Donna Evans transcript
05/08/11

>>DONNA: I'm Donna Evans. I was born in Colorado to a farmer. When I started first grade, my dad wouldn't let me have a library card until I learned how to read. So I was learning how to read from Dick and Jane books and I was pretty motivated. Probably the end of January I finally earned that library card. Then my grandmother, his mother, he was an adopted child, she would sit beside me and listen to me read for hours. I don't think she read on her on but she'd sit there and listen and listen and listen. So, I remember that. And I remember playing with the skin on her arm while she was doing it.

I suppose the thing that is most important to my writing is that handwriting for a long time was connected to failure. First grade, holed oak desks, holes carved in them by other students, I remember one day having a writing assignment and the pencil went through the paper into the hole. As I tried to erase around it, the whole became the larger. I took the paper up to the teacher and she picked it up, put it up to her face and looked at me through the hole and said "What's this?" And then she gave me an F. So I stuffed the paper beside the seat in the bus on the way home and cried. I did, later on, discover that I liked writing. Then I became a mother of 9 children and spent all my time mothering, until we moved to Oregon in 1998. When we moved to the desert of Oregon, all of a sudden something woke up in me and I had to write. Major calming, and I had to write about it. Then I started writing poetry, then I started writing fiction, then I started writing new stories. Now I'm here. I'm at a graduate program at WOSU, hope to finish my PHD in 2 years in writing composition.

>>INTERVIEWER: So, did that incident with the hole in the paper affect your own teaching?

>>DONNA: I think it does. I'm very conscious of my L1 and L2 students handwriting and try very hard to understand what they're writing. I understand messiness is not necessarily congruent with a messy mind. Well, my mind is a little messy, but it brings things together really well sometimes. So, as far as writing goes, I realize that perfection is not the model I'm aiming for. I'm aiming for voice. And I hope my students will understand that after studying with me. I want to listen to them, I like to listen to them talk. I also like to listen to them write the way they would talk.