Playwrights Imani Josey and Jose Requena flank their teacher Jim English at the opening night for the Young Playwrights Festival at Pegasus Players.

If anyone ever had a reason to gloat, Jim English does. Two of the four finalists in the 19th Annual Young Playwrights Festival won with stories written in his creative writing class at Whitney Young High School. This accomplishment becomes all the more impressive when you realize that the folks at Pegasus Players received over 600 entries this year, from students all over Chicago.

When you ask the soft-spoken chairman of Whitney Young's English Department about how he feels, he admits he's pleased, but he doesn't get puffed up about it. He also doesn't take a lot of credit for the accomplishment, preferring to throw the attention to his students.

Ask him what his secret it for teaching creative writing he gives a very self-effacing answer: "Teaching creative writing lets me realize that I don't have to be the teacher all of the time. The students will set their own path. I am there to answer questions, but kids at that age need to be discovering things–instead of being fed things.

"This runs against the way education is set up nowadays, with the constant striving toward tests where you have concrete things where you are testing XYZ and all the lesson plans are carefully created so the students learn exactly XYZ and the students are all managed and controlled. That especially doesn't work at Whitney Young. All students need to learn things on their own."

It sounds almost as if English does little more than take attendance and hand out pens and paper. The funny thing is that if you talk to his students, you get a very different view of what English does.

Imani Josey, whose one act, "Grace," starts out the four-play evening in this year's festival, gives English credit for establishing a safe, creative environment in his classroom.

"He is very open about what you are writing," Josey enthuses. "He encourages your own style and helps you make your writing something you will be really proud of, something that is your own. He encourages a lot of different kinds of writing. He didn't critique our writing in terms of what we wrote about, he just helped us with things like how our dialogue flows. He was very open with who we are and what we are writing about."

Talking with Josey it is not hard to see why 50 of English's students felt confident enough about the plays they wrote last year to enter them in the Young Playwrights Festival.

If you ask English where he was raised he will answer, somewhat laconically, that he grew up "basically in Chicago." His family moved to the area when his father got a job in Elgin.

English doesn't reveal much more than that about his childhood and adolescence. He reveals only a little more about his life before he went into teaching.

"I worked at computers for a while for Blue Cross," English says. "And like a lot of people in the 1960's. I did a lot of hanging out, working odd jobs. I had friends in California. Friends in New York City. I did a lot of traveling. I liked to travel. I bought an old van and spent a year traveling."

English didn't get around to going to college until he was in his mid-20's.

"I went to college at 26," English says, sounding ever so slightly sheepish, "I went to UIC for undergraduate. I thought when I entered I would study science and math but I drifted into English. And after I got done I went to Europe and traveled around some more. Then I went to University of Virginia for graduate school."

There he studied American Literature. It was while he was at the University of Virginia that English decided that "the rigor of the pure academic life" was not what he wanted. English returned to Chicago and taught at UIC for three years in the English department as a lecturer in writing.

By that time he was starting a family and needed something steady and secure. He took courses to get certified to teach. He got his certification in the early 80's, a time when there was still a glut of teachers and a distinct shortage of entry level positions.

 "I bounced around for a while in one year positions—Main West, Evanston and Argo High School. And then I ended at Whitney Young in 1988."

I ask English if he has ever written about his travels before he settled into teaching; he tells me he hasn't. If he has ever thought his adventures were worth putting down on paper, his tone of voice doesn't reveal it. I ask him if he does any writing on his own. Often working writers make strong creative writing teachers. No, he doesn't write. In fact, he ended up as a creative writing teacher at Whitney Young precisely because he didn't write.

"When I started at Whitney Young I taught straight literature courses. Then I moved into AP composition and I did that a long time. A lot of the students wanted to do creative writing so we offered creative writing. We have several people on staff who did writing on their own time but they didn't wanted to take the classes. So I did. I have been doing creative writing for four years now."

So what does English do to encourage creative play writing in his students? As English describes his process, it is clear that what he does not do is at least as important as what he does do. He doesn't control his students' thought processes. And he doesn't tie them to a tight production schedule.

"You have students working at different paces," English explains. "It is less of a class where you have students working on a piece of literature and more of a class where students share with each other. That keeps the teacher out of the spotlight."

English also doesn't focus exclusively on writing plays. Over the course of the year, students work on prose fiction, drama and poetry.

English does give assignments, such as finding someone in history and basing a scene or a story on that figure. But he also gives them leeway to write about whatever they want to.

Josey based her winning play on a dream a family member had. "In the African-American community, when you see a fish in a dream someone is pregnant. One of my family members once dreamt about fish."

English's students also feel empowered to write about what they want to write about, not what they think will sell, or earn them prizes. That, interestingly enough, is the theme of the other winning play written by an English student, Jose Requena's Bowdlerism.

In this comic fantasy, a young writer trying to pound out a story is paralyzed by the conflicting advice he receives from three spirits who visit him as he tries compose: an agent, a critic, and a thick-headed average audience member. The writer only succeeds in breaking his block when he dismisses these spirits and focuses only on what he wants to write.

The play is not a bad summary of the lesson English teaches his students: be yourself, write what you want, enjoy what you are doing, and success will follow.