Apple of the Mind: Introduction to Third Mind
By Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet

This is the complete introduction which was written for the anthology Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art, published by Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

This anthology comes to you with the intention of providing practical exercises and theoretical ideas for how to integrate visual art and writing into the classroom. There is a perception that artwork and writing are two widely separate disciplines; however, bringing the the two together helps to synthesize two questions that can sometimes cancel each other out in our classrooms: "How do we get students to write?" always comes first and with great urgency, and yet, "How do we get students engaged as thinkers, writers, and seers?" is an equally important question. Too much attention to the question of how to “make” students produce “good” writing becomes an exercise in teaching students to respond, more or less, to what Philip Lopate describes as "an assignment cleverly preconstructed to minimize failure". Making the connection between writing and visual art activates what William Burroughs called “The Third Mind”—the result of a collaboration in which, as Anne Waldman describes, “something new, or other” emerges from the combination that would not have come about with a solo act (326).” Making this spirit of collaboration accessible to the classroom, the third mind also comes about when an individual mind sees itself contextualized within a multiplicity of other minds and ways of thinking. With that in mind, this anthology focuses on ways of examining through writing what's seen and how it's seen; on making and ways of making through looking and writing.

Unfortunately, for many of our students learning to write has been an event that is disconnected from what they do day-to-day. Before learning to write, children carry what they know of the world in their heads, each with a unique way of organizing that information and of assembling narrative understandings of their own worlds. And yet, when children come to school, we ask them to categorize the world in specific ways and to learn information that at first seems irrelevant to their immediate experiences. We ask them to organize their knowledge into formulaic compositions with thesis statements, complete sentences, and concluding paragraphs. These forms are, of course, necessary. They are a part of our socialization into a literate community. They are the forms we use to participate in discussions begun long before our arrival and that will continue long after our departures. And of course, children are anxious to please and to grow up, eager to embrace "adult" ways of categorizing and naming things. As Michael Theune observes in his essay, "Ut pictura poesis," "Young people...are often more concerned about distancing themselves from their childlike aspects than they are about indulging in them. Often believing that art is serious and believing that to be serious is to be mature, many young writers use their creative writing as an opportunity to produce evidence that they can be mature, can handle adult themes with adult ability, with ideas, with abstraction, with objectivity." This desire for maturity means greater attention to those external forms that evidence their assimilation into a kind of adulthood, and less to their particular, internally filtered visions.

All this is complicated by the fact that their imaginations are simultaneously being colonized and quickly destroyed with pre-packaged big-eyed cartoon characters (and all the paraphernalia that goes with them). They begin to think of the imagination as being reflected by Saturday morning cartoons—alien mouse men, black-belt turtles, talking unicorns, and roly-poly yellow flying things that need to save the world from their evil twins. These manufactured dream-lands become the space of childish escape, and few encourage the pursuit of deep reflection, of critical examination, or of serious thought. When children enter our classrooms it is with a collective mind—a mind that when asked to create a character or draw a mythological creature eagerly pulls out a sticker collection and sets out to depict the pre-packaged traits of an action figure designed and marketed by Warner Brothers. And this mentality carries all the way through high-school and into college, so that teaching creative writing or art can sometimes feel like a de-programming mission.

So, how do we as writers and as teachers help students to believe in the superpower of their own imaginations, to take back control of their minds? To draw lines of connection between the written word, the syllable spoken, the light seen, and the life lived? How do we teach writing in ways that illuminate what Will Alexander in his essay “Igniting the Inward Prodigy” calls "interior sonority"? To de-program the collective mind and activate the unique potential of each student? Teaching creative writing--or rather, writing that creates, that makes, that paints--is one way of connecting the act of writing to that process of living, of reflecting on experience, and of ascribing or making meaning. Through becoming absorbed by their own imagination, following it along wherever it may take them, students will find their own ways into the adult world using their own experiences and individual ways of making sense.

Terry Blackhawk in her essay "Ekphrastic Poetry” paraphrases Edward Hirsh’s notion that "looking at a work of art is like looking into the act of creation." This is an important concept to this book, because it simultaneously simplifies and complexifies the act of looking at a work of art. The “looking” Blackhawk discusses involves processes of seeing and understanding, which only come through close examination. Blackhawk’s essay provides a useful introduction to exphrasis (poetry that takes its inspiration from visual art), and demonstrates how through the act of looking, writers and artists enter into a dialogue which has been happening for centuries. The poem or creative response that is produced in dialogue with visual art is not the product of an individual stroke of genius, but rather of an engagement with something other that has triggered a response. When students are asked to involve themselves with their own processes of looking, they enter into an engagement with a mind and intellect that is ancient, that has precedent, that “real” artists and “real” writers use all the time.

The idea of a dialogue between the visual arts and the verbal and written arts is a part of an ancient tradition. In The Phaedrus, Plato observes that paintings and poems, when put together, “seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever." That participatory spirit of hearing what paintings and poems have to say, and entering into a conversation with them through writing is the desire of this anthology.
Although all of the essays included here are concerned with teaching writing through visual art, they cover a broad range of perspectives--from the classroom teacher’s to the arts administrator's to the writer's; and a broad range of artistic disciplines as well. In this anthology you will read Susan Karwoska’s example of how to collect and incorporate students’ memories into a quilt; educator Pamela Beal's essay suggests insightful and practical ways of creating interdisciplinary literature units for public school curricula that includes how to use the principal as a paper mache giant to eventually inspire a pop-up book illustrating students’ understanding of Giglamesh. There are examples of ways to incorporate artwork from various cultures: the Chinese brush paintings that Beth Zasloff uses to help students “translate their visions into words on the page,” the Native American creation myths that artist Debora Iyall (mentioned in Tina Rotenberg’s essay) uses to make puppets with lines of dialogue on their backs. There are also examples of how teachers and writers have implemented writing/visual arts projects and exercises in classrooms, in museums, and in after-school programs across the country, in both rural and urban areas. Kathy Walsh-Piper's essay at the end of the anthology provides valuable information on curriculum and collaborative arts programs that exist for teachers to incorporate into their classrooms.

You will find surprising and easy methods for introducing photography into your classroom—Ezra Shales draws from his experience of teaching students in an after-school program portraiture techniques that blend photography, drawing, and writing. Similarly, The Rybickis use photography to encourage students to become engaged by representing their own worlds. Working with photography is particularly important for students who had never believed in themselves as having stories that were worth telling, because it enables them to use their own faces and stories as the inspiration for assignments that make the snapping of the shutter itself a moment to remember. As bell hooks writes in her essay, “Art is for Everybody,” it is important to keep in mind that there is what she calls a “politics of seeing.” Hooks explicitly discusses the effects of the “underrepresentation” of images and artists that reflect the experiences of African Americans. As educators working with visual art, we need to be mindful of the social power of images to allow students to participate in their own representation of the world around them. “Identification with art is a process,” hooks writes. “We look with the received understanding that art is necessarily a terrain of defamiliarization: it may take what we see/know and make us look at it in a new way.” The motivation to write or to create comes from the incentive of the teacher to respond to and to engage in dialogue with the social, cultural, and economic contexts of both her students and herself. We have included an essay by Michelle Wallace that confronts exactly these issues when discussing Tim Rollins’ contraversial KOS project. With these issues always in the back of our minds, this anthology hopes to present a wide range of images and both theoretical and practical discussions that will help to complexify ways of seeing ourselves reflected in all of the actual worlds that surround us.
Visual art can direct students to investigate how they see and think, and to recognize that the investigation is itself part of the process of whatever they create in the classroom. These essays examine some of the questions that teachers using a writing/visual art approach may find themselves confronting. In his essay, “Unfamiliar Ground,” Gary Hawkins confronts his own initial resistance to introducing abstract art to students. Assuming that they would not “get it,” Hawkins questioned his own hesitation and decided that perhaps it was he who needed to suspend disbelief. He first had to confront his own uncertainty at both what qualifies as a “good” poem, and acknowledge that expecting students to produce some “exquisite object of poetry as the product of each encounter” limited his own abilities to teach. Good writing rarely happens though the intention to write something good. It is actually through an indirect gesture that the writing actually becomes and speaks. Hawkins’ essay affirms that good writing happens when the teachers and the students enter into unfamiliar territory--and his ideas for how to translate into writing the visual metaphors found in works of art is one way to begin charting a coarse. Challenging expectations for accurate representation as the ultimate goal of students’ work enabled him to open up to possibilities for experiencing with different methods of creativity in his classroom.

The self-reflection that teachers go through is just as important to us as that which students go through. As teachers of writing in Cooper Union's Saturday/Outreach Program, (an intensive series of courses in which high-school students interested in pursuing careers in art attend intensive weekend and summer studio workshops), we regularly confront the problem of getting students to play out on the page, in words, the sounds of the specific winds that they hear. As teachers we have both made the mistake of thinking that a simple way to get students to respond is by introducing a painting and then saying "just look and describe." We have also made the mistake of telling students that good writing "shows, not tells," and having as a result received only blank stares and even blanker pages--the bored pride of the student who thinks that having revised his sentence "the dog went outside" to "the big brown dog went to the green park" fulfills the show/tell dictum. This non-response is a sustained silence that can often be intimidating. How often do students, confronted with a painting or a poem and a teacher's "What do you think?" respond, "I don't know?"--a response of both least and greatest resistance.

Tangible and colorful, with shapes, images and shades for students to grab onto, visual art lends itself very easily to an exercise that simply instructs "write a description of all that you see." And yet, encouraging this descriptive engagement with the artwork is only the tip of the ice (I-see) berg of what using visual art in the classroom can do. The magic occurs when students actually manage to write using vivid details that are lively precisely because they suggest a particular and active "I" seeing--as well as the object of that eye's vision, in addition to figurative language. Michael Theune’s essay looks at the difficulty of convincing resistant adolescents of the value of surrealism. He uses surrealist paintings on postcards to generate a pantoum—a poetic form which facilitates an intentional, sometimes non-sensical disconnect between different lines in the poem. The poem, in other words, mirrors the way they are seeing the painting, as a series of images that don’t really go together, but are synthesized to form something new.

In very succinctly connecting the form of a poem and the form of a painting, Theune articulates something crucial to our engagement with this process—that we can articulate visions and revisions with the lines we write on the page and draw or paint on the canvas. The line of perspective drawn by the painter can direct the seer's eye on how to perceive the image on the canvas. The lyric line in a poem directs the reader on how to "read" the poem, both musically and emotionally. In both the painting and the poem, the line gives shape to what is seen and understood. It defines boundaries between the known and the unknown, between the seen and the unseen, between what is perceived and what is not. The poetic image (visual or written), which is only one imaginable gesture in a series of movements, is as Hawkins notes quoting Pound, "a compact of emotion." The painting or the poem is not the beginning or the end of a creative act, but rather a single realized moment that implies a larger story--like the feeling of "anger" or "joy" that is triggered by a glimpse of the moon, or the sudden pain of a stubbed toe, or an attractive blue shirt, or a poor showing on the basketball court. Holly Mastuzo makes this connection by having her students study the paintings of Cy Twombly—an abstract artist whose “scribbles” across a canvas are able to replicate the gesture of writing. The strokes are deliberate, hard, repetitious, layered--the scribble in and of itself is a stroke. Making the connection between the painterly gesture of scratching and the writerly gesture of forming letters, Masturzo is able to get students to recognize their own emotions in the lines they are drawing. They are participating in the immediacy of their own absorption into the process of drawing and writing—what she calls the “feltness of that moment of creation” when “sensation and sense-making, between matter and mind.”

With this book, we invite teachers to access their own imaginations, to do every assignment along with their students. To transform the writing classroom into what Rene Magritte so aptly titled one of his paintings-- "the listening room." A green apple is surrounded by four walls. Either the apple is gigantic and, like Alice with her arms and legs sticking out of the rabbit's house, is on the verge of outgrowing the room. Or, the apple is normal size, and it is the house that is inordinately small, shrinking around it. Either way, the house is only a temporary constraint for whatever is happening to the apple--whether expanding or retreating, the apple soon will be free of the room. This painting suggests multiple perspectives and multiple realities simultaneously. It is not one or the other, but both. The title of the work also suggests this idea of multiplicity. "The Listening Room" is both the room in which one listens and the room that listens to us. It is also the classroom when multiple minds are all working independently, absorbed by the moment of writing. It is the room in our minds that houses images and words, creaking and shuddering as the two collide with each other in a poem or story. As we look through the painting and into the room and see the apple, with all of its possible perspectives, we are looking at a moment of making. Make the classroom and the page a site of making. Using art in the classroom can make students engage with their own writing, it can make them see into their own process of seeing; and if nothing else, it gives them something to write about so they are not concerned with writing to only complete an assignment. Rather, they have momentarily disappeared into a space created by their own visions and voices.