A Tribe of Weirdos by Cristi Julsrud

I graduated high school in 1996. My school experience was forgettable. I was a fair student. I was kind of a weirdo; all of my friends were. We read together, and discussed poetry together, and eventually we decided that we should write poetry together too. Thus the Literary Society of West Iredell High School was born.

That’s yours truly in the back row with the 1970s paisley caftan on. Did I mention I was pretty strange?

The Literary Society quickly became one of my favorite places to be, and some of the friendships I formed there have lasted to this day. It was my first writing community, and in spite of the fact that we were mostly writing terrible rip-offs of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, it was the first time I felt like a writer. We met to share work, write together, and support each other.  And even though we never got around to publishing that book of our writing, we did start participating in open mic poetry night at the coffee house downtown, and some of us got together and self-published a zine called The Mad Hatter, with a poetry section titled Vineyard Psalms (ah, the 90s...when any teen with an ink pen and access to a copier could publish).

I cringe now when I look back at some of the poetry I wrote during those afternoons in Ms. Fox’s classroom. But that first writing community gave me the confidence to read at open mic night, which gave me the confidence to take creative writing in college, which gave me the courage to send in poetry for publication, which gave me the courage to join new writing communities, and so on and so forth until here I am today, finding the courage to share my voice with the good people at the Teach Write community.

Sometimes I am still afraid that I don’t have anything valuable to say. And that’s where writing communities are most valuable, to convince you that your voice does matter. It’s never too late to find one; you only need to find your own tribe of weirdos, and make space for yourselves to share your voices with the world. Students need that too, so when you find a little group of kids who want to stay after school and write bad poetry, let them.

You just might help another writer find her voice.


Cristi Julsrud is a National Board certified Language Arts teacher at East Alexander Middle School in Hiddenite, North Carolina. She has taught at the elementary and middle school level, but loves teaching 8th graders the most, and has been doing so for fifteen years. Her primary goal is to create readers and writers and students who are comfortable speaking out and advocating for themselves. She has piloted and implemented a feedback-only, gradeless classroom over the past three years. If you are interested in learning more about Cristi's teaching life or about implementing a gradeless readers/writers workshop, you can read more at her blog at The Literate Teacher's Manifesto (http://litmanifesto.blogspot.com). You can also find her on Twitter (@Mrs_J_of_EAMS) or on Facebook (Cristi Lackey Julsrud).