Meet the Teacher" offers a quick introduction to The Porch's Teaching Writers. Today we welcome Ellie Black,  who is teaching two classes for us in Summer 2024: the Taylor Swift-inspired “Tortured Poets Anonymous: The Confessional Poem” and “The Ethics of Writing About Real People.” —Ed. Ellie is a poet and memoirist, currently working on her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, where she also received her MFA. Winner of the 2023 Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, she has work published in The Drift, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mississippi Review, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. —Ed.

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Tell us about a book you've recently read and enjoyed.

A few months ago, I read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, which is just an absolutely baller novel. Strange and beautiful and deeply affecting, it made me feel like the secrets of my heart aren’t so secret. Plus I have a special fondness for prose books written by poets. I’m also currently reading The Art of Creative Research by Philip Gerard and loving it. And to shout out a poetry collection, earlier this summer, I read Figment by Leila Chatti, which is a gorgeous exploration of the grief of infertility and pregnancy loss through the deconstruction of language into sound parts.

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What’s one craft book or essay you return to again and again?

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is, of course, one of the absolute classics. I often teach “Shitty First Drafts” to remind my students (or let them know for the first time!) that first drafts are supposed to be bad, and in fact it’s better if they are.

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What is your favorite writing rule to break?

This one’s poetry-specific: There’s a sort of general agreement that contemporary poetry doesn’t/shouldn’t rhyme—that to rhyme is amateurish or uncool. And certainly I usually tell young or inexperienced poets to read contemporary poets and write without rhyme schemes in their own work (at least for a while) so  they can develop a sense of their own voice rather than trying to stuff their ideas into the box of what they think poetry Should Be Like, an idea often based on an incomplete education on poetry, its history, and its uses. 

But I love rhyme. I use it all the time in my own work. I’m very invested in sound play. Sometimes that looks more formal (á la sonnets); sometimes it’s intense internal rhyme. I’m also very fond of a rhyming (and/or strictly metric) couplet at the end of an otherwise non-rhyming poem. I suppose for me it’s one of those learn-the-rules-so-you-can-break-them situations. Rhyme can be so enchanting and incantatory under the right circumstances.

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Music while writing: Y/N? 

Definitely! I often get locked into one song on repeat while I’m working on a particular project—recently, while working on an essay on the linkages between confessional poetry and memoir, I got stuck listening to “The Florist” by Abby Sage for days in a row. Other recent writing loop songs include “Touching Yourself” by Japanese Breakfast, “Call Me Your Baby” by River Whyless, and “If I Was” by Creekbed Carter Hogan.

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What do you love most about teaching writing?

I love the “a-ha” moment when a student finally understands how to communicate an idea. The important thing isn’t saying it correctly, or in the most objectively beautiful or flowery set of words; it’s saying it how you need to say it. Watching a student really understand that for the first time is magical, no matter what we’re working on: a poem, an essay, a personal statement, anything.

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There’s a sort of general agreement that contemporary poetry doesn’t/shouldn’t rhyme. But I love rhyme. I’m very invested in sound play. I’m very fond of a rhyming (and/or strictly metric) couplet at the end of an otherwise non-rhyming poem. I suppose for me it’s one of those learn-the-rules-so-you-can-break-them situations.

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Tell us why you pitched these classes. 

On Saturday 6/29, I’m teaching a class on Taylor Swift and confessional poetry. I was of course inspired by the famous Harvard Taylor Swift class taught by Stephanie Burt this spring. I also did a lecture in December 2023 at the University of Mississippi about confessional poetry in which I explored the connection between Swift’s writing style and the original Confessional movement, so I’m pulling from that, too. I’m a musician as well as a poet and nonfiction writer, so I get excited to consider what songwriting and poetry do and don’t have in common.

Then on Saturday 7/13, I’m teaching a class called The Ethics of Writing about Real People. I’m currently working on a book that explores this very question: What are the ethics of writing (in fiction or nonfiction) about real people? What do writers owe their subjects? So this is sort of my life’s work at the moment, ha. It’s a lifelong obsession for sure. I’m thrilled by the opportunity to get to discuss these big questions with a classroom of folks interested in writing about their own lives or in using real people as characters in fiction.

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Share something that has inspired your creativity lately, other than a book.  

Maybe this is kind of cheating because it’s based on a book, but I just saw Gatsby: An American Myth at the American Repertory Theater. Life-changing. Perhaps the best musical of the decade. The music is outstanding, and Chavkin et. al.’s take on Fitzgerald’s story and its continued resonance up to present day just really works. It activated many of the same questions for me that are activated by memoir and other writing about real people: How do we imagine each other? How do we tell each other’s stories? How do we adapt pre-existing stories, and what do we choose to change? What’s real, what’s made up, and when does it matter? 

It also made me cry a lot. At one particular moment I (along with half the audience) literally screamed in delighted surprise. No spoilers.

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