SF student suspended over Connecticut poem (about school shooter)

[Luminous Animal]

97. You are making two assumptions that are incorrect...

1) I do not believe that the girl thinks killing children is an understandable response to society. She has stated so herself. What I believe she is trying to say is that she understands alienation from a cruel society. A GOOD teacher would have assisted her in expressing that more elegantly and probably would have helped her expand her vocabulary.

2) IF if if if, I thought it were true, if I took her words at face value, I'd be advancing an entirely different argument which would include a scathing denunciation of that view.


My daughter writes. While she was growing up, I read quite a bit of her half-baked and "ignorant" stuff. Poems, essays and short stories that were, essentially stream of thought - not worked over and not meant to be viewed by outsiders... just things that popped into her head. And when people write things that pop into their head, it can be, well... eye-popping. When she wrote things for public consumption, she and I would spend days, weeks, sometimes months sussing out the precise language and meter that would best illustrate what she was trying to convey. We'd sit with dictionaries, and thesauruses, and do the google-y thing to search phrases in order to avoid the "trite". She has been working on one song for two years.

One of the things that resonates with me about this girl is her reference to Stephen King. When my daughter was 15 she took a youth writing workshop with the author Michael Chabon titled Fantasy and Dark Fiction. Stephen King is a friend of Chabon's and offered (as a result of a casual phone conversation) to fly from New Hampshire to San Francisco to lead one of the sessions. It was a remarkably generous thing to do. The goal of the workshop was to encourage the kids to explore their darkest thoughts - thoughts that they might ordinarily repress or wake up sweating and frightened as a result of a nightmare. As my daughter tells it, King's one day contribution was invaluable (and fortunately she recorded it on audio tape and still has it 8 years later); freeing many in the workshop to write things that they had often thought but were afraid to commit to paper. Much of what they wrote before and after King's visit would have sparked suggestions that they be evaluated by a psychiatrist.