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The First Step Is Fluency:
An Interview with Richard Marius

Carroll Viera
Tennessee Tech University

In 1985, Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander called upon Marius to design and direct a summer program to help improve the teaching of writing in public schools. As a well-known writer and a charismatic teacher, Marius was ideally suited for the task. The first Governor's Academy for Teachers of Writing, held in the summer of 1986, was so successful that it survived the state's transition from a Republican to a Democratic administration the following fall. Dr. Charles Smith, Tennessee's Commissioner of Education since 1987, has the following comments on the program:

The Governor's Academy for Teachers of Writing is one of the most exciting and rewarding professional development opportunities available to classroom teachers in this country. Each year, letters pour in from Academy participants stating how much they learned from the Academy and how they are going to integrate new ideas into their teaching. I know that this Academy is making a significant and positive difference in the classrooms across this state.

Richard Marius's leadership is the key to the success of the Governor's Academy. He is as gifted a teacher as he is a writer, and he knows how to make people believe in themselves and expand their abilities.

As representative comments from an assessment report compiled in 1989 reveal, Academy graduates share Commissioner Smith's enthusiasm: "This is the BEST thing the State of Tennessee has done for me since I began teaching a few years ago"; "The experience of the Academy was probably the single most important professional development of my teaching career"; "The Governor's Writing Academy . . . completely changed the way I teach, as well as the way I deal with students on a personal level"; "The two weeks spent at the first Governor's Academy for Teachers of Writing continues to be a highlight of my career."

This interview took place at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on July 14, 1993, during the eighth Governor's Academy. Here Richard Marius shares some of his experiences as a writer and some of his thoughts on teaching writing.

CV: How has your experience as a writer shaped your teaching of writing?

RM: Through the summer of 1968 and through much of 1969, I was re-writing my dissertation to go into the Yale edition of the works of St. Thomas More, and I realized how difficult yet how essential it was to organize my material. I cut and re-wrote my dissertation enormously so that it wasn't really just a re- write--it was a bottoms-up revision. Then I realized that my students had similar problems with their papers--that they could not tell a simple historical story, an interpretative narrative; so in 1969 I started having a paper due every week in my history honors seminar, and then I stopped giving exams because I was seeing so many papers. The next year I had students in my other classes write papers too. The word spread that if you took my course you learned how to write an academic essay, and it wasn't like English composition, where students were often writing only personal things. At that point I became a writing teacher.

CV: You mentioned a sense of narrative. How do you help writing teachers acquire this sense?

RM: I want more than anything else for teachers to see writing as a means of communicating, and I believe that narrative is fundamental to writing. It's important for teachers and students to think about what goes into telling a story and to transpose that knowledge into taking an essay apart and seeing it as a kind of narrative. Here at the Academy we're trying to show teachers that writing is primarily saying something that you want to say to somebody else, and ideally in the course of two weeks what the teachers want to say expands: They begin by wanting to write about their own experience but then realize that their experience includes what they read and what they think and how they judge things.

CV: How can teachers best convey this concept of writing to their students? RM: I'd love for teachers in elementary school to have students describe things they look at in order to develop a sense of fluency--for teachers to say, "Here is a picture. Look at it and tell me what's there." This assignment is manageable, and asking students what the picture is like activates their minds to explore parts of their own experience. There is no right or wrong answer. and the minute they start talking about what the picture is like they have to integrate previous experiences but not in an intensely personal way. I had a battle with one writing program last year when I was on a visiting committee because they were asking college students to write about the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to them. and I didn't think they had any business doing that. If a kid says he's been sexually abused by his father for the past ten years, what do you do? You're not prepared to deal with that. By asking students to write about things outside of themselves even in the early grades, you get them to start trying to integrate experience but without the traumatic result that often comes when you try to get kids to tell about an intimate experience. If a child writes of sexual abuse, unless you are prepared to follow up on an assignment like that, you don't have any business asking. But you can develop fluency by saying to a kid, "Here's a poem. What does it mean to you? Here's a photograph in a textbook. What does it mean to you? Here's a paragraph describing somebody. What do you get out of the paragraph?" In short, I encourage teachers to give writing assignments that take the kid outside of the intimate experience--assignments that give the academic context in some way and that require the student to integrate memory and experience into understanding a short piece of prose or a photograph or painting.

CV: How can teachers help students move from descriptive exercises into storytelling and a sense of narrative?

RM: The first step is fluency. and you have to show students models. I'm a great believer in taking an essay-- especially a student essay--and saying, "This writer has done what I want." and I say it very precisely. In telling a story, for example, integrating all the details so that you are driving toward a climax, driving toward a moment where you either resolve the problem or identify the problem in such a way that it cries out for resolution beyond your particular essay. The most successful way I have taught is to say to students, "This writer is doing what I want done." I take an essay that I like and walk through it showing that it has transitions, showing that it is using evidence, showing that it is moving from A to B to C in a controlled way, showing that here's an inference where the writer has jumped beyond the evidence to infer something that is plausible from the evidence. Showing the class that one of its members is successful is, I find, very helpful. But never take a bad paper and say it is bad.

CV: What has the Governor's Academy accomplished for teachers?

RM: It's taught a lot of teachers to enjoy writing and to see many possibilities for writing in the classroom. Teachers write me that for the first time they use writing in their classrooms. A lot of elementary school kids are keeping journals now. A lot of teachers have become interested in oral history and keep telling me that they are having their students interview people. Teachers are also looking at textbooks as a means of writing. I hear that teachers, instead of just having discussions, are having students write in response to their textbooks and then read their writing. That's one of the most important things they can do.

CV: What was your most memorable experience as a writer during your school-age years:

RM: Oh, that's hard. No, it isn't hard. The most memorable experience I had was interviewing Estes Kefauver when he had just won the election to the US Senate in 1948. I was fifteen and writing a column of high school news for my hometown paper, the Lenoir City News: and the editor hated Kefauver and, as an insult to him, sent me to interview him. The editor said, "Go tell him you're the press." and since I didn't have a driver's license, my mother drove me to his victory reception, and I interviewed him. The next morning, when I turned in my story, the editor said, "On a newspaper we don't call him 'Mr. Kefauver'; he's just "Kefauver'"'; and he scratched out all the "Mr.'s" and printed the story pretty much as it was under my by- line. It was the first big writing I'd ever done, and he gave me ten dollars. In 1948, ten dollars was, well, ten dollars. It enthralled me that I could do something I enjoyed so much as writing and get paid for it. I don't think I ever wrote a long paper in high school. I took exams, but I don't believe I can remember a single assignment where I had to go off and write a paper. But I did write for the high school paper and edited it for two years--three years really, because when I became managing editor, I did most of the work--and I just loved it. I was writing and seeing people read what I wrote. I started writing a column for the Lenoir City News called "Rambling with Richard." Gone With the Wind was re-released along in that time--for the sixteenth time, I guess--and I saw it twice, and I became a romantic Confederate. All my people had fought for the Union, and I was dismayed by that. and in my column I talked about the great grandeur of the confederacy. But I will say to my credit that when "Brown versus Board" came down in 1954, I wrote immediately that we should accept it--that we can't help what we are, what color we are. That was the first time that I had a large group of people riled up at me. I was twenty years old. and I interviewed old people all over Loudon County, Tennessee, about history. I got marvelous interviews. The newspaper burned down in 1957, and I hope everything I wrote burned up. But I still remember those interviews and some of the wonderful stories I got. Living intimately with a town--seeing its conflicts and its virtues and its hypocrisies--has given me the sense that there's enough to keep writing about in Loudon County (alias Bourbon County in my novels) as long as I live.

CV: How can teachers encourage the kind of enthusiasm for writing that you acquired through journalism?

RM: I hope teachers will show students how to interview people. I really do think that teachers should get students to write for each other and to make writing something other than a test--to make it a way of communicating. One of my most successful assignments in the Academy is to have teachers interview each other and write the interview without using any adjectives but by simply telling what the other person is doing. We also need to understand and accept that not everyone is going to be a good writer. Everyone doesn't want to be a good writer, and everyone doesn't need to be a good writer. But you want to expose everybody possible to the pleasures of writing without being humiliated or upset by the students who don't catch on. I'm always delighted by teachers who come out of the Academy--and there are so many--who discover the thrill of writing.

CV: You warn teachers at the Academy of common pitfalls such as marking too many mistakes, assigning too many papers, and putting too much emphasis on style. How can teachers, especially those with excessive student loads, best teach writing?

RM: I believe the stress ought to be on re-writing. You can have students re-write papers and can read them but comment on them very little. You can say, "Re-write this and try to make it better; there are so many of you, I can't comment on this line-by-line." By re-writing the student will improve. Students have a very hard time making the mechanical adjustments that keep the hand and the brain coordinated, and the only way to deal with that is to have the student re-write and spend more time in bringing the hand and the brain into closer coordination. I don't believe all the notes in the margins that you can write will do that as well as just having a kid re-write a paper.

CV: What guidelines do students need who haven't had much instruction in revision?

RM; You certainly would say to them, "You need to tell me more; I don't understand this." and of course it's always advisable to have them work with each other and get the writer to ask the reader if he or she understands what the writer is trying to say and to have the reader explain what he or she thinks the writer is trying to say.

CV: Most teachers leave the Academy fired with new enthusiasm for writing and having students write. What advice do you have for teachers who don't have professional opportunities like the Academy?

RM: That is so tough. Society puts so many strains on teachers. Teachers are supposed to teach kids morality and all sorts of things that the family was once supposed to do, and society jumps on teachers when kids don't learn anything writing in their classrooms. A lot of elementary school kids are keeping journals now. A lot of teachers have become interested in oral history and keep telling me that they are having their students interview people. Teachers are also looking at textbooks as a means of writing. I hear that teachers, instead of just having discussions, are having students write in response to their textbooks and then read their writing. That's one of the most important things they can do. Teaching today is a very lonely profession. When I was a kid, three teachers I knew were always going to movies together, and I have a feeling that those outside-the-classroom contacts are getting rarer. I do think the salvation of teachers lies in getting together in small groups to talk about problems and to try to work out together how to deal with them. You have to try not to get yourself in one of two positions. You can't get to the place where you are the adversary of your students; on the other hand, you can't get to the place where you want to be one of your students. In some way you have to find ways of getting them to respond to you without necessarily trying to get them to love you. Somewhere between those two extremes, success as a teacher lies.

NOTE: In addition to the works mentioned above, Richard Marius has written The McGraw-Hill College Handbook (with Harvey Wiener), A Short Guide to Writing History, and numerous essays on the teaching of writing and other topics. His third novel, After the War, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993; his fourth novel is due for release in 1995.