Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work.
In episode #118 of The Writing Coach podcast, I speak with poet and educator Garry Cox.
With a Masters of Education from Northern Arizona University, Garry has devoted his life to inspiring people to realize their dreams. He’s a teacher, a poet, an actor, a runner, a blogger, father, and friend.
During our discussion, Garry describes:
- How he combines common place notebooks with scheduled writing time to create his poetry
- What his “first responder” approach to poetry entails
- How educators can encourage the younger generation to develop their critical thinking through writing
- Why he loves writing in the mornings
- The importance of catching brain mites
- And much more!
Listen to the full podcast episode:
The Writing Coach Episode #118 Show Notes
Episode Transcript
Today on the writing coach podcast. I have Garry Cox. Garry, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Kevin. And thank you so much for having me.
Let the listeners know a bit about who you are in the world of writing as well as teaching.
I like to call myself a lifer because my mother decided that I was a poet when I was about four years old. I never understood what she was saying. And it took me almost 60 years to grow into it. But I never forgot that that some of the babbling that I must’ve done at the time, she thought was rather poetic and she told me about it. So I just accepted that. And when I went back to it, I decided to write some poetry. And actually what, the reason I did that is that my wife had retired before I did so every morning and my wife on, on her way to morning coffee would go to the kitchen, get her coffee and come back, sit down and see and read her poll. And they were just personal ditties about our lives, you know, and, and you know, what we thought about what we, what I thought about her and what I thought of what we both liked to do, and whatever came to my mind, because I didn’t have much time.
I was going to dash it off and then go jump in my car and go to work. You know, she got to the point where she expected that. And so like, when I would come home at night, she would, she would and she always had such a pleasant voice whenever I would come home. She’d make me feel so welcome. But on days where I didn’t do give her a poem, it was more like hi, I didn’t get my poem today. You know, I said, oh yeah, you know, I really had today this morning. I w I, I stay in the shower too long. I had a meeting, you know, first thing in the morning. Yeah. But be honest with you. I hardly ever missed a day. You know I, I told her, I said, look, you’re not, if I’m out of town, you don’t get a pole, but as long as I’m here, you know, you’re going to get one every day or you can hold me accountable.
And the funny thing was, she has three daughters and one of them would stay with us quite a while. I, by quite a while, I mean, a week or so when she would visit. And so she noticed that her mother was getting up to read these poems. So the daughter reads them and she says, mom, you know, these poems are kind of kinda neat. You know, you could probably publish those. And of course my wife in her inimitable style said, why would I want to do that? They’re my poems. And so temporarily, that was the end of my poetry writing. But, you know, as, as time passed and I retired and like I said, I had written I had a bunch of half-finished novels and plays. And and I had, I had written a lot of at edge of what I call edgy dramas that were published and sent around as learning pieces to adult education throughout the whole country.
We got a couple of awards for them, so I never stopped writing, but I didn’t write poetry. Until I, until after I retired. And I was just, you know, one day just, I was just thinking about her. And I said, well, you know, I liked poetry. I was livid language and literature major, you know and I must have liked what I wrote because the next thing I knew I was working on my first book the waters of grappa news county, which was where I was, I was raised. And the funny thing about the wars of avenues county was that you know, back in the day and you got to kind of consider I’m not going to tell you exactly how old I am, but you can kind of tell by the wrinkles, you know, it’s like, just who’s been around, you know back in the day education was very highly thought of public education I’m talking about.
And if you were raised in afternoons county, you had a virtual plethora of good English teachers. I mean, really good English teachers. And they taught me well, you know, and, and I always, and to be honest, I was kind of a goofball. If I hadn’t, if I hadn’t played sports, I could have been in big trouble, but they kinda cut me some slack. But the one thing I always did really well at was, was in my English classes, the writing I did, but there were other good students in my English classes. And so it’s like, like I say in my first book in my anguish, in my class high school class, and there were more than 130 students in my high school I said, I, in my high school class, I might’ve been the third best writer. You know, that’s how good the writing program was. Most of us kids can really just really write our butts, you know? And I may have been a bit modest. I think there are days when I thought I might’ve been number two or, you know, but writing was the only class I ever got a so there you go, there, you have it. That’s why I became a person who wrote a lot.
We touched on this idea here that you came out of a great English program. What do you think makes a great English program? What can teachers of writing these days do to replicate what you went through in your younger years?
Well, you know, and I say this because as a, as an educator, I am a lifer. I mean, that’s, that’s what I’ve done my whole life. And the first thing I think you got to do is is, is strengthen the lower grade levels in terms of expectations. You know, in other words, if you if you tell a very young person that day, you’re going to teach them to write a sentence. And from there, encourage them to, you know, share the thoughts or give their opinions. And as you get older, you get into a critical, more critical thinking skills. But if you, if you, if you start young and you encourage students, I really think in the third grade, and I know that my granddaughter committed my granddaughter at age 10 or something, I don’t know could write perfect sentences.
I mean, grammatically correct and sentences. That meant something to her, you know, and I think that’s and I know that her parents were, were educated in a public school system just like me. And I, I think that that’s, that’s what you do is you have to, you have to start young, you have to really encourage them. And I think that I just, I just don’t think that they, that, that the, the writing skills are pushed as much even in public schools, there’s a used to be, but there’s gotta be some reinforcement of a person’s personal communication skills. You know, in other words, I think kids have to be encouraged to, to speak about themselves, to talk about their lives and, and to write about it and not to make such a big deal about it. Well, okay, this is English, and you got to remember these rules and, and like that.
But just say, this is just another, you know, we’ve got storytelling time, and then we’ve got some writing time and all we want you to do is just share what’s going on in your life. You know, and I think that approach if started younger, then I think students would be eater really to express themselves. Whereas I think now once you know, once the English teacher cracks down on you, that’s, that’s about it. Some kids kind of shrivel up, you know, and that’s a shame because to me, the whole thing, all of education is, is about expressing yourself.
Well, that leads me to a quote you have on your website where you’ve said in the past, “I believe writing is a precursor to thought, not the other way round.” Could you speak to that a little bit?
I think that that was probably always true. It really became true when I started writing poems because I would sit down and face a blank computer screen, you know? And I said, well, maybe I’ll, I’ll, I’ll write a poem about something I’ve been thinking about something that you might hear in the news or something like that. And try to do it as a point of like, I am a first responder, I’m a first reactor to it and I would start to write. And I said, but you haven’t really even thought about this. I said, well, yeah, you’re right about that. But on the other hand, what am I going to do? Sit here for an hour and know, like the old joke start every, every, every session with the word, the, and see where that takes you. And of course the, the punchline to that joke is after an hour, you have written the, you type in hell of it, the hell of it, you know so, or the hell with it, whatever you want to say. But I noticed that when I would start to write about a particular subject that interested me I would often come up. I would often have the reaction that really, I didn’t know. I even had that thought, but there it is. So let’s see where it goes. And actually I didn’t really, by the time I would finish a piece, I’d have the realization. Wow. You have an opinion that you didn’t even know you had, and that was magic to me.
You think it’s the, the process of putting the words on the page, kind of forces you to articulate what you’re feeling, which is otherwise more of a vague thing inside of you.
Right. And you make a statement, you say, well, now I’m going to have to back that up. I’m going to have to continue with that piece. And it’s like, okay, considering where I started, let’s see where that goes. And of course, that is, to me, that’s how all poems get written. I never know what I’m going to write as a poem. What I’ll do is I’ve got notebooks, little notebooks about a yay, big all over the house because I get snippets of ideas, phrases come to me sometimes, even like tombs come to me now, if I wait until my writing time in the morning, 90% of that will be gone. So, but if I, if I get them down in one of my little notebooks, you know, then when I sit down to the computer, you know, I may just say, okay, well, you read for today, we’ll see where it goes.
In terms of process, you have the commonplace note where you’re putting these things out as they occurred to you, but then you mentioned a writing time in the morning. So do you, do you have kind of a regularly scheduled writing time where you’re jotting down ideas as you go and then you, but then you’re also scheduled, but how do you actually go about your work?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. On my, I have a word doc on my computer and every little thought that I can find goes into that. And then, you know, so I said, okay. And I try not to think too much about any of it or judge any of it. I said, yeah, well, all those little nothings there that you have collected could go someplace. So then I would take it. I would go to my website, the, the older I get, the more I realized, I think I was born to have a website that seems to be, that’s my main squeeze. I, I call myself a poet, but I, I love my website because I can do posts on almost anything I want to and get some feedback on it.
The address to the website, it’s http://www.garrycox.com. Is that correct?
Thank you. Yes, that’s what it is is, is brand new. And I was talking to my the, the gal who is reconstructing my website so that it really is more of a much more vital entity. And I said, okay, hold on. I mention you, I was thinking, I might mention, you mentioned her to you because this was earlier day. And I said you know, what should I call her? So I said, well, what should I call you? You know, she said, well, you can call me your your assistant. I said, are you kidding assistant police? If anything, if anybody’s an assistant I’m in, as I’m the assistant, you are, you are revamping my life. You know, my you expanded my horizons, you know, exponentially. And so she said, okay, I’ll be a website manager. I said, all right. All right, I’m that guy, we can work here. We could fuss about this all day. I said, but that’s who you are now.
You mentioned you feel like you were born to that to have a log in a website. Is it just the ability to publish instantly that, that you love so much or what is about?
Absolutely. My habit is to get up. For years I would get up at five o’clock and this is after my wife passed and Bernice pass in 2011. So it was easy for me to get up early in the morning. And I like it dark, all those shades are drawn, you know, I’ve, I have no distractions, no sounds. Nobody’s calling me that early, you know? And that’s if I it’s, it’s almost like having being in space or something, you know, I’m so disconnected with the rest of the world. And that’s the way my, my mind likes it. And that’s when I’ll take these little scraps and I’ll put them on it on the web to, to website and you know usually there’ll be as many as 10 or 20 of them.
Bye scraps, do you mean pieces of poetry, little pieces or ideas?
Ideas, pieces of poetry revisions? One of my favorite poems is a brain mind. It’s in my new book, a coffee with the Bart that came about just because, you know, I w I would, I would, I would have these, these thoughts and it got to the point where it was almost like these little creatures would come through my brain and they would leave something, you know, and say, okay, let’s, let’s see if he let’s see if it gets through the computer with this, you know, let’s see if you remember that, you know, and it’s, it’s like scope. I developed this relationship now a lot of them, because I spent probably a couple of years waking up getting an idea rushing to the computer, but by the time I got to the website, I had forgotten it. And that’s why, that’s why I put all these little notebooks around, you know?
So, so the whole poem is about you know you know, catch us if you can, you know and that became a poem. And then I got I have one thing I really like about my new book is it’s, it’s, it’s illustrated. And, and so yeah, you know, and I’m glad we, you asked me this because I’ve never had too much opportunity to remind people that it is a little different than just a print book because of the illustrations, which I think are just, I think they’re dynamite. I think every one of them is just perfect.
Who did the illustrations?
Elizabeth broker. I give her credit for creating the illusions for the poems brain mites and loving the bud, and suppose you were a black hole. Okay. So she did all of those. And then I have this character. It is this, this rapper kid who calls him swell itself, sweet life banks. What he did is he took images of me and made art out of them, you know, or pieces. And he did he created my avatar so that I call avatar Bard and run it and running Bard and stump speed stump, speech Bard, and Barb piece. So I resection in the book. Every section starts with an illustration, and these were, these were my well, they were my two primary illustrators they deserve to be mentioned because to me, they make the book
We’ve touched on The Waters of Appanoose County, and we’ve got Coffee with the Bard. So let’s touch, you’ve got three books. We might as well hit on Beyond the Waters. What’s that one about?
Originally, it was just a clever way to say, Hey folks, this is book number two. If you liked the water’s rapid county, you might want to go beyond the wa. And my concept was, I want to go beyond my beginnings, being my youth and everything growing up you know, in the Midwest. And I want to go beyond that. And I want, I want people to look at the book as me stepping out, trying to go beyond what I already had had created in the first book.
Well, the book is Coffee with the Bard. Is the subtitle 2020 Blues?
Yes
I think we can all relate to that.
The first year of the pandemic, I did a lot of writing and all, most of those poems are in the new book. You know, I don’t turn anything down. If something develops into a good poll, I don’t care what the subject matter is. Oh, I like that. You know, and that’s, that’s how I work. You know, I, I stayed those little thoughts that I was telling your daughter with with the shape and scraps of paper and everything, you know, or not the scraps of paper, but the little notebooks, you know become poems. And I don’t know what they’re going to be like, just like, I don’t know just say it’s a political issue. I may not know what I actually think about it, but I have got her, something got under my skin and I wrote it down a sentence up there.
And and I go to my website and I looked through this and I said, man, this stuff’s been in the air for two weeks and nothing, nothing came up. But I swear as within another week there, this support three or four lines, you know, and then I go in and I say, dude, you got so many beginnings of poems. You gotta, you gotta finish one of these, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s go, you know, Paula, you know, let’s write some poetry and that’s kinda, that’s how I kinda, how things evolve. So it’s like, when I say, I don’t know what I, I think until I write you can apply that to life and politics or anything you want to apply it to. I really don’t start anything with the perceived conviction.
Well, I think that’s a beautiful place to leave things, Gary, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast today.
I thank you. And I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you on.
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