Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
From bad to verse
Scott, arts council poetry ambassador, talks of his struggles, successes.
FAYETTEVILLE — Clayton Scott is not a man who speaks in cliches. He speaks in poetry, in verses recited in front of more than 150,000 students throughout the state of Arkansas, his words inspiring close to half a million poems written by young children and teenagers.
“He’s very talented and charismatic,” says Cynthia Haas, the Arts in Education program manager for the Arkansas Arts Council. “He knows how to engage, whether that be an adult audience or in a classroom setting with students. He’s one of the best teaching artists we’ve had, and probably one of the most-requested teaching artists we have in Arkansas.”
A poetry ambassador with the Arts in Education program, Scott speaks honestly and directly, with warmth and a startling lack of pretense. He’s an open book, equally as comfortable discussing his personal struggles as he is his successes.
So when the winner of the 2012 Arkansas Governor’s Award for Arts in Education describes a drive through Interstate 540’s Bobby Hopper Tunnel as a “rebirth,” it’s not a word to be taken lightly. It truly marked the beginning of his current life.
“Call it a midlife crisis, I lost who I was,” he says. “I needed to discover some stuff in order to live.”
The fateful drive took place in 2001, when Scott was seemingly at his lowest point. His marriage of 28 years was ending, breaking up a family of eight.
At the same time, he had hit a spiritual brick wall, one that made him leave the ministry after spending a decade and a half at a nondenominational church in Alma.
“I think I went through a second rebellion,” he says. “I had been living pretty tight-fisted in church and religion. I never abandoned my faith, but I left organized religion.”
As Scott drove north on I-540, he knew he had reached a turning point in his life.
But as he pulled into Fayetteville, and as he spent the next year living in a recreational vehicle parked in a friend’s driveway, he had no idea just how dramatic that life change would be.
“He’s a comeback kid, so to speak,” says lifelong friend Tom Henry of Denver. “He tends to take what happens, and it might get him down temporarily, but he makes it a positive.
“He integrates it into his life and work, [whether it’s] cancer, divorce, jobs.”
The Clayton Scott who emerged from that year in the RV was someone who was honored for his poetry, on the page in writing competitions and spoken out loud in slam-poetry events. He was also a man with a dream.
That dream was to bring poetry into the lives of children. He founded the Student Poetry Movement, with the idea of performing and inspiring poetry in public schools.
After successfully applying to be a part of the Arkansas Arts Council’s Arts on Tour program, Scott hit the road. He traveled all over the state, blowing into a school on a
Monday, reading his original works, and then excitedly watching as the kids threw themselves into their poetry, competing in poetry slams by Friday.
Today, the teacher-turned-comedian-turned-minister-turned-mostly works out of Northwest Arkansas, appearing in schools for a week at a time and inspiring new generations of enthusiastic young writers.
“He is like a celebrity the week he is here,” says Michelle Doshier, the principal at Hunt Elementary School in Springdale, where Scott has appeared some half-dozen times. “He has changed writing for the kids at our school, because he just makes it cool. He gets them motivated. Kids who don’t normally like to write or share their writing are excited because of him.”
SEMI-TOUGH
The people who called Scott “Tuffy” — and really, that was just about everybody — had it half right.
Scott certainly had a hardened exterior, the kind that made him get into plenty of scraps. He also had a softness.
“When we moved to Kingfisher [Okla.], I put his name down at school as ‘ Tuffy Scott,’” says Scott’s mother, Eileen Niles of El Reno, Okla. “The teachers thought they were going to have a hard time with him, but he turned out to be a jewel.”
Clayton Scott was born in Oklahoma, and he and his family moved all over the place when he was young. His father was in the Air Force, a battle-scarred bomber pilot who had been tortured as a prisoner of war during World War II.
Scott says his dad was a “mean drunk,” but could also be affectionate and outgoing. He was a storyteller, the source of Scott’s outgoing nature.
“From day one that I met him [as a junior in high school], he’s been one of the funniest people I’ve ever been around,” Henry says of Scott. “He’s a really sharp, creative individual.”
When Scott, the fourth of six children, was in the first grade, his family moved to Minco, a town of about 1,000 in Oklahoma. It was a hardscrabble farming community, a place Scott says was straight out of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders.
Minco was a town where the cool kids fought and drank and tooled around with muscle cars. “Tuffy” did what he could to fit in, but it wasn’t really his true nature.
“I’ve always been the tenderhearted kid, but I could put on a bluff,” he says. “I had this nickname, ‘Tuffy,’ that I had to live up to. I was on a pretty reckless downward spiral as a teenager.”
When Scott was 12, his parents split up. His mother remarried two years later and he found himself in Kingfisher in time for his sophomore year of high school.
Kingfisher wasn’t all that far from Minco, but it might as well have been in another country. The social structure was totally different, and the cool kids weren’t the rebels, but rather the straight-laced kids — the athletes, the churchgoers, the ones who didn’t smoke or drink.
Scott realized that if he was going to be accepted in Kingfisher, he was going to have to change his act.
“He’s adaptable,” Niles says. “I have six outgoing children, and they were able to adapt to different communities and make themselves acceptable. Usually they fit in.
“Clayton tried to become one of the special ones in his classes ... although he was always independent and went out on his own.”
NEW EXPERIENCES
Fitting in at Kingfisher meant going to church, an alien experience to Scott at the time.
His only real experience with religion had been getting periodically dragged to Church of Christ services with his grandparents.
“My grandmother was very religious, but my grandfather would fall asleep, so she would punch him to wake him up,” he recalls, laughing. “He was a hard-working cattle rancher, and that was his only time to rest.”
Religion became a big part of Scott’s life after the move to Kingfisher. By his senior year, he and Henry teamed up to form the comedy team TNT, which Scott calls “kind of the Cheech and Chong of the Christian world.”
Their act was a series of skits, in which Scott and Henry rapidly changed clothes and characters. They performed all over Oklahoma and Texas off and on until the mid-1980s.
“He’s a person who’s always been cutting-edge and a little bit ahead of what was going on,” Henry says. “We tried to make [the skits] relevant to what was going on at time, funny stuff that had upbeat messages.”
Today, Scott’s performances are mostly for children, the majority of them in elementary school. At the start of the week, he’ll work with kids on their “recipe for good writing,” tailoring lessons on style and metaphors to each grade level.
He’ll then assign a little homework, maybe asking the kids to write about their favorite food or what they did last summer. They come back the next day, share their work, and the lessons progress over the course of the week, culminating in a student-judged poetry slam (competition) at the end of Scott’s week at the school.
“He gets up there and uses different voices and comes in in different hats each day, and the kids just love him,” Doshier says. “His love for writing just translates over to them. They think he’s so cool, and if he thinks it’s cool to write, then it must be pretty cool to do themselves.”
Scott has been comfortable performing in public since the first grade.
It’s a story he has told to thousands of children: All his classmates took turns reading out loud, and when Scott’s portion was over, his ancient first grade teacher said, “Very good William. [She wouldn’t call him ‘Tuffy.’] But I want you to read it again with feeling and expression.”
“I look back on it now, and it was an epiphany,” he says. “A light switch turned on, and I knew that’s how you present stuff. It’s up to the presenter to bring life to the language.”
LIFE CHANGES
Scott, 57, has always loved children.
He has seven of them himself, and before he was a dad, he was a teacher.
Following his graduation from Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Scott took a job teaching fourth grade in Del City, Okla., right outside Oklahoma City. He taught for three years before he and his wife headed to Los Angeles to start a church with some friends.
That didn’t go so well, so he switched to comedy. He performed at the famed Improv and The Comedy Store in the early ’80s, but ultimately decided he didn’t want to suffer the hardships required to make it big as a comedian, so he moved back to Oklahoma, taking a job as the producer of a talk show.
When the show moved to Dallas, he stayed in Oklahoma, becoming the youth minister of a nondenominational church in 1983. Two years later, he became the senior minister at Grace Covenant Church in Alma.
“I was ready to go into the woods,” he says. “I was tired of the big city, the big church; I was tired of big. I wanted to go small, to grow a beard and learn how to cut wood and have home births.”
The Scotts lived in Mountainburg for two years before settling in Alma, where Clayton got very involved in the community. But he and his wife ultimately drifted apart, and their marriage ended around the same time he left the church.
He and his ex are friends today; she even invites Scott and his fiancee, Jeanette Beltram, over for parties. At the time of the divorce, though, emotions were raw.
“The divorce was tough for all of us,” Scott says. “It was painful. We all cried together.”
While all this was happening, Scott went to a poetry reading in Fort Smith featuring the late Fayetteville slam poet Brenda Moossy. Scott had written a little bit of poetry in high school, then gone into a long drought, but seeing Moossy, he felt like he was “just blown out of my skin.”
Scott became fast friends with Moossy. He moved to Fayetteville, parked his RV in her driveway, and threw himself into his writing.
For the next year, he wrote at a feverish pace and performed in poetry slams, winning a series of awards. But while he loved poetry, he quickly grew tired of the competitive, low-paying nature of slam poetry.
So he created the Student Poetry Movement in 2002, went to the Arkansas Arts Council, and was green-lighted for its Arts on Tour and Arts in Education rosters. It took a lot of hustling to build his act, contacting principals and teachers and convincing them that he could help them.
In the early years, he performed all over the state, one year spending 11 weeks in Hope. As Scott’s reputation has grown, he has been able to stay closer to his Fayetteville home; this year, he is contracted to be in Springdale for 10 weeks.
“At the church, he was not reaching the people he wanted to reach,” Niles says. “He wanted use his abilities to [reach] children. When he branched out into schools, it was the best thing that ever happened to him.”
More than a decade after he began teaching poetry, Scott’s still writing it, as well as other pieces. After earning a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Spalding University (Louisville, Ky.) and surviving a brief 2008 bout with prostate cancer, Scott wrote and starred in the one-man play Down in Littletown.
The play appeared all over the state, and was the greatest professional accomplishment of his life until he won the Arkansas Governor’s Award last year. His future works — the slam- poetry instructional manual, the screenplay he’s working on with a friend — may one day find him more fame, but it’s hard to imagine they’ll top the award.
“That was an unbelievable honor,” he says. “For someone to say you are deserving of this award, you are a prolific, hard-working teacher/artist ....”
Scott trails off for a a second.
“I tried not to cry during the ceremony,” he continues. “I have fought dragons. I have broken down in the middle of the night on highways. I have taught sick. I’ve gone through all this and survived.”