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Shara McCallum
Shara McCallum (Poetry; on leave Summer 06) is the author of two books of poems, Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), which won the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems and personal essays have appeared in journals such as The Antioch Review, Callaloo, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Witness. Her work has been reprinted in several anthologies, including The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology and Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-first Century. Originally from Jamaica, she lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. Selected Publications: Song of Thieves (The University of Pittsburgh Press, March 2003)
The act of writing a poem and showing it to someone else is one that usually makes the author feel alternately hopeful and despondent. It almost always makes us feel vulnerable. In commenting on the work of other writers, I try to keep this in mind at all times. Since I studied dance for years, it feels most natural to use that discipline as a metaphor for the relationship I see between myself and my students. As writers, I think we engage in the kinds of training all dancers have to undergo: before you ever step onto the stage, you spend hours stretching at the barre, executing across the floor combinations, and learning the choreography for the pieces you will eventually perform. All the while, the dance teacher offers corrections to the body's form, placing her hands on your body to prod you to arch your back even further, point your toe even harder, rotate your hips this way and that. Some of these "corrections" are comfortable and immediately feel right; others, initially, are not and do not. But all, ultimately, help the body learn the path to its own best expression. A poem is, like the human body in disciplined motion, a work of art as well as artifice. My role, as I see it, is to prod and praise the poem to achieve its best possible articulation and resonance. My approach to setting up the semester plan with students varies depending on which semester a student is in; however, it is always based on trying to support and discover where the student's interests and talents reside. In crafting a reading list for example, I will suggest books after I have had a conversation with the student about his or her work. The list will usually be comprised of books the student selects as well as ones that I select. As I get to know the student's work better during the course of the semester, I will usually add suggestions to that list (and I allow the student as well to make substitutions as he or she sees fit). My written feedback on each packet focuses on large issues I see in the student's work as well as provides specific, even line-by-line, questions and suggestions for revision for each poem sent. I also offer questions in regard to the annotations, and will sometimes offer suggestions for revision or expansion of an annotation, particularly for second semester students who are often using the annotations to spark ideas for the third semester critical thesis. Since I think we learn as much from what we do right as what we do wrong, I try to always include praise as well as constructive criticism in my feedback. In terms of logistics, my preference is to work with students by email (as this gives students the maximum amount of time between packets). My guidelines for page lengths for assignments within packets and for total number of packets (5 per semester) coincide with those agreed upon by all faculty members in the program. For the fifth packet, though, no matter what semester the student is in, I ask to see revisions of work produced in the first four packets. I think this helps students best prepare for the final project of the degree (the creative thesis) and for the work of being a writer once the program ends. To my mind, revision is where most writing actually occurs. While I prefer to see work only when packets are due, I am available to my students by email or telephone for any questions or concerns they may have between the due dates for packets. Links: Read about the Shara McCallum and the Stadler Center: Read an interview with Shara McCallum: Read a review of Shara's book The Water Between Us:
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