Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Rhyme and Reason : Bowman High Writing Class Teaches Students to Express Themselves

I’ll designate a driver to cruise through my mind.

But let me tell you

I’ll warn him of the twisted thoughts and ghoulish nightmares.

That exist on my freeway of thought.

-- From the poem “Head Trip,” by Bowman High School student Christine Forman

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Having a troubled past is considered an asset in Richard Weekley’s creative writing class at Bowman High School, a continuation school for students taken out of traditional schools.

Weekley has taught students to capture their experiences and emotions through poetry. Today, the class will unveil a book of the students’ writings called “Buried Mirrors” at the school, 21515 Redview Drive.

Christine Forman’s “Head Trip” and Len Carthy’s “That Damn Basil” are among the more than 40 poems written by 23 students contained in the book. Carthy’s work reads:

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I’m missing a piece of my finger.

That damn Basil is always trying to break me apart.

Even the plants are trying to do me in now.

Or was it that knife?

I’m missing a piece of my finger.

It’s a nice big chunk that’s gone.

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The book, available for $2.50, is simple--38 pages printed on letter-sized paper folded in half. But Weekley and his students said that capturing the feelings in print means more than the slickness of the product or its sales.

“I think the people are more poetic here than at a normal high school,” said Melvin Butters, 18, a student with two poems in the book. “The people here have gone through different experiences.”

Weekley said he started the class, now in its second year, because he felt there were plenty of talented minds at the school, but many were afraid to write because of bad experiences in English classes at traditional schools.

“Hopefully, the main thing they’ll get out of this classroom is willingness to trust themselves and their thoughts and feelings,” he said. “We do a lot of encouraging of them to take their feelings and thoughts and express them, knowing they won’t be laughed at.”

Many of the Bowman students are willing to “take more chances” than traditional students do once they are comfortable writing, making their poetry more intriguing, Weekley said.

Darren Beauchamp, 16, said that he started writing love poems for girls when e was a freshman but that Weekley’s class has opened him up in other ways. Beauchamp has two poems in the book, neither containing any romantic references.

“He’s taught us not how to write, but what to pick out,” he said.

Another Weekley student, Brian Preece, has won a scholarship to the California State Summer School for the Arts in creative writing.

Weekley, whose poems have been published in four countries, said he taught for 24 years at traditional schools in the Santa Clarita Valley before requesting a transfer two years ago to Bowman, where he felt there would be more freedom in what he could teach students.

He said some of his creative writing techniques could be taught at regular schools, but a full course on it was impossible.

Many students’ enthusiasm for poetry has proved surprisingly strong, Weekley added. He said he went to a poetry reading in Los Angeles about three months ago, and several of his students asked to go along.

“Here are the supposed troublemakers, the gang-bangers, and they’re sitting at a poet-laureate reading, and at the end of it they’re going, ‘God, that was great,’ ” he said.