Comments (0) Best Place to Find a Literate Bus Driver - 2007

"Interacting with people, observing the city, seeing different neighborhoods—that's a great gathering activity for a writer. So much of what a writer does is just observing the world." Poet Dana Elkun speaks, of course, of bus drivers. And what better way to channel that experience than 4_Culture's Bus Driver–only Poetry Class and Award. The county's cultural agency sponsored two poetry writing workshops in April exclusively for Metro drivers and maintenance employees. At the helm was Elkun, a UW poetry MFA who also teaches through Seattle Arts and Lectures' Writers in the Schools program (with a Summer Camp for Writers class at Hugo House on the way). "It was fabulous," she says of the drivers' enthusiasm, noting that two arrived with their own self-published books of poetry. "They had a lot of stories they'd gathered, but not a lot of outlets for those stories," Elkun adds. "They have a great snapshot of humanity in Seattle, and that's great content for writing."—Karla Starr poetryonbuses. org.