The Mark Farrington Personal Writing Award

The Northern Virginia Writing Project is pleased to announce the fourth annual Mark Farrington Personal Writing Award of $500 to be granted to one NVWP Teacher Consultant to further his or her personal writing.

The money may be used to attend a conference or workshop, to take a course, to purchase books, to buy release time—anything directly related to furthering his or her personal writing. All TC’s are eligible, whether they are currently teaching, working in another field, or retired. ( Please note: This award is only available to NVWP TCS, i.e., teachers who have completed the five week Northern Virginia Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute).  

Those interested should send a letter of no more than 250 words to Dr. Paul M. Rogers at the address below. Self-nominations are accepted.  Deadline for applications is February 1, 2012; notification of the award is February 15, 2011; and the money must be spent by December 30, 2012.

Read “The Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival: Changing My Focus to the Poet in Me” written by 2010 Award Winner and NVWP Co-Director Cathy Hailey.  The article comes from the 2010 Vol. 3 Issue of the Journal of the Virginia Writing Project.

Please send letters of interest to:

Paul M. Rogers
Director, Northern Virginia Writing Project
English Department
3E4 George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Or use the form below:

cforms contact form by delicious:days

A personal message to NVWP TCs from Mark Farrington

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in eleventh grade. Around that time, and especially once I got to college, I also thought I’d like to become a teacher. But to me, these two careers did not seem compatible. I had read books and articles by writers who talked about how they wrote, and had even met a few professional writers and saw how they wrote, and what I saw seemed directly opposed to what I was being taught in school. Professional writers talked about discovery and surprise and spontaneity; they didn’t know what they had to say until they saw what they’d written down. “I thought I was writing X,” they said, “until halfway through, I suddenly discovered I was writing Y.” And they didn’t say this as if they considered themselves a failure; rather, they accepted this was part of the process.

In school I was taught that I should know exactly what I wanted to say before I ever set pen to paper. You decide what you want to say and then you say it, and your focus in the writing is to make sure your sentences are clear and grammatically correct. It’s a waste of time and paper – and a clear sign of failure – if halfway through a writing you suddenly decide it’s really about something different than you originally thought.

Simply put, the way I was being taught to write in school was opposite the way I was seeing professional writers write. Oddly enough, I didn’t rail at education for being wrong; I simply decided these must be different worlds, and I would have to choose one or the other.

I chose being a writer, and I left academia and worked as a taxi driver, a clerk in a bookstore, a security guard and caretaker at an 86-acre resort. I sought to teach myself how to write like a writer, by reading Flannery O’Connor’s letters, all of John Gardner, Dorothea Brande, and novels, novels, novels.

In 1986 I decided to get an M.F.A. I went to George Mason, and I discovered that in the nine years I’d been out of academia, a revolution had occurred. Thanks in large part to the work of the National Writing Project (and reflected at Mason by Don Gallehr, Chris Thaiss, and others of NVWP), students were now being taught to write the way professional writers wrote. Even more, teachers who taught writing were being asked to practice writing themselves.

Suddenly these two worlds that had seemed so opposed to each other had come together, and for me, what a revelation it was to think that I could actually become both a writer and a teacher; I didn’t have to choose one over the other.

And the great thing for me is that I am a writer AND a teacher. Those two things together make up what I do best. To only be a writer is too solitary for me, too solipsistic; to only be a teacher has meant, for me, minimizing a desire I’ve had all my life, to create something permanent of my own, to make something creative out of my own existence. When I both write and teach, I really am getting the best of both worlds. I am a better writer because I teach. I am a better teacher because I write.

A few years back, when I became able to make an annual contribution to NVWP, I spoke with Don Gallehr about an idea I had, to give money directed specifically to encourage TC’s to enhance their own relationship with personal writing. He thought that was a great idea, and the Mark Farrington Personal Writing Award was born (Don came up with the name; whenever I see it, I have the urge to go check to make sure I haven’t died and been memorialized). It’s $500 a year (I wish it could be more, and maybe down the road it will grow, but for now it’s the best I can do.) And it’s given to one TC who will use it in some way to create or extend an opportunity to do more with his or her personal writing than he or she would have done without the money. That’s really all I was hoping: that the money would help a TC spend just a bit more time thinking of him or herself as a writer – not instead of, but in addition to, being a teacher of writing.

I’ve been thrilled with the TCs who have won the award in the past, and I’ve been disappointed for those who submitted perfectly valid proposals but who did not win, because each year we can choose only one winner. Many of the proposals have been along the lines that I’ve expected – TCs going to writing conferences or festivals, or finding ways to get a little extra writing time for themselves – but I’ve also been excited when TCs have proposed unexpected possibilities. I purposely asked Don to keep the specifics vague, because I want every option considered. The only real requirement: you will use this money in some way that enhances your own sense of yourself as a writer.

That’s my hope with this award: that other TCs can feel what I have been allowed to feel, ever since (and in no small part, because of) NVWP helped me understand that I didn’t have to choose between being a writer or a teacher, but I really could be both. And because I could be both, my life has been richer than it ever would have been, had I been only one or the other.

Mark Farrington NVWP TC and Assistant Director of the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program