Kelly Grey Carlisle, Ph.D.

Students often talk about how you create deep and personal relationships with them not just as students but as people. This in turn creates deeply vested interests in your courses. Can you speak more about how you ‘get to know’ your students--especially during the fast pace of a single semester?

I put a lot of effort into building community in the classroom for pedagogical reasons no one reading this doesn’t already know. In my class it is essential that students feel comfortable in the community because I will ask them to do many things that will make them feel very uncomfortable, including writing about difficult personal material and sharing it. Feeling “known” is essential to a sense of belonging and community, so I try to get to know every student well.

Because I write nonfiction, I am practiced in getting to know people who interest me, and because I teach nonfiction, including personal writing, I get to know my students quickly. Probably the most important thing I do is ask students questions, listen to them, and remember what they say.

My only hack: Before we even start the semester, since Covid, I have students fill out a padlet with their picture, their chosen name and their pronouns, as well as answers to questions about who they are and what they value. I take roll with this for the first couple of weeks because it helps me remember who each person is as I take roll. It also helps me avoid dead names and incorrect pronouns.

I also meet with every student individually about their work at least twice a semester and spend part of the time asking how they are.

Building healthy, meaningful relationships with students also means maintaining important boundaries too. I am very careful about asking invasive questions, try very hard never to assume anything, remember that I am not a therapist, and try to give students the option of not being known.

Because you so often teach courses with a creative component, you might encounter particular challenges in assessing and grading. What techniques have you found most successful for learning in a creative class?

I find grades to be supremely unhelpful to the creative endeavor. First, they seem to be exactly the wrong kind of motivation for deep thinking and taking risks. They can lead to anxiety when to create, we often need a calm mind and focus. This doesn’t mean I don’t have high expectations, nor does it mean that creative work can’t be objectively assessed for quality and worth. It can.

I don’t grade small stakes work anymore but respond with feedback only. I grade first drafts so that students don’t blow them off, but I grade them very generously, especially during Covid, and provide heavy feedback. I grade their final revision more stringently, because by then they’ve had intervention from me, their classmates, and several weeks to work on revising.

I encourage students to ignore or modify my feedback if it runs against their goals for the piece. I use a rubric that focuses almost exclusively on the techniques and elements of craft we’ve learned all semester, but which makes room for experimentation and innovation. Finally, I have students include a revision narrative with each piece, which is an important part of my assessment of their work, because it shows me how well and deeply they have been thinking about their writing choices.

You have seen a large amount of success outside of the academic field with the publishing of your memoir We Are All Shipwrecks. What advice do you have for those who are wanting to publish in nonacademic circles?

As a creative writing professor, my research area is writing creative work for non-academic publication, and I have prepared for a lifetime in my field of expertise. My work is rejected much more often than it is accepted, and this is normal. My best advice would be to read and internalize a lot of contemporary fiction, memoir, poetry and nonfiction as well as many older works. Taking a creative writing class (or several) can be a shortcut to learning techniques one might otherwise learn through trial and error over an extended period of time. It is helpful to read widely in literary journals or magazines that publish short works in genre fiction or journalistic nonfiction, if those are your things. The nitty gritty of publishing in literary journals or other venues, getting an agent, and writing, revising, and selling a manuscript are all covered in blogs and websites.

According to your website, you are currently working on another book focusing on the Durham church in England. What draws you to write about this historical building?

(Cracks knuckles) Durham Cathedral was built by the Normans, beginning in 1093, and was mostly finished by 1133. It is a massive and beautiful beast of a building, of architectural significance, perched on a cliff overlooking the River Wear in what was the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria. It houses the body of St. Cuthbert, a powerful English saint who terrorized William the Conqueror from beyond the grave, on its east end, and on its west end, it houses the body of the Venerable Bede, whom we often call the Father of English History. Unlike most churches, Durham still has the bodies of its saints, because when Henry the VIIIs’ commissioners arrived to plunder Cuthbert’s treasures and burn his bones, they found not bones, but an entire body, preserved, as if asleep...since his death in 687. They were too scared to destroy it. (It is easy to believe in magic when you are at the cathedral.)

The Cathedral and its complex are a United Nations World Heritage site that sees 700,000 visitors a year, many of whom are there to visit Hogwarts and Asgard.

I love the building because it is full of contradictions and secret places to explore, locked doors to open. To understand it requires the kind of interdisciplinary learning I love in history, geology, art, literature, architecture, music, ecology, math, religion; the list is endless.

But the biggest reason I love it is the vibrant community of several hundred people who live, work, worship, and volunteer there today, including bellringers and stonemasons, child choristers and gardeners, priests and docents, unhoused people and the mentally ill, the archeologist and the Dean.

My favorite memory is from New Year’s Eve, when, late at night, I followed an 80-something bellringer up the 325 steps of the 200 foot central tower, passing cryptic masons marks spread like stars along the narrow passage, carrying my sleepy two year old in my arms, to the ringing chamber. The dean and canons and cathedral organist, the rest of the bellringers, and their families were all there in their pajamas and sweats. The bell pulls were hanging down in a magic circle, some attached to bells as heavy as a ton and many three hundred years old. There was cheap champagne and chocolate on a folding table, a playpen for the bell captain's baby, turned over when not in use so the pigeons wouldn’t foul it. My children and I sat in a corner of the chamber, wrapped in a blanket, while the ringers rang out the old year, their bodies rising and falling with bells. The Dean, official timekeeper with his cell phone, announced a minute till. A pause, then on old man chimed midnight by hand. 1, 2, 3 the girls and I counted softly. At 12 all the other ringers joined in again, welcoming the new year with the most riotous, joyful, loudest sound I have ever heard. This is where that expression comes from, you see, to ring out the old year and ring in the new. As they rang the celebratory ‘peal’ for New Years, which could be heard for miles round, you could feel the 600 year old stone tower sway with the motion of the heavy bells. It was like being in a ship, two hundred feet up, plowing through waves of sound and time.