Wildlife Rescue Series!

I’m working on my presentation for this international educators’ conference coming up Friday, and the topic I promised them was, “Pen or Sword? The Student Writer as SuperHero.”

So far, I’ve got enough material to fill a 6-credit university course. Problem is, they’ve only given me 45 minutes. Apparently I’m going to have to pare down.

I did some reading last night that reminded me why the question is so important in the first place. Lummy gave me a book for my birthday called Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life. It’s edited by Constance Rooke, and proceeds go to PEN Canada. I’ve found the essays I’ve read so far to be hilarious, moving, insightful, reassuring, comforting, daunting, revealing and astonishingly good reads. I particularly enjoyed Alice Munro’s “Writing, Or, Giving Up Writing” about the distractions inherent in the writing process (many days, there are more distractions than there is writing) and the pleasure and relief she anticipates upon retiring. Lynn Coady’s “On Behaving Badly” about the persona of the author, particularly on tour. Howard Engel’s “Stroking the Writer,” about reclaiming his writing life after a stroke that leaves him unable to read.

Last night, though, I happened to read some of Constance Rooke’s own introduction to the book itself. Her words spoke to the thoughts and feelings I’d been trying to express all day as I worked on my conference presentation, and will, I hope, inform its final shape.

I hope I do not call down upon myself a stampede of lawyers by quoting a few sections from Ms. Rooke’s intro:

“PEN Canada is one of the most active of the 141 centres of International PEN operating around the world. We are a human rights organization of writers and other supporters of free speech, and our mission is to defend ‘freedom of opinion and the peaceable expression of such opinion.’ Enshrined both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, freedom of expression is a fundamental human right that is vital to the protection of all other human rights.

We see this every day in the work for which PEN is best known: our struggle on behalf of writers in prison around the world. Overwhelmingly, these are people living under oppressive regimes who have chosen to speak out about abuses in their own countries. Jail is intended to silence them and hide them away.”

Toward the end of the piece, she says, “We are all in varying ways and degrees in exile or in prison; we are all in varying measure stifled in the expression of what is in our hearts. But sometimes there are words that pass through prison walls, words that by connecting us can help to free us.”

These are the words I want to talk about on Friday–the words that can free us. I want to talk with educators about showing kids ways to bring those words to the surface, to use them to pass through prison walls–walls made of fear, of shame, of convention, of peer pressure, of stereotyping and racism, of sexism and patriarchy, of expectations, of abuse.

We are born to be free, and we know it. And if we do not find the words, or the ways, to express ourselves, to let ourselves out of prison, we will pick up our swords and try to cut our way out. We will instinctively oppose whatever–or whoever–tries to keep us locked away, and we will use whatever tools lie at our disposal.
May they be music, dance, art … not guns. May they be words, not blades. The pen is mightier than the sword, not because of what it can do to your opponent, but because of what it can do for you: connect you to your heart and your soul; release your voice; illuminate your path; keep you out of trouble. Set you free.
And if somebody makes finger guns and exploding noises with their mouth and says to you, “Yeah, whatever, gimme Live Free or Die Hard any day,” you can answer,

“Somebody wrote that.”