Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art

Arts & Activities, Feb, 2004 by Jerome J. Hausman

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(2002; $19.95), edited by Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet. Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 5 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003, www.twc.org.

Some art teachers are understandably suspicious of connecting visual arts learning activities with writing and reading. After all, so much time in most curricula is about language learning. So little time is left for non-verbal activity. Yet, there is great potential for collaboration involving visual art and creative writing activities. As Anne Waldman (one of the writers included in this book) put it: "Collaboration is a calling to work with and for others, is the service of something that transcends artistic ego and, as such, has to do with love, survival, generosity, and a conservation in which the terms of language are multidimensional."

Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art is a collection of essays written by poets, teachers, and persons involved in out-of-school creative writing projects. The book references programs at all educational levels. The spirit of all the essays can be summed up by Holly Masturzo's essay: "Consciously connecting physical with cerebral process in the teaching of writing can be our dynamo. By helping students come to understand physicality as something subtle, complicated, wide-reaching and layered--and not simply "primal"--we encourage them to trust their own impulses as stores of knowledge. This in turn helps them to understand that the process of writing, like the process of learning, moves between sensation and sense-making, between matter and mind." For information about this publication, circle No. 393 on the Reader Service Card.