Kate Clanchy, writer and teacher [editor: England: Poems from a School – poetry from migrant children; writer: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me – on teaching in general and teaching creative writing] is someone I know through her tweets, and these are predominantly examples of her students’ poetry, this prompted by her creative writing ideas/models – essential stimulus – and her guidance/encouragement as a teacher – fundamental.

She recently posted a wonderful poem by Helen, 14, Full Length Portrait of the Wind, and this was the stimulus for the poem [to read her poem, go to KC’s twitter account]:

If you take ten minutes at the beginning of the lesson to ask your students what sort of boots the wind is wearing this morning and what coat she has on, then no one’s GCSEs will be harmed and poems will probably occur. Helen was 14.

I am always impressed by, and as a writer/teacher myself empathetic to, the ideas and responses Clanchy posts, but what acted as a prompt to me was the assertion then ‘no one’s GCSEs will be harmed’, an obvious if satirical point one shouldn’t have to state, but there are plenty of educational philistines out there who wouldn’t have a clue.

I made a retweet about GCSEs in boots and KC responded with an urge for writing that personifies GCSEs – and I did, sort of. What I came up with was more emblem than personification, but I enjoyed the stimulus:

With thanks to ReVerse Butcher for posting my poem here at Burning House Press.

Do check out others in the this ongoing Vision issue.

As always, my sincere thanks to IT and Rupert for publishing this in the International Times – read here. My thanks [and acknowledgement] as well to Atlanta Wiggs for another wonderful image.

I am especially pleased when IT gives the occasional platform to my poems about education in general, but more often than not about teaching and the teaching of Writing. I can’t recall exactly what nonsense prompted this poem, but I will have come across, at random, some education ‘advice’ about writing intervention which was typically meaningless, invasive, and most likely quite brutal in its ‘corrective’ designs.

I don’t believe I ever used the term ‘writing intervention’ when working as an English teacher. I confess to occasionally having had to adapt the language of ‘leadership management’, for example in needing to prepare documentation for inspection. One such I can recall is ‘work scrutiny’, which isn’t as appalling as most, and the actual Writing stimulation and task we used collectively as a department was engaging and creative [as ‘proven’ by the work scrutiny of its outcomes!]. Maybe I should have called it ‘work discovery’…

I have written consistently my criticism of nonsensical approaches to the teaching of writing on this blog, not least about the previous and current SATs testing regimes and therefore consequent teaching to this. However, one of the dumbest but also brutal ‘celebrations’ of a teacher’s writing intervention idea was featured here.

I first read The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 7 years ago, and haven’t returned, yet. Maybe I will having just seen the film last week.

It is a fine interpretation/representation and I never find it all that useful to compare a film made from a book. I loved the book, and I enjoyed the film. The brotherly bond, tested by the brutality of their lives and the ‘normal’ sibling tensions, is realistically and humorously portrayed in the film; the scene-setting – the cinematography – is often quite beautiful. I feel there was more brutality and more humour in the book, but I can’t be sure.

What I do have for certain is a review of the book written in 2012 and I am reprising it here:

Fraternal Fighters

This is a wonderfully comic and enriching story about the brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters, killers on a job-related quest. Their lives and sustained survival are underscored by menace and mendacity, but the telling of the siblings’ mean and murderous journey is delivered with an opposing calm and honesty by Eli – and the simple but wholly absorbing narrative and dialogue of writer Patrick deWitt.

Their story encompasses brotherly love and hate, greed, frontier existentialism, drinking, weight worries, teeth hygiene [every dentist should have these extracts printed in pamphlets replacing irrelevant surgery magazines], killing with aplomb, the work ethic, commitment, altruism, and, of course, the journey through which this and so much more is variously embraced and rejected.

Care and concern for horses has a place in this tale too. Eli’s horse Tub features strongly throughout and is both absurdly and metaphorically central to the themes of friendship, reliance and pragmatism.

Eli is the younger brother, and though less coldly clinical in killing than Charlie, his temper makes him no less effective – however, fraternal love will always make them a deadly duo because there is such an instinctive bond when it comes to either hunting out their prey or dealing immediately with unforeseen interference in this. But it is Eli who ruminates on the killings afterwards and yearns for a different life.

Both serve the Commodore, their mysterious but powerful employer, and his retributive, murderous instructions are theirs to carry out without question and however far it takes them – in this story across gold-rush California in search of Herman Kermit Warm who has offended their brutal boss. At first we don’t know what this offense was, and it isn’t meant to matter to the brothers whose fame is based on their relentless expertise in fulfilling such duties. But we do find out and this is where the story begins its shifts and presents uncertainty into the Sisters Brothers’ world – well, at least initially into Eli’s thinking.

There is a redemptive ending yet at a considerable cost, but I won’t spoil the story by saying anything further on this. Needless to say, the reading journey following theirs is a delightful and rewarding experience.