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Interview with Kate Crowe

Kate Crowe is the co-ordinator of Prior Learning from Experience program. Her work is to help her students make academic sense out of their lives and work experience. Inevitably her students end up making common sense as well as academic sense out of their experience, and learn to write too. Kate teaches poetry and short story writing to contract and summer students as well.
Kate believes that writing is hard enough without making it more difficult by not having fun. “The first thing I always do is to make it very relaxed, get rid of all the anxiety, fear and junk that we carry with us. It’s fun and games,” she tells her new students, “but we are going to learn too.” Her classroom strategy is to keep it loose, keep it rolling, avoid stifling. She “really cares” about how the endeavor “is working for them.”

“And if somebody gets upset with somebody else, ‘Well,’ I tell them, ‘that’s what happens here at Evergreen sometimes, it’s what happens at college: we’re not in grade school where the teacher controls things.’ Students just rise to that, they love it.”

Kate has had the experience that gives her the authority to help people write about their own. She was born in North Dakota on a farm/cattle ranch. At age four she was responsible both for washing the dishes and supervising her young siblings learning to dry the dishes. Her parents called their small legs their “running water” as the house was plumbed only for outgoing water not incoming water from their small lake. She gained loads of “intense, rich experience on the farm” but knew she’s be leaving at the appropriate moment.

Farm girl Kate read Forever Amber at ten but failed to interest her father in a discussion of the meaning “seed” in this context. At eight her lighter reading had included Time, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Look, Life, Reader’s Digest, including the condensed novels therein, as well as American Girl and Hemingway. She graduated from High School when she was seventeen. Her Aunt and Uncle from Olympia visited. “They asked if I would like to spend the summer with them in Olympia. I ran upstairs and packed my new Sears & Roebuck luggage that Mom had given me for graduation. No decision, I didn’t even ask. I was on my way out West a week later. She wasn’t escaping exactly; she was going to the fabulous West Coast her Dad had told her so much about since she was a child.

Once in Olympia it seemed logical to go to San Francisco for a look-see. One of the first things she did when she got there is to go into a huge department store and informed a clerk that she was there to see Mr. Macy; she was looking for a job. (Ask her about her employment office experience some time.)

After numerous adventures she and her girlfriend decided that Puget Sound was where they needed to be, and that turns out to have been true.

As for what students might have to forgive in Kate: “People who are used to really structured, black and white scenarios, find out I am very random. I tell people what’s going to happen but I like to tell them once. I am definitely not a hand-holder and I can get snappy when people get in my face asking me the same stuff I just told them talking to the whole group. Students have to tolerate me not tolerating that.”

Interviewer: Pete Sinclair

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007