Before I Was a Teacher, I Was a Writer by Christi Julsrud

Before I was a teacher, I was a writer. Poetry gave me an outlet for what, as a teenager, felt like my tortured soul. As I got older, and realized that maybe I wasn’t so tortured, poetry gave me a way to capture beauty from ugly memories, a way to hold on to what is good in the light of change and chaos. I still turn to poetry to embrace the beauty in everyday life. No matter how ugly things get, poetry gives me an opportunity to make something beautiful out of words.

Many of my favorite poems came from a very dark period of my life, when an important relationship fell apart. I lost a lot of myself. Writing poetry was healing, and as I worked to make something beautiful out of the fragments left of my life, I started to discover my own voice. It makes me smile now to realize how much I gained from a time that seemed so full of loss. This poem is one of my favorites.

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).