A series of posts on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.
One of the most revealing exercises that teachers regularly assign in the creative writing classroom is the construction of a literary “family tree”—a map of a student writer’s artistic influences, those influences’ influences, and so on. In my creative writing MFA program, I had to construct a family tree of 20 poets who had shaped my own writing style, starting with 20th-century poet Adrienne Rich and stretching back from her to Emily Dickinson in the 19th century, on to Shakespeare, and all the way back to Sappho, who wrote 2,500 years ago. I then read and took an exam on all these figures’ writing. The exam resembled comprehensive exams in a PhD program, but with the explicit framework of my own personal artistic lineage and legacy.
In this post, I offer the “family tree” as a tool to be used by instructors in any discipline to help students on their vocational journeys.
Poetry is a deeply intertextual art form, with poets responding directly and indirectly to their predecessors and forming a continuous chain of thought spanning thousands of years. For students to know why they write the way they do, they need to understand that they do not exist in a vacuum. As creative writing instructors, we ask our students to see themselves as part of a larger heritage of thinkers and artists, both those who came before them and those who will continue after them. We ask them to explore their roots and consider what kind of legacy they want to leave for future writers. What traditions do they want to follow and continue? What walls do they want to tear down? What silences do they want to break?
Poet Judy Grahn’s book The Highest Apple, first published in 1980, powerfully illustrates this practice in action. In it, Grahn creates a cultural history of lesbian writers, starting with Sappho and moving all the way to her own present moment. The focus of her book was intentionally political—she aimed to show that there have always been lesbian poets, and that lesbians have had an outsized impact shaping lyric poetry. Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians makes similar claims, but about early 20th century intellectual movements.
This lineage paradigm can help student historians, philosophers, doctors, and engineers find where they fit into the larger historical context of their field. Every discipline has its movements, turning points, significant figures, and lines of influence or schools of thought. It’s just a matter of making these apparent to students and helping them see where they are situated within them. Perhaps even more powerfully, the inherent message of a “family tree” type of assignment is: you belong. You belong in this field, this discipline, this profession, this tradition. As a lesbian who was closeted in college and for part of grad school, I could have benefited from this exercise. Finding myself in rich, long-standing traditions through books like Grahn’s and Souhami’s would have been deeply empowering.
An equally inspiring framework asks us to consider the ways that we, but especially our students, are not the “end of the line” but merely a new branch in the grand tree of history. In an interview on NetVUE’s podcast Callings, Abel Chávez, president of Our Lady of the Lake University, shared that he asks his students two questions when discussing vocational discernment with them: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and “What type of ancestor do you want to be?” Similarly, in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Robert N. Bellah and colleagues write that students should be invited to “consciously link [their] destinies to those of [their] ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants.” In this kind of lineage exercise, students can consider the ancestors they owe gratitude and imagine the descendants they hope to feel responsible for.
Any instructor in any discipline can ask students to consider their intellectual or artistic lineage and legacy—to invite them to imagine and see where their individual lives fit into the broader history of the world’s knowledge. For instance, students in an education class could make a family tree that shows what other teachers have inspired or influenced their classroom style. Social science students could consider the key theorists who have shaped their research interests, or music students could explore their “musical DNA.”
Students in any discipline can also be invited to write an “intellectual autobiography” that details the steps in their academic development. Which theories did they wrestle with the most? Which concepts transformed their paradigms? Which major texts, questions, or arguments shaped their understanding of their discipline most profoundly?
With sophomores or juniors who have declared their majors, this exercise works best with a narrow, discipline-oriented approach. But with budding first-year students or graduating seniors reflecting in a capstone class, a broader, more personal approach can also work well. For this approach, consider using the tree of life exercise, which Zimbabwean child psychologist Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo developed as a narrative-based therapeutic intervention for vulnerable children. Using the simple metaphor of a tree, students reflect on their life influences (roots), skills and values (trunk), hopes and dreams (branches), supportive mentors (leaves), and gifts received (fruits). My favorite thing about the exercise is that it allows students to celebrate their “roots” and to remain connected with their families, cultural heritage, and values. This is especially important for first-generation students and students from historically underrepresented communities who may face institutional barriers, imposter syndrome, or a purpose gap during their vocational discernment.
I first learned about the tree of life exercise from my university’s Center for Career and Professional Development. I incorporated it into my senior capstone and found that it resonated powerfully with my students, especially when it was paired with structured discussion. At the very end of class that day, I asked students to focus on the “leaves” and “fruits” on their trees—on the people who have shaped them most, and the gifts those people have given them. I then invited my students to pick one of those people and write them a thank-you note—either over email or via text—and send it before they left the classroom that day.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the room, me included.
Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University. She is the author of six poetry collections, two video game history books, and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. Her lyrics have been performed at Carnegie Hall and her poetry is permanently installed on a wall of the New York City Public Library’s East Harlem branch. She is a teacher of students aged 8 to 80, and received her MFA from George Mason University. For more posts by Alyse, click here.