 1994)

"Daddy's Girl" had begun as an essay, or at least as a prose poem. When I first saw this piece, it was a series of separate sentences, images of Margaret's father working on the car. It began: "Dad curved his hand around the plate of chrome and snapped the spring that released the hood." and on a separate line: "He looked over the mass of hoses and coils, which were covered with a layer of dust." The last "paragraph" read: "Finally he reached the hood again. He looked at me and said, `Be good to my girl.' With that I pushed the silver door handle and left for school." Margaret's author's note on this first draft said:

This is a piece (I'm not sure it's a poem although I think I want it to be) I wrote for my Dad. I got the idea for it when I went home and watched my Dad check over my old school car. It was Dad's first car and mine, too, and he treats it like it's a Rolls Royce. This is the piece I would like to put in the class book. I have good, strong feelings about this one. I think the reader can get a vivid picture of the car. Can you "see" the meaning here? (18 October 1994)

Of course, I was thrilled by the "double meaning," the poignancy of "daddy's girl" as the car this man so lovingly touches and cares for as his daughter leaves for school. My first response on this draft was to tell Margaret that she had a "great start," and that "I can see why this has such power for you." My advice at this point was to "play around with the line breaks, making the lines shorter and seeing what happens."

Over the next weeks, Margaret indeed played around with this poem, making both subtle and substantive changes by rearranging the lines and putting them together in different ways. Her "sentences" became stanzas:

Finally,
he reaches the hood again.
He looks at me and says,
"Be good to my girl."

I nod
and turn the key.
School starts
in ten minutes. (11 November 1994)

By the time she brought the finished poem to class, Margaret described her work this way:

I think I have captured a few moments with my father before school well. The line breaks seem to make these moments even more realistic for the reader. As you and Lara [her group member] suggested, I experimented with them to see what I liked and what I didn't. While I was experimenting, I discovered how the poem changed and formed with each break. I think this was probably the most challenging piece I created this semester. As I stated, earlier, I know little about poetry writing. However, I feel writing my own poem allowed me to learn about the art of writing poetry. I also learned that, in writing poetry, all of the words must be carefully selected. While it is also true in composing other drafts, poetry seems to have a more delicate nature where each word is necessary and important.

Again, I'm pleased with Margaret's insights into the power of form here, and especially the connections she makes between form in poetry and prose. Because she chose this topic, and because she chose to write about her father in a poem, a poem to her father, she learned much more about working as a writer, with a real audience and a real purpose, and her choices mattered to her.

My doubts about the propriety and the place of short stories and poetry in a composition class are partly resolved by what students like John and Margaret tell me about their learning. But I don't have only success stories to report, as my readers must suspect by now. I never knew quite what to say about rhymed, bouncy poems that "worked" but that seemed finished the minute they were written. I felt at a loss to help one writer of short stories who seemed so caught up in the world she was creating that she couldn't explain it to me or to any reader. And a few times during this course, I steered writers away from short stories they were trying to write about people and issues very close to them; the distance, I felt, was masking their reasons for writing in the first place. Some of these students took my advice; some didn't. and the overall point is that perhaps my agenda as a reader isn't that important in the first place. "Shaking stories up" was the real work of this class, looking at them in different forms, for different purposes and audiences. Ted Lardner agues that "the languages of poetry and letters offer students avenues to make real sense of their experience" (101). I agree, but I would add that it's the choice of form that offers the sense-making, more than the form itself.

What's the Use of Stories That Aren't True?

I've wanted to do something on my Grampa because he's really special to me, but also because he makes a great story.
--Angie, author's note on draft, 20 October 1994

What's the use of stories that aren't true?
--Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990

In this class of future teachers, two students, who were practicing fiction writers, wrote only stories all semester; three students never ventured beyond the essay. But all the rest of the students in this class, and each of the writers whose work I've discussed so far, wrote a range of pieces, in a great variety of forms, over the course of the semester. I believe that part of the reason was the variety of work they were hearing from the other writers in the class, all a result of my requiring students to choose their own topics, form, and purposes for their own writing. Angie was a poet, a real poet, who had published her work and who wrote every day. Her poetry was a true pleasure to read, but I felt quite superfluous at times as her reader; I behaved more as a fan than a critic. and although I did not encourage her to write anything besides the poetry I was enjoying so much, right after midterm she handed in a draft called "Grampa's Water," a descriptive essay, familiar to me as a composition teacher but a new step for Angie. In her author's note, she explained:

I've had the idea for this piece for a few years now, although I wasn't quite sure how I'd string it together until recently. I want this to be a sincere but humorous piece about my Grampa and the way a fishing trip we had gave me lot to think about. Most of the story is true, though the situation is presented in a somewhat altered context. Some characters and time periods have been left out, for example, in order to keep it short and tight. What I'd like to know from you is simply, what do you think? Does it pull you in? The part I like best is the first section where I've been able to tighten it up a bit. I think the details are coming along pretty well here. The part I like the least is the second section. I like what I want to do, but not what I've done. The way this part is now I'm telling not showing. What suggestions do you have? Any ideas here would be great. I'm never quite sure how well I do with prose. (26 October 1994)

Angie had worked the first part of this essay like a poet, going over it word for word, tightening and condensing and making her grandfather live on the page. As usual, I simply raved. But in the second section, there was actually work for me to do as a reader: I said things like "You're moving too fast here," "This sentence is hard to get through," or crossing out phrases and saying "This seems more stilted and wordy than you usually are." Through six drafts of "Grampa's Water," Angie and I wrote back and forth, examining the impact of specific words, moving scenes around, asking and answering questions of each other and the text, until she was satisfied enough to "publish" this essay in the class book. For example, next to "Fishing hadn't shown a better evening, though nothing had tugged our lines but the sun's reflection swimming on the water," I wrote, "`Shown' isn't the right word? Not very strong?" Angie's next version read, "We fished intently, though nothing tugged on our lines but the sun's reflection swimming on the water." We examined all her images of water, trying to connect and intensify their effect, from the lake itself, to the water jug the old man always carried, including images of rain, reflection, ripples, and the relentlessness of age. Her author's note on the last draft I read says:

This is a polished version of "Grampa's Water." I'm glad that I've finally completed a piece that's been in my head for so long. While you're reading, I'd like for you to notice if the prose is engaging. Are there any parts left that lose you? contradict one another? weak spots? Did you like it enough to read it again? Does this give you what it promises at the beginning? Most important, does my intended theme come through strongly? It's hard for me to evaluate my prose because sometimes it seems to me like poetry, and good poetry and prose are not the same things. (22 November 1994)

Writing a piece of prose non-fiction, then, was a major step for Angie. and this reversal, the idea of writing an essay as a stretch in a composition class, underscores my point about genre being perhaps the least important thing for teachers to consider in setting up writing courses. Yet, she talks about this essay in language we usually reserve for fiction: the question "Did you like it enough to read it again?" reveals Angie's belief in the literary, aesthetic nature of this expository essay, and, I would argue, argues strongly for the effect of choice on a writer's confidence and belief in her own work. The question itself is an amazing act in a composition class in school. In the cover letter to her final portfolio, Angie described why writing an essay was, indeed, a creative act for her:

At the beginning of the semester, I mentioned my intent to write different kinds of pieces on different kinds of topics. At first, I have to admit that I thought this was a very high goal to set, especially because I'm really pretty focused on writing poetry. Being around so many different kinds of people and their writing, though, helped me stay out of ruts and try new things. (10 December 1994)

The variety of writing that results from students choosing their own forms and topics, and the public reading and responding that are part of a writing workshop, then, often lead students to try forms that are new to them. The community of writers in a workshop challenges and sustains this kind of risk-taking.

In the end, I'm not sure that the generic difference between creative and expository writing have ever mattered that much in terms of the way English teachers respond to student writing. Given our own love of reading literature, I suspect that we've always asked students to write the kinds of prose that give us pleasure in the first place. Our advice about "adding detail" and making ideas "more specific" seems tied more to our literary preferences than to any outside "standards" for expository writing [2]. Angie's "story" about her grandfather, for example, was "true," but through her own metaphoric language she made the story both more and less, as she heightened and condensed according to her own imagination, her own memory, and her own purposes. Her grandfather did, indeed, "make a good story," a story that became more real as the result of its telling.

and truth is not the issue anyway. Berthoff says that

The emphasis on differentiating critical and creative writing, as if they were symptoms of different brain functions, has meant that we've lost the advantages that are there to be enjoyed if we concentrate instead on what they have in common . . . . If we are to conceive of literacy as a facility in making meaning in reading and writing, we will need to understand the heuristic power of language itself . . . . Imagination must be rescued from the creativity corner and returned to the center of all that we do. (29)

If we think of the imagination in this way, then "true" and "untrue" stories blur into one another. The uses of stories that aren't true are many, and it's time we acknowledge their uses more fully in composition classes, especially if our purposes are to help writers develop and understand the uses of writing in their lives, rather than helping texts develop according to some predetermined notion of what they should look and sound like.

In Haroun, the story of the Ocean of the Streams of Stories in fact saves stories for the world. Haroun's father regains the Gift of Gab, everyone is reunited, and we expect, lives happily ever after, all as a result of the telling of the story that is the novel. I'm sure that's an ending Rushdie would wish for, that stories would be free to roam the world, saving lives. However, Haroun learns at the end of his adventure that "Happy Endings are much rarer in stories, and also in life, than most people think" (201). Yet, the Walrus, the head guy of the Ocean of the Streams of Stories, announces that he's "learned how to synthesize them artificially. In plain language, we can make them up" (202). Like many essays where teachers explore their own teaching, this essay has built to a happy ending too, a vision of my students happily choosing and learning about the implications of those choices. I didn't make this up; I swear every word is true. and even if it's not, I hope it's useful to think about the place of stories and the imagination in composition classes.

Notes

[1] One of the other name changes I've made as a result is that I no longer say of the stack of papers in my arms as I leave the building at the end of the day, "I have to grade/mark/correct these papers tonight"; now, I say, "I have to read/respond to these papers tonight." I cannot emphasize enough the pleasure that this change has brought to my life.

[2] I have explored this question of English teachers' stylistic preferences in "Style: The Hidden Agenda in Composition Classes," in The Subject Is Writing, edited by Wendy Bishop and published in 1993 by Heinemann.

Works Cited

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987.

Berthoff, Ann E. The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing Teachers. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1981.

Calkins, Lucy. Lessons from a Child: On the Teaching and Learning of Writing Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1983.

Lardner, Ted. "Voices Seldom Heard: Poetry and Letters in the English Classroom." English Journal 79 (1990): 100-101.

Moxley, Joseph. "Creative Writing and Composition: Bridging the Gap." AWP Chronicle 23 (1990): 1, 7-12.

Rief, Linda. Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992.

Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books, 1990.