Follow that pencil!

Follow the scrawl of mangled handwriting from the top of page one to the bottom of page three and you'll move from a description of pretty yellow butterflies to a suggestion that Disney princesses need group therapy. How could such a short piece of writing carry readers such a distance?

The writing was mine, produced during a series of free-writing exercises in my creative nonfiction class. We had read and discussed Joni Tevis's essay "In the County of Rent and Tatter," which creates a rich mental map of a place by quilting together colorful fragments of meaning. I asked my students to think about an incident in their own lives that they could associate with a particular color, and then I set them loose to free-write: Write as fast as you can. Don't stop until I tell you. Follow the pencil wherever it leads.

I decided to write along with my students. I started by describing a moment in the meadow with yellow butterflies hovering over goldenrod, but then the dog barged into the scene and reminded me of my encounter with mud-wallowing butterflies who rose and scattered and swirled around me like airborne bits of gold, and then it occurred to me that if I were a Disney princess, those butterflies would have settled on my hair like a coronet.

I had reached that point when it was time to stop writing. I told my students how I had followed my pencil into ideas I wasn't even aware I possessed, and I asked them whether their pencils had led them into surprising territory. A few shared the unexpected turns their writing had taken, and then I asked each student to underline just one interesting sentence or idea from their free-writing and use that as the start of another round.

So I started with the Disney princess crowned by butterflies and wrote about the number of princesses who rely on help from woodland creatures (Snow White), creatures from the sea (Ariel), or even household appliances (Belle). Why, I wonder, do so many Disney princesses depend upon assistance from unexpected quarters? Why do they need butterflies and bunnies and crabs and clocks to ease their path through life? Maybe they need to take a good, old-fashioned Home Ec class or join a support group for codependent princesses.

Time's up. Stop writing. No really, I mean it, stop writing! I can tell it's going to be a fun class when my students don't want to stop writing--and neither do I. I need to figure out what group therapy for princesses might look like, but the only way to find out is to keep following that pencil wherever it leads.