You gotta be ready for some serious truth to be spoken.

• Date: 22 December 2002
• Author: Busman, Debra
• Published date: 22 December 2002
• Author: Busman, Debra

WHEN YOU ASK STUDENTS TO BREAK SILENCE, TO BEAR WITNESS, TO CONNECT the meaning of their own personal lives within the larger societal frame, you gotta be ready for the truths that fly out, crawl out, peep out, and scream out from underneath the thick walls of practiced silence. You gotta be ready for stories of border crossings, coyotes and cops, night beatings, wife beatings, baby beatings, date rapes, gang rapes, daddy rapes, gunshots and chemo, pesticides, HIV, AZT, protease inhibitors, and the pink-cheeked 19-year-old who says, "Hey, next Tuesday I'll have five years clean and sober; can we have a cake in class?" You gotta be ready for stories that start out, "Ese pinche Columbus didn't have no stinkin' green card." You gotta be ready for the straight A student who has to leave school because her INS paperwork hasn't come through yet, the social security number she gave at registration was the first nine numbers that came to her mind, and she cannot get financial aid because she is "illegal."

To teach Creative Writing and Social Action means you gotta be ready for all the stories, whether you want to hear them or not. When you ask students to speak the truths of their lives, you gotta be ready for the Stanford-bound future teacher of America who writes about being kicked out of the Navy for being too racist. You gotta be ready for the sweet-faced, curly-haired lover of Jesus who writes stories of his days as a violent skinhead, beating up Blacks, Jews, and queers. You gotta be ready for the stories the young man cannot yet share in class, scribbles slid under your office door, 4:30 A.M. e-mails, telling of his father's rage, the belt, the whiskey, the steel pipe slammed down hard on the body of the...