Inside My Pencil: Teaching Poetry in Detroit Public Schools

by Peter Markus

Overview

For over twenty years, award-winning short story writer and novelist Peter Markus has made his living teaching creative writing in the Detroit Public Schools. As a teaching artist with Detroit's longest enduring literary non-profit — InsideOut Literary Arts Project — Markus has inspired thousands of students to become believers in the power of words, armed with nothing but an ordinary pencil — the same beat-up, unsharpened pencil Markus has carried with him, story has it, since he was in the third grade. With nods to Pablo Neruda, Mark Strand, T.S. Eliot, and the vital honesty of his own poetic experience, he invites children to explore the dreamscapes of their imaginary worlds, encouraging even the most resistant students to see what magic and wonder awaits them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941531860
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	03/28/2017
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Peter Markus is the Senior Writer with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. He is the author of the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as several other books of short fiction, among them We Make Mud and The Fish and the Not Fish.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Because I Must vii

Mr. Pete and the Twelve-Legged Purple Octopus 13

Inside My Magic Pencil 35

The Boy with the Blind Third Eye 53

Transformed, or on Becoming a Ladybug 71

Caged Brains 97

Beyond the Blue of the Sky 107

My Pencil Is 115

A Knock at the Door 119

Accidents Will Happen 123

Nothing Beautiful 125

Something Beautiful 133

Love Is a Big Blue Cadillac 137

Inside My Heart 143

Memory Is a Box 151

The Singing Hearts 155

On Growing Up 157

I've Got the Whole World in My Hands 163

What Have I Just Done? 173

Finding Your Voice 179

Mr. Pete and the Twelve-Legged Purple Octopus: Revisited 187

Afterword: Poetry is Good Food 195

Editorial Reviews

01/23/2017
Markus (The Fish and the Not Fish) transports readers into the classroom in the Detroit Public Schools where he has spent over 20 years teaching creative writing as part of the nonprofit InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Markus—or “Mr. Pete,” as he’s called in his classes—doesn’t devote a lot of space to the mechanics of his role or the lesson plans. Instead, he immerses readers in the discourse in the classroom. Markus makes use of the creative license he instills in students; the book is a teacher’s guide of sorts but reads like experimental memoir. He demonstrates with his own words how he captivates students through stories and how he gets students to believe in the power of words and imagination, and see beauty in the work of metaphor and simile. Over the course of the book, readers become his students, and even the most cynical will emerge believing a bit more in the magic of creativity. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Markus writes in spare yet poetic language that is simple enough to be read and understood by younger readers. However, adults—especially writers and teachers—willing to see with their hearts as well as their minds will also be rewarded for reading this unique book. An inventive and inspiring memoir from an innovative educator."
-Kirkus Reviews



“In prose that is poetic in itself, Markus brings us into the classroom and feeds us lines his students came up with in response. The creativity and imagination of the kids is a joy to read.”
-NewPage



"Peter Markus’s teaching memoir, is warm, patient, and wise—an enchanting ‘how-to’ sparkling with pedagogical gems.”
-Brooklyn Rail



“Not only is Markus a wonderfully gifted fiction writer and poet of immense talent, but he is a passionate, dedicated, and generous creative writing teacher of both schoolchildren and adults. In this new inspiring book, Mr. Pete shows that he's a true Detroit original. His working-class roots and sensibilities have combined to create in him a unique literary voice and an incredible heart for teaching and believing in young writers. He has had a major impact on thousands of young lives of Detroit school children, and this new book is his story…. You will enjoy the experience of a great literary journey as a reader, and you will have the rich opportunity to see the joy of creativity in action.”
-M. L. Liebler, author of I Want to Be Once and Heaven Was Detroit: Detroit Music from Jazz to Hip Hop



"Part memoir, part magic, Inside My Pencil is an ode to the human imagination by one of our best excavators of that imagination. Markus leads us on a journey through the classroom, a journey that also swerves through both the mind and heart. ... Read this book. It is a book of wonders, a book 'where anything—no, everything—is possible.'"
-Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzzanines



"In a glowing current of interwoven short essays, 'Mr. Pete' carries us into the transformative glow of his classroom, that trap door to the sublime that opens into the magic pencil—a chewed-up, ordinary wand that sparks the spirit behind words, a telescope that allows us, like his visionary Detroit students, to see with a third eye right through the sky's blue into the magic we hold in our own hands. ... In hoping to write an ode to children, Markus failed. Instead, he soared beyond: this book bears witness to a love strong enough to save the world heart by heart; it is a ceaseless testament to the beauty of being alive, an ageless reminder to us all that nothing ever dies and to believe in what can and cannot be seen."

—Robert Fanning, author of American Prophet



"Markus has handcrafted a moving prime moving primer for the primal crafting of our prime directive. In Inside My Pencil (a memoir, a meditation, a Mercator map projection) Markus makes news and makes the new new again (for his students, for us, for himself) renegotiating that ancient saw about there being nothing new under that old poetic fusion-powered endlessly blissful and basking sun. Here there is a time for everything and that time for you, reader, is now."
-Michael Martone, author of Rules of Thumb



"Markus helps us say yes to a world where magic and transcendence are still possible. This book reaffirms that any one of us—when led by a teacher like Markus—can baptize a page in light."
-John Rybicki, author of We Bed Down Into Water



"I read most of Inside My Pencil in one sitting with a smile on my face. It is a gift of spare and resonant language that earns its delights. Markus’s syntax, imaginative figurations, and refrains constantly fold in on themselves, creating pockets of density or space. In these pockets the reader is invited to imagine and wonder alongside the lovingly rendered children of Detroit."
- Jamaal May, author of Hum


"Markus (The Fish and the Not Fish) transports readers into the classroom in the Detroit Public Schools where he has spent over 20 years teaching creative writing as part of the nonprofit InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Markus—or “Mr. Pete,” as he’s called in his classes—doesn’t devote a lot of space to the mechanics of his role or the lesson plans. Instead, he immerses readers in the discourse in the classroom. Markus makes use of the creative license he instills in students; the book is a teacher’s guide of sorts but reads like experimental memoir. He demonstrates with his own words how he captivates students through stories and how he gets students to believe in the power of words and imagination, and see beauty in the work of metaphor and simile. Over the course of the book, readers become his students, and even the most cynical will emerge believing a bit more in the magic of creativity."
-Publishers Weekly


“Markus empowers his students to turn their simple No. 2 pencils into instruments more magical than any wand at Hogwarts.”
—Booklist

From the Publisher

2016-12-26
A fiction writer chronicles his journey teaching Detroit children to use words to give flight to their imaginations.For 20 years, Michigan-based novelist and short story writer Markus (The Fish and the Not Fish, 2014, etc.) has worked at the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit as a writer in residence and educator. In this book, he presents a series of quirky, charming essays that capture some of the exchanges he had with the young inner-city students he taught. Markus begins with a piece that recalls how he transformed an episode of tardiness to class into an occasion to tell his students about the "twelve-legged purple octopus with the goldfish-orange top hat" that made him late. "I wanted to talk to the kids about the powers of the imagination, how words can get us to believe in the unbelievable," he writes. In "Inside My Magic Pencil," Markus shares some of the creative visions of his "young seers"—which included everything from a giant purple squid eating a cheeseburger to a rainbow eyeball—after they looked inside pencils that Markus made them believe were "magic." As he writes in "Caged Brains," his intent was to make the children "see what nobody else has seen." With eyes trained to "see beyond the surface," his students, most of whom struggled with poverty, could then begin to look for beauty in everything from broken glass to crushed violets. In "Nothing Beautiful," the author recounts how an 8-year-old girl who believed that "nothing is beautiful" in the world later discovered it in herself after her mother told her that she was beautiful. Markus writes in spare yet poetic language that is simple enough to be read and understood by younger readers. However, adults—especially writers and teachers—willing to see with their hearts as well as their minds will also be rewarded for reading this unique book. An inventive and inspiring memoir from an innovative educator.

Kirkus Reviews