Indiana University Southeast Writing Project

Our writing marathon was inspired by Richard Louth, SLWP. A portion of his article follows:

The New Orleans Writing Marathon

By: Richard Louth
Date: Winter 2002
Summary: Louisiana site director Richard Louth describes the magic, and anxiety, of leading a writing marathon. While revealing that “things do go wrong,” he admits surprising success and offers tips for conducting a marathon, writing prompts, and excerpts of participants’ writing.

Café du Monde and the click and clanging of the glasses and silverware. One of the few places where they greet you with a glass of water.”
—Trish Benit, 2001

The sexy yak of a saxophone drifts into the Café du Monde, mixing with the beat of ceiling fans and the smell of hot, powdered beignets. Across the street, two children tap-dance for quarters while a third spins a bicycle wheel on his head, the spokes a gray halo in the humid air. A horse-drawn carriage clops by St. Louis Cathedral while a mime dressed as Uncle Sam freezes in midstride outside the café window. Inside, teachers gingerly sip café au lait, knock excess sugar off their beignets, and stare at the world outside. Despite their good spirits, I see anxiety in their expressions. “What are we doing here?” they seem to ask.

Usually by 10 a.m., members of our Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project (SLWP) summer institute are comfortably enclosed in a room on the other side of the swamps. And we have already finished journal writing, someone has shared the log, and one nervous summer fellow is launching into a ninety-minute teaching demonstration.

But today we are embracing the unfamiliar in our surroundings, and ourselves, through a field trip we call the New Orleans Writing Marathon.

In the Beginning: Natalie Goldberg’s Marathon

Our first writing marathon took place on much more familiar soil in 1992, when one summer institute participant, Melanie Plesh, introduced us to her practice of journaling with students and to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. During her teaching demonstration, the other institute participants sat around one table and wrote for hours in response to Melanie’s prompts, which differ significantly from Goldberg’s (see below). Here is Goldberg’s advice about writing during the marathon:

Everyone in the group agrees to commit himself or herself for the full time. Then we make up a schedule. For example, a ten-minute writing session, another ten-minute session, a fifteen-minute session, two twenty-minute sessions, and then we finish with a half-hour round of writing. So for the first session, we all write for ten minutes and then go around the room and read what we’ve written with no comments by anyone. . . . A pause naturally happens after each reader, but we do not say “That was great” or even “I know what you mean.” There is no good or bad, no praise or criticism. We read what we have written and go on to the next person. . . . What usually happens is you stop thinking: you write; you become less and less self-conscious. Everyone is in the same boat, and because no comments are made, you feel freer and freer to write anything you want. (150)

Go to SLWP to read the rest:

This is the theory behind our marathoning, and the first week of every institute, we still “marathon” this way because we value the intensity of the writing experience and the sense of community it produces. But in 1994, we discovered how the marathon could be transformed into a different dish altogether when we added a cup of Louisiana spices to the roux.

The First New Orleans Marathon

The first New Orleans Writing Marathon was not for an institute but for a conference of about a hundred teacher-consultants from across the state. Asked to lead an afternoon of writing activities for the statewide Louisiana Writing Project’s Festival of Writers, I wanted to do a marathon based on our site’s approach but knew that there were too many people to make it work. I knew also that after a morning of workshops, teachers would rather be on the streets of the French Quarter than writing in a hotel conference room, and that they would crave a chance to chat over an oyster po’boy washed down by a Dixie beer at least as much as the opportunity to write. The solution was to form small writing groups and release them to the streets where Faulkner wrote his first novel, Tennessee Williams set A Streetcar Named Desire, and Andrei Codrescu insists The Muse is Always Half-Dressed.

Immediately, there were practical questions. Who should be in each group? Where should each group go? What would convince them to come back? Also, as both the city and the marathon experience were new to most participants, how could they be prepared for each?

Fearing mass confusion, groups too large, individuals left out, and people getting lost, I had collected the names of all participants beforehand and on file cards created groups with designated itineraries. However, at the last minute, instinct told me to have faith in my audience, to scrap these plans, and to ask everyone to determine their own groups and paths. All they received was a simple handout explaining Goldberg’s advice about responding, a map, and a list of restaurants, coffeehouses, and bars. In addition, I recommended that they limit groups to four or five people so as not to disrupt any establishment they entered, that they try to pick a new spot to write each hour, and that they return by 5 p.m. I concluded with three final pieces of advice that I still give to marathoners:

written by David Stoner