Many years ago, I conducted a contest for The Denver Post asking 13-year-olds to write short stories about baseball. In one, a madman designs a ball that explodes, “and pieces of L.A.’s pitcher will be raining down for days.” In all, 38 pitchers are killed before the “Baseball Bomber” is captured and electrocuted. In another, five snipers open fire at a baseball field, killing almost 500 people.
These fictional stories, ostensibly on such a seemingly idyllic topic, were so numerous, dark and grisly, I warned the teachers – then created a folder just for the ones I might one day need to forward to the police. When the Columbine massacre took place, I retrieved the file, half expecting to find the names of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.
They weren’t there. As far as I know, none of my angst-ridden teen writers ever gravitated into a cold-blooded killer.
Now comes word that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui wrote plays. In one, students plot to kill their rapist teacher. In another, a 13-year-old boy confronts his stepfather over his pedophilia and is murdered for it. He wrote them for a creative- writing class at Virginia Tech.
( click here to read the 10-page play, “Richard McBeef,” in full.)
In hindsight, there’s no question Cho’s writings reveal a dark window into the mind of a killer. But if anyone suggests that written violence might accurately predict a writer’s potential for actual violent behavior, why don’t we go ahead and round up Stephen King, David Mamet and Martin McDonagh? And the creative teams from “The Shield” and “24.”
All sorts of reasons
Young people write for all sorts of reasons – and art is often way down on the list. Anyone who has read a MySpace blog or LiveJournal entry knows teens express their pain, confess their secrets, wrestle their demons and reveal their fantasies, light and dark, through their writing.
They write to get stuff out of their system. Catharsis is a fundamental purpose of writing. Christy Montour-Larson, adjunct faculty member at Metropolitan State College of Denver, said you’d be surprised how much of the dark stuff crosses their desks.
“We’re always asking kids to always dig deeper and find different parts of their temperament. … You have to create a safe environment where students feel comfortable going to wonderful places and deep and dark and scary places that humanity go to. For me to censor that type of deep imagination is not good for theater, or for the kids.”
Writing offers an outlet
In McDonagh’s “The Pillowman,” recently staged by the Denver Center Theatre Company, a writer is arrested for depicting grisly acts of violence against children. His point is that some people write about violence so that they won’t go out and actually commit violence.
When Rebecca Gorman heard Cho had written plays, she immediately was reminded of the videotapes made by the Columbine shooters.
“They made these fantasy videotapes of them shooting a bunch of stuff,” said Gorman, an assistant English professor who teaches playwriting at Metro State. “Perhaps writing these plays was his videotape.”
The massacre brings up an important question about the responsibility of teachers when presented with violent material in student writings. Cho’s teachers apparently did everything right. His writings were flagged, and he was referred for counseling.
At Metro State, teachers have actually been trained to assess the level of threat in a student’s writing, Gorman said.
She has had semesters when “more than half of my class are writing about mental illness and death and hearing voices,” she said. “We have to ask, ‘Is this something that is clearly fiction? Or is this a fantasy, and the writer wishes he were this person, and acting these things out?”‘
Beware “blank pages”
When a work is flagged, Gorman can push a student toward counseling. “We can say, ‘Look, you obviously have some issues you need to deal with, but this writing class is not going to cut it,’ ” she said. Writing classes are not meant to be therapy. They are meant to improve writing.”
Still, students clearly must be encouraged to express a dark side through their writing.
“The ones to be concerned about are the people who are blank pages,” Gorman said. “The ones who don’t laugh, who don’t cry, who are unable to express their emotions.”
There is a reason small children who have been through traumatic events are made by therapists to draw pictures of them, to express through visuals what they cannot say in words.
“There is something inherently good in writing about the things that one fears the most,” Gorman said. “They have to be heard.
“Then there is the scary side – when no one is listening.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
