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Week of 10 September 1999 Vol. III, No. 5 Feature Article Igniting creative sparks in an inner-city high school By Bari Walsh Askold Melnyczuk (GRS'78), novelist, essayist, and poet, fits perfectly in the wood-toned halls of academia at 236 Bay State Road, home of the CAS English department and the freshman composition class he teaches. He also looks natural farther up Commonwealth Avenue, at a cramped desk in the small offices of Agni, the literary journal sponsored by BU that he founded and edits. But he seems a bit out of place in the brick citadel that is the Jeremiah Burke High School, a place that at times exemplifies much that is wrong with urban public education. And yet there he is every Wednesday morning, teaching writing to teenagers in a Dorchester neighborhood that still shows all the scars of inner city problems, even though gang violence has subsided, street crime is down, and academic performance at the school is improving. Having failed in all nine categories measured in the state high school accreditation process in 1995, Jeremiah Burke has reversed course. It is fully accredited again, with a crowded docket of programs in place to support and encourage students and their teachers. The writing program established by Melnyczuk and fellow novelist and essayist George Packer on behalf of PEN New England is part of the new vitality that a visitor can sense in the hallways of the school. More specifically, it has helped these two literary men find community in a place where the borders had at first seemed impenetrable. Novelists George Packer (left) and Askold Melnyczuk (GRS'78), who teaches a freshman composition class at BU, stand in front of the Jeremiah Burke High School in Dorchester, where they have established a writing program. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky Melnyczuk and Packer have been at "the Burke" for three years now, sharpening their program, originally intended as a creative writing seminar, into the pragmatic college-preparatory writing center that it is today. They readily admit that the going was rough at the start: discipline was lax, disruptions frequent, and many of the kids didn't know what to make of the outsiders. They weren't so sure themselves. "I began to think that the freedom of creative writing, and the fact that it wasn't intimately tied in to the rest of their curriculum, was working against us," says Packer. "The closer we got to work that had very concrete applications, the more I felt that we were on solid ground. Over three years, we went from poems and stories to college essays and research papers. But while doing these more practical things, we're continually talking about what's important about writing, and we're trying to bring some of our pleasure in it to each session." So they settled last year into a routine of "the kind of intense tutorial work which I believe should happen at all universities in lieu of large composition classes," says Melnyczuk, with a wink toward Bay State Road. An alumnus of BU's Creative Writing Program who also teaches fiction at Bennington College's Graduate Writing Seminars (in between