Remica Bingham-Risher ’01 is in her 13th year as ’s director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives, where she helps faculty integrate writing into their disciplines. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning poet, memoirist and aspiring novelist, she recently shared her experience working with middle school students and how she nurtures her creative spark.
How did you connect with the middle schoolers at Cape Henry Collegiate in Virginia Beach, Virginia?
Kris Irwin, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Management at ’s Strome College of Business introduced me to Peggy Morland (M.A. ’00), who was doing work on contemporary Black women poets and thinking about memoirs in her classroom at Cape Henry Collegiate. She said, “It would be really cool if I could share some of your work with the students, and you could visit us on Zoom.” And so that’s what we did.
The book they were talking about was my most recent, ” It has a Virginia bent and is about two of my grandmothers, who converged in Petersburg, Virginia. But these are not easy stories. My paternal great-great-great grandmother was born in 1859 and enslaved in Petersburg. My maternal grandmother was sent to Petersburg at 18 after birthing her first child. They didn’t know what postpartum (depression) was then, and she was sent to the (Blacks only) insane asylum in Petersburg.
These are not things you would generally take into a middle school classroom unless you had a wonderful teacher giving them historical context. The book traces lineage, and they were doing a unit on family history. So, it hit all the boxes. When I’m visiting students, it’s almost exclusively university students. It’s rare that I get to talk to seventh graders, but middle school was the most formative time in all my life, so it was a gift to get to hang with them.
The kids were so enthusiastic that they kept sending me questions afterwards. When those questions added up, I decided to do a video series on Screencastify and answered the whole thing in a 12-minute video and then broke them up for Instagram.
How did middle school impact your journey as a writer?
I discovered poetry by means of a wonderful teacher in the fifth grade, but really the seventh and eighth grade is when my world turned on its head. It was when I started to question things in my family. Middle school is very hard, because dz’r figuring out who you are. It is a time where you can say, “But why? And how?” All the questions that I’m still working through as a writer are middle school questions.
In your videos to the class, you said you don’t believe in writer’s block — why?
I have said to students, “I do not believe in writers’ block” because I believe we can always create something. I do believe in a general malaise, and just really being stuck. I think many of us right now, in the midst of current events, have a general malaise or real fear stopping us.
Something I’ve been struggling with recently is being on social media. I’ve been so stuck on the scroll because my brain just needs something to focus on. I realized, “Oh, you have to take that out of the equation for your brain to sit down and focus on something else.” Even reading — which is my favorite pastime, and the only thing that gets me to writing — has been harder for me.
I think we are all struggling deeply. But I do believe, especially for students and writers, there are always writing exercises. I can open a book right now and try a writing exercise inspired by an author. Will it be something beautiful that I want to send out into the world? Absolutely not. But will it be something I can tinker with and revise and work through? Yes.
So, in that sense, I don’t believe in writer’s block. We can always get something on the page. The hard part is getting yourself to the page.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Remica Bingham-Risher's tips for getting unstuck:
Read, read, read. Read 10 times more than you write. Read 10 poems to write one. If dz’r stuck, find a book you love to fill the well.
Use writing exercises to spark your creativity. Sometimes shaking up the subconscious is just what you need to begin again. Whatever you come up with will be messy and imperfect, but you will have something on the page.
Go to a museum (there are great exhibits online as well), then write about a piece of art that arrests you. You can write to the artist, about the composition or just about the feeling it gives you. Ekphrastic writing, a literary description of a visual work of art, might open you up in ways you ’t imagined.
Take a nap (or at least get more sleep at night) and keep a dream journal. Try to write down whatever you remember dreaming about, even if it DZ’t follow a clear narrative. Then, highlight the lines or images that intrigue you and use one to start a poem, story, etc.
Sit in a busy place and listen to the conversations of others. That’s right: eavesdrop. Take a notebook and write down the funny, intriguing, worrisome phrases you hear, then create a character who might begin their story this way.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.