Lindsay Maddox Ellis

The LMWP hosted its first Invitational Summer Institute in 2003, and I came on board in 2006 as a participant, in 2007 as a co-leader, and in 2008 as Director. Every summer, teachers keep me real. They remind me how dizzying a life in K-12 classrooms can be, and they kick my sense of humor up a notch. For all of us, the pandemic was a kick in the gut. We were astonished and exhausted by the rapid changes we were forced to undergo, and the LMWP took a summer off, not sure if gathering in digital spaces could still be called the LMWP. Over the four years since, we’ve inched back into routines and made new ones.

To see what the LMWP is up to in 2025, come visit us on the digital campus of Grand Valley State University at www.gvsu.edu/lmwp . We’re running youth writing camps and hosting another Invitational Summer Institute. If you want to be one of the invited ones, email me at ellisl (at) gvsu.edu. Happy writing, Lindsay

This is our summer of cherry tomatoes. Today you harvested one hundred and fifty-seven. Last week nine hundred twenty-one. Midsummer you laid thirty-three thousand pennies in rows and glued them to the floor. As a child, sent to bed early by responsible parents on hot summer nights while the neighborhood kids still kicked the can outside, you counted — picking up where you left off the night before — to a million. You count and count, testing your considerable powers of estimation. Meanwhile, the roguish tomato plants have reseeded themselves across the yard.  They have sprung up like dandelions along our driveway and next to the chickens’ pen.  They have engulfed the two raised beds and overtaken the basil and spinach.  They have grown six feet high.  “Can we eat something without tomatoes?” Caroline asks, but the answer is no.  Tomatoes in our black beans and rice, tomatoes in our quiche, tomatoes on platters with bread and cheese. Winter is a few months away. Tonight we’re having tomatoes. When we renovated this kitchen, where a bowl of tomatoes sits on the soapstone counter next to a tray of hens’ eggs and a dish of farm-share garlic and onions, I measured every cabinet twice and planned every drawer, but the tomatoes weren’t on the blueprints.  They are more than we asked or paid for. They are more than I counted on.

What can we learn about education from J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy? There have been critiques of the broad strokes of his generalizations about Appalachian culture (See Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019)), but that’s not the focus of my analysis here.  I’m interested in Vance’s experiences in school as he recalls and describes them.  The story that Vance tells about his undergraduate years at Ohio State turns on one pivotal class encounter:

[A]t twenty-four, I was a little too old to be a second-year college student.  But with four years in the Marine Corps behind me, more separated me from the other students than age. During an undergraduate seminar in foreign policy, I listened as a nineteen-year-old classmate with a hideous beard spouted off about the Iraq War.

186

What this non-veteran has to say, Vance disagrees with.  The classmate describes all soldiers as one problematic “type.”  Soldiers were “typically less intelligent” than straight-to-college students.  Soldiers “butchered and disrespected Iraqi civilians.” And so forth.  Vance’s first-hand experiences contradicted these views.  In the Marine Corps, Vance had worked alongside men and women with diverse views and diverse backgrounds.  “Many,” he writes, “of my Marine Corps friends were staunch liberals who had no love for our commander in chief—then George W. Bush.”  Additionally, rather than disrespecting Iraqis, Vance says his deployment included “never-ending training on how to respect Iraqi culture” (186).  This is a moment of classroom conflict.  Two students have different worldviews.  They are drawing on different sources of information to form opinions.

            Moments like this abound in healthy democracies, indeed in any collaboration.  America in particular is a large, diverse country whose citizens have different religious, ethnic, generational, geographic, and all-around cultural and personal experiences.  In order to live with any hope of non-violent civic participation and leadership, schools in democracies must train students to manage conflicts skillfully—neither fighting nor withdrawing.

            How did Vance’s professor—and all of the teachers in his years of school to this point—prepare him in advance for moments like this?   Crickets.  Nada.  Vance continues:

As the student prattled on… I thought about my friends who were covered in third-degree burns, ‘lucky’ to have survived an IED attack in the Al-Qaim region of Iraq. And here was this dipshit in a spotty beard telling our class that we butchered people for sport. I felt an immediate drive to finish college as quickly as possible.  I met with a guidence counselor and plotted my exit.

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Faced with interpersonal conflict, Vance plotted his exit and fled. 

In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance reflects honestly on how his family taught him to fight or to flee, but only in his personal life.  Fighting was what his mother, grandmother, great grandmother, grandfather and uncles did. Vance actually speaks with some reverence for them as “enforcers of hillbilly justice” (17). However, fleeing is what they did to survive when the fighting got too bad. These became his learned responses to conflict.  Reflecting in the act of storytelling, Vance admits how destructive fighting was to himself as a boy longing for stability. Without another alternative in school or at home, Vance habitually fled.  His girlfriend (now wife)

stumbled upon an analogy that described me perfectly. I was, she said, a turtle. “Whenever something bad happers—even a hint of disagreement—you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.” It was true. I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all. I could scream at her when she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could withdraw and get away. Those were the proverbial arrows in my quiver, and I had nothing else.

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What schooling—from Kindergarten through high school, college, and law school—failed to give J.D. Vance were strategies for handling disagreements in ways that preserved relationships.  Both civic relationships and intimate ones matter.  They are vital as the air we breathe. Indeed, having clean air to breathe and relaxed lungs to breathe it literally requires them.

It’s here: my second sabbatical. In September of 2019 (two years ago for those whose sense of time has been scrambled by COVID), I submitted a proposal for a book project. That proposal took me six months of free minutes to construct, and it took another five months to be approved. I breathed a sigh of relief in June of 2020 that the crazy months of February, March, April, and May–shifting abruptly to online instruction and homeschooling–were over. My husband had had three surgeries during those months. I’d spent hours reading student papers while waiting in hospital parking lots, socially isolated but required to be on site. Summer was approaching, though, and the sky was looking brighter. In just a few weeks, that relief turned to disbelief. My university postponed all 2020-21 sabbaticals and called all tenured and tenure track faculty back to campus to respond to the teaching needs of students now sitting 6 feet apart or in their basements with headphones and screens. Fall of 2020, I taught four distinctly different courses, two of which I’d never taught before. Both of my children were doing school the only way that their district offered: in their bedrooms on their laptops. It was so rough.

But that’s over now.

(Please let it be over now. Please help it be over for all the health care workers and teachers and people in poverty for whom vaccines aren’t yet available. Please don’t let your body be host to the making of the next, worse variant.)

But the sabbatical. As I restarted my project, I began by rereading and writing about J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. I did so before he started making the rounds on talk shows as a Marine Corps public affairs veteran of the war in Iraq because he is running in the Ohio Republican primary for a Senate seat. Here he is, back on the front page with much to say. I’m looking at his memoir to see what I can learn about his experiences in school, and what we can learn from what else he says and how he says it. Did he manage to reconcile the content of school with the culture of home? Did he learn from school how to reason well in the face of conflicts? Did he learn to analyze arguments–his own as well as others’? Did he learn to empathize with multiple stakeholders before designing solutions to problems?

What Vance shows us honestly in Hillbilly Elegy is the violence in Scots-Irish culture, of those he calls his people. “Mama came from a family that would shoot at you rather than argue with you” (25). J.D. is most vulnerable in his book when he confesses his struggle to not act violently, to overcome this intimate history of responding to perceived slights by fighting or fleeing. He doesn’t want to yell at his family or strike his dog. In school, at Yale specifically, he learned to write concise sentences. Did Vance learn to use language non-violently? Did he learn to seek to understand and to find common ground between conflicting viewpoints? Today, looking at his Twitter feed, I don’t see that skill in evidence.

He might not swing his fists anymore, but in his most recent article J. D. Vance attacks the thousands of Americans who work in universities. He wrangles us all into one category and summarily dismisses us. According to his fighting words, the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan is the fault of the “universities that teach our elites to be stupid conformists.”* Hmmm. At my university, we are trying to teach skills for democracy: how to listen with respectful curiosity to others and create common-ground ways to live as one union of states despite our differences. Comprehending others requires hard intellectual work. Democracy requires understanding and recognizing competing interests. The reason that that Taliban is a problem is because they don’t do that. In his memoir, Vance did recognize and wrestle with the complexity of poverty and its solutions. It’s unfortunate to see him return to the verbal combativeness and anti-education posture of toxic masculinity. Once upon a time, he could see what that posturing almost cost him. The women in Afghanistan could remind him.

*(https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/16/the-afghanistan-failure-proves-americas-regime-isnt-fit-to-lead/)

Yesterday morning, I wrote along the shore of Lake Michigan.  I’ve been there in fog and storm, blue sky and gray.  The water at times is blue, others dark green, and all shades of gray under gray clouds.  Its constant presence, yet changing moods, reminded me of my family–fortunately present but ever-changing in emotion.

I invite you to try to describe a scene that you see or a mood that you feel–or both–using color.  I used Sherwin Williams’ paint names as inspiration, then invented my own: https://www.sherwin–williams.com/homeowners/color/find-and-explore-colors/paint-colors-by-family#   Here are the first two lines of my draft.

Sherwin Williams Sky

The horizon is crisp this morning,

painters’ contrast between

Moonmist and Denim.

Some dawns it’s all Aviary to the west,

fog drifting over our breakfast cereal.

….

Are you traveling to see family this Labor Day weekend?  This is an opportunity to think about your family and your identity.  In the following poem, Angela C. Trudell Vasquez describes the town within which her family lived and describes her family within the town.   

“Identity”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/146927/identity-5b05c79b7b931

Take some time to read it.  After reading and enjoying the poem the first time, I went back and looked for a line that could inspire a response from me.  I chose

“according to the unspoken doctrine in our house of:

fast first eat later after communion,

we intruded with our Mexican music

bellowing out the open windows

the smell of bacon frying,

pancakes baking, coffee

and eggs scrambled to order”

What are the “unspoken doctrines” of your house?  Here is your invitation:

Begin with the line  “According to the unspoken doctrine in our house of:” and keep going.  What would that doctrine be? How does it influence what your family does and how it interacts with its community?

Here is the first ten minutes of drafting I did this morning, following this prompt.

According to the unspoken doctrine in my husband’s head of:

clean first, then be social,

we put worn-out socks on our hands and dust the wooden edges of the stairs,

unload the clean dishwasher, fill it with the ones from the sink,

fold the dry laundry, and start a new load from the plastic trash can laundry basket.

He cuts the September sunflowers toppled by last night’s thunderstorm

and places them towering over the kitchen counter.

There is also the kitchen floor to wipe, endlessly crumby and stained,

the chickens to feed, the fern on the front porch to water.

My body, too, is a chore to check off the list:

stretch, strain, pump up, and sedate.

In sleep we regain the will power to do it all again tomorrow,

this wheel of making.

In the LMWP Institute, we read books about teaching writing and drafted reviews for each other.  Here’s my review of one of the books I chose to read this summer, focusing particularly on the concluding, “so what” chapter.  Our discussion of this text threatened to divide our otherwise warm community, so I offer this as one turn of talk in an ongoing conversation.  I’m a White professor listening closely to the research of two Black scholars.

Alim, H. S., & Smitherman, G. (2012). Articulate while black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the U.S. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Should students’ Black Language be accepted in school?  Should we correct sentences that don’t follow the rules of standard English when students are talking to us, talking to each other, writing first drafts, or editing final drafts?  Alim and Smitherman tackle this question head on.  In their last chapter, they even use the verb “should” to speak directly to educators: “Rather than interpreting Black language behavior through the lens of Black inferiority, ignorance, or violence, these creative language practices should be utilized for educational purposes” (177).  Are they advocating that students be encouraged to express themselves using the very strongest “creative language practices” that their home languages have to offer?  Sometimes, but not all the time.  They insist that students of all backgrounds be taught the rules of Standard Written English, and we all know that good teaching involves lots of practice.  What Alim and Smitherman want is for students to “be fluent in multiple language varieties, including Black Language and ‘standard English’” (168), and they lament that “schools continue to fail in their teaching of ‘standard English’ to Black students” (168).

What accounts for this failure?  Alim and Smitherman argue that “many youth can learn ‘standard English’ grammar, [but] they resist the constant and unrelenting imposition of White linguistic norms by their teachers.”  They continue, “It’s one thing to learn grammar rules but quite another to be rewarded for ‘sounding White’ (as if there is something inherently wrong with ‘sounding Black’)” (175).  As a White teacher, I was convicted by Toni Morrison’s words that open chapter six:

The language, only the language….It is the thing that black people love so much–the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them.  It’s a love, a passion….The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language….It’s terrible to think that a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with books that are less than his own language.  And then to be told things about his language, which is him, that are sometimes permanently damaging….This is a really cruel fallout of racism.  (The New Republic, March 1981)

What are the se “five different present tenses” that Morrison references?  I don’t know exactly, and that’s part of the problem.  I know a lot about the rules of Standard Written English, but not so many of the rules that make Black Language so resonant, so poetic.  Alim and Smitherman outline some of the linguistic strengths of Black language in this chapter, not only explaining twelve rules of the Black language syntactic system (copula absence, use of equatives, and negative inversion, for example) but also artistic and creative cultural modes of discourse.  

So what teaching practices does this suggest, exactly? How do we teach the rules of Standard Written English while honoring the strengths of Black language?  Teach them both.  Teach a critical awareness of the two dialects side by side–all of the dialects, actually, that circulate in students’ subcultures.  Teachers, they suggest, need to educate ourselves, not only about what standard verb tenses are (what is the present perfect tense again?) but also about the rules that govern the dialects that our students speak–because there are rules (see the examples above).  We do not need to pretend to be experts of any of it, but to model a meta-linguistic curiosity for our students; model being sleuths of language variety in our world.  Alim and Smitherman argue that this stance of humble curiosity and attentive study of the grammar rules not just of White English but also Black Language can have an influence for good in our society weakened by social inequity: “The critical linguistic perspective that we adopt in this book should be taught in schools in order to bring about social change” (169).

After a week in France with my friend Anne and her family and a week with my parents, I found it difficult to come back to work. It felt like the first half mile of a run, when my heart rate is still so slow that my muscles are begging for more oxygen. The pace felt too fast. People seemed to be talking too much about too many things. One week later, I’m moving at the same speed as the work, so it’s fine. I’m over jet lag, and the memory of a vacation continues to bring almost as much pleasure as the vacation itself. That’s one of the benefits to having an imagination as vivid as my actual senses.

Steve, Caroline, and Margaret and me: our three days with Anne, Eric, and Bea in Ansouis are now like a perfectly smooth, giant pearl in my pocket. I can wrap the fingers of my memory around it and admire its beauty.

The beauty of traveling with family and friends is that the pearl can be passed around.  We can remember together.

So Anne,

Just now, our children are laughing. They are trying to learn how to do a somersault in the water, but they turn catawampus and come up wiping the pool from their faces. They are holding hands and jumping in, blue and green sunbursts of flowers opening just behind their shoulders.

On the bulwark of the castle behind us, our husbands lean over the wall. Steve is saying “Hey, look at me! See what I did?” because he climbed part of the tower to get a better view.

You notice that there’s lavender growing by the side of the pool. You say, “Wouldn’t it be great to drive through lavender fields?”

We walk past a festival of Porches to reach the farmers’ market, where you and B buy radishes to make a French side dish. The men are giddy to buy un poulet entier for dinner. We wash our hands with a lavender soap stone, rinsing them with water the seller pumps from a jug with her foot. My children beg to buy colored pencils, and I let them.

In the afternoon, we walk out of the village and look back on it, sun slanting across the blonde stone walls of the castle and church. We know what is inside the rectory: red poppies, wild flowers bending thickly over streams, and a few naked women painted by the man in the corner. His art is on display annually in the region. The posters are a year or two old, announcing the show’s location.

At the church where scenes from Manon des Source was filmed, a baptism takes place on Saturday morning. French families navigate their cars up the narrow streets (as we did looking for our hotel) and park by the entrance to the castle, taking the final climb to the church on foot.

We walk the steep angle of the streets for the pleasure of the views, vinyards stretching to the feet of forested hills in the distance. I hope we will walk up the closest hill and look back on the village, and we do. We slowly learn to read the trail signage through trial and error. We scramble over fallen trunks to a vista on a rocky outcrop. I take a photo of Caroline taking a photo.

At night, we let the light fade around us on the patio. Our children sleep nearby together, while we lament and laugh at politics. In our hands are French wine and chocolate. In our hands are our husbands hands.  We have no papers to grade, no lessons to prepare. The next day will be like this one.

So, when I want to feel relaxed, to be convinced that life is beautiful, I’m going back to Ansouis. I can rearrange the chronology, erase the travel discomfort, and stretch it out as long as I like. Memory is good like that.

As the 2016 LMWP ISI ramps up, it’s time to begin at the beginning again.

“Let us remember…that in the end we [write] for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”
~Christian Wiman

I’m going on a bike ride.  Grand Rapids to Chicago.  That’s a long way for these legs to take me, from our home in Heritage Hill to the windy city, assisted only by two pedals and some gears.  I anticipate some aching muscles and a sore seat, but I’m committed to trying to make it for two reasons.  First, it’s an adventure with my husband, Steve, for whom this will be his third Climate Ride.  Last year on sabbatical in Europe, we lived without a car and loved it.  The photo above is me and our kids taking our weekly bike ride to the local farm to buy our produce directly from the grower.  Yes, it was idyllic.  Bike paths made it possible.  This brings me to number two.  Going on Climate Ride allows me to help raise awareness of the dire need for more sustainable solutions for global transportation.  People, our use of fossil fuels is a problem that we need to solve with the best minds of this generation.  I don’t have one of those minds, but I do have a love of exercise and adventure, so here I go.

Not only am I hoping to raise awareness about the need for sustainable solutions to the host of issues affecting the health of our planet, economy, and communities, but I’m also trying to raise some money for a few organizations that are doing front line work.   If you’re also interested in a green future, you can help me to support these organizations.  I’ve designated that all of the money I raise for Climate Ride goes to West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC), Grand Rapids Bicycle Coalition, National Parks Conservation Association, and Wellhouse.   Giving to my fundraising goal for Climate Ride is giving to these local and national advocates for sustainability.

You can make a secure online donation by clicking on the “Support Me” icon above. Both of us will be notified by email of your advocacy.

Thank you for your love and support!

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