For some writers, community service comes naturally. But for those of us who are accustomed to guarding our precious writing time with our lives, the very thought of adding another activity—no matter how worthy—is daunting. We watch in awe as fellow writers teach, mentor, and travel to remote locations to give workshops to populations ranging from the incarcerated to the homeless to senior citizens. Why do they do it? How do they find the time and emotional energy? Is it possible to serve others without neglecting one's own work?

"The philosophy I learned coming up is that you give back whatever resources you have," says poet and arts activist Kenneth Carroll. "I'm terrible at technology, carpentry, and pretty much everything else useful, but I do know how to write—and I can teach that."

Carroll is executive director of DC WritersCorps, which sends writers to teach middle school students throughout Washington, D.C. Teaching adolescents to "see writing as a lifelong tool for success" may prevent them from dropping out of school. It also enriches Carroll's life and his writing. "I'm always learning and boning up on the fundamentals of my craft, which in turn informs both me and my work," he says.

OUTREACH TO THE "ORDINARY"
For novelist and professor Rosellen Brown, volunteering is a chance to "shut up and listen" to people who have never tried to tell their stories on paper before. A board member of Neighborhood Writing Alliance (NWA) and an occasional seminar leader, she says the work has affirmed her belief that "everybody potentially has a voice that can be heard on paper."

NWA volunteer writers lead weekly workshops for adults in a dozen different venues across Chicago, including libraries, homeless shelters, and social-services agency offices. As part of its mission to provide "an avenue for people to write about their personal experiences," NWA reaches out to everyone from recent immigrants to residents of housing projects. The organization publishes students' work in a quarterly literary magazine, Journal of Ordinary Thought.

"The students are people who are eager to tell their stories," says Brown. "There is a tremendous desire to go on record with terrible things that have happened in their lives, to celebrate the wonderful things, and to learn to appreciate the details that will make a terrific story or poem." For Brown, the work is not just about "doing your bit for the community." It's a unique opportunity to hear authentic voices that are "different from your own solipsistic voice and the voices of those you teach."

Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (Anchor, 1992), also gives talks to NWA students, as well as to young teachers and students in public schools. For him, deciding which invitations to accept and which to reject is never easy, but "I figure [these talks are] the least I can do, since I can't afford to give back in a significant way financially."

Kotlowitz finds he sometimes welcomes the chance to engage with the world in the midst of long writing stints, and he also enjoys the chance to discuss his work with students who have read it. "I don't write for myself-I write to be read. So there's nothing more rewarding than to know I'm being read, and to talk about my writing with students who are discovering the joy of reading and writing."

MENTORING MAGIC
Los Angeles screenwriter Allison Deegan went to a meeting of WriteGirl, expecting to write a check and duck out the door. Instead, something about the group's work—matching high school girls with writers—made her feel "warm and fuzzy," so she signed on to become a mentor.

Deegan had never worked with teenagers before—"I was afraid of them"—but she found the work rejuvenating. "Writers are so neurotic that we often don't value what we do. But as a mentor, you see the difference you're making right away. As you give [someone else] validation, a little bit of your insecurity about whether writing is worth doing goes away."

Not that the relationship is always smooth sailing. "In our training, we emphasize that mentors have to really commit to the communication process and not see it as a rejection if the girl doesn't call back," says Keren Taylor, founder and executive director of WriteGirl. Case in point: Deegan's first mentee disappeared from the program for several weeks, despite repeated phone calls and letters. It turned out the eighth-grader had been caring for six younger brothers while her mother was at work.

Although mentoring cuts into Deegan's writing time, she says the feeling of community and the affirmation of the value of writing make it worthwhile. "This work has transformed me," she says. "I feel it's a privilege knowing all these girls and their challenges."

For award-winning activist and poet Allison Hedge Coke, mentoring helps heal the wounds of the past. As a Native American who has experienced homelessness, family mental illness, and poverty, Hedge Coke is active in mentoring and teaching Native Americans on reservations, in urban settings, and in prisons in South Dakota and other states. From this work has come several published anthologies representing migrant and rural children, Native American youths, and disabled youths, as well as recognition as Mentor of the Year in 2001 by the Wordcraft Circle of Writers and Storytellers. She is currently working on collections by children of schizophrenics and members of the Native American working class.

"These are all places of renewal for me, as I give back to where I came from myself," says Coke, who was mentored herself as a teenager by a Native American poet. "Whether my students are aware of how much we share or not, I know. It gives me a personal truth to return to my own beginnings and do some good work there." The work is fraught with challenges, including burnout. But every once in a while there are "those moments when something clicks and a student erupts into a writer from a nonwriter. It is always magic. There is nothing like it."

UNEARTHING SENIORS' STORIES
Fiction writer Susannah Risley began working with senior citizens as a volunteer while attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She's been doing it ever since. Thanks in part to grants from Poets & Writers, Inc. (the publisher of this magazine), she has traveled all over New York State to lead memoir-writing groups, and has "had a blast doing it."

Risley learned early on that older people in our society are an undiscovered treasure. "Something like eighty percent of people in nursing homes never have a visitor," she says. "They don't have the interaction of talking to other people, and they don't have their lives validated. When you express interest, they become much more animated and excited, and you see how interesting they really are."

Risley is fascinated with older people and the link they provide to history. "People in their eighties and nineties grew up in a world without media, when high school education included learning Latin, and when character and community were vitally important," she says. "With a little jogging of their memories, they remember extraordinary things, and they tend to be very good writers. Working with people who are so stable and have so much character has really enlarged my experience of humanity." It even inspired Risley to reconnect with a lost chapter of her own history, tracking down an aunt and uncle she had never met before.

Poet Clara Sala, who works with seniors, teenagers, the homeless, and HIV sufferers in New York City, says she uses different approaches with each group. "With elders, listening becomes really important," she says. "I'm sensitive to the fact that a lot of them feel that society views them as not useful or full human beings." She emphasizes to these students that "the process of bringing out parts of yourself that you've kept under wraps is ageless."

BIG CHANGES BEHIND BARS
Best-selling novelist and retired English teacher Wally Lamb says that his involvement with a writing workshop at Connecticut's maximum-security prison York Correctional Institution is the most rewarding teaching he's ever done. "I work with students who are immediately appreciative, who have come to a place and a time in their lives where they really want to figure things out and are hungry to learn all they can. They take feedback seriously, they work hard, they invest in revision. For a teacher, that's something big that you get back."

But first you have to gain students' trust, in an environment where mistrust often prevails, and get them to open up on paper. "Many incarcerated women have been victimized all their lives," Lamb explains. "If you're told during your formative years that you're an idiot, you learn silence. So one of the things you have to do as a teacher is get women beyond the assumption that they are voiceless. Once they start trusting their memories on the page, they begin to feel better."

Racial issues can also block communication. "Most of my students are black and I am not, so that can be a problem for black guys who feel that all whites are the enemy," says Wally Wood, a business writer and novelist who has volunteered in both the Connecticut and New York state prison systems since 1992. "My being there forces them to reevaluate that, just as I've had to reevaluate what I think about convicted felons."

To make sure students are serious about writing, it's important to establish firm parameters, says Wood, whose prison workshops include fiction, nonfiction, and a practical class he developed called Writing for Life. "I learned to make it an ironclad rule that each person has to bring a piece of writing to class as a ticket of admission. You either have to participate by writing or not be in the class."

Teaching fiction and poetry has helped Wood grow as a fiction writer. "Seeing students' work, and the kinds of writing problems they have, helps me learn more about how fiction is put together—what works, what doesn't work, and why it doesn't work," he says.

The work has also tested his ability to be flexible. "Prisons are bureaucracies whose first concern is safety and security," he says. "You can show up for a class and, through a clerical error, you're not on the list to get in that night. Or there's been a fight and the whole prison is locked down. Or you have a terrific student and boom, he's gone, because he's been transferred to another prison. If you like a nice, steady routine, this is not the thing to volunteer for."

GIVING VOICE TO THE VOICELESS
Publisher and Iowa resident Robert Wolf first taught GED classes at a homeless shelter in 1988. He encourages students to open up on paper with his own technique of oral storytelling, followed by writing and publication. "Getting their writing published gave homeless people self-respect and self-esteem. It's an important element in rehabilitation, to feel that someone cares enough about you to publish your work," he says.

Since then, Wolf has helped a wide variety of populations get their stories and histories into print. He cofounded the nonprofit Free River Press, which publishes collections of writing by farmers, the homeless, and former prison inmates, among others. This work promotes his message that "these are real people, not simply numbers," and it gives him insights into the current state of the country. Plus, it helps his own writing.

Similarly, Detroit-based poet M.L. Liebler seeks to bring poetry to unlikely places, since that's where poetry first found him. "The reason I want to volunteer and contribute is because I came to poetry in an unusual way, from a blue-collar, working-class family, not from a home where books were read. My thinking is that if a person from my background—totally disconnected from the arts and literature-can become an appreciator of poetry, anybody can."

In his drive to "spread the poetry gospel," Liebler has spent time with youths, senior citizens, and prisoners in urban and suburban Detroit, and as far as Germany and China. It is the same challenge regardless of his audience: "You're making people aware of something they've never thought about before, and showing them it can have a life-changing effect."

Whether you choose a volunteer role as a mentor or a workshop leader, whether you work with inner-city adolescents or rural senior citizens, whether you put in an hour each month or 10 hours a week, you'll probably find that this "life-changing effect" isn't limited to those on the receiving end. For many writers, giving back is a chance to pass on a spark that was ignited in them by a teacher, mentor, or role model. "A lot of volunteers in our organization had one or two people in their lives who inspired and encouraged them to be a writer," says Shannon Hughes, program director of the New York City-based Girls Write Now mentoring organization. "Now they want to provide that same inspiration to someone else."

Catherine Wald is the author of The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph from 20 Top Authors (Persea Books, 2004). She can be found at www.writerwald.com [3] and www.rejectioncollection.com [4].