State of Mind: Adventures in Place-Conscious Teaching

AWP 2012: Nonfiction and the Essay

2012-03-07T08:41:00.009-06:00

I've been waiting for Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French's book, Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, since I found out it was coming out (and I will write a more detailed review when I've finished it, rather than flipping through it as I've done so far). I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why essayists--and nonfiction writers in general--spend so much time trying to define the genre, rather than spending any time talking about anything else. Nonfiction is still the genre used to write about other genres, the mode of criticism for other genres--and this, I posit, is part of the reason that nonfiction still feels like the redheaded stepchild. Also, I'm beginning to be able to articulate another reason why nonfiction isn't taken as seriously: the first few essayists I read in the Essayists book describe the essay as playful, as an experiment, as a loose thing, a meandering of the mind--and no wonder it's not taken seriously. Or why it feels like we're not taken seriously.

Here's the point I want to make, the questions I would like to pose: Why isn't there more criticism on nonfiction? Why isn't there an outlet for it? Why are we, as nonfiction writers, not encouraged to write it?

And here's my reasoning. I'm in a PhD program where most of my writing time has been devoted to critical writing. I've spent as much time honing my critical craft as I have with my own creative work--and the unfortunate reality is that I haven't written anything creative since classes started last August, being so wrapped up in my classes and preparing for my comps (which involve two critical papers, based on my lists). Why do we spend so much time in a program concentrating on the criticism and then not value it outside of classes? I've heard too many times how much of a waste of time it is to write these seminar papers that we're never going to do anything with.

As the MFA becomes more ubiquitous and most job postings are now requiring a PhD in addition to a published book, it's clear that the standards for those seeking academic positions are changing. I would venture to guess that most of us in PhD programs--even those that offer creative dissertations--are writing a lot of critical work. At the moment, I'm putting together both my Field paper (on the contemporary Essay) and my project for my Women's Rhetoric class (I think I'm looking at how women write the Plains--specifically looking at Gretel Ehrlich, Kathleen Norris, and Deb Marquart...I think)--and so far, I've found one solid critical article on Gretel Ehrlich, I haven't done much looking for Kathleen Norris, but I'm fairly certain that I won't find any on Deb Marquart. We're being asked, as students, to write these critical papers on topics that fit with our educational path, but we don't have the critical resources to support them. This is what I found while trying to put together my Field list--and what happens every time I try to write a critical paper on a writer who's not Didion, Mailer, Dillard, or the like.

Following this PhD student angle (and the angle of the increasing number of creative writing teachers with PhDs), how many editors of literary journals have PhDs? And editors of nonfiction journals, specifically? Since this is the direction that academia is going, and these editors having critical experience, is it time that the nonfiction genre starts valuing criticism? Or do we feel like it's selling out to The Dark Side (as a friend put it recently). Is it time that we, as nonfiction writers, start proposing panels to AWP on nonfiction scholarship, delivering papers that do the work of articulating this wonderful thing that is our chosen genre? How many creative writing teachers require craft and criticism of their creative writing classes?

There is so much value in complicating our genre, bringing various writers (new and old) into the larger conversations of the genre. As has been obvious with the pre-AWP kerfuffle over John D'Agata's latest exploits, we only seem to come together to talk critically about what's going on in the genre when there's something large to argue about--and, unfortunately, usually those argument boil down to old, tired back-and-forth over the continuum of truth and fact. Why aren't we considering our nonfiction in terms of the genre itself, the craft of the work, nonfiction and rhetoric, nonfiction and ecocriticism, nonfiction and gender studies, and more? It feels like one can find isolated articles here and there that do this--but why are such articles so isolated?

Possibly a better question is if this kind of criticism is being published, have I missed it, where is it and where can I find it? It's entirely possible I'm looking in the wrong places and I would be eternally grateful if someone would enlighten me--I'm not afraid to be wrong here.

It seems like the great majority of the books on nonfiction are craft, closer to textbooks for beginning writers than they are geared to higher levels of nonfiction writers. I don't mean to say that these books aren't wonderful and valuable, because they are and I love them. I'm saying that there's a hole in our genre for critical work, written by the writers who also write in the creative sphere, because this is the next step in a full exploration of the genre.

But I hope we can start talking about the future of our genre, not just in terms of what constitutes and defines nonfiction, the essay, the memoir, persona, truth and fact, the lyric essay, and whatever else we seem to gravitate back to--towards considering the intricacies of what those nonfiction works and writers are doing.

AWP 2012: Women and Crime Fiction

2012-03-05T09:49:00.004-06:00

Here begins a series of post-AWP posts, because I didn't have time or energy or internet to post during the conference itself. Truth be told, I still don't have energy (the train got into Lincoln at 12:15 last night and I teach this morning), but I still have that post-AWP glow of inspiration and energy that I hope will hang around for a while. It's also beneficial to let things simmer for a while and see what bubbles to the top.

I went to "Women in Jeopardy: Crime Fiction" on Thursday and I don't know what I wanted the panel to be, but I didn't get it. It was fine and I didn't know what I wanted out of it, but it left me strangely disappointed. But the basic ideas about men vs. women being represented in crime fiction were interesting and I learned terms about the genre that I didn't know before. But I would have liked to talk about the actual fiction, rather than the business of it.

On the train ride back to Lincoln from Chicago yesterday, we sat next to a woman who teaches in the MFA program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. My friend Danielle, a first-year MA in fiction, is very interested in social justice, particularly in human and sex trafficking and we were talking about the panel and violence against women used for entertainment. This Rhetoric of Women Writers class I'm taking has been huge in giving me the vocabulary to talk about things I already feel like I know. But so much of crime fiction, so much of the thriller-type movie genre involves violence against women as the precipitating event of the plot, women needing to be saved. The panel did discuss writing strong women characters, women who have agency, where women and men come together eye-to-eye, on equal footing.

But my larger question--and this is what the three of us discussed on the train yesterday--how do you get away from that? She mentioned absolutely hating the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (she hadn't seen the American version, and wouldn't) its adherence to this plot; Danielle and I mentioned the movie Taken (which I hated and started me on this kick). I like to read mysteries and thrillers. Someday, I'd like to write one. So how do you write the anti-version of "violence against women as entertainment." And my short answer to the woman from UNO was "I don't know." And I don't know. Part of it, yes, is giving women characters agency and the ability and tools to solve her own problems. But there's a larger issue here and I don't know what to do about it. It's definitely worth continuing the discussion, because I certainly don't have any answers.

But it's like I told the woman from UNO: things that bother me, things that enrage me, things I can't quite figure out, well, that sounds like a class I should teach.

Anybody want to weigh in?

Eng. 150: Finishing up the Dust Bowl

2012-02-27T11:20:00.002-06:00

Today, we finished talking about Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, just as my students turned in their second interview for their project (how their community has been shaped by a specific natural disaster).

We started off talking about the final chapters and how the response to the aftermath of the Dust Bowl sounds eerily familiar to our lives today. The same questions still rage: what is the value of a place? Does it only have value if it can be used? Just as Roosevelt proposed planting the Plains with trees to hold down the soil, we also talked about whether that means that we'd learned nothing from the last ten years. The Plains wasn't designed for trees--so would we only be courting further disaster, introducing vegetation which it was never designed to have? We'll be talking about Wangari Maathai later in the semester and the Green Belt Movement, but it seemed pertinent to bring it up now too.

My students were surprised how political the book became, how much the government and politics were involved in the Dust Bowl--in all stages. We came to rest on the question of where do we go from here? What do we do? (This is exactly the question I wanted them to come to, because WP3 is all about that...) My students were also really stuck on learning more about the Dust Bowl and other historical events in an English class than they ever did in a history class. And then I told them that history is only boring if you forget it's about real people.

Then we turned to their projects. This time, I had them imagine the disaster they're researching and write it as a story. Where are the concrete details, the sensory details? What was this disaster like? What did it smell like, feel like? They wrote for a while, more feverishly than I've seen them write in a long time. I wrapped them up after a few minutes and had them recast the interview they'd just done into a narrative. Some of them had expressed admiration for how Egan writes, the way he incorporates voices, but were nervous about trying out those techniques for themselves. So I wanted them to try. What does the person look like, what does their voice sound like? Where are you sitting? I'm really looking forward to how their paper turns out. So far, the blogs they've been putting together have been terrific and I'm really excited to see how they turn out. There will be some adjustments I make to the project as a whole, but so far, things are going fairly well.

Today, my 252 class is turning in a draft of their short story--and I'm excited to see what those look like, having talked about them with various students over the past couple of weeks. Should be interesting!

Galway(s)

2012-02-25T10:15:00.008-06:00

The third Air Schooner podcast is up, the second to do with our lovely Irish issue. For my own endless literary vanity, this one also includes me, reading from my essay "Galway(s)." I can't figure out how to embed the podcast here in this post, so click here for it.)

And below is the whole essay (it cuts off abruptly at the end, but that is the end, so you haven't missed anything.)

(Of course, there's a little of is that my voice? to quote Yzma. Why do our voices sound so foreign to us?)

Eng. 252: John Banville and other Literary Crushes

2012-02-25T09:55:00.006-06:00

It's no secret among those who know me that I have intellectual crushes. Yesterday a high school friend teased me for posting about my crush on Placido Domingo (he appeared on The Colbert Report the other day)--a crush I've had since I was a kid and saw him on Sesame Street with Placido Flamingo. It was the day I learned what "namesake" meant. But I also sent word to my three high school English teachers that the incredible William Kent Krueger was going to be in Park Rapids next week and if they didn't know his work, they should. Two of my teachers are retired (and I know they would love Krueger's mysteries), but one teacher is still teaching and I had a brief moment of wondering whether she would spread the word to her students, maybe take a few to listen to him. When Krueger Skyped with my 252 last semester, that might have been the highlight of the whole term for my students.

Yesterday, in my 252, we talked about John Banville, another of my literary crushes. I read The Untouchable during my MFA and loved it. An excerpt from Mefisto was in our anthology, so we read that on a day we were talking about voice and pacing, the Friday before their short stories are due on Monday. I paired that with the first few pages of The Untouchable and the first few pages of Christine Falls. And I remembered that Dawn Duncan, my mentor with whom I'm collaborating with Joseph O'Connor, she loves Banville, so I sent her a quick email--to which she replied that she and her students were boarding their plane for Ireland (it's spring break where she teaches) and I was instantly insanely jealous. She's going to meet up with O'Connor, I think, so I'm doubly jealous.

I did post an interview with Banville, talking about his writing and his alter ego, Benjamin Black (who wrote Christine Falls). One of my students wished I hadn't told him that Banville and Black were the same person. We talked about how a writer can so clearly choose his style and his voice depending on the story s/he's trying to tell. If we didn't know better, we would have no idea that the man who wrote The Untouchable and Mefisto is the same writer who wrote Christine Falls. The basic sentencing is different, the tone, the voice, the mechanics of it. But above all, at the most basic level, though, is a man who loves his sentences.

I suppose I expected that my students would want to turn the pages on Christine Falls the most out of the three, simply because it is a crime thriller and the first few pages set up enough questions to make the reader want to turn the pages. But I was surprised how many students really were intrigued by the other two excerpts, Banville's excerpts. I can't wait to talk about that a little more with them next week. I'm really interested to see how they're reacting, as writers, to the texts we've been reading. They're not the most cheerful of stories, but then, that's not confined to the Irish--"Hills Like White Elephants" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and ZZ Packer's "Brownies" and all the other American stories we've also been reading aren't cheerful either. Makes me doubly curious for the kind of stories I'll see when they turn them in on Monday

I'm glad it's Saturday, and a sunny one at that. I have reading for my women's rhetoric class to do, but then I have high hopes for a pot of Maritime Mist, a Cadbury Creme egg, and some quality time with Banville.

State of Mind: Tuesday Edition

2012-02-21T10:51:00.003-06:00

Last night, I texted my sister, K2: "Sitting here, drinking Twinings Orange, Mango, and Cinnamon, tasting the Aran Islands, and thinking of you." And I was. Tasting a squall that blew up just as we got back to our hostel in 2000 after a walk to Dun Aengus, very nearly slamming the door behind us as it hit, then laughing through it as we sat in the kitchen with our hands warming around mugs of tea and soup.

It was a Galway kind of day yesterday, all cold rain and wind, Assam in my Stanley thermos. I've said before that I think since my first introduction to Galway was in the winter and the rain, that's how I prefer my Ireland. And last night, in the warmth and cozy of my tiny apartment, drenched in low lamplight and surrounded by the insulating power of my books on my shelves, the steam from my mug of Twinings--tea bags hoarded since the last time I was in Ireland in 2007--tasted of All is Right With the World.

This morning, the rain has moved past and there was sun when I took out the garbage and recycling. It's Viennese Earl Grey in the pot this morning and the brightness of the morning sun is highlighting the dust on the shelves and the pieces of cardboard Maeve has strewn around the floor in the last two days. And it is time to vacuum, refill the pot of tea, cats sleeping in various parts of the apartment, blues on the iTunes. This too, has its own flavor of All is Right With the World.

Cemetery Hunting in Seward

2012-02-20T08:10:00.004-06:00

It's a gorgeous February Sunday and I'm standing over the grave of Etta Shattuck, born 1868 and died before her twentieth birthday, on 6 February 1888, in the aftermath of the Children's Blizzard. The sun was rich butter yellow when I set out from Lincoln on Hwy 34, thinned to lemon by the time I reached the Seward city limits. It's not flat here, the hills like shoulders.

This is a place of deliberation. This is a place where trees plant themselves at creek edges, looking from a distance like morning-after scruff, but these creeks are not simply water. They plow their way through the soil, ripping it away, forming their own paths, their own beds. This is a place of gravity. This is a place where the weather and the world comes to you, because it can't help itself.

But I'm standing at Etta's grave because we just finished talking about the Children's Blizzard in my English 150 class, combining David Laskin's book The Children's Blizzard with Ted Kooser's poetry Blizzard Voices. Ted asked me on Friday if I'd been out to see Etta's grave and I had not yet done so--but it was beautiful yesterday, so I fired up the Jeep and went to see what I could find. I hoped I could find her, so I could report back to my class on Monday.

Etta was a schoolteacher, the sole support for her family, which included her father, a Civil War veteran. There were many markers for Civil War veterans in the three cemeteries I went to yesterday and such things are the reason I love to hunt cemeteries, for these stories. I know that through the Homestead Act and the ones that followed it, if you were a Civil War veteran you could get a year knocked off the five year "prove up" limit for every year you were in the service. That must have sounded mighty good to those who fought. Etta was caught in the storm, rode it out in a haystack, survived. But gangrene followed the frostbite and she had both legs amputated below the knee. Whatever complications followed nobody knows, but she did not survive.

I've said this before: hang around in a cemetery long enough and you'll find out everything you need to know about the town you're in. You'll find out who the main families are. You'll find out when it was settled, what its original language was, when the language switched to English. You'll find out about epidemics, war participation, and more. And that's what I found.

I found the Berneckers, two brothers, married, with children, families buried in adjacent plots. The children's graves are in German, one of the mother's in English (much later). Of the children there, the dates stuck out. 1883. Oscar Bernecker and his wife Mary lost three young children with about two weeks in 1883. A few feet away, Herman and Salome Bernecker lost two of their young children in 1883. Five children in one family in such a short period of time. I don't always Google to find out what happened, but I did for these kids: it was a diphtheria epidemic. Ten years later, Oscar and Mary had twin girls, one of whom lived for five weeks and the other who died after three months.

Too many graves of children here. Intellectually, I know about mortality rates and I know that they were much worse on the Plains, in rural areas. But too many children.

Today we start talking about the Dust Bowl in my 150. And we'll talk about the interviews that my students did over the weekend for their own project. We'll talk about how many hundreds of gravestones there are in the cemeteries I visited and for all that death came to each of them, there are no identical stories in any of those stones. Each one is unique, each one is a story that should be told. I found graves where the young mother and her child died in childbirth, I found young men in their thirties, I found old ones of ninety. Accidental deaths, went to sleep and never woke up, murder, diphtheria epidemics, cancer, pneumonia, premature birth. Each one is a unique story, never to be repeated. But that doesn't mean we can't listen.

Eng. 150: Ted Kooser Visits Our Class!

2012-02-17T10:29:00.003-06:00

Today, the long-awaited day when Ted Kooser comes to visit my English 150 class. If you've been following this blog, you know that this class is deep into natural disasters and we're currently working on our second Writing Project, which deals with a specific natural disaster's effect on a community. My students turned in their topic proposals today and just skimming through them, I have several working on the 1975 Omaha tornado, the 1997 Plains storms, tornadoes in Arkansas, the European heat wave, earthquakes, snowstorms, and more. They just posted their weekly Think Piece to their blog last night/this morning--and I'm so excited about them, I just don't know what to do.

We finished David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard on Monday and for today, my students read Ted Kooser's poetry in Blizzard Voices. It's really interesting to see the difference in perspective that prose and poetry offers. We sat in a circle and the first question one of my students asked was about process, how Ted went about finding these voices. He said that he tried to stay close to the original source that the story came from, but using the poetry itself to highlight the drama of the voice and the story. And then Ted said something that resonated throughout the class period--and I think it's going to resonate beyond. He said that memories attach to concrete things, and so if you can find that concrete detail in a memory, that is what will keep it coming back. He told a story told to him, about an American Legion presence at a funeral and as they prepped for the gun salute, one of the guys got his yellow necktie caught in the gun and it wouldn't fire. He whispers to the platoon leader, what should he do? The platoon leader whispers back, simulate! The guy whispers to the guy next to him, what does simulate mean? He's told it means pretend. And so when the guns go off, the guy with the jammed rifle yells BAM! And so what we remember out of this memory is that yellow necktie. So find those concrete details.

I was curious about something Ted said, about still being curious about the Children's Blizzard, going (and returning) to see the graves in Seward, Nebraska--and what about this disaster still provokes such curiosity and wondering? He said that there's an energy in the air with things like this, and he likes to be in the presence of that energy. He likes to walk around, just to see what he can feel. I like the idea of lingering energy and that being a eternal springboard for trying to understand what happened in a place and the people it happened to.

Another student asked about Ted's writing process, how that might come out of his previous comment about liking to be alone. Ted said that he's always written, but because of his job at the insurance agency (he needed to be there at 8:00), he usually gets up at 4:30 to write, because when he gets home he's too tired. "I write poorly every day. I write well about once a month," he said. And this was something that I hoped my students could latch onto--not being afraid to write badly. It doesn't always have to be brilliant. It's all about the process and using the process to combat the fear, the thinking that what comes out of a page needs to be perfect the first time. Love it. He said that he writes in an 8 1/2 x 11" artist notebook, with blank pages, and it always starts as a journal entry. What he did yesterday. What the temperature is. Sometimes he'll doodle. And it might go no further than that journal type entry. But sometimes it sparks something. And that's what's important. He doesn't force the writing to go where it won't go and he said that if he gets six poems a year that he's happy with, that's a good year of writing.

Ted gave some specific advice to my students, that he started out in the insurance company in an entry level position and he retired as a vice president--and he thinks the main reason that was is because he could write. He'd never had a business class, but he could write. And so the other people who had business degrees would come to him, asking for help with their writing. Lots of people in business can't write, he said.

I also loved his comment that "writing is almost an athletic endeavor." He told us how he quit drinking 25 years ago and that was the best thing he ever did, because it was almost a second job. To be a writer, you need to eat well, sleep well, and be healthy, be disciplined about writing and about your life. This myth that you need to be a miserable starving artist is ridiculous.

To wrap things up, one of my students asked for specific advice as they went into their Writing Projects, how they might tease out some of the things he was talking about. Ted said that they should listen for concrete details (like the necktie), those things that memory is attached to. If you can get the person to think in terms of sensory images, that's really important--smells, sounds, that sort of thing. He also told the tale of trying to get his mother to talk about the house she grew up in, but she said (and this sounds like my grandmother), "Oh, I don't really remember anything about it" but then he had her draw a floor plan of the house--and I thought this was brilliant--and she could, in incredible detail. Doing this teased out that his mother and sisters and their mother slept in one room and the father and brother slept in the other room. "Your parents didn't sleep together?" he asked her. "Oh, no, I guess they didn't." There are ways to get people to remember--and I'm definitely trying that floor plan idea. Another question he likes to ask (and he got this from a friend) is have you met anyone famous?

He read the last poem in Blizzard Voices for us to wrap up the class (brilliant--see video in previous post), kindly signed my students' books, and then we said goodbye. My students, who I think were more intimidated than I expected them to be (especially considering how NOT intimidating Ted Kooser is), absolutely bubbled their way out of class. I can't wait to talk to them next week about their reactions. I love my job.

Eng. 150: Children's Blizzard, Day 2

2012-02-15T10:10:00.006-06:00

Monday was a great day. I'm sure my students were overwhelmed with all I tried to cram into our fifty minutes, but such is life. We're reading excerpts from David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard and on Monday I paired our reading with a couple of articles. I know my students hate the articles, but they're so important--and I'm so hoping that is coming clear to them. So many of their Think Pieces from last week detailed how they'd never heard of the Children's Blizzard, even having lived in Nebraska their whole lives. I know. I know. So we read John Opie's "Moral Geography in High Plans History" and Marita Sturken's "Desiring the Weather: El Nino, the Media, and California Identity." Fascinating. Simply fascinating. Half the class had read one of the articles and the other half read the other article and they taught what they had read to the other half of the class. It's the first time I've tried that tactic and I think it went well--but I'm really missing my longer TR class periods.

Getting my students to consider the Plains in terms of Opie's "moral geography" was an interesting process. What happens when we impose a morality on a piece of land, how a landscape is made to represent fundamental values of a group of people? We talked about Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, the Homestead Act (most of my students had no idea what that was), and how all of that plays into shaping the people who live in this place we are also now calling home. The article also talks about various federal Farm Bills as moral responses to take care of the people starving in this geography.

Some thought-provoking moments:

"On the Plains, when farmers failed they believed they were under the divine hammer and had also betrayed the American dream. They believed it was both sinful and unpatriotic to abandon their homesteads" (244).

"It offered a geography of hope, a pastoral idealism preached by Jefferson, Crevecoeur, and many others. By the ninetieth century, a near-mythic belief that life on a family farm...was a superior way of life stood as an article of faith at the heart of Americanism" (245).

"Because God was on the United States' side, surely nature would conform to God's plan. A livable landscape could thus be imposed on the challenging Plains" (247).

"By the second half of the twentieth century, the Plains had slipped off most Americans' mental map; they became a region beyond society's edge. By mid-twentieth century, American 'social space' stopped at the boundaries of suburbia, and any unique features beyond suburbia appeared to be antique, hardly relevant curiosities" (253).

And more. I could go on and on and on. This is a great article, thinking about all the ways this landscape was manipulated--and in the case of many of the immigrants that Laskin follows throughout his book, how the immigrants themselves were manipulated into this place. Wes Jackson makes an appearance here, a welcome introduction for my students into a biocentric view of the world.

Combining this with Sturken's article about the weather and El Nino was likewise fascinating. I'm looking forward to my students' Think Pieces tomorrow, because I really want to see them applying ideas and moving in and out and among them. Sturken writes about the weather as a thing "not to be experienced so much as watched and consumed" (162). She moves through the weather as entertainment and how the weather, throughout much of history, "has been dictated by narratives of control" (163). She considers the weather in terms of revenge--and as we've been talking about in my class, morality tales. (Dear students, this is a moment of connection you should be making with the blizzard and Opie...)

A fascinating moment, though, is how she connects the weather and its narratives to citizenship and nationalist discourses, where "weather is most often defined as coming from elsewhere" (164). El Nino was "a foreign entity...visited upon the United States" (165)--and for the purposes of thinking about the Children's Blizzard, it came on the wings of an Alberta Clipper. Weather, she writes, "is also one of the means through which people situate themselves in the world, not only as local citizens but as national and global citizens" (171). She does discuss Othering in terms of who is affected--and I really wish we could have dug into that a little deeper in class. Oh, the limits of the classroom space.

One piece my students found fascinating was the two narratives of weather and disaster in California: the first is that of an apocalyptic narrative, that it's inevitable that The Big One will come and California will be destroyed and crack off and become an island in the Pacific; and the second one is a narrative of "California desires what it gets [coming] under the guise of a moralistic stance about consumerism and popular culture" (182), that because California is asking for these disasters because of their immoral ways (Godless in Hollywood, gay marriage, all that fun stuff). Fascinating, because she also points out that Florida and other states in the path of hurricanes regularly suffer more damage than California, but Florida and those places have no apocalyptic narratives. And it's even more fascination how Sturken considers all of this in terms of California's regional identity. Another point of contact for my students and our class. You can't escape how a landscape shapes your identity as an individual and you can't escape how it shapes your community.

Ending as Sturken does was a great way to end the class--one I hope we can continue to talk about in our class--that "These narratives are ultimately about the question of survival... The story of weather disaster is about finding meaning in survival" (186). She continues, "In creating an overreaching narrative for the weather, El Nino provided an explanation for that thing which is perceived to be the most uncontrollable... This was weather with a purpose, and, as such, an indicator of a larger purpose in life" (187). We talk about these disasters because they have meaning--not in themselves, but meaning that we give them, as we try to find answers in the unknowable, patterns in the random, explanations in the unexplainable. It's why the Plains--and other places prone to disasters--have formed this moral geography, because it's one of the ways that we find meaning in our lives.

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser is coming to our class to talk about his book Blizzard Voices, which is a collection of poetry about the Children's Blizzard. I can't wait. It's going to be fantastic.

Launch of the Prairie Schooner Irish Issue!

2012-02-14T12:52:00.010-06:00

This last week, Prairie Schooner, the venerable literary journal on which I am happy to serve as the Senior Nonfiction Reader, celebrated the launch of its special Irish issue. Over two days (Thursday and Friday), we welcomed four visiting writers, Aidan Rooney, Nuala Ní Chonchuír, Deanie Rowan Blank, and Sandra Bunting. (Click here to read Nuala's write-up on her trip.) There were interviews, readings, and it was a great time. I was a part of the panel on contemporary Irish writing, moderated by Dr. Stephen Behrendt, and it contained Aidan Rooney, Nuala Ní Chonchuír, my friend Bret Shepard, and myself. Our broad topic was the role of place and landscape in contemporary Irish writing, something very near and dear to my own heart, but the discussion went off in many interesting directions, too many to report here. But I would like to summarize and think about a couple of the ideas we did talk about--and feel free to weigh in on any of these things. We didn't come to any conclusions, but I'm not sure we wanted to.

For me, being interested in place studies as I am, it's really interesting to see my own definitions of place being expanded. It's one thing to think of environment as encompassing both the natural and built environments, and as Aidan Rooney pointed out, "Joyce [in Ulysses] made the urban very important." And we considered the way that Ireland is viewed as homogeneous, but it's actually very regionally diverse. Accents differ, language differs, perspectives and values differ. So considering all those factors that influence our idea of place need to be expanded. We considered the traditional "sense of place" in Irish writing, how it is tied to the rural, and how the Irish are continuing to reclaim their right to name their places. The place is tied very much to the land. But there's also the issue of immigration, which sets up a sense of placelessness as well.

But I also started to think of place studies in terms of domestic space, of houses and such (especially as they play out in the big house genre)--and what happens when we expand the domestic space to also encompass the body as place. The fiction of Nuala Ní Chonchuír is very intensely situated in the body as place (which makes boiling down what her stories are about to sex and relationships dangerously simplistic). When one of our panel members mentioned that (I forget who), someone else quipped, "Let's not go there"--which is an interesting choice of phrasing, one that means there is a there there to go, i.e., a physical place as well as an intellectual one. This week in my Women's Rhetoric class, we're reading bell hooks and her discussion of the homeplace as a place of political situation--and such is also true in other spheres. Women's bodies are intensely political spaces, but I'm only beginning to think of that kind of rhetoric and that kind of performance in terms of place studies. This is a new idea for me, so I'm very much looking forward to spending some quality time on Jstor.

But other considerations and expansions in the ways we think about place moved in our discussion from the page as space to thinking about digital space, in terms of writing and literature. Nuala Ní Chonchuír made a comment about the performance poets working in Ireland right now, how anti-page they are, and Stephen Behrendt observed how many of his students come to class reading on their Kindles. There has been a shift, whether writers are on board with digital forms of literacy or not, a shift has happened. But the page is still an important space. One of my fiction students who was attending the panel wondered about "literary Darwinism" and the internet, wondering if good work will always be good work, no matter how much crap is posted on the internet (I'm paraphrasing). There will always be a tension between the benefit of access readers have to works they would never have been exposed to before, simply because of this digital space, and more traditional venues of publishing that prize the page. Nuala Ní Chonchuír also brought up the changing editors of Poetry Ireland Review and the recent death of the Irish Times poetry critic. She said that poetry is losing the visibility it once had on the page. Interestingly enough, Behrendt commented on Ted Kooser's poetry project, the goal of which is to increase the visibility of poetry in newspapers.

And the third major item I'd like to report on came towards the end of our session, a piece I wish we could have explored further. The question came: "how do you define Irish poetry?" And the immediate response was that poetry is poetry, that the first thing a writer must do is be human. Fiction must be real life. But then the conversation shifted, Aidan Rooney commented that there is a tendency for Irish writers to do what is expected of them, that they are Irish first. The result is a kind of quaintness. But he hesitates to feel Irish all the time, that he wants to be known as a good poet, not a good Irish poet. Our editor, Kwame Dawes, piped up with a reference to Langston Hughes and his discussion over the difference between being a good poet and a good black poet--and that what's happening is not as universal as we like to think it is. Such a desire is actually very specific and it is white, coming from a position of power. The question we were not able to answer was how would we know if a writer is writing an Irish poem or not? What makes a poem--or a poet--Irish? Someone brought up that in the Dublin Writer's Museum, it is all men, except for one woman. We discussed writing from a perspective that is not our own, but we acknowledged the great responsibility in doing so, especially when there has been exploitation in that relationship.

As our panel ended, Stephen Behrendt said, "We write to find our own reality, our own definition of self. We write to find who I am at this moment." And quite succinctly, Nuala Ní Chonchuír said, "At the end of the day, we don't go to the desk thinking 'I'm a woman writer.' We just go to the desk."

Eng. 252: Sebastian Barry and Point of View

2012-02-08T13:28:00.006-06:00

Sebastian Barry is my new literary obsession, ever since I finished A Long Long Way. I loved Annie Dunne, which is on my Focus list for my comps, and I wish A Long Long Way was on there instead--and I wish I had more time to read just for fun, to follow an author until you've exhausted everything they've written. It's the good kind of literary stalking. (The other kind can be found at AWP at the end of the month...) So I have no idea why I was nervous to teach the excerpt from The Engine of Owl-Light in our anthology, other than its subject matter would be disturbing to my Midwestern undergraduates. The first third of the story is in a strip club, the second on a boat where the characters argue about homosexuality in the Rasta culture, and the third where the characters witness a murder.

What's great about looking at contemporary writers is that they're still alive and you can either talk to them in person or you can find interviews and such things on You Tube. Brilliant. It's one of the reasons I like doing contemporary work as much as I do. I could have tried to contact Barry, but I didn't. Maybe I will at a later time. So I played a video interview where he is speaking of his novel The Secret Scripture, inspired by his great-aunt. After the clip finished, I had my students think of a person on their family tree who would make a great character, who has an interesting story to tell, where the puzzle of things surrounding them just doesn't all fit right. My students came up with some great ideas.

Then, on to Barry:

What I've learned about teaching, in general, lately, is this: it's obvious that every class is different. But why do I insist--to myself--on treating them all the same? I'm finally getting smart(er) about that. This class needs some time to think through their thoughts--on the page--before we get into a discussion. Now, that wasn't too hard, was it? Seriously. It makes so much sense in hindsight. This also makes the students who I know didn't read the assignment flip through the book to find the story and pretend to write something, like they're actually doing what they're supposed to. (It's hard to take when half your class is there because they think it's an easy creative writing class and boy, did they pick the wrong class if that's what they want...) So I had them write a reaction to the Barry excerpt. What did you think? And then I asked them to consider how these three parts of this story fit together. What's the connective tissue between them?

The discussion turned out to be great. Maybe I shouldn't have worried. (Of course I worry. I'm a teacher. And a Minnesotan.) But we talked about the reality vs. imagination that was going on, the denial that the characters face. It's easier to deny that there are gays in the Rastas, to deny that a murder has just taken place in front of you, if those people aren't human. In the strip club scene, the women are objects, not people; in the boat scene, gays aren't people; in the murder scene, the murdered person is not a person. As Ali keeps speaking in absolutes, "That didn't happen" or "It cannot be" or "It isn't," his character combines the objectification of people in these scenes into a social apathy towards what would be a moral issue. Of course, this brings up how and why that happens, and why Ali's character feels the need to do that. But it's interesting. And all of it plays very nicely into our weeklong discussion of Point of View, this detached observer of the narrator who shifts from a first person to third person back to first person.

We talked about language, about not overlooking the simple poetic devices like alliteration or not underestimating your verbs. I think that moment caught them a bit by surprise, for whatever reason.

Tomorrow (Thursday) and Friday is the launch of the Prairie Schooner Irish issue and it's going to be chock full of writing and talking about writing. Four of the writers published in the issue are coming to campus and there will be interviews with them, readings, and what I'm most invested in: the panel on contemporary Irish literature that I'm doing with Dr. Stephen Behrendt (who edited the issue), my friend Bret Shepard, and two of the visiting writers. We're going to be talking about the role of place and landscape in contemporary Irish writing and let the conversation flow where it may. The events will take place in the Sheldon Art Museum and here's a link to more information. Join us! It's going to be great!

Eng. 150: The 1888 Children's Blizzard, Day 1

2012-02-08T10:28:00.007-06:00

It's been a while since I've posted about my English 150 class, mostly because the last two weeks were a whirlwind of rough drafts, conferencing about said rough drafts, workshopping, and final drafts. On Monday, my students turned in their final drafts, I'm in the midst of grading them, and we started our second Writing Project. Quite serendipitous though, that we had a really great snowstorm over the weekend, before we start reading excerpts from David Laskin's awesome book The Children's Blizzard.

Here's the goals of WP2: Use primary and secondary research to investigate a local disaster where you come from. You will use all tools available to you to complete this project, which will include doing personal interviews with people from your community who witnessed this disaster first-hand or have another sort of primary knowledge. You will also investigate other texts like photographs and artwork, personal artifacts, and more to consider all possible angles of how this event affected this community. You will put together a digital space (a blog) that details what you've discovered, one that allows your community (as well as other digital communities) to share in the knowledge.

So. On Monday, each student created a blog, where they will post their Think Pieces, their interviews, their interpretations of those interviews, videos and articles they find, videos they may choose to make, etc. This will be capped with a five page paper that takes all they've learned and puts it together. They don't have topics yet, but they will by the end of next week. They seem kind of skeptical about it--even strangely hostile--but I hope that will change soon. Otherwise it's going to be an uncomfortable few weeks.

Today was the first day of WP2 and we had our Author Presentation on David Laskin and the Children's Blizzard. Like the presentation on Jonis Agee a couple of weeks ago, it was great. Great information on the author, great information about the disaster itself.

Then, we wrote: as I mentioned earlier, we had a great snowstorm this weekend, which left behind 12+ inches of snow on its way. It started Friday night, ended Saturday. Gorgeous. Of course, there were plowing issues (as always happens in Lincoln), as well as some power outages. So here's the prompt I gave them: How did you handle this storm? What did you do, what did you think, what did you see when you looked outside? I said that I'd gotten self-righteous about my four-wheel drive, which made them laugh. And then, after I'd given them a good chunk of time to write, I asked them How was what you did, what you didn't do, what you thought, etc. influenced by the community you come from?

We talked for a while about their writings, what they did, what they feared about the storm, what they didn't fear, and more. What was particularly interesting, though, was the connections they were able to make about their community's influence and the place they come from. I said that when I went out on Sunday to dig out my Jeep, a guy had gone into the snowbank across the street and was stuck. So I lent him my shovel, because I was using the brush. He was grateful. But the place where I grew up valued winter survival kits--extensive ones--with kitty litter, shovels, and more. Our communities are where we learn how to look at the world, how to stay safe in it. For this particular Wednesday, the wheels were turning, but it was slow. Hopefully this gives them something new to think about as we continue with this project.

Then we shifted to Laskin. I started with a little bit about why we're doing this, why it's so important to find these connections--that this blizzard and this book is not just about snow and people who died. It's a lot more complicated than that. It rubs up against the American Dream, Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism--even to the myth of the Great Plains and how that was sold to immigrants who didn't know any differently. We considered how we define tragedy.

I showed them a clip of Galloping Gertie, which collapsed in 1940 as the beginning of the storm system that would become the 1940 Armistice Day Blizzard in Minnesota, then would go on to wreak havoc over the Great Lakes. Most of them had never heard of either event, but I didn't expect that they would have, so I showed them the video clip of Galloping Gertie. It elicited the reaction I wanted from them.

We worked our way through the first 26 pages of Laskin, I gave them some things to think about as they continue to read, complications they might not have considered, reminded them of the Think Piece they have due on Friday, and sent them on their merry way. Unfortunately, I did also have to remind them about reading the assignment and even if they choose not to print it off, they still need to have a good enough grasp to discuss it in class. I hate it when I have to give that speech. But all in all, a great start to WP2.

Dear Students, the world is a much more fascinating place than you could ever imagine.

Short Mini-Interview With Joseph O'Connor

2012-02-05T10:09:00.008-06:00

My Eng. 252 class is reading O'Connor's short story "Mothers Were All The Same" for Monday and so I sent O'Connor an email, wondering if he could give us some insight into the writing of the story. (My class is collaborating with him and Dawn Duncan's Eng. 346 class at Concordia College, so we've set up this communication beforehand.) We're studying POV this week in our fiction class, so we'll be talking about that, as well as other areas of craft (dialogue, setting/place, character development, etc.) It's true, the story is fairly old (for himself), but he was willing and so here's our exchange. Some interesting insights here.

Karen Babine: "I'm wondering if you could talk about the process you went through to get to the final draft we're reading. How many drafts did you go through? Any particular struggles you went through to revise?"

Joseph O'Connor: "I wrote "Mothers Were All the Same" about 25 years ago, perhaps before many of your students were born, and so you will understand that I no longer remember all the precise steps (and mis-steps) that I took during the process of that particular story. But generally, back in those days, my approach to a story was fairly instinctive. In a first draft I would simply splash the words down onto the page and not worry about anything like grammar or spelling, or even logic. I probably focussed on something like finding a 'voice', the actual sound of the person speaking. Then, when I had written perhaps four thousand words, I would start into the process of refining and shaping them. Usually, I would do maybe forty drafts of a story. Anything less than twenty drafts doesn't work for me."

Karen Babine: "We're studying POV next week, so it might be beneficial for my students to hear something about how you chose a first person narrator over a third person narrator (even a 3rd person limited narrator). (We'll talk more about POV when we get to Star of the Sea.) When you're writing, how do you decide what POV to choose? Do you ever change POV in a story when you go back to revise (like 3rd to 1st or 1st to 3rd), if you find that one works better than another?"

Joseph O'Connor: "I am not conscious of ever choosing a point a view for a story. Instead, I try to let the story choose its own point of view and then go with that. Your students will have realised that point of view changes everything in a story. 'Mothers Were All the Same' would be a very different thing were it written by the young woman he meets on the train. And it would be equally different if narrated by an all-seeing eye. It simply felt to me as though the ACTUAL subject of the story, as opposed to the plot it outlines, is the naivety of the young man narrating events he scarcely understands. For that to come across, I must have felt it would be better told from his point of view."

Karen Babine: "This week we're studying dialogue, so I'm wondering if you could speak to your use of direct vs. indirect dialogue in this story. How did you choose the way that you presented the dialogue? Was it a matter of pacing and tone, voice, or something else?"

Joseph O'Connor: "Again, you ask about my 'choices', but I am rarely conscious of making any choice, as such, when writing a piece of fiction. I mean, I do make choices, as every writer must, but I tend to go by instinct. My approach, perhaps a rather idiosyncratic one, is that I assume the story already exists 'out there' somewhere, and what I am doing is trying to see it more clearly so that I can write it down. That sounds insane, I know. But that's what I do.

I feel dialogue is truly essential to get right in a story. Nothing trips the reader up more severely than bad or unbelievable dialogue. When I wrote that story, I was myself young, and so I wrote the dialogue through a process of listening how my friends talked. Every writer needs to be a listener, and a watcher, before being anything else. That's far more important than literary 'style'. In fact, no style is possible without it. And as writers, we need to read like writers, not simply readers. So, when we encounter the work of a writer who does dialogue well (for example, James Joyce) we need to study every nuance.

You ask about the issue of 'reported' dialogue, as opposed to noting down exactly what someone said. The answer is very simple. I just don't believe any of us remember entire conversations word-for-word with total precision, so when a writer asks me to believe that he or she does, I don't believe it, and then I lose interest. Everything we do as writers needs to be focused on making readers stay with us, not driving them away."

***

If you're interested in more of our collaborative project, check out our wiki-in-progress (it's very in-progress...).

I also think this interview is a good one:

Creative Writing Can Be Taught: Creative Writing Professors Answer More Important Questions

2012-02-05T08:06:00.003-06:00

Stephanie Vanderslice and Anna Leahy put together a fantastic roundtable conversation in response to Anis Shivani's latest rant against creative writing classrooms. Find it here on the Huffington Post. Find Shivani's original article here. Find my own response here.

Happy Sunday! We got more than a foot of snow here yesterday, so we'll see how that goes.

Eng. 252: Stress Tics and John Edgar Wideman

2012-02-03T13:30:00.006-06:00

This morning I wondered how Galway looked so much like Lincoln. The rain was hard, sideways, the wind feeling like it was right off the Atlantic. I brewed my Assam "strong enough for a mouse to trot across," filled my big Stanley Thermos, and off I went to campus. I was glad for my awesome jacket (waterproof, windproof, and good to 20 degrees), but my jeans were soaked by the time I walked from the parking garage into Andrews Hall. I contemplated my Thermos, remembering a comment a student made on Wednesday, wondering if those things were like military issue in the English department. I liked the juxtaposition of those ideas. But then I thought it would be much more convenient to have a tea spigot right here in my office.

It's the final day of two days of conferences. Fairly good all around. I like conferences and I find I like them better when I forget the sign-up sheet at home, so I don't know who's standing me up. Better for my stress level. And so I was thinking about stress when I walked into 252 this morning. I knew my students were stressed and I was feeling it myself. Figured I might as well channel that energy into something productive--and teach my students how to do the same. I went through the daily housekeeping as I usually do--to a very hardy few who braved the weather--and then our writing exercise for the day is one I was particularly proud of :

What is your stress tic? What is that thing you do when you're particularly stressed--that you might not even recognize as being caused by your stress? I gave them the example of my freshman roommate in college, who came home one day to a spotless dorm room, looked at me, and said, "Did you have a bad day?" And when I thought about it, I had. "Why?" I asked her. She looked at me. "Because you clean when you're stressed." Huh, I thought. I guess I do. Never realized that before.

When they finished writing, we talked about some of the things they do and we move to talking about how they need to view their characters as real people. Your characters will have stress tics too. They may pick the skin on their fingers, they may drive to Kansas City for no reason, they may play the same music over and over on the piano. Very rarely do our stress outlets turn out to be passive. We usually have to do something to combat our stress. So do your characters.

I also talked about channeling their stress into their writing. When I was starting my MFA, 9/11 happened and I didn't have cable yet. So I channelled all that uncertainty, all that fear, all that stress into the character I was writing. When I was writing of the death of a different character, it was how I dealt with watching my grandmother fall down the steps (she did not die, but she broke her collarbone) and me not being able to catch her. Writing is a very good stress relief, because we can channel that onto the page. Sometimes it turns into something awesome, sometimes we write our way through it, burn the page, and we feel better for it. Of course, things like this sound a lot like the "therapy" that Anis Shivani was raging about a couple weeks ago, but the reality is that fiction (like other genres) is real life. And emotions and actions and motivations and stress tics are also real life. It's how we get to the real heart of whatever it is that we're writing.

It was from there that we switched to talking about John Edgar Wideman's short story "Fever." I love that story, but I wasn't sure how my students would take it. Since this week we're talking about dialogue, I wanted to see what they'd say. There isn't a whole lot of dialogue-dialogue in it, but the switchings of POV/voice/character puts forth a dialogue of its very own. And there was a moment in class when I asked why Wideman did it this way, why he didn't just write one main character in a traditional sort of narrative--and what would have been lost had he done that? And my students all popped in with ideas about how the story was like the fever, all sort of dreamy, that you never quite knew what was going on, how you never quite knew who was speaking, but that's the whole effect of the story. He wanted that dreamy fever-like stage, which he couldn't have gotten any other way. I think they're starting to understand what it means to read like a writer, which makes me so happy I could just dance around the office. I love my job.

And I also have to mention that several of my 252 students signed up for conferences too and I hope I've been able to talk them out of thinking their first draft has to be perfect, like the things we've been reading in class. I think they're just starting to understand that the story in front of them is absolutely not the first draft that author made of that story. It doesn't happen. And so they're starting to turn off that internal censor that tells them ugly things. At least I hope so.

(Feel free to post your stress tics in the comments!)

Eng. 252: Awesome Videos on Writing

2012-01-30T11:07:00.013-06:00

Need a writing pick-me-up? Check out these videos I used in today's 252 lecture. (And I just figured out how to embed video. Prepare for more videos on this blog, now that I know how to do it.)

We're not reading Colm Toibin yet (CHOI-bin is how I'm told his last name is pronounced), but we will later in the semester. And in here, he's got a great line about Mary Lavin and writing the least-likely story. And in the second video, about the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer (and listening, actually). Brilliant. And in the third, Junot Diaz has great advice about comfort zones, mapped territory, and writing something new.

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But here's the fun part. These were part of my lecture on narration and dialogue--and I always think it's valuable to hear the writers we're reading, see them (almost in person), because we often forget that it's an actual person who wrote what we're reading.

So we finished watching the second clip of Colm Toibin (my students made me repeat his name a couple of times) and then I told them to write that conversation as if Toibin were a character. You don't have to get the lines and the dialogue right--just write the dialogue. Write his eyebrows, write his jowls, write the tone of his voice, write his inflections. One of the big goals of yesterday's discussion of dialogue was to get them beyond attributive verbs (hissed, was one brought up). Hopefully it works. We ran out of time to talk about John McGahern, but we'll combine him with Edna O'Brien tomorrow. Whee!

Eng. 252: Sean O'Faolain, "The Talking Trees"

2012-01-25T14:03:00.001-06:00

We jumped into 252 with both feet today, with Sean O'Faolain's short story "The Talking Trees." O-FWAY-lun is how I'm told his name is pronounced. My knowledge of Irish things is largely written, not verbal, so my pronunciations are not what I would wish them to be.

We started class with a writing exercise out of the What If? book, Exercise #22 for those of you with the 3rd edition, which has a goal of creating a child narrator: "Using the present tense, write an early memory in the first person. Choose something that happened before you were ten. Use only those words and perceptions appropriate to a young child. The memory should be encapsulated in a short period of time--no more than an hour or so--and should happen in one place. Don't interpret or analyze; simply report it as you would a dream. When you can't remember details, make them up; you may heighten the narrative so long as you remain faithful to the "meaning" of the memory--the reason you recalled it in the first place." We wrote for ten minutes and then we talked about what we did to create this voice, how the sentences worked, the word choices, how we wrote about what we noticed, how we didn't interpret what we saw. It was a useful starting point to talk about O'Faolain, whose story is that of four teenage boys. The way the narrative starts is in the voice of a fifteen year old boy.

I divided the class into five groups of four and gave each group a specific question to consider, they would talk in their groups, and then we would come back together as a large group. Most importantly: what can we learn as writers from this story?

Plot and conflict: what is this story about? (How many things is it about?) How does the story move? What moves it?
Class and Gender: we can see that the author is working with class issues and gender issues, but we're interested as writers. How are these issues brought up, represented, constructed on the page?
How does the POV shift between characters? How are the characters constructed on the page?
Place and setting? How does it function?
Voice. How is it crafted? Look at the first page, think Noah Lukeman and A Dash of Style.

When we came back together, we had a great discussion. We talked about the way that the setting reflects what's going on there, how the story starts in a candy shop and moves to a darker place, how that reflects the childlike characters and their childishness and moves into a more grown-up place. We talked about the way that class and gender work on the page, how that's constructed in dialogue, in characterization, in the tone. We talked about how Gong Gong is where the story rests, because it's his character who takes the conversation out of the candy shop and moves it from thought to action and it's Gong Gong who becomes the point of the story by the end, shedding the nickname that others gave to him and becoming himself ("Tommy"). We talked about music and class, we talked about how where Gong Gong was prone to bursts of dialogue (as he's described at the beginning) and how by the end of the story, he's lost that childish-outburst type of style. We talked about how the subject matter (teenage boys being afraid to talk to girls) is as relevant today as it is in the story, that while the place/setting itself is essential to the story, the universal quality of the story itself is what makes it resonate.

And then there's the final paragraph. Dear students, never underestimate your sentences.

We concluded class thinking about what this story can teach us, as writers and my students piped up with things like not being as afraid to use younger characters; that there's as much drama in the teenage years as there is outside of them; that just because the drama isn't Death, that doesn't mean that it won't make a good story; and once again, I walked out of that classroom thinking that 50 minutes is a really short amount of time.

For Friday, we're reading Bridget O'Connor's "Postcards"--and this always throws me for a loop because one of my characters in my novel is Brighid O'Connor. All in all, quite a good day teaching.

Eng. 150: Jonis Agee, Special Guest Star!

2012-01-25T10:39:00.000-06:00

Mornings like this remind me that I'm a morning person and there's a reason for it. Of course, a good night's sleep helps too. But this morning, I'm in my windowless office on the 3rd floor of Andrews Hall, drinking Assam "strong enough for a mouse to trot across," my feet propped on my desk, new, awesome shoes on the floor. The lamps are on, it's cozy in here, and all is right with the world. I love my life.

This morning, in my 150, Dr. Jonis Agee came to visit. We've been reading her novel The River Wife in that class, talking about identity and characters and the New Madrid earthquakes. As I mentioned to my friend Jacob on my way down to class, this is one of the moments of teaching they never tell you about, when your students come into class, absolutely beside themselves with surprise that the liked the book you assigned. Because of scheduling, we're actually going to finish the novel on Friday. I knew my students would love her, because she's one of the biggest personalities I know, she laughs like the world is full of joy and jokes, and she doesn't pull her punches. What I won't tell my students is that I have a Post-It note on my sightline at home, so when I look up from my computer I see this admonition: "Just write the fucking thing. -Jonis Agee." And that makes me put my eyes back on my computer screen. She's a writer whose voice you can hear on the page with perfect pitch. I admire her a lot, and not just because she's my advisor.

She started out by telling us how the story started, what led to it, and she was visiting a bootmaker in the Ozarks who had just returned from New Madrid. "I always drive through New Madrid fast," he said. "Why would you do that?" she asked. Because that place still has quakes every day, little shivers. When Jonis started doing research--"because that's what writers do"--she learned the story of a girl who would morph into the character of Annie Lark in her book, a girl who was trapped in her cabin by the New Madrid earthquakes and left to die. Jonis describes this as "haunting," that the story of this girl haunted her--"and if you're a writer, you have to do something about it." And do something she did.

Here are some of the questions my students asked and the conversations that came out of those questions:

1. Who killed Baby Jula, really? Whose fault was it, Jacques or Annie's? Jonis said that she considered them both guilty, because they both played a part in it; my student blamed Jacques more. Jonis said that she considered that even the core event that destroyed their marriage, an event that started with Jacques being willing to buy and sell human lives, being willing to do anything after that.

2. Annie's death. Jonis said that she always felt Annie was living on borrowed time, that sooner or later everything that Jacques touched would be destroyed. She asked a very pertinent question that seems to resonate in many spheres in this book: what does it cost to have dreams? (We didn't talk about this in class, but how would each of those characters answer that question--Omah, Laura, Little Maddie, Jacques, Dealie, Annie, Chabot, Hedie, Clement, and all the others). Jonis said that she saw Annie and Jacques locked together in a passionate dream that would both destroy them both but not let them go.

3. The role of place. The role that the earthquakes and the flood had in the characters' lives is a matter of knowing the place where you live (something that my students and I are starting to talk about in more depth as we become more familiar with the concepts). The river floods. That's what it does. And Jacques, in his quest for control, forgot that. It's interesting how the river bookends Annie and Jacques' relationship--it brings them together and it tears them apart. The river brings both wealth and destruction. When we forget what the place is, that's when things get dangerous. Or when we think we can control a place.

4. Framing structure with Hedie's story (in the 1930s). Jonis said that she always felt like Annie's story wasn't big enough to carry the whole novel, that the first chapter from Hedie's POV was the first thing she ever wrote, the voice that stuck with her--and that chapter was supposed to be a short story. Eventually, though, the story wouldn't go away and it became more important to show this one place through time, through all the people who lived there.

5. The writing process. I love when my students ask this particular question, because it's part of my goal every semester to get my students to figure out their own process, because it's never going to be the same as anybody else's. Jonis has a page limit every day, not a time limit, and she usually writes early in the morning. The River Wife, she said, took between six and eight drafts, and took her eight years to write. I think this, also, is the single greatest moment that my students can hear--that published writers go through the same process they do, of drafting and revision and struggle and joy and all of it. What they see in front of them, perfect though it may be, never started out like that.

She said that she carries around a writer's notebook and that she and Ted Kooser have had a constant conversation about the search for the perfect notebook (Kooser is also coming to our class in a few weeks). Writers, she said, are also on the search for the perfect pen, the kind of pen that makes you feel good when you write.

Jonis mostly writes on the computer, but if something isn't going right, she'll usually switch mediums, to pen and paper. Some writers, she told them, write their first drafts longhand and then transcribe it to a computer and that's their first revision. She told the story of Kerouac writing on a long roll of paper, so he wouldn't lose his momentum. She talked of giving her intermediate creative writing students an assignment to write as fast as they can with no punctuation, no capital letters, nothing--and to write two pages a day for seven days. The goal is to not write backwards. I loved that. How often do we go back and delete what we just wrote when we're working on a computer? I love the idea of not being able to go back, only able to write forward. I might try that myself, just to see what comes of it.

My students were actively engaged in the discussion, leaning forward in their chairs, smiling and nodding, even if they weren't speaking. When class was over--and we probably could have gone for much longer than our allotted 50 minutes--the majority of the class waited in line outside in the hall for her to sign their books. Happy sigh. I just love the days that remind me why I do what I do.

State of Mind: A Response to Anis Shivani

2012-01-23T07:32:00.000-06:00

It would be very easy to dismiss Anis Shivani and his latest rant “Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Therapy for the Disaffected Masses” in language my amazing mother would disapprove of (she was very insistent at “no body parts, no body functions,” especially at the dinner table) and it was my instinct to employ silence as a rhetorical device and not even engage him, because it really seems like his purpose is to incite, not provoke legitimate dialogue—but then once I realized that not saying anything was part of his goal in silencing, that put my back up, and here we are. It seems that I always come away enraged when I read anything he's written, yet I can't help clicking on links when they come up to see what he's done now. I could write a lot more than this on this topic, adding references to all kinds of writers, but then we’d also be here forever. So, as you read this, know that there is always more to add to the conversation.

Shivani asks the age-old question, can creative writing be taught?, and such a question will never find an answer among writers. As a teacher, I believe it can, though there is a line between talent and skill, but Shivani intends to take the question in a different direction, which in itself is well within his rights to do. Extending and complicating a question like this is important for the writing community, but the main problem with Shivani’s rehashing this old question is the gendered way in which he does it, destroying the female perspective and contributions and highlighting only that which is male. He writes in the second paragraph that “Creative writing is not literary writing as has been understood for all of the history of writing. Creative writing is a subset of therapy, with the same essential modalities… More appropriately, we might call it the Oprahfied mindset that penetrates workshop.” Whether Shivani has taken any courses that might have introduced him to the history of rhetoric or the craft of writing is unclear. But the rhetorical canon aside, the main issue that Shivani overlooks—whether intentional or not, in his purpose to incite as much reaction as possible in his readers—is the difference between creative writing and literature: literature is artifact. As my fiction students identified last week, artifact brings to mind archaeology, digging, brushing away, interpreting this long-dead item for what it can tell us. Creative writing, on the other hand, considers a text as a living, breathing thing, something that puts my students in a chair next to Raymond Carver, because “Cathedral” did not spring, fully-formed, from the mind of Carver. He was once a beginning writer too. He wasn’t always Raymond Carver.

What is clear, however, that Shivani has equated creative writing with the feminine, and “real” writing with the masculine, for the purpose of silencing voices other than his own. Calling creative writing “Oprahfied” certainly genders the creative writing in terms that call to mind powerful women, mass appeal, and to him, little substance. From this argument, only women go to therapy; men do not. But what is particularly interesting about this phrasing is that it is a female mindset that phallically penetrates the workshop. He genders the workshop itself in other ways, using “she” to represent the creative workshop teacher—though it is interesting that as Shivani also argues that students are guided to imitate the models that the female teacher brings to class (Carver, Hemingway, Barthelme, Plat, Glück, and Levine are the ones he mentions), two women, four men, but the method of imitation that he rails against comes strictly out of this classical, masculine, rhetorical tradition. In Cheryl Glenn’s article “Silence: A Rhetorical Art for Resisting Discipline(s),” she writes “gendered power differentials [still] continue to determine who gets to speak out, who should remain silent, who gets to decide—and when” (267). And, as we will see later here, gendered power differentials also still determine what we can and cannot write about.

But it also defines what forms of writing are acceptable to Shivani, a move that discounts any other method of telling than his own. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald write that “women have often written in unprivileged or devalued forms such as letters, journals, and speeches to other women” (xx) and “they write of the necessity of an education, the perils of marriage, the catastrophe of abuse, the conditions of women’s poverty, or the pleasures of women’s sexualities” (xxi). As women find voice, a consideration of different forms is necessary, because a linear form often does not represent fully the subject matter that a particular author brings to the page. From my perspective, a recovery of women’s voices, rhetorics, and literatures is an important adding-to of the vast world of words and though—not a taking-away. I simply don’t understand why some men feel so threatened by literature written by women—and to extend this, why the literary world feels threatened by reading minority writers, LGBTQ writers, or anyone else.

Shivani continues, “Literature as we have known it though history springs from genius—that most politically incorrect of words. By definition, no creative writing teacher can give official sanction to this terminology. And so the literary criticism of Horace or Sidney or Coleridge or Eliot is out the door. All of literary criticism is banished. Creative writing can flourish only in this enormous vacuum. Creative writing is taught with this single most important premise: no criticism, as the word is traditionally understood, can be allowed into the workshop.” At this point, I actually agree with Shivani—sort of—which is enough to make me slightly nauseous. I think that criticism should play a large part in the creative writing classroom—but craft criticism, not literary criticism. Traditional literary criticism has its role in the literature classroom, where it is extremely valuable in interpreting the artifact of a text. The beauty of criticism in that sphere is that it is constantly changing, constantly recovering lost voices, constantly questioning the perspective that one brings to the reading of a work. Craft criticism is different. Craft criticism looks at the way a text is constructed to achieve the effect that literary criticism looks at. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” which we discussed in my fiction class on Friday, we don’t care if the story is about abortion, what the title might represent, what symbols and metaphors and such Hemingway used. We looked at how he constructed the ambiguity of the story, how he crafted the dialogue, used the repetition of phrasing to construct the characters, used his punctuation (we’d also been reading Noah Lukeman’s A Dash of Style), to end up with the story we were reading.

But what Shivani defines as genius is complicated in “Philip Levine and Other Mediocrities” (Huffington Post 8/13/2011) when he attempts to silence the female poets in ways we women writers have come to expect: “One would think that a celebrated female poet like Sharon Olds would show some signs that she had assimilated the key ideas of the twentieth century—or even since the late eighteenth century. But Olds is like a time-trap in medievalism, stuck in her obsessions with bodily flows, the pain of childbirth, and the witchery of men who love like it hurts…but it might as well be in a land before constitution, consultation, and communication.” What Shivani fails to understand—or at least acknowledge and articulate—is that women writers being able to write on such topics is a very recent acquisition, even as he rails against confessional poetry. In his attempts to silence the validity of women’s voices, the way that women—and more than women—come to voice in the creative writing classroom, are relegated to realms of “therapy,” which still retains a stigma of shame. Teaching students to be ashamed of their bodies, their experiences, and their traumas is absolutely unconscionable. Cheryl Glenn, in “Mapping the Silences, or Remapping Rhetorical Territory,” writes, “For the past twenty-five hundred years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement)” (1). Writers are told to “write what you know” and until only very recently have women in the United States been permitted to know anything but their own bodies—and even then, their bodies have legally been controlled by the men in their lives. Still, today, men want to control women’s bodies and our decision about what to do with them. And even this basic freedom for women is not universal. And those are perspectives we need to be reading too.

Until recent decades, women writing about their bodies and their experiences has been confined to “confessional” writing—and demeaned in the doing—but even as I write those phrases, women writing illness narratives, addiction narratives, and other deeply personal things is still largely dismissed in the writing world, often shelved in “self-help.” Even Susan Sontag, writing Illness as Metaphor at the beginning of this phase, could only write about her experiences with illness in a form that did not recognize her personal experience as a valuable source of knowledge and understanding. But such silencing affects men as well as women: while it is slightly more acceptable these days to write about motherhood, menstruation, rape, and other personal issues rooted in the physical body, the flip side is that it’s less acceptable for men to write about fatherhood. Yet it was Philip Lopate who wrote Portrait of My Body, navel-gazing at its literal best. But it’s still less acceptable for non-white, non-straight men to write about themselves honestly, let alone about their bodies.

Shivani argues for tradition in the literature/writing classroom even as he argues against it. He writes, “Literature is about having, first of all, a broad humanist understanding of the tradition, how vastly oppositional styles of writing have sought to grapple with the same human problems over time, how history and politics have shaped national literatures, how you can not necessarily learn—for that is too reductionist a term—but by challenged by great writers like Chekhov or Tolstoy or Kafka, to create something utterly unique to yourself.” Of course, he seems completely unaware—or purposefully remains unaware—of the way that masculine traditions have shaped literature, how it has shaped the canon, even to how masculine voices are the ones, traditionally, who have run academic departments and decreed what can and should be read in various classes. And of the great geniuses he mentions, all of them are men. This is not to say that Chekhov and Tolstoy and Kafka are not brilliant, but it reduces the vast world of writing down to a tiny sphere of What Is Acceptable To Read. And he remains ignorant of why any of that would be problematic.

He argues that “Literature is not about expressing yourself,” and again he uses “penetrate,” and in his picture of the creative writing classroom, the students who “eagerly participate” in this “mild form of hazing” are all gendered male. And he concludes his argument that “[creative writing] is perhaps also a refuge from self-help (which is where memoir flourishes)… No wonder creative writing is the most popular scene on campus. Show don’t tell, find your own voice, write what you know, sure, you can do that while carrying on a hectic social life and not even feel guilty you’re wasting time. Come to think of it, Louise Glück, that Pulitzer winner, doesn’t look at all that different from what you’ve been doing.” The voices he is disparaging here through his sarcasm—not to mention using a female Pulitzer winner as his example of creative writing gone wrong—are the voices we most need to recover from silence. It is the reason that my students have no idea that there are more writers in Nebraska than Willa Cather—and introducing them to various contemporary writers of the Midwest teaches them that they can participate in this community of words, that the Midwest is still a valuable place on the planet, that their perspectives are valuable, and even essential. It is an opportunity, not a problem. To quote Audre Lord, who argues for the value of perspectives: “‘I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing—their experience is so different from mine,’ yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, ‘She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?’ Or, ‘She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?’ Or again, ‘This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.’ And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other” (304). What Shivani is ultimately arguing for is a continuation of the white, straight, male, privileged class that has dictated What Is Literature since rhetoric began (ironic, he doesn’t fit into that paradigm either). If that’s all he wants to read, that’s his business, and I wish he’d leave the rest of us alone. He’s not a teacher; his website only claims a bachelor’s degree in economics as his education. What right does he have to speak for us?

But that is not what literature is. Literature is the voice of a perspective at a specific time during a specific event. But creative writing is how we get to the literature. If there’s any element of therapy in a creative writing classroom it is to teach students that their perspectives are valuable, that you can write about anything you like (and sometimes that should go no further than your diary), it’s teaching that “what you know” is valuable, because the reality is that my students don’t think it is. That’s why I have to tell them I don’t want to see any science fiction stories—they feel attracted to writing about brand new worlds because they don’t believe that the world in front of them has anything left to see, to say, to learn from.

If you feel like weighing in, please do! I don't pretend to have all the answers--and a discussion would be lovely!

Why I Teach, Wednesday Edition

2012-01-19T08:33:00.000-06:00

I did my fair share of complaining this weekend for having MLK Day off, not because I object to the holiday or the reason for it, but because it comes at such a dumb time in the semester. I have the same problems with Labor Day. I just meet my students, we just get started, just start to create a momentum in our classroom and then I don't see them for almost a week. So my goal yesterday was to get some of that momentum back.

In my 150, we started reading Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife, which my students were excited to tell me how surprised they were that they were liking it. Most of them had read beyond the assigned pages. I'm having small groups do author presentations for the major authors we're reading, so my first group did theirs on Jonis--and it was wonderful. I just love this class so much I can't hardly stand it. Not only was the presentation great, giving information about her, her books, the background on the New Madrid earthquakes, GET THIS: they emailed her to get more information about some things, because they couldn't find it any other way. I just wanted to dance at their initiative. (Of course, I didn't and we were all grateful for it...) So amazing.

Then we talked about the Ryden essay from last week a little bit, because we went to the museum that day and here's the most important moment that came out of that class yesterday: when we talked about how people view the Midwest as backward, wondering if we have malls (as a student mentioned yesterday), wondering if we have running water, my question was: how is this possible? How is it possible that this is still the image of the Midwest that's out there? The point of the Ryden essay is to argue that the Midwest is just as full of history and wonderful things happening right now as any other place. But when we think of Nebraska literature or Midwestern literature, we think Willa Cather (and all my students shuddered)--we don't think Jonis Agee, or Ted Kooser, or any of the other amazing Midwestern writers who are writing fantastic work.

And here's the moment of the day: one of my student piped up and said she thought it was because we're so focused on the past here. We learn about our history in school, but we don't learn about the present and the future. We read Willa Cather, we don't read anybody else. We know this place is complicated and valuable to us, but what we're taught has everything to do with the past. Not who we are now. This isn't to say that the past and history isn't important, because it is, as we've seen in Ryden and the museum, but we need to do some thinking about the present, the here and now.

I love my job.

We talked some about The River Wife and we ran out of time, but the point of today's discussion of the book was to think about the ways that the characters were formed and shaped by the New Madrid earthquakes. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about "who is othered in this book?" I'm having them read some scholarly articles for every class, to complicated the book, but I think that I'm going to need to give them another way to think about those articles, because they're in that "if I can't relate to it, if it doesn't do anything for me, it can't matter" and that's not true. So it's going to be a matter of giving them tools to understand complicated material and question why it was so important to read that I'm having them do it.

Yesterday in 252 was the first really good day I've had in there, mostly because I'm still getting used to the MWF-50 minute schedule. Last semester, you may recall, was a Tuesday 3-hour class. I'm still getting used to the rhythm and finding out what I can and can't do in 50-minutes. But yesterday was the first day that we've gotten into the main course of fiction and craft, beginning to talk about voice and sentencing and characters. I had them read the first chunk of Noah Lukeman's awesome book A Dash of Style--and they loved it. I figured most of them probably would--but I just love that moment of "I never thought about it that way!" It felt good. The discussion after the lecture felt good. On Friday we'll talk voice and character and Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." Not yet too deep into the Irish fiction, but that'll come. Need to find a balance of working with what they know before I push them off the deep end.

On a completely separate note, yesterday our intrepid former custodian James Cherry (he's been moved out of Andrews Hall to Seton, I hear) did his recitation of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Bailey Library yesterday morning. James was there, in 1963, to hear the speech in person--something that just makes my skin tingle--but then he gave the speech. Memorized, as he's done every year for forty years. It was beyond incredible. It's been a long time since I've been moved nearly to tears by something like this. Incredible.

Eng. 150: Morrill Hall and Disruptions

2012-01-13T16:15:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned last semester, I'm sure that the rate of posting will go down as the semester picks up speed. But for now, enough is going on that's worth sharing that I'm going to keep at it. Today I took my Eng. 150 class to Morrill Hall, the natural history museum. The purpose of this first week in our Rhetoric as Inquiry class is, as far it is possible for me, to disrupt what they think they know without scaring them so much that they shut down out of fear. So far, it appears all is going well, on all counts.

We started out in the large mammoth and mastodon room at Morrill Hall to get our bearings before I sent them out on their own. I asked them to read Kent C. Ryden's article "Writing the Midwest: History, Literature, and Regional Identity" to orient their thinking. I asked them what Ryden had to do with us being here and one of my students very promptly answered that "we do have a history in the Midwest." The point of Ryden's article is to contrast the way that history is visible in other regions (the Northeast and the South). My student said, paraphrasing Ryden, that our history in the Midwest is not defined by an event in the way the Northeast defines itself by the Revolutionary War or the South does by the Civil War; our identity, for that matter--but that doesn't mean we don't have one.

Some moments in Ryden's article that are particularly thought-provoking:

"'Region' in this sense implies a historical veneer through which a section of the country is seen, understood, assigned meaning, and given identity according to some defining experiences located deep in the past, a crucial phase or moment at which the region was broken away, stamped for life, and set on its separate cultural course within the national collective, having achieved an identity that it is believed to maintain with greater or lesser dilution to the present day" (513).

"Lacking the historical touchstone of identity so readily available to other regions, midwesterners are required to do a different sort of imaginative work. Instead of adopting and adapting a ready-made history, they continually construct the past anew from the materials at hand...locating regional identity not in a spot but in the spot on which they stand" (513).

"Travelers in the Midwest, by contrast, notice something very different as they move through the landscape. The signs at town borders tend to bristle not with long-ago dates but with the names and accomplishments of athletic and academic champions from the local high school, a practice I have never seen in New England...a need, I suspect may seem particularly urgent in a part of the country that, unlike New England, has no obvious claim to be the locus of a national origin myth" (517, 519).

"[Many observers] are so unimpressed that they insist on seeing flatness in a landscape that is really quite rumpled, filled with swelling hills and interesting glacial leavings if not mountains. Not seeing any obvious topographical or historical significance in the landscape around them, they witness nothing at all, intuiting and projecting emptiness in a region that residents could tell them is actually richly textured; it is just that the texture is subtle, the flatness is finely calibrated and frequently interrupted, although none of these nuances is particularly obvious unless you have spent time there" (521).

"True, the region may lack a defining historical moment and an agreed-upon pantheon of cultural heroes. To expect these things, though, is to come at a definition of regional identity from the wrong direction, a direction inappropriate to midwestern circumstances" (528).

The point, I said, why we're here, is this: we're talking about this place we all home and what we know about that place that shapes who we are and how we think. We're here at Morrill Hall to either learn more about how and what history is written in this place--or to find out that maybe we don't know as much as we think we do. I asked them to be on the lookout for surprising things, weird things, things they didn't notice when they were here as kids. And I sent them to explore on their own.

While I was waiting for them, I skimmed through their first Think Pieces that they had just turned in. And I'm so proud of them that I just can't stand it. My grin just got bigger and bigger the more I read through their ideas and reactions. Most of them expressed some dismay at the confusion they felt after reading the Steinberg and Warnock articles (that we read for Wed.)--what they thought defined a natural disaster was basically destroyed--and neither I nor the authors gave a suitable definition to replace it. A great number of them admitted that these two authors forced them to be more open minded about natural disasters as Acts of God or Acts of Humans, expressing very strong religious beliefs in a God who still controls nature to teach humans a lesson. Even so, their ideas of that were complicated in ways I was very pleased to see them admit.

A few students wrote about wondering how a class on natural disasters--a subject they did not know much about--would go. Would it be boring? (This, of course, is always a chief worry of mine as a teacher, as it is for many teachers...) But already, just one week in, they're being open minded, at least, if not as excited about this as I am. And, one student mentioned that when the teacher is excited, it's a lot easier to get interested--especially at such an early hour of the morning.

When we all came back together, I asked them what they'd found and they talked about the camels, about other things that surprised them or they didn't know about. Lovely to hear what they were thinking, what they don't know about this place many of them have called home since childhood. Love it. I can't wait to talk more about Ryden's article in depth next week, as we expand our thinking.

Next week we start reading Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife--and one student, in her Think Piece, already started it and is loving it. I just love my job.

Eng. 150: What is a Natural Disaster?

2012-01-11T11:23:00.000-06:00

This morning, the weather changed. Where it's been unseasonably warm for January in Nebraska, barely requiring a jacket, let alone mittens, this morning was chilly and windy and made me regret leaving the house with wet hair. There was Pepto-Bismol pink of the sunrise reflected on the buildings I passed on my way to campus, but strangely, it felt as if the light came from somewhere else, because it didn't feel like the sun was actually rising. Very odd way to start the day.

Today was the second time I've met with my new English 150 class and I went into class thoroughly caffeinated and energized by what we'd talk about today and hoping that my enthusiasm, my very large Stanley thermos of Earl Grey Supreme, and what we'd read would somehow translate to my students. Since we don't know each other very well, I didn't have high hopes for getting them to talk about two scholarly articles on topics they had little knowledge of. But it was a great class, so exciting that it's given me the push I needed to get out of the First Week Worry that this brand new class on a topic I hadn't taught before and now I'm just straight-up excited for the rest of the semester. My students are talkative and willing to be interested, which is more than I could have asked for at this early date.

I had them read Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?" and Mary Warnock's "What is Natural? And Should We Care?" I started off the class with a short free write, a space for them to define for themselves--and then we would construct a collective definition--of what constitutes a Natural Disaster. They offered things like death, destruction, caused by nature, unexpected, out of our control, affects a group of people (rather than an individual), affects an area, involves the elements (water, fire, land, etc.). From there, we complicated those definitions, because the point I wanted to make with Steinberg and Warnock was that defining such things is not as simple as it sounds. Death is not the only way that humans can be scarred by a disaster. In the 1997 Red River Flood, nobody died, but that didn't make it any less horrifying. Caused by nature--what does that mean? Because Steinberg starts his article with a reference to the 1889 Johnstown flood, which was partially caused by spring rains, but it was the faulty dam that failed that caused the catastrophic flood. We'll talk about Erik Reece and mountaintop removal--that's a human thing that's causing catastrophic environmental damage. So it's not just nature--people are involved. Unexpected works in some areas, but we saw Katrina coming, we saw the 1997 Red River Flood coming--that doesn't make them less a disaster.

From there, we talked about both articles and the way both authors worked through natural disasters by bringing in the human component. Culture is a very influential filter of disasters, how we think of them, how we understand them. Natural disasters as morality tales is one of our oldest forms of storytelling. Plato's telling of Atlantis was a morality tale. The biblical flood is a morality tale. But even more complicated is the way that both authors discuss "natural" and "unnatural," how disasters are either Acts of God and something completely out of our control or they are completely explainable as to how humans contributed--and both authors' arguments culminated in "it's not that simple."

Trying to understand natural disasters is our earliest form of trying to figure out the world around us. It's how we get the Greek myths, how we get Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. And once we start to understand the place we come from, we understand how it works, how the way that that the Red River floods can be explained by its geologic history and the soil composition around it. Warnock also made the point where the environment stopped being just nature and became political nature and economic nature. I said that nature wasn't just what Thoreau went to find at Walden. What keeps nature natural is a matter of politics and economics. A very interesting moment.

One of the greatest moments that came out of class today was one of my students, when we were briefly talking about the Dust Bowl: why didn't they leave? An excellent question--why didn't they leave? Those who left Oklahoma and went to California left--and what happened to them? What other things might be in play that people wouldn't leave? What would prevent them from leaving? He also said something about cloud seeding and such as being crazy and why didn't they just wait out the drought, have faith that once you hit rock bottom, things will come back up? Another truly excellent question--but how did they know that things would get better? How are things not that simple? At what point, when the drought has been going on for ten years and your children are dying from dust pneumonia do you try anything and everything in your power to make it end?

The point of class today was to complicate--and yet somehow come to a common understanding--of natural disasters, how we would be talking about them with relation to understanding a place where we come from, how they might form personal identity as well as a community identity, and more. On Friday, we're going to Morrill Hall, to the museum to specifically explore "What don't we know about this place that we should?" My purpose is to further disrupt what they think they know, because the assumptions we make about place don't help us to understand it and how it affects us.

State of Mind: Linguistic Ecology and its Implications

2012-01-08T14:49:00.000-06:00

There's a moment that usually happens on the Sunday before a semester starts, where stress and worry turns into excitement for the semester to begin. Today it's happening in that space between my migraine existing and starting to go away. The weather is changing around here--they're forecasting flurries or some such nonsense--and that almost always gives me a headache. Add to that two late nights of short sleep with weird dreams and I just want to curl into a ball and wait for all that pain to go away. So, today has been a cocktail of Excedrin, Advil, tea, rice bags, and every other remedy I know to relax my muscles. Of course, there's no cure for the weather.

Now that my headache has started to go away, the stress of tomorrow leading to excitement, I'm really excited to teach my Natural Disasters 150 and my Irish 252. I hope I can interest my students and teach them to think about the world just a little bit differently. I have my box of books ready to go to the office tomorrow, and my bag will be packed tonight. One of the greatest things about teaching college is that the first day of school happens twice a year (of course, this is also a drawback...)

Here's the greatest part of the day: I've been stressing about what to do to propose for the IASIL Conference this summer (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature), the kind of stress that leads to this delightful headache. But yesterday, it all popped clear for me. I've been working for a while to create this space where environmental ideas and creative writing and literature can come together and it occurs to me that the ideas of linguistic ecology that I explored with my recent paper on the Irish essayist Tim Robinson (recently published in New Hibernia Review!) is something that I would like to keep working on. So, what if I continued that idea and kept trying to apply it to other pieces of contemporary Irish literature, and see where it leads me?

My current idea, which is in the fiddling-with-language stage of the proposal process, is to take Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea and filter it through my linguistic ecology to see what the choices he made as a creative writer have done to effect a particular ecological perspective. What interests me most right now is not just the sentence-level awesomeness that I love to do, but I also want to examine the physical form that the narrative takes as well. This is a very interesting book, craft-wise. It's written as a book within a book, with very interesting character/voice/POV movement, that uses different forms to move the narrative forward (footnotes, letters, newspaper accounts, etc.). The prospect is extremely exciting, only some of which is relief at filling the Void of No Idea.

And then, I enter the realm that has become familiar territory for me: nobody else does this kind of creative writing/linguistic ecology thingy, to my knowledge. If I take my Tim Robinson essay, add to it my impending essay on O'Connor, write a couple more (especially given my also-impending Focus List on Irish environmental prose), I could have a book before too long. That would be excellent, a larger project, something to work towards, rather than random essays here and there. And because I also always do this, I wonder what it would be like to teach a class on the subject? Hm. Might keep that in mind for my focus portfolio, the syllabi that are required as a part of it, and hmmmmm. The possibilities are endless. So many classes, so little time--time to focus on the ones I'm actually teaching!

Bring on the new semester!

Bookmarking: Place in the Pages

2012-01-05T09:30:00.000-06:00

Now I'm really stretching the purpose of this blog, but classes start next week and I'll be able to post on actually teaching things. But I wanted to take stock of my New Year, so far, because it's Day 5, and the reading has actually gone quite well. I'm trying to read as much as possible for my comps before the semester starts, because I don't know how much I'll be able to do--though I hope I can keep at a pretty good clip. So, to keep myself honest, here we go:

1. Dinty W. Moore's Between Panic and Desire. Freaking stupendous. I'd read parts of this, but never all the way through. I love that my comps is getting me to read all kinds of stuff I've put off till Later. I'm fairly traditional when it comes to nonfiction and form, but considering different forms is something I'm working on. My overarching question when the form isn't traditional circles around why write something this way? Mostly, my first introductions to experimental forms has come with pieces that feel like the writer is pulling a gimmick, trying to do something just for the sake of being weird, not because the piece demands such a form. With Dinty's pieces (some more than others, but that's going to happen in any book) the form was absolutely the right way to write his way through those ideas and those events. I'm looking forward to talking with him about this book at AWP, as well as my friend SFM, my resident expert in all things form.

2. Susan Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup. Hated. But I pretty much knew that going in. I'm not a fan of the New Yorker style pieces, of which this book is mostly composed. There's nothing in those style of pieces (I can't bring myself to call them essays, because they're not even close) that transcends their subjects. They're lovely in their writing--and they absolutely know their audience. However, because they're so topical with no perspective, they rely on their reader for meaning, which means if you don't know the person she's talking about, don't know New York or the place, or don't have some other sort of connection, it's going to be a waste of time. I will say that I think the New Yorker style inhibits Orlean, because those pieces that were not published in the New Yorker were near to brilliant. Those pieces allowed Orlean to make meaning out of the person, the event, the place, or whatever she was seeing. She's a brilliant writer, that's not in doubt. This just solidifies that the New Yorker wouldn't know a good essay if it bit them in the ass--what they do is good, but they should stop calling them essays. And stop clogging up Best American Essays with them. Sorry, sorry. Soapbox alert. Sorry.

3. Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. Not for my comps, but for enjoyment as well as wondering if I could possibly teach it at some point. It's been a long time since I've closed the back cover of a book with a heartfelt and reverent "holy shit," but this book was one of them. This book was so complicated, so brilliant, that I think it's definitely going to be on a teaching list one of these days. First, most importantly, the man can write a sentence. Wow. And the role of the place in the story was so much more than setting, second. Boston was not just a setting, but a place, a character, and acted as much on the human characters as they did upon it. I'm definitely teaching this one.

4. I haven't read David Quammen's Monster of God yet, but that's what's on my list for today. Bring on the charismatic mega-fauna! Stay tuned to see what I think of it.

Happy Reading!

On a Wednesday Before the New Semester

2012-01-04T17:02:00.000-06:00

Why is it that when you have the least amount of time, when what time you have is very tightly allotted to various projects, that all the idea for other things come up. I was on the phone today with a friend and we were lamenting the stress of spring syllabi, because while we had the entire summer to plan fall classes, we only have a couple of weeks to do the spring ones. We figured that we should try--even as we wouldn't know what we were teaching in any given spring--to plan the spring classes over the summer too.

The imaginary class I'm planning in my head (only barely out of the dreaming stage, which is where I hope it'll stay for the foreseeable future, or at least till summer) has to do with literary mysteries, and teach it with a place emphasis: what role does the place play in the narrative?

I'd definitely teach William Kent Krueger again. Particularly Iron Lake, but I might revisit some of his other works. Maybe some Nevada Barr. But right now, I'm reading Dennis Lehane--Mystic River right now--and thinking that maybe this book would be a fantastic addition to my imaginary list. The book is so great that I'm only halfway through it and so blown away that sometimes I have to put it down to breathe. Core question for this book: how is he playing with the expectations of the genre and form in this novel? Such a good book.

I also found Benjamin Black's first novel, Christine Falls, at one of the thrift stores in Fargo over Christmas--Benjamin Black, of course, being the pen name of the one-and-only John Banville. This one I haven't read yet because its first couple of pages are being scanned, so I can teach my students about pacing (we'll read an excerpt from Mefisto, the first few pages of The Untouchable, and the first few pages of Christine Falls in my 252 this spring). Dear students, you will never be a writer unless you learn to love sentences. And it doesn't matter where you find them. Twilight, Harry Potter, Hemingway. It doesn't matter what you read as long as you read.

I stole the loving sentences bit from Annie Dillard. In "Write Till You Drop," she tells this story:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "Well," the writer said, "I don't know... Do you like sentences?" The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of the paint."

***

Anyway, I digress. As I'm starting to formulate this imaginary reading list, I realize it's very, very short on women. If you've got a favorite, one that uses place (urban or rural, all is good), let me know.

While I'm at it, my knowledge of canonical-type mysteries is low too. I'm a nonfiction writer, after all. Beyond Poe, I don't have much. So help there too would be great.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T10:55:00.000-06:00

I'm going to stretch the definitions of place and space in this particular post, because I need to put this in writing and it only has very little to do with teaching and place. But it does fit. Sort of. There's a bit of New Year's resolution in here, but not really.

1 January 2012 marks the beginning of my eight months of comps, which, at UNL, means that I've already submitted my reading lists for approval to the graduate committee, they've been approved, and I've got the go-ahead to go ahead. Because I want to finish both my Field and Focus portfolios by the start of fall semester, my plan is to do my Field in the spring and Focus over the summer. Each list consists of 30-40 books selected around a theme of sorts. The Field is designed to be the larger of the two, in terms of scope: mine is "20-21st c. American Nonfiction" and my goal is to write my paper on the Contemporary Essay. My Field list is "Contemporary Irish Prose: 1966-present" and I want to write on contemporary environmental prose, particularly in the West of Ireland.

In addition to these 20+ page scholarly papers, our portfolios will include an annotated bibliography of our reading lists, a syllabi based on the list, a statement of teaching goals, and such. I'm pretty excited about the whole thing, because this is a subject I'm in love with, books I want to read, and I have plenty of tea in my cabinet to get me through. I'm eternally grateful that the shift from creative writing to scholarly writing isn't a hard one for me (though I think that scholarly writing is equally as creative as "creative" writing).

So, this morning, while the bright New Year's sunshine fills my south-facing bedroom (the only windows in my apartment), while Galway sleeps on the radiator, sandwiched between the warmth of the pipes and the warmth of the sun, while Maeve sleeps on the fleece on the couch, I've got a pot of Almond Biscotti/Madagascar Vanilla tea in my favorite pink pottery pot that I bought for my birthday a few years ago and it's wonderful. The lights on my small Christmas tree are bright and comforting. Cinnamon candles warming the air. Dinty Moore's Between Panic and Desire on my coffee table, with a pencil.

I'm basking in the glow of great books to come, great classes to come, new friends, old friends, new students, new ideas, new experiences, and the general wonder of a brand new year. This year is going to bring a lot of exciting things and I'm ready for the challenge.

Digital Spaces: Preparing for Spring 2012

2011-12-29T14:58:00.000-06:00

I'm putting a "mostly done" label on my two classes for spring, which is a great feeling. Some tweaking, I'm sure, will be required, as well as printing and proofing, before I deliver the babies off to the office to be copied. It's about the only thing I'll be printing for my classes, so I don't feel too guilty about it.

But as it's my goal to try something new every semester--at least while I'm at UNL--this coming semester is going to be an exercise not only in new themes and texts, but I'm experimenting with digital spaces as an extension of my classroom. Seeing these in play as I'm writing these syllabi is pretty exciting. It's also challenging me to do research on digital space as a place, to aid in my place-conscious pedagogy. I won't say I'm technologically challenged, but sometimes I find technology quite challenging.

So: today I set up the wiki that Dr. Dawn Duncan of Concordia College-Moorhead, MN and I will be using to teach our respective classes Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea. She's teaching "From Empire to Independence" (contemporary British literature) and she's using O'Connor--and I'm teaching the book in my Intro to Fiction (252) at UNL. Dawn's a dear friend of mine, dating back to my undergrad days at Concordia. There's no one I'd rather collaborate with than her. So, the goal is to approach this one novel from a scholarly, critical, readerly perspective and the perspective of a creative writer. The wiki is barely functional right now, since I don't know much about wikis, but we have until the 2nd half of the semester to figure it out. We're going to group our students across classes, have them post and discuss, and enrich each others' readings of the novel. Dawn and I also sent an email to Joseph O'Connor himself, wondering if he might be interested in being a part of this collaboration. As it's a large part of my own teaching philosophy and pedagogy to have my students talk and interact directly with the writers they are reading, I hope-hope-hope O'Connor's intrigued enough by what we're doing to want to be involved. Fingers crossed!

In my 150 class, which is a W.H. Thompson Scholars section (a UNL learning community comprised of first-generation/low-income students who have won the Thompson scholarship), we'll be talking about natural disasters in a variety of ways. The new, digital space thing here is that their second writing project, an oral history project that researches a disaster where they come from, is going to be a largely online project. They will create a blog designed to aid in their community's knowledge and understanding of this event. As I was working through the assignment, it made no sense to have my students do interviews and other oral-history-type-research and translate that oral quality into the written form. They will do written work, of course, but I think something too important would have been lost in the translation. Because they're creating a blog, they can post audio files, video files, and more. And the form that the project takes will be much more accessible to their communities. Should be exciting!

I'm pretty excited about both of these classes and I'm ready for them to begin! Well, ready for them to begin on the first day of the semester. Happy New Year!

Taking a Step to the Side

2011-12-07T10:23:00.001-06:00

Things are wrapping up nicely here at the end of the semester and the panicked emails from my students haven't been that bad. I got final portfolios from my 252 class last night and I'm really looking forward to seeing the revisions of their short story and their craft papers, because I suspect they're very good. I get final drafts of Writing Project 3 from my 150 tomorrow. Whee!

But we got our first snowstorm of the season this last weekend and since Lincoln isn't great about plowing its streets, I was grateful for my four wheel drive. My winter survival kit, however, is still in my bedroom. Three years ago, when I hurt my back, that's what I was carrying, so it always makes me a little nervous to lug it around--even though I know it needs to go in the Jeep.

Because.

Here's the story from Monday: I'm looking for a parking spot in the four hour meters and see this car spinning its tires on the ice in its parking spot, going nowhere. So, I get out, the guy rolls down his window and I offer to help. It's an orange Camaro. New. Leather seats, top of the line sound system. Vanity license plate. The guy driving it probably isn't more than twenty and from his accent and what's on his vanity license plate, I assume he's an international student from a place not used to ice and snow. He gets out to push and I slide into the driver's seat before I realize it's a stick shift (of course it is) and I can't drive a stick shift. We get that little problem taken care of and he tries to push and nothing happens. I say that I've got some kitty litter in my Jeep that might help and he doesn't know what that is (another thing that makes me think he's an international student) and so I take the kitty litter out and pour some behind his tires, to get some traction. It's the Tidy Cats for my actual cats, not the non-clumping stuff in my survival kit that's much better for traction (larger particles)--and it doesn't work. I feel like a failure as a Minnesotan. Maybe this winter, I need to get a chain for my Jeep and have my dad teach me how to use it. I do know the difference between 4-high and 4-low, at least.

But this is the reason you don't see a lot of sports cars in Nebraska (or Minnesota or the large of the Midwest in general). They're not great on ice. And if you're driving a rear wheel drive vehicle, like that gorgeous Camaro, you're going to want to go to the hardware store and stock up on sandbags.

Dear students. This is place. This is what it means to live in this place, today. Place means wearing your winter boots to school and then changing into your regular shoes when you get there. Place means not letting your gas tank get below a quarter tank. Place means remembering the difference between which way you turn into a skid, depending on if you've got front or rear wheel drive. Which I always forget, because I'm directionally dyslexic. And I know you're in college and invincible, but there is no shame in wearing a hat and mittens.

And to close with my favorite weather-related quote: "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing." Happy winter! Happy last week of classes!

Looking Ahead: Spring Eng. 252

2011-12-01T09:44:00.000-06:00

I'm lucky enough to be able to teach another section of Intro to Fiction next semester, a spectacular opportunity on so many levels. I've mentioned before on this blog that because my time at UNL is short, it's my goal never to teach the same syllabus twice. This next semester, with my Natural Disasters 150 I'm halfway to that goal. With this new 252, I have another opportunity to stretch myself and make the most of the experience.

The first thing that's obviously different is that the class is MWF, not just once a week. And while I taught a variety of place-based fiction this semester, next semester we're reading contemporary Irish fiction. We'll be using the Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (ed. Dermot Bolger) and Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea. I'm coming to understand, practically, how important it is for students to read both short fiction and novels in fiction classes, something I've only known intellectually. I'm really excited to broaden their perspectives about what writing is happening in the world, as well as my own.

So, the other stupendous opportunity is that--as it stands right now--I'm going to be collaborating with my delightful friend Dawn Duncan, who is a brilliant Irish Lit/postcolonial scholar, who is also teaching O'Connor's Star of the Sea in her Contemporary Brit Lit class. So we're putting together some ideas about how we can foster cross-over between her literature class and my creative writing class, reading the same book. Her class is in Moorhead, MN and mine is in Lincoln, Nebraska. That also provides some challenges.

I've never done anything like this before and I would love some feedback from those of you who use more technology than I do in the classroom. Would you suggest a blog? Pen pals? Skype dates with both classes? How would you best foster an environment where one class who is studying this book as literature can easily converse with a class who is studying this book as writers?

What fantastic ideas could you suggest?

Bonus Double-Post Wednesday: Place-Based Writing Exercises

2011-11-30T11:17:00.001-06:00

I called it the Writing Blitzkrieg, which comes on the class period before the rough draft is due in my English 150 class. We've been talking about Mark Tredinnick's The Blue Plateau to complicate our ideas of how humans shape place and how place shapes humans, a conversation that has gotten consistently better as we get deeper into the book. They started out not liking it much, but once we got into talking about it, analyzing it both as readers and writers, they started to become more fond of it. I love it when that happens.

I've done this once before, where I've given them a zillion writing prompts in a very short amount of time and we've spent a maximum of five minutes on them, to give them as much exposure to different prompts as possible. It seemed to work well before, to jar them out of expected modes of thought, so I did it again.

Here are a bunch of the prompts I've used--and a disclaimer here: I got these prompts from somewhere a long time ago and I don't know where, so I'm unintentionally plagiarizing here. If anybody knows who these prompts belong to, please let me know and I'll give credit where it is due.

Write a little something that includes the following: the smell of fresh-baked bread, hot peaches, a man in a beret, the words souvenir, clink, and lurk.
Write about a time you either very very hot or extremely cold--and try to include something visual in every single sentence (a color, a description of an object, a metaphor). The idea behind this exercise is to combine two senses at the same time--the visual and the tactile.
In this exercise, list ten places. (Any place will do.) Then list a smell that comes to mind in each place. After you have those ten places and ten smells, circle the pair that you find most intriguing and start writing.
See #3, except do ten places, ten sounds.
With specific detail that appeals to all the senses, describe windy weather on a city street.
Imagine a body of water. Might be a lake or pond or river, anything. What do you see in your mind? Describe this body of water in detail--detail that addresses all the senses. What colors do you see? Lights and shadows? How does it feel on your skin? What is in it, near it? And in the last minute, write the feelings that this body of water evokes.

Happy Wednesday writing!

'Tis the Season...For Skype!

2011-11-30T08:04:00.000-06:00

It's getting down to the end of the semester and the workload is increasing in inverse proportion to my students' willingness to do it. But it's also the season of Skype. For the last couple of semesters, my teaching philosophy and practice has been evolving (as one might expect with changing schools and starting a PhD program) and it's become increasingly important for me to get my students to talk with the writers who are writing what they're reading. Last spring, when the Australian nature writer Mark Tredinnick came to UNL, I corralled him to come to my Eng. 150 class--and my students loved it--which gave me the desire to try to do more.

This semester, I set up a conversation for my 252 with Mike Czyzniejewski, fiction writer and editor of Mid-American Review--and my students picked his brain for what he was reading, what his writing process looked like, what stories catch his attention as an editor, things to do and not to do. The best piece of advice he gave them was something his mentor told him: find the best story you know and go and write a better one.

Last week, my 252 Skyped with Kent Krueger, author of Iron Lake. We asked him about the use of place in his fiction (and he said that the best place-based fiction that he's found is in the genre novels, not literary fiction). We asked him about his process, what books he likes to read. (For me as a writer, my favorite question to ask any writer is what they're reading right now. Or what they've read lately that's set their world on fire.) He told us about his two failed novels that he wrote before Iron Lake, he told us what he went through to get that book published. (And after we hung up, my students were thrilled to learn that even published authors started where they're sitting right now. I love that moment.) Krueger asked us, since we hadn't asked, about why he'd killed off a certain character in Iron Lake. It seemed that he gets that question a lot and it surprised him some that we hadn't asked. In fact, we had considered that very thing a few class periods before--and we'd decided that Cork, the protagonist, did his best work when his world wasn't going right. Practically, Krueger said that he didn't know when started writing what would happen to that particular character and it surprised him when she died. But she had to, for the series to continue.

Last night, my 252 had a lovely conversation with W. Scott Olsen, author of more books than I can count and editor of the literary journal Ascent. What surprised me is how chatty and excited my students were before I turned on the Skype and then they got pretty shy, which was funny to me. But they asked about writing, they asked about publishing, about being interested in editing. We got insights into online literary journals and online submissions, to the future of e-books and such. We talked about what editing means and how many different kinds there are. Scott told a story about an essay I'd rejected at Mid-American Review that Scott not only took, but ended up in the Notables of Best American Essays. When I'd received my copy of Ascent, I'd emailed him, laughing over the weirdness of the whole thing, and then he pointed out that he'd cut the last page of the essay, which completely made it into a different, wonderful piece. In that way, editing is a lot like teaching--finding the potential and making it better.

I'm in the midst of possibly setting up a conversation with Mark Tredinnick for my 150 class for next week, but I'm not sure it will work. Tredinnick, who's in Australia, is 17 hours ahead of our time zone, which makes my 11:00 class at 4:00 in the morning for him. We'll see. But my students really ended up loving The Blue Plateau, as I knew most of them would, so it would do them good to talk to him.

Next semester, I've already got several conversations already on my syllabus, for both my 150 and my 252. I'm so excited about them, which is a lovely bright spot at the end of this semester. I'm doing conferences this week, trying to calm the fears of my students who are over their heads with stress. And so far, I've only been stood up once today.

The Class Before Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T13:11:00.000-06:00

This morning, I rode the elevator with one of the department's poetry professors, who commented that today should be like a ghost town around here and I agreed. It's the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and for us, break starts tomorrow. Yesterday, my dear friend Mike Czyzniejewski posted this as his Facebook status: "I've never met people as thankful as my students this semester, many of who are taking a nine-day weekend to celebrate their awesome level of thankfulness. It's inspiring, really." I was, frankly, quite surprised that only two of my students in my 150 skipped this morning, mostly because their rough draft of their final Writing Project was due. Tonight, I know of one student who will miss Fiction, not because she went home, but because she got some theater tickets to something or other. We're Skyping with Kent Krueger tonight, so it's her loss, I suppose.

But today in 150, I tried a new workshop strategy that I'd not tried before. I got the idea from the ProfHacker blog on the Chronicle website: "Speed Dating Peer Review Workshops." The directions here are for an exercise on introductions, but since that's not something we need help on at this particular stage, I had my students choose one short section of their essay that they were nervous about, didn't think worked well, or they had a specific question about. We formed two circles, facing each other, and since we had an odd number of students, I hopped in to the mix. The pairs switched papers and each read the section identified and came up with a specific piece of advice. They traded advice, wrote down the advice on a separate sheet of paper (to keep the draft clean for the next person). Very quick--this whole process took 5 minutes. Then one circle stood up and moved one seat to the right. Five minutes. Next seat. We did this six or seven times and then I had the students look at the feedback they'd gotten and I had them write hard for five minutes, immediately starting to revise that section with fresh ideas. Write hard, keep going, if you get stuck write I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm stuck.

The consensus was that it was a good exercise, they got some interesting feedback and the quick writing netted some positive results. I'm looking forward to using this workshop idea in more classes, maybe even in a creative writing class. The quick nature of the feedback and that they got quite a few pieces of advice on the same section meant that if their partner gave them advice that didn't work, they weren't left with no advice.

My goal is to grade some of these rough drafts before I leave for home tomorrow, so I can spend the weekend playing with my family and chasing my niece. I hope they're good drafts!

Happy Thanksgiving!

On Reading(s)

2011-11-13T12:22:00.000-06:00

It's a lovely, chilly, sunny November Sunday and the Weather Channel warns of severe wind that could cause power outages. Fantastic. My pot of water is simmering on the stove, adding much needed humidity to the air so I can breathe. If we're going to lose power--which just should not happen--I figure I should already have some humidity going and a pot of tea refilled, just for such an eventuality. And I should really go put that load of laundry in the wash.

Later.

As I posted yesterday, I finally feel like I have my life back on track, at least professionally. I have my 150 for next semester figured out and as of yesterday, and a series of traded emails with the delightful Dawn Duncan of Concordia College, Moorhead (who is also my undergraduate Irish lit professor, as well as being my colleague and friend), led to the most spectacular idea and I hope to God it works. I emailed Duncan yesterday to get her take on whether I should assign John Banville's The Untouchable or Sebastian Barry's Annie Dunne for my Intro to Fiction Writing (252) next semester. Knowing what I know about Duncan and Banville and Barry, I figured it would be like trying to get her to choose between her dogs. Duncan is a post colonialist and I'm a writer, so why we would want to teach certain books is based in where we're coming from. She'd rather assign Barry's A Long, Long Way, which led to me asking her given what she knows about that book and about me, would she recommend that I teach a book that I haven't read yet. From there, we discussed Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, which is on my Field List, but I haven't read that either. And from there, we came up with what could potentially be the most spectacular idea: a collaboration between my creative writing fiction class and her literature class, reading the same book from different perspectives, then talking to each other about those perspectives. I have no idea how it's going to work--all hail the technology!--but I'm going to see Dawn at Thanksgiving and I'm sure we'll work it out. I'm so excited--I hope it works!

Because yesterday's writing was successful, today is devoted to tea and reading. And perhaps the aforementioned laundry, which is a great multi-tasking task. I'm almost through my first pot of Assam, ready for the refill, and on today's reading list is Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men. I'm a third of the way through it, basking in the love I already have for Lopez, and I really hope to finish it today. There's something really spectacular about reading that reminds me why I'm a writer. Reading good work--just like reading bad work--teaches you how to think, how to put sentences together, how not to be satisfied with the easy answer. So many books, so little time. Except for today, when I've made the time.

And the tea.

So here's the question of the day: anybody done a collaboration like this before, between a lit class and a creative writing class, reading the same book?

State of Mind: 150 (again) and MN State Volleyball Championships.

2011-11-12T11:42:00.000-06:00

The good news is that in the wee hours of Thursday night, when all seemed darkest (and perhaps influenced by the necessity of Benadryl to my allergies), I woke up in the middle of the night with the solution to my Eng. 150 problem for next semester. Hallelujah. It was enough that instead of just turning over and thinking I'd remember it in the morning, I got up out of bed, leaving behind the lovely electric blanket, and found my notebook in the living room. I jotted down what was in my head, because the subconscious was clearly at work here and I was clearly not awake, and then stumbled back to bed.

The idea was this: to more fully embrace place-conscious inquiry tenets, I reformed my class to function better at the 100-level. We're going to start with reading fiction, Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife, which starts with the 1811 New Madrid Earthquakes. It is no coincidence that I'm using this book as we pass the 200-year anniversary of those earthquakes. It's sometimes easier to see how place affects character and plot if we're looking at fiction, rather than our own lives. The goal here is to explore the natural disasters that have formed This Place, what's under our feet that we might not know about. We'll go to Morrill Hall and see how those bones and such can illuminate our ideas.

Then we'll shift into modern disasters: the 1888 Children's Blizzard (reading David Laskin and Ted Kooser) and then into the Dust Bowl (reading Timothy Egan). This writing project will be an oral history type of project in which the students will investigate how local disasters of recent memory (and it does not have to be those two) formed the identities of those who live in that place, in that community. Where I come from, the 1991 Halloween Blizzard is still indicative of my hometown (which I'll get to in a moment), because the town was empty to go watch the Tigers play in the football playoffs in the Twin Cities. That event says a lot about who Nevis is as a community.

The third project will investigate modern, human-caused disasters, because another tenet of place-conscious education is to move beyond the personal and immediate and into the larger world and the larger community. This week, Obama put the kibosh (basically, we hope) on the Keystone XL pipeline. The environmental catastrophe that would have resulted from this pipeline is incalculable. On this same day, a report surfaced that the chemical used to frack in Pennsylvania was showing up in the aquifer. So, we'll read Erik Reece's The Lost Mountain, about mountaintop removal for coal mining. We'll talk about the wetlands of the Mississippi being destroyed (and, maybe, get some face time with my favorite musician, Tab Benoit?--we'll see...). And we'll approach the topic--whichever one the students choose to write about--from a position of conservation or prevention.

I feel better about this.

I also believe it's no accident that after way-t00-long of trying to set up a Skype date with my friend N. (whose older sister J. was my good friend in high school and I'm J's daughter's godmother; and said daughter turned ten yesterday) the Skype finally happened. And not only did I get to talk to N. and her 2-yr-old E., who was rocking the little blonde pigtails, who should pop into the frame, but N.'s dad, Mr. Smith, my high school history teacher, one of my favorite people in the world. We talked a little about teaching, a little about Nevis volleyball--because, get this, NEVIS IS PLAYING FOR THE STATE CHAMPIONSHIP IN VOLLEYBALL TODAY!! IN LESS THAN AN HOUR!!!--and see previous comment about the 1991 football, because I'm guessing most of Nevis is in Minneapolis today. Being in Nebraska makes watching MN high school volleyball difficult (even if the Huskers weren't playing Penn State today--another interesting example of community and disaster)--but the good news is that it's going to be streamed live on various websites, both radio and video. I'm sure I don't know any of the kids playing, but that doesn't matter.

It all comes full circle. Communities don't just exist in thin air. They are created and they must be fostered. All members of the community must contribute. Places influence who we are--even if we specifically reject that influence, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But it's valuable to look back to see how we got to where we are--as well as look forward to see where we're going.

Stay tuned for the results of the volleyball game!

(We lost the game 3-0, but I'm so proud of them!)

State of Mind: Post-Election and Week 12 Meltdown

2011-11-09T10:44:00.000-06:00

A lot of things are on my mind, place-related, this morning, some of them pedagogical, some political, some personal--and some food-related.

My 150 students and I are not connecting well with each other right now and I'm supremely disappointed in them, for several reasons. The last straw was yesterday, when we went to Morrill Hall, the natural history museum on campus, to get some ideas for our third Writing Project, and when I asked them what they found, if they learned anything new, they just stared at me. Even "what was the weirdest thing you saw?" elicited blank stares. There will probably be a come to Jesus meeting with them tomorrow if this continues. Guess how much I'm looking forward to that. As a result, there is much stress in the Babine household today--and I'm going to cook my way out of it. Roast chicken, chicken stock, baked oatmeal, carrot ginger soup, and chocolate chip cookies.

My 252 is continuing to discuss Kent Krueger's Iron Lake and Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map. They're loving both books, for different reasons, and that just makes me happy. We discussed the middle section of Iron Lake last night and I love how discussing a book with students helps me to see things I never noticed before. The discussions last night of how many ways place and landscape and weather are active participants in the plot were spectacular. Next week, Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell are visiting campus and their reading is during our class time, so we're going to go hear them read. Should be a good time.

On a completely separate place-related note: at the grocery store this morning, the produce is displayed so it's the first thing you see. It's still apple season, so the apples are front and center. I am an apple nerd. Not an expert, but a nerd. My grandparents managed an apple orchard in New Ulm, MN in the 1950s and I've learned quite a lot about Minnesota apples. Earlier in the fall, Hy-Vee was selling Haralsons--and it's been years since I've had a Haralson, let alone seen them anywhere outside Minnesota. And then today, there were Firesides. It's been even more years since I've had a Fireside. I was so excited that I had to call my mother.

"Don't get the green ones," she said.

"I know," I said, "or it'll taste like a potato."

"Your grandmother will be so proud that you remembered," she said, laughing. Firesides are late apples and they have to ripen fully on the tree or they have no flavor at all.

The depths of my apple nerd-ity were also confirmed as I was watching ABC's new show Once Upon a Time. The evil queen--in her mayoral persona--was telling Emma that she has her own special apple tree, of Honeycrisps, though the link to the poisoned apple is obvious. However, the apples she has in her basket--and the ones that are on the tree in later scenes, are absolutely not Honeycrisps. They're not the right color or the right shape. The evil apples are Red Delicious, which in my own apple snobbery, seems about right.

I am a nerd.

But I'm also conscious of politics this morning and what it means to live in a place at a certain time. Yesterday, Ohio overturned SB5, which severely limited collective bargaining power. And Mississippi failed to pass its Personhood initiative, which would legislate that a fertilized egg is a person, with all the legal rights guaranteed to a person who has been born (except, as I saw one article say, a woman of childbearing age...). Dear students, if you don't think that place influences you, you only have to look at how different places define what it means to live there, or not live there, or the living conditions you are entitled to--or not--while you live there.

I hope Thursday's discussion in my 150 can convince them that the bubble they think they live in doesn't exist--and the world's a lot more interesting out here than it is in that bubble.

Eng. 150: The Blue Plateau

2011-11-03T08:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a turn in the weather that made me really happy, even as my eighty-year-old joints protested. It was a good day for my fireplace app on my iPad, some Godiva hot chocolate with ghost-shaped marshmallows left over from Halloween, and as it turned out, some Gay Talese. I'm reading Unto the Sons for an independent study I'm doing this semester (on the subject of Essentials of Mid-Century American Nonfiction). And then there was dinner at Bread and Cup last night, as it was Bread and Cup Wednesday. Local food just tastes better.

This morning, the air was on the cold side of crisp and my neighbor and I had a discussion on the way to campus about how fifty degrees (the high for today) in November is not the same fifty degrees as March. In November, fifty degrees is jacket, hat, and mittens; fifty degrees in March is shorts and a t-shirt.

Today in my English 150 class (Rhetoric as Inquiry), we're starting our third and final unit of the semester, on the topic of how have humans shaped place--and how does place shape humans? We're reading Mark Tredinnick's awesome The Blue Plateau to go along with it. Tredinnick visited UNL last spring and kindly visited my class; this semester we're reading the whole book instead of just excerpts. Next week, my class is going to Morrill Hall, to the natural history museum, and I'm excited to hear what my students find there. Many of them have been there before, on school field trips and such, but this time around, they've got a different purpose, a different way of looking at what's there. Love it. Museums are not boring, people.

So, today's class on Tredinnick will talk about settler culture, difficult landscapes, and more. There are days that I'm more excited to teach than others--but today is one of those days where I'm particularly excited. This book is about wanting to belong--and a book about failing to belong. How and why does he fail--and was that always a foregone conclusion? We'll talk about pastoral landscapes, this particular definition taken from Tredinnick's anthology, A Place on Earth:

The literature of landscape we have made, therefore, has tended to take as its models for literary engagement with landscape the works of other citified cultures--it has written about landscape as Rome's writers did, as London's have... A pastoral engagement with land is sentimental and escapist rather than realist and vernacular. In it, nature is a foreign place to which one escapes, when one can, the stress and grime and world-weariness of the city. Pastoral does not witness; it idealizes or demonizes; and it sounds, even at its best, unrooted in the soil of the places it evokes. The place escapes it. It is an idyll of landscape made in the city. This is the nature of the greater part of our writing about place. Until now" (43).

And on Tredinnick's website, this gem, from his The Little Red Writing Book:

What makes writing worth writing--and reading--is what the story or the poem achieves beyond the tale it tells: its music, its form, the way it makes the ordinary world beautifully strange. A good tale is only good, in other words, if the telling is sound and memorable. It's the voice and mood, the arc and flow, the poetry of the writing that endure when the storyline fades. Literature doesn't aim to tell anybody anything. To tell a story or make a poem that makes sense, of course, you're going to have to convey some information. But that's not really what the work is for. Creative writing makes art out of the stuff of life, it makes it out of the words we speak, and it's for whatever art is for. How a piece of writing becomes a work of art--a plain but unforgettable thing--has everything to do with the integrity and humanity of its voice and the elegant of the work's composition."

It's a good way to start off a chilly Thursday morning in November. At least I think so. And so, to cap off this post, some writing prompts we will be doing:

What they won't tell you about ___ is ___.
This is the kind of place where___.
Describe a place as if it were a person, complete with hair color, height, personality, a favorite book, and more.
Name something significant that happened in this place--how you define "significant" is up to you.
If this place were a song, what would it be?
How do you get to this place? Write your way into this place. What are its boundaries? Theoretical? Natural boundaries (like a river)? Political? Cultural?
Where is the physical center of this place? Where is the emotional center of this place? Are they the same? Different? Write about that.

Happy writing! Happy reading!

Teaching Iron Lake, Part 1

2011-11-01T07:44:00.000-05:00

It was actually accidental that last week our craft lesson was on the rhetoric of beginnings, and we were starting two new books in my English 252 (Intro to Fiction). The first is William Kent Krueger's suspense novel Iron Lake; the second is Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map.

We started with Iron Lake and as we're concentrating this semester on reading like writers, we looked at this novel with the same eye that we've given any other written work in front of us. How was this created? What techniques can we discern--and emulate, possibly? We looked at how Krueger moves in and out of the main narrative, moving to flashback, to exposition. We considered how the dialogue was constructed and how it created characters and voice. As we were talking about beginnings at the start of class, we discussed how Krueger begins this novel (we read the first nine chapters).

In the first nine chapters, we are introduced to the main character, Cork O'Connor, the former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota. When we meet him, Cork's life is pretty messy. It's been a year since the recall election that forced him from his job, his wife wants a divorce, and it's Christmas and he misses his kids. Add in the main plot thread of a judge's death and a missing kid, cultural turmoil between the Anishinaabe on the reservation and the whites in the town of Aurora.

Here are some of the questions we asked:

What role does place play here? How it as much a character as Cork or Molly or Jo or anybody?
What role does weather and landscape play in advancing the story?
How does the book begin? What do we learn about Cork and Sam Winter Moon in the first few pages?
Consider the voice of each character: how is it constructed?
What does each character want--by the end of this section? What does Cork want by the end of these first nine chapters?
The prologue and the first chapter are both in the voice of fourteen year old boys (Cork in the prologue, Paul Le Beau in the first chapter). What does that do to the movement of the narrative?
What function does the Windigo serve? Obviously it serve a plot function--and we can talk about it from a literary criticism position and discuss metaphor, etc, but we won't. How is the character of the Windigo created and how does it work in narrative?
Where do you get the best insight into characters? (We discussed that it was in dialogue that we got the best insight into Cork, because he's a different person in his dialogue with Molly than he is with Jo.) We got our best characterization of Henry Meloux through dialogue as well, just that brief car ride where Cork picks him up on the side of the road.
In Chapter 4, the prologue plays an important role, because we see the return of Sam Winter Moon. By now, as all the characters are being introduced, we start to see how they all fit together.
Just from that first page of Chapter 4, what can we tell about Sam's character? Given the prologue, we get that he is showing compassion for Cork, who just lost his father. But in Chapter 4, we find that Sam has left "Sam's Place" to Cork, so it's obvious that they have created a special relationship, that they were close even after that bear hunting outing.

In their reading responses, my students commented on how Krueger created his characters, how closely they are written in the landscape; they commented on the dialogue; they commented on the descriptions; they commented on how the conflicts are set up. All in all, I was really proud of the way they looked at this book as something equal to what they were doing: a draft that had been sweated over, that took the same techniques and struggles that they are currently working through, that what Krueger is doing here in this book is what they're trying to do in their own stories. And they're getting more comfortable analyzing the craft of the writers we're reading. I love it.

And then we took a short break and I tried to set up the Skype, so we could talk with Mike Czyzniejewski, author of Elephants in the Bedroom and co-editor of Mid-American Review. The Skype didn't work, so we conducted the interview via speakerphone. Mike was great and my students asked some great questions--and even though I know how important it is (to me, as a teacher) to get my students to talk to established fiction writers, they were just so excited about what Mike had told them afterwards that it made all the technological difficulties worth the trouble. Tonight, Chapters 10-18 of Iron Lake!

A Day in the Life: Week 11 Update

2011-10-31T17:32:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted, but my Eng. 150 has been workshopping their second Writing Project, and there hasn't been much to report there, except that their topics and approaches are phenomenal. I just love my job. I'll have more to report after tomorrow, when they turn in their final drafts. The other reason why I've been lax here is that I've been working on my novel, since my self-imposed deadline to give the second draft to my advisor is tomorrow (11/1)--and I made it. I made it! The last quarter of it is nowhere near where I'd like it to be, but I'm seriously stuck, so it's a good time to get somebody else's eyes on it.

A side note: my Eng. 252 (Fiction) class was asking me about titles for their stories a couple weeks ago and I told them that I wouldn't be any help, since I'm really bad at titles. One of my smart-asses (smart ass in a good way) says, "What's the name of your novel?" Blushing, because I can't ever help it, stupid Swedish skin, I say, "The O'Connor Women." He looks back at me and says, "Yeah, that's pretty bad." Yes, students, it's true what I meant: I won't ever bullshit you. I will always tell you the truth.

My Eng. 252 class has started off the second half of the semester by starting William Kent Krueger's suspense novel Iron Lake and Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map. We've moved beyond the craft-lecture portion of the semester and the rest of the semester, we'll be applying what we've learned about writing and how to read like a writer to these texts. Last week went really well as we talked about the role that place plays in each of the books, how landscape and weather plays in character development, plot and suspense, and more. My students are revising their short stories that we workshopped before Fall Break and they're working on their craft essays, due at the end of the semester. The premise of this essay is to take an element of craft (voice, character, plot, dialogue, tone, any of the things we've been talking about) and write about it: they could look at one author's craft across several craft elements or they could take one craft element and look at one author's use of it, or they could examine how several authors use it. Should be interesting--in a really good way. I see proposals of that paper in the next couple of weeks.

Right now, for the purposes of this blog and this Eng. 992 class I'm taking, I'm working on several place-conscious pieces of my own, both creative and critical and that's just fun. As part of the requirements of the class, we're asked to put together a place-based teaching unit and even though I don't know what classes I'll be teaching next semester, I'm working on putting together this natural disasters narratives class that I've been dreaming about for a long time. As I'm envisioning the class, I'm leaving it open enough that I could teach it as Eng. 101 (Rhetoric as Reading) or Eng. 150 (Rhetoric as Inquiry). I've started putting readings on the syllabus, page numbers, giving titles to the various days' discussions, due dates. It's true. I'm a nerd. But it's further confirmation that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. That's always great.

So far, in the Ancient Disasters Unit (Writing Project 1), we're reading the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Biblical flood, with critical readings on all sorts of interpretations; then we'll read some Plato and Dialogues of Timaeus and Critias and talk about Atlantis. Yes, I know that I've got my chronology backwards (Atlantis is earlier than the Flood), but it works better this way, in terms of developing the ideas of the course:

What is a natural disaster?
How do we talk about disasters in literature? What function do they serve in the culture and history of this group of people, at this particular time?
How does the epic form impact the subject matter?
How do these stories function for readers today? Morality tales? Literal history?
How do these stories and the disasters themselves function in terms of creating identity?
How does the literature of fact and the literature of fiction here? How does one become another and how does the disaster play into that?

Their first Writing Project essay will be discussing their position on any one of these questions (and more), supported with direct references to various primary texts, as well as critical texts.

I'm pretty excited about it, but maybe today I'm more excited about natural disasters than usual, because it's the 20th anniversary of the 1991 Halloween Blizzard: more on it here at the Star Tribune. I don't remember much about it, except that it was about football playoff time and because of the snow, all the playoff games were moved to the Metrodome in Minneapolis, because all the fields were under several feet of snow. And I'm remembering my own Halloween escapades, the injustice of having to be a ballerina in a snowsuit. This is what it means to be a kid in Minnesota and that's different than any other place in the world. This is what Place means.

Right now, my sister is dressing up her dog, Marley, in the sheriff costume I sent--and I'm waiting for pictures of my niece, C., in her bunny costume. I'm promised videos.

No Name Reading Series: Aran By Foot

2011-10-15T09:03:00.000-05:00

The podcast for my recent appearance at the No Name Reading Series is now up on the website, excerpts from an essay titled "Aran By Foot." I read second on the podcast, about 11:56 on the timer. (It's always so weird to hear yourself speak--I don't think I sound like that at all!--and I could have sworn I spoke slower than that...)

Enjoy!

Eng. 150: Place and the Language of Natural Disasters

2011-10-14T10:46:00.000-05:00

It might be accurate to say that my apartment is a sort of natural disaster this morning. I'm still recovering from my weekend at ACIS, followed by the most insane allergy attack I've ever had, followed by a migraine so bad that every cell of my body rebelled. I have the broken blood vessels around my eyes to prove it. I look like a raccoon with red freckles. Funny looking, in hindsight. But such is the Midwest when the weather shifts from season to season. These are things to know about one's place in the world. (And, Maeve and Galway have been chasing each other around my apartment, knocking things over, and I've had to peel her off him more than once--and now she's chasing her tail on my bed...)

Yesterday, I taught Kim Barnes's incomparable essay "The Ashes of August" and Dorothy Barresi's "Earthquake Weather" out of A Year In Place to my English 150 class, as we continue our discussion of place and language. (This book that these pieces come out of is pretty amazing.) Yesterday was about the language of natural disasters, a topic that is becoming dearer to my own heart as I'm putting together this class for next semester on natural disaster narratives. Barnes's essay is one of my favorites of all time and it's always fun to teach those. Barresi's essay is a nice complement to it. Barresi's is about earthquakes (specifically the 1994 Northridge earthquake), but also about the death of her mother, her marriage and her parents' marriage, and the birth of her son. Barnes's essay is about wildfires, but also about family, the way that stories evolve under those conditions, with what we know and how we know it.

I started class by putting my students in their groups, then asking them to look for how many different languages were being used in these essays. In Barresi's, they identified not just the technical language of earthquakes, but also the language of California, the language of Los Angeles (which is not the same as the language of California), the language of cancer, the language of marriage, the language of motherhood. We talked about the many narrative threads that Barresi weaves in this essay, that it's about an earthquake, but it's also about marriage, it's also about motherhood, the loss of her mother, and the birth of her child. It all comes together at the end, just at the point my students were wondering if it ever would.

In Barnes's, we got the language of wildfires, the language of Idaho: even in the first page, as we get this spectacular grounding in light and color and taste (which is bookended in the last paragraph by spectacular evocation of smell), the reader is told that "the riverbanks are bedded in basalt" and I looked at my students and asked where basalt comes from. We've been talking about what it means to live on different bedrocks, how it's different to live on the limestone of the Aran Islands or the granite of Connemara in the West of Ireland. Basalt, they remembered, comes from volcanoes. Ah, yes, I said. So this place was formed by volcanoes. What she's telling us it that this is a volatile place, formed by fire, from earliest days. And it's more effective to tell us that it's basalt, than to tell us straight out what that means. Oh, they said, nodding, and I had that thrilling teaching moment where they nod at me, then scratch at the page with their pencils, making some kind of note, some connection.

We talked about what craft is happening here, that the essayist is making these stories relevant to the reader. My students knew about the 1994 Northridge earthquake, but none of them had ever been in an earthquake, they're not from California, they'd never been through a wildfire. So how do the essayists make these stories relevant? (We've been working rather hard in the last several weeks to get them beyond thinking that they have to relate to something to care.) The context makes us care, the exposition that both essayists use to develop the idea that they're working with. If it was a straight narrative about Barresi getting married, her mother dying, and having a baby, nobody would care. If it was a straight narrative about the wildfire around Barnes's home and her husband going out to fight it, nobody would care. Everyone has stories, I tell them, and nobody cares about yours. Unless you make them care. The exposition, the high exposition--that's what makes people care. (More head nodding, more pencils to page. It was a good day.) Language, the descriptions that Barnes and Barresi use, the ideas that they're developing from beginning to end--that's what makes people care.

Then we morphed the discussion into Where are these two essayists doing things that you recognize? Where is the narrative, the exposition? What's the rhetoric of the beginnings, the endings? How about the use of white space (as we talked about segmented essays last week)? The longer I teach, the more I'm realizing how much I want to break down the barrier between my students' work and published work. In my Intro to Fiction class, I had my students write their last two reading responses on one of the pieces that was getting workshopped that week (they had to write on one of the stories in the same way that they did any of the other published pieces we read) and the results were astounding. What can this story teach you about writing? I was so proud of their responses that I wanted to hug them. They talked about being able to see things in other stories that they wanted to do in theirs, they saw things they did that they wanted to avoid. They were able to look at the craft of the stories with the same eye that they did any of the other stories we talked about. It was a beautiful thing. And in two weeks, my 252 class will Skype with Mike Czyzniejewski, the editor of Mid-American Review and author of Elephants in the Bedroom, beginning the second half of the semester filled with Skype conversations with real live writers, writers who are writing what they're reading, writers who are going through the same struggles and triumphs that they are.

What I'm realizing this week, as we go into Fall Break and I won't see my students again until they turn in the rough draft of Writing Project 2, is that we've reached the point of the class where they're afraid to trust themselves. It happens every semester. We can get through the first Writing Project well enough, because they're writing about themselves, about a place they know well. Some will get the essay part, some will not. But when we get to writing about a place and its language, they lose all confidence that they have any ideas, that they have anything valuable to say. Every semester, I know it's coming, but it always seems to surprise me. Yesterday, I had a flood of students come to my office hours (the first they've done so all semester), worrying about the topic for their paper. And every one of them, every single one of them, came into my office with a fantastic idea. Absolutely fantastic. But not a single one of them had the courage to believe that the idea was a good one. And they got hung up on the sources I'm requiring them to use, as if those were more important than the essay itself. The rough drafts are going to be interesting, I think. And I have a feeling that when the mandatory conferences come around in two weeks, I'm going to be repeating myself a lot: Trust yourself. Trust what you have to say is valuable. If you don't trust what you have to say, nobody else is going to. And, my personal favorite: don't be afraid to write crap. Nobody writes a perfect first draft. Nobody. Let me tell you stories about that...

Eng. 150: Tim Robinson's Linguistic Ecology, In Practice

2011-10-11T09:41:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I presented a paper on Tim Robinson's Linguistic Ecology to the Midwest meeting of the American Conference of Irish Studies. My feeling is that the paper went over fairly well, even though I also felt like my audience had no idea what to do with ecocriticism or nonfiction. But, the praise I received made me spend most of the weekend in a blush, especially when my last paragraph was compared to equalling James Joyce's lyricism in "The Dead." Hefty praise, that. Not sure I live up to that, but at least the audience didn't fall asleep or throw rotten vegetables.

So, it is with great anticipation (and a great deal of caffeine, after spending the weekend fighting allergies with Benadryl, which means my eyes are not yet focusing) that I'm going to be teaching Robinson's "A Connemara Fractal" and "On the Cultivation of the Compass Rose" to my 150 class this morning. I fully expect that they're going to have massive problems with it. He's dense and complicated. I know. But we're working on getting the students beyond that, to a place where they can start to understand how awesome he is.

We're talking about language and place, today concentrating on the language of place and math and cartography. In "A Connemara Fractal," Robinson uses the language of mathematical fractals to discuss the impossibility of mapping the Connemara shoreline. Fractals find their uses in art, math, and nature, so using another vocabulary here would be silly--it's simply the most useful language he has to discuss this particular thing, this particular place. Originally, when I first read this essay, I dismissed it as being too hard, too beyond my abilities as a mathematician (I have no abilities)--but I find that every time I go back to it, I love it more. In some ways, then, "On the Cultivation the Compass Rose" is the opposite of "A Connemara Fractal." And perhaps it is more Montaignian, which is fun in a different way.

But Bret and I talked briefly this morning about using the essay form to teach place-consciousness to first-year students, to get them away from memoir and journal-type confessional writing. The purpose of the Essay (deliberately capitalized) is to make relevant ideas and moments for the readers. Just because Robinson is writing about mapping the Connemara shoreline doesn't mean anybody else is going to care about it. He has to take it beyond that simple narrative and complicate it, bring in the exposition of the math language and how that relates to his inability to comprehend the place, to elevate it beyond a diary. Everybody has stories and nobody cares about yours, so you have to make them care. It doesn't happen by accident.

Here's the questions we'll use to get the discussion going, beyond our standard "what is this essay about?" and "what is this essay about?":

Quiddity: the inherent nature of something, a distinctive feature, a peculiarity (p. 81)
What is the quiddity of "A Connemara Fractal"?
What are the larger implications? How and where and why is the larger idea applicable outside of math?
We think of math as definable and solvable (like an island, in "Islands and Images")--how does Robinson disprove that?
How does he work the idea of fractals into other contexts?
What is the nature of uncertainty? Can we know anything, truly?

As we move into discussing "On the Cultivation of the Compass Rose":

Formulate the a question/confusion/irritation, the most interesting question you can come up with...
Answer/explicate/complicate it. Prepare to present for 3-4 minutes.

A note on last week's reading responses, to which most students responded to one of the essays by Robinson that I'd assigned. I'm so proud of my students, I just want to hug them. Most of them acknowledged that Robinson was hard, just like I said he was, and that was intimidating, but they wrote about what Robinson could teach them about writing, about description, about interesting ideas. Most of the responses said it took some effort to get beyond the initial frustration, because Robinson is not the easiest, quickest read, but once they did, they really found moments and ideas and language that they really could learn from. Hooray!

The Writer's Craft: Perspectives on Irish Environmental Writing

2011-10-05T12:25:00.000-05:00

The timing here is actually pretty good: we're reading Tim Robinson in my English 150 class and tomorrow Bret and I are off to Fargo/Moorhead for the American Conference of Irish Studies: our panel is titled "The Writer's Craft: Perspectives on Irish Environmental Writing." We will be joined by the distinguished Eamonn Wall.

Here's our panel description: Ecocriticism, which has been popular in the United States for many years, has recently made the transition to a viable lens through which Irish literature can be studied. Christine Cusick's Out of the Earth (Cork University Press, 2010) and Eamonn Wall's Writing the Irish West (Notre Dam UP, 2011) are the most recent examples. While ecocriticism is a valuable literary tool, another, similar view should also be considered: how are these writers crafting their various works with an eye towards a particular environmental reading? How are essayists, poets, and fiction writers using place (all definitions of "place") to influence characters, plot, or language? This panel aims to explore the use of place and environment form the craft side of Irish writing.

My paper is titled "If all the sky were paper and all the sea were ink': Tim Robinson's Linguistic Ecology" (I'm representing the nonfiction perspective.)

Bret will be speaking on "'What we claim and what claims us': Exploring the 'Eco' in Theo Dorgan's Poetry."

And Eamonn Wall will present on "'Creatures of the Earth': An Ecocritical Reading of John McGahern's Late Stories."

I'm pretty dang excited.

The conference is taking place between Moorhead State University (fine, Minnesota State University--Moorhead) and North Dakota State University, but I went to college in Moorhead, at Concordia. It'll almost be like Homecoming, which is actually happening next week at Concordia, my ten year reunion, so I'll just walk the grounds a week early. It should be an awesome panel, chaired by my amazing undergrad Irish lit prof, Dawn Duncan. (I've been asked to chair her panel, so that's really cool.) My nerves are not being soothed by practicing my paper (which might have something to do with my nervous cats trying to kill each other because I have a suitcase on the bed), but it'll all work out. I am pretty nervous about butchering the Irish in my paper, but I'm going ask for confirmation on pronunciations (again) and then apologize profusely before I start.

Bonus Double-Post Monday! Terrain.org

2011-10-03T14:12:00.000-05:00

The new issue of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments is newly live and there are several pieces of note that you might be interested in.

Scott Boyon, "Defining the City: On Being and Becoming" (particularly relevant to our 992 class).

What does America’s oldest city have in common with one of its youngest? The urge to define itself.

Lauret Savoy, "A Stone's Throw: Geographies of the Interior"

Every journey across the continent reveals to me lessons of time and geography. While they can be skimmed over the course of a flight, I prefer to read more slowly and deeply as I drive the back roads and highways. On each trip, by land or air, Erwin Raisz’s landforms map of the country is at my side.

Land patterns from the Atlantic coast westward provide condensed narratives of Earth and human histories inseparably linked, histories of ideas as well as actions, histories of change.

The oft quoted W. Scott Olsen, "River Flying in Winter: The Sheyenne River"

Here is a truth, perhaps a secret, about the northern prairie: winter is the most beautiful season. Beautiful in the way hoar frost hangs from trees. Beautiful in the way snow can fall so gently you believe, for more than just a moment, you’ve entered a place both sacred and deep. Beautiful in the way that cold air can kill you fast. Beautiful in the way that sun dogs in the morning can make it seem like three suns ignite the horizon. Beautiful in the hard contrasts of winter light, every shape a crisp edge. Beautiful in the way that clear sky on a midwinter night is so quiet you swear you can hear the radio voices of stars. Beautiful in the way that every story is about staying alive, and beautiful in the way that people smile when they tell them.

Eng. 992: Week 7 Response

2011-10-03T12:45:00.000-05:00

The various articles we read for this week, along with the "Stories of Home" project, leaves me with a series of intersecting ideas and questions. The idea of the "tragedy rhetoric" of rural studies seemed to be dismantled by these different ways to take action in one's community, no matter if that is rural or urban. Tragedy rhetoric resonates in urban contexts as well.

What is the effect of separation (and all its definitions and contexts) in the context of place-conscious pedagogy? At what point is physical action required of a place-conscious classroom? And, is it absolutely necessary? Are there forms of mental action that are just as effective? Is writing enough of a physical action?

I started thinking about the idea of separation being a vital part of considering how and where and why we belong after I read the section of "Sustainable Pedagogy" where Charlotte discusses urban students thinking they can't relate to a nonfiction piece about a "hick," yet that is exactly how those same urban students are viewed when they are in LA. As this essay also discusses, the separation of our first-year students face between their high school home and education and their college home and education is again, vital, for them to discover how and where they belong. Without this separation, they cannot begin to consider the answers.

But it's also seeming necessary to separate students from long-held assumptions and beliefs--not that educated teachers are trying to fill the empty vessel, to paraphrase Paolo Freire, but to give the students enough room to articulate why they believe the way they do, about whatever it is they're considering. College is not a place where blind faith in ideas can flourish. Faith and ideas, yes, but blind--no. Units like the food politics unit are excellent facilitators of this kind of separation. The food politics unit is one that I've seen used before, both here at UNL and where I came from at Bowling Green State University. It's an excellent way to move beyond simple explorations of an issue and discover all its complexities--especially in rural universities like UNL or BGSU. But I can imagine that it could be very interesting to use in an urban setting as well.

All of the authors addressed ways of belonging and how that belonging is constructed. Part of it is simply valuing the students' existing experiences and knowledge and part of it is an active participation in the issues of the communities they are connected to. I appreciated Charlotte Hogg's idea that for her students in Texas, they are all temporarily Texan, just by virtue of choosing to attend that particular college. That seems like a useful way to convince students that they need to be involved in their community--however they define it--wherever they go, but I also see little light bulbs going on, I never considered that before. Maybe it's also useful to consider that one can belong to more than one community, as well as understanding that community doesn't happen magically. Effort is required to make a community and they have a part in that making. The "Stories of Home" project, taken as a whole, complicates the idea of what it means to belong--and what it means to be separated from your place (physical, cultural, emotional, political, etc.). Anne Harrison, the Orphan Train orphan, wondered where and how she belonged. The stories of the refugee families were full of being a part of more than one place. The stories of disability and courage gave another view of what it means to define yourself in one way and to have the world view you in another way. I appreciated articulation of trying to belong to a place that doesn't want you, not just in the stories of the refugees, but also in the story of Lin and Barb. In another way, Lela Knox Shanks illustrated another way of trying to find a place in a world that doesn't want you. I didn't know about this project before this week, but I can see myself incorporating this collection of stories into a class.

Donehower, Hogg, and Schell's article concentrates on separating both students and teachers from mutual bias over their own knowledge and perspectives, towards a goal of mutual inquiry. Swan's "Three Generation Work History" sounded very interesting, especially in its effects of breaking down assumptions, especially the fictions that are constructed by families--or by imagination that fills in the gaps in knowledge. Those separations are absolutely useful to begin thinking about what constitutes a community and what's been done in the past to break up certain communities or prevent communities from forming.

Using Bill Bryson's "Fat Girls in Des Moines" and Kathleen Norris's "Status," was brilliantly articulated to address these goals. Maybe I should not be surprised any longer when writers I admire crop up in our readings. I used the first page of "Fat Girls in Des Moines" just last week in my 150 class (see previous post on Beginnings and Endings), because the rhetoric of "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to" is a great discussion starter for how he makes the reader want to turn the page. Part of it is voice, part of it is pacing. But using the memoir form as an assignment for students to engage these ideas is excellent--but I wonder if using the essay form, in the Montaignian sense of the term, would be more appropriate than memoir, for the simple reason that I think that writing can be its own form of action, and the essay a more effective form than memoir (but that's my own bias towards the essay coming forward).

In my place-based English 150 I've been using the Montaignian definition of essay, since that is what I write, what I study, and what I read. I think the form itself is particularly suitable for place-based inquiry. This type of essay is not an academic work, nor a five-paragraph essay. It is a fluid, malleable form that combines narrative, exposition, and high exposition as the canvas upon which the writer's mind moves its brush. Scott Olsen defines the essay as "the witnessed development of an idea." What makes an essay work is the writer's mind, which means that an essay on the smallest subject can become the largest essay. An essay is not strictly narrative--though that is and can be a part of it--but it is the perspective that the writer brings to the subject that is important. The writer needs to make the subject matter relevant to the reader, which is not simply "relating." The writer needs to actively make the reader care. Patrick Madden is a particularly fine practitioner of this form these days.

I just finished grading the first Writing Project, which was on an aspect of a place they're connected to. I got essays on high school (yet the essay was not a straight narrative of their memories there--it was about how communities are constructed); an essay about a student who goes to her best friend's grave on the 5th of every month was not about the student herself--it was a meditation on the tangibility and intangibility of grief. What makes an essay work is "the story behind the story," as Swan writes, which "reveals the logic, motivations, and implications visible only through insider perspectives." I use the essay to illustrate to students that not only are their experiences important, valuable, vital, but that their thought processes are as well. English 150 is called "Rhetoric as Inquiry" and the essay itself is a natural written expression of that kind of inquiry.

All of these pieces move the conversation of place and belonging beyond Donehower, Hogg, and Schell's premise that effective teaching units that engage the world beyond the physical classroom do address race-ethnicity-gender-class (that most of the composition textbooks try to promote) in ways and contexts that expands the conversation, which moves beyond simple preservationist rhetoric. Students are then able to understand that these diversity questions actually do exist in situations where they consider the community too heterogeneous to support any separations like race-gender-class, especially as students consider their own contributions towards perpetuating certain divisions as well as having those divisions perpetuated on them.

Spatula!

2011-10-01T09:30:00.001-05:00

What a great way to begin October!

It's true that part of my love of place is food-related. Maybe it goes back to childhood and the insane garden that my mom kept, the vegetables that we'd eat right out of the garden, just barely rinsed at the spigot, maybe it was the sense of camaraderie of preparing those veggies to be frozen or canned for the winter. Maybe it was just a satisfaction of growing something. I don't know. I just know that I miss having a garden.

When I was living in Bowling Green, I didn't miss a garden so much because I had the amazing Toledo Farmer's Market, that I frequented with my good friend Amanda nearly every week during the summer. I'd brew the tea, pick her up, and away we'd go. Sometimes we had shopping lists, sometimes we'd see what was good. That was the first place I'd seen brussels sprouts on their stalk. I never knew they grew that way. But I knew they were tasty. A friend of mine from church helped out his family at their stand and he always cut me a deal on canning tomatoes.

Amanda and I taught in the same English department at the university and we knew each other long before we became friends, probably through her husband, FDR, who also taught in the same department and is an amazing poet (Amanda's no slouch in that area herself). I'm sure that the change probably had something to do with food. We discovered that we only lived one street away from each other, so discussions of food became "Hey, I just made this, want leftovers?" or "Hey, I just made this, I need a second opinion!" And across the street we'd go. We started walking in the mornings, sometimes with her tank of a black lab, Bleu, who still thinks he's a puppy. (He may always be a puppy to us.)

Most of those conversations were discussions of various Food Network shows, expressions of love for the awesomeness that is Jamie Oliver, talking about locally sourced food and more. She's the one who introduced me to kale, sautéed in a bit of olive oil and butter till it's just wilted, spritzed with lemon juice, lightly sprinkled with salt and pepper. She made me Jamie Oliver's steak and guinness pie for my birthday once and I swear I could hear angels singing. That fall, we split a quarter of a cow, locally-sourced, grass-fed beef, and it was the greatest thing I'd ever done.

We are the people who take pictures of our food when we go out to eat. If you want to see us in action (albeit in written form), click here. Amanda herself writes for her very cool blog Everyday Palate.

As a cook and an eater, she's completely fearless. (But, she's not a baker. Completely different skill set, she would say. I was the baker of the two.) Part of that has to do with the influence of one Sarah Lenz, who writes on a very cool blog called Prose and Potatoes. I don't know Sarah as well, but she also teaches in the same English department. Sarah is even more fearless than Amanda, especially when it comes to unmentionable bits of various animals. She raises her own chickens. If it can be made herself, she does it.

Amanda has been the Food and Wine editor of the online journal Connotation Press for two years and this fall, they've morphed the written element of the column into a video. Sarah and Amanda have their own cooking show, Spatula. It's amazing. One ingredient, two ways. This month, it's beef and they're making burgers. Amanda is using locally sourced ground chuck from the grocery store and Sarah is grinding her own from chuck and short ribs. I started to drool, I swear. Real burgers are a work of art. These two have personality, they have skills, they have a love of food that is as evident as the finished product. This is a cooking show that you'll want to keep an eye on, if for no other reason than it's fun. Food Network, watch out!

I have heard rumors that Sarah is coming to Omaha over spring break and may drag Amanda with her--I hope so! I can see it now: Spatula: Tiny Kitchen Edition.

In Praise of Libraries

2011-09-30T18:13:00.000-05:00

This weekend is the annual Lincoln City Libraries book sale. Anyone who's been in my vicinity in the last couple of days has heard me go on and on about it. I love libraries, public or private. I think they're among the world's greatest ideas. (So are library ladders, for that matter. I fantasize about built-in bookshelves too...) I went last year and got some amazing books and though this is only my second year in Lincoln, it's becoming my favorite part of the year. Fall is here, the sun is shining, the fields are gold, and there's a chill if you're standing in the shade. It's the perfect time of year for sitting on your couch with a book, under a blanket, with a mug of something warm.

Yesterday, I took home 63 books for very little money (today was about half that and I'll go back on Sunday, when things are half price or ten cents a piece), especially compared to what I would have spent elsewhere. I'm working on my comps and my dissertation, as well as preparing classes to teach for the future, and that all adds up to lots of books I need that my stipend doesn't cover. So, I gather every book I see that could be useful in the future, Best American Essays from the early 1990s that I don't have, Irish lit and Great Plains lit and other types of Lit that I should have on my shelf, Irish criticism on James Joyce and Sean O'Casey, books that I want to teach at some point in my life, books by people I know (which is one of the true joys of being a writer and knowing writers). Poetry that I may or may not read, but that I should own, because I know poets. Books for the independent study I'm taking this semester. I picked up paperbacks by mystery authors I adore. Three cookbooks that look like fun.

My apartment is 450 sq ft and my bookcases, four of the tall ones, are already filled to the brim, the paperbacks stacked two deep. With the aid of various types of crates, I'm able to stack the books higher, almost to the ceiling. I love the high ceilings. I moved two orange crates above the tea cabinet and separated out my comp lists, then put on top of them Irish criticism that I'm glad I have, that will be useful later, but that I don't need to get to often. Last night I turned on Anthony Bourdain and let his snark fill my apartment as I put my new books away.

There are people in my life who ask why do you need to own them? Why don't you just check them out from the library? It's true, I have a small space and a small budget. But you can't explain to a non-writer why owning the books is important. I write in the margins, I put sticky notes on the really important passages. I reread them, sometimes for professional reasons, sometimes just for pleasure. You never know when you'll need to produce a copy of something or other. I write from them, I write critical papers about them. That means that I need to be able to pull it off the shelf and find exactly what I need there.

Part is that I'm feeling exceptionally smug that I was able to find a place for the books I've brought home so far, though I might be at the end of that kind of space. The next crop of books will require some creativity in space. But there's something even bigger here. The color on my shelves is just fantastic, the kind of color you can't get any other way, not from wall paint, not from photographs and paintings hung on the wall. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks. All sizes and shapes, various heights and thicknesses. This is a library that gets used. These are books that have had a life before they joined mine and they'll have a life long after I'm gone. This is the reason that I can never get fully onboard with e-books. I can't do it. I love the books that have somebody's inscription in them. Birthday wishes from Mom, "I bought this for you because I thought you would like it" notes.

Most of the books I brought home this weekend are well-loved. Worn. Some showing quite a bit of stress. Books are meant to be read and these have. Yet, perversely, I hope never to have read every book on my shelf. I want there to be at least one book that I haven't read, something that keeps me coming back. Sometimes I despair at never being able to read all I need to read to be a writer, to be a teacher, that there's always more out there to read than I can read--but sometimes, this is a lovely thought.

When my sisters and niece were here last weekend, both of my sisters wanted something to read before bed. The sense of satisfaction I felt at the question was the whole reason I love my library. I want my library to be a place where other people get lost, just looking to see what's there. When friends or family are looking for a certain kind of book, I want to be able to go through the shelves and just pull out book after book. You'll like this one, I want to say. Try this one. Let me know what you think. K3 returned Bill Bryson and Tim Cahill and requested fiction, which surprised me. She doesn't often read fiction, let alone fluffy fiction. I gave her Jennifer Crusie's Agnes and the Hitman. I want to be Agnes when I grow up, I said. K2 looked at me (as she'd already read the book) and said, You already are Agnes. I gave her a withering look and said, I don't attack people with frying pans.

And I want my library to be a place, filled with the kind of books that if you don't bring them back, it's not the end of the world. This is one of the reasons I love used books--there's no inherent worth in them. They're only worth what they mean to me. None of the books I own are worth much money. Of course, there are books on my shelf that would break my heart to lose, those that are written and signed by friends, those that are rare in some fashion. But barring accidents that render them unreadable--fire, spilled mugs of coffee, cats who chew on paper, like Maeve--I'll probably be thrilled that you liked the book well enough to not return it. At least that's what I'll choose to believe. It's better than thinking you just forgot. I once lent a student my signed copy of Joe Mackall's book Last Street Before Cleveland and he never returned it. I hope he got something out of the reading.

Books are living, breathing things in my world, in my apartment, on my shelves. They bear fingerprints. They bear the stories of being read. Stories make the world go 'round.

Scott Russell Sanders coming to UNO!!

2011-09-27T07:57:00.001-05:00

Wednesday, October 12

7:30 PM

Milo Bail Student Center Nebraska Room

Light refreshments will served.

Thursday, October 13

The Writing Life: A Conversation with Students

4:00-5:00 PM

Eppley Administration Building Auditorium 102

How exciting is this?

For more information, click here.

Eng. 992: Week 6 Response

2011-09-25T16:21:00.000-05:00

"Local Life Aware Of Itself"

On Friday, I attended the launch of Dr. Tom Lynch's new book, Face of the Earth, co-authored with SueEllen Campbell and others, and he read brief excerpts from his chapter on deserts, which he said have a lot to do with grasslands in terms of perceptions. He spoke of the vertical and horizontal sublime and it reminded me of something W. Scott Olsen wrote in his essay "Gravity":

"People who live in the mountains or visit them say, 'You can see so far!' Yet, living on the prairie, I know I can see farther. The difference is one, I believe, of a framed and unframed landscape. In the mountains, you see more surface. You see more dirt, but you see less far. On the prairie, you can't see nearly as much surface. The surface falls away with the curvature of the earth, but you can see forever."

How to look and what you see when you look at the prairies and grasslands is the essential focus between John T. Price's "The First Miracle of the Prairie" and Wes Jackson's "Matfield Green." Both consider how teachers like us might contribute to place-consciousness. Jackson advocates that universities should "assume the awesome responsibility of both validating and educating those who want to be homecomers--not that they necessarily want to go home, but rather to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native." The idea of being a homecomer is especially attractive at the present moment, because it allows for people to make a home anywhere they are, whether they were born in that soil or not.

Price's essay starts out with much the same rhetorical strategy as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, as Price sets up a specific place that should provoke a specific reaction, yet results in exactly the opposite reaction. Price expects to feel "its character, its magnitude...something special to mark this as an arrival, something spiritual, mystical--God. Instead, I felt cold gusts working the collar of my sweatshirt, the itch of fly bites, the painful throb in my right palm where I had stuck myself on a prickly pear." Price is coming to the grasslands from a perspective after the 1993 Mississippi flood, where nature has been anything but a passive physical setting where other things happen.

The first step to forming a commitment to the landscape where one is (whether that is where one is born or where one chooses to be) is, as he asserts, a matter of language. He mentions Annie Dillard, that "seeing is a matter of verbalization," and that the 1993 flood destroyed his ability to attach language to what he was seeing in action. I felt the same way during the various Red River floods between North Dakota and Minnesota, especially the 1997 Flood. Price argues that articulation is the first step to his "own confused and contradictory relationship to my home region, my own tenuous reach, as a resident and a writer, toward commitment, responsibility, and love." He takes his own path to articulation through the words of other writers (passive learning), but then he takes the initiative to write to several of these writers, interview and meet them, and actively participate in the conversation of the place (active learning). That movement was not lost on me as a teacher, as we've been considering active learning in the past several weeks in this class.

What was particularly striking about Price's essay was the juxtaposition between the landscape itself and the writings that came out of it. The grasslands and prairies are considered empty landscapes, devoid of any inherent redeeming qualities, having no value at all until money can be made from it (by cultivation or ranching). Throughout the essay, he begins the journey to understand that the grasslands are valuable all on their own, that there is incredible biodiversity here, that this place is indeed special. As he does this, he also makes a case that the grasslands are not devoid of writers writing about them either, as some might assume. If you asked most people to name writers writing about the Great Plains, some might be able to name Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Ted Kooser, maybe one or two more. But the sheer number of nonfiction writers he mentions (seeing most of the names he mentions absolutely thrilled me, because some of them are quite unknown) means that there is more value here, on a literary level, than most could articulate on first glance. Some of the writers he mentions in this essay are among my favorites: Kathleen Norris and Gretel Ehrlich, Bill Kittredge and Linda Hasselstrom, and more. (And it reminded me that, sheerly by coincidence, my fiction class is reading Dan Chaon's short story "The Bees," and I had no idea that he was originally from Nebraska. I keep adding to this list of classes I want to put together--and now I'm getting some cool ideas for "Contemporary Literature of the Great Plains.")

What Price advocating is that writing can be the savior of the prairie--both in the reading and in the writing. He asks, "How might we return to that other perspective, facing in the grasslands that thing which humbles us, inspires us, throws us back upon our selves?" The next question to ask, though, is yes, but why should we? This is a question answered in a different, more economical/practical way by Jackson. For himself, Price advocates the place of the nature writer, a classification of writer that is, like the grasslands, marginalized even among the genre of nonfiction, not taken as seriously as writers who are not labeled "regional." Part of the problem is teaching prairie children (and prairie writers) that their place is not as important as other places, that writing that comes out of local places, stories of "local color," are simply charming, not important--both in literature and their own writing. As Price quotes Hamlin Garland:

"Local color, he claimed, has 'such quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native. It means a statement of life as indigenous as the plant growth.' Such a statement does not arise from calculated literary choices but rather from a perspective so intrinsic that 'the writer naturally carries it with him half-consciously, or conscious only of its significance, its interest to him.' It is a way of writing as natural as living."

For too long has the term "local color" been pejorative in literature, but it certainly is an example of what it means to know a place intimately (and be able to articulate that to others). The complexity that that kind of knowing offers is exactly what Wendell Berry describes, as Price quotes him later: "without a complex knowledge of one's place, and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly and eventually destroyed." For the purpose of this class, asking how to facilitate students forming that type of complex knowledge is important. What constitutes this complex knowledge? Is it knowing names of plants and how the ecology works? Is it knowing the geological history (like Ashfall) and how that effects how we live in this place today? Is it knowing the human history, the toll that the Europeans forced on this particular bioregion? Is it asking students to investigate their own personal history in this place? Is it all of the above?

While Price worked through the literary presence on the prairie, Jackson articulated well some interesting economic ideas, towards a sustainable economy. These aren't perfect places, he writes, that "the graveyard contains the cuckolder and the cuckoldee, the shooter and the shot, the drunk and the sober." He writes of the realities of Place, how it is possible to become native to a place, that it requires not just social and contextual elements, but also economical ones: such things cannot--and should not--be separated. This offers hope for a larger population. As he writes of the ladies' club in Matfield Green, learning how to cope with the August heat, he writes that in what we could call "uneducated" ways, they're learning how to be a native of that place: the alternative to which is air conditioning, which is detrimental in more ways than we can count.

It makes me wonder if this is one way that we as educators can translate these ideas of place-consciousness to our students: how is it possible to become native to a place that you were not born in, didn't grow up in? John Banville, the Irish novelist, writes in his novel The Untouchable, "To take possession of a city of which you are not a native, you must first of all fall in love there." John T. Price mentioned love at the beginning of his essay, and the idea of love is also frequent in Gruchow's essays. What does it mean to love a place? How is that the same and different from loving a human being? How is it not a one-time event, that it is a way of making a life, of continually forming particular relationships? Too often we see the land as passive, that humans are (almost) the only active element on it. Both Price and Jackson articulate that in order to find value in a place, the relationship needs to be equal, that we need to see (and verbalize) how the landscape acts on us as much as we act on it.

Writing Craft: Beginnings and Endings

2011-09-22T08:05:00.001-05:00

This week, I've seen rough drafts from my 150 class and the first round of stories from my 252 class. Oh, the potential held in these drafts. I love my job. Of course, they're drafts , so there's work to be done, but there's something so elementally thrilling about seeing students trying to work through the skills and concepts and ideas we've been talking about for the past five weeks. I love my job. In my 150 drafts, I love that when I give my students a prompt like "an aspect of a place you're connected to" that out of a class of 21 students, nobody writes the same essay. It does my little teacher heart good to see all that creativity, all that unique attention, all of the ideas that they come up with. Mostly, the biggest problem with these drafts is that my students are--as they admit out loud--still unsure of themselves, still not willing to trust what they know, but I know that this is a semester-long process to teach them to trust that their ideas are valuable. But this is a good start.

Today in class, we're talking about Beginnings and Endings. I love this particular activity, which I shamelessly stole (well, after asking permission) from the indomitable W. Scott Olsen at Concordia College. I've photocopied the first page of various nonfiction books and essays and the last page of various books and essays (not the same first and last pages) and we'll talk about the rhetoric of beginnings and endings. I have beginnings from Tim Cahill, Bill Bryson (the best opening line ever: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."), Jon Krakauer, and more. We've already talked about starting an essay from a place of energy--and what constitutes energy--and so today we're going to talk about rhetoric.

What does it mean that Brian Doyle starts "Joyas Voladoras" with "Consider the hummingbird for a long moment"--what do readers do with an imperative? What about starting with some startling observation, stunning in its tone and voice, like Tim Cahill's "This Teeming Ark," which starts with "It was like trying to drink a beer on the subway at rush hour"?

And when we switch to talk about endings, we don't talk about conclusions, like we would when writing a more formal argumentative piece. We'll talk about not putting all the exposition and ideas at the end of a piece, since an essay (to quote Scott again) is "the witnessed development of an idea." We'll talk about what might be right for an essay, to come to some sort of answer (like Lopate in "One Man's Abortion") or leave things ambiguous, like Linda Hasselstrom in "Buffalo Winter."

Since we've been talking about Noah Lukeman's book A Dash of Style, which looks at punctuation from the perspective of a writer and the effect that punctuation can have on the pacing and emotional effect of a piece (rather than rules about how and when to use commas and such), we'll talk about the way these writers put their sentences together in their first and last pages. What's the effect? What are they trying to do? And how are they using their sentences and punctuation to do that?

Yes, indeed. Days like this, I just love my job.

Gary McDowell: On Using Hybrid Texts to Lead the Creative Writing Classroom

2011-09-20T13:12:00.000-05:00

Bonus Double-Post Tuesday! Here's a great post from my friend Gary, who teaches poetry at Belmont University. Some great thoughts here for teaching how to read like a writer, no matter your genre. The original post can be found at HTML Giant.

***

In the Creative Writing classroom, I don’t teach so much as I lead. Discussions. Close-readings. Deep-readings. Free-writings. Whatever it is, I keep minds attuned to construction rather than destruction. Destruction is better left to the literature classroom, where it has its purpose, surely. We don’t read to answer what or who but rather why and how. We read widely, and we imitate shamelessly; we invent, therefore, with an existing form as backbone before we learn to invent forms of our own. We string words on the page like Christmas lights across the roof; we have purpose and design in mind, but mainly, we just want shit to glow brightly. The goal: limit the variables, at least at first. As we learn to construct within the preconceived frames, we increase the variables beyond simple imitation, and the possibilities to invent then grow considerably. We understand, ultimately, that poetry can exist in many physical shapes, and we strive to keep the language malleable within whatever shape it takes.

T.S. Eliot told us that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” The goal in the beginning of any semester then is to get the students invested in communicating in this foreign language of image, tone, metaphor, parataxis, association. Vision, therefore, comes before technique. And then, once we’ve forged an explanation of vision, vision and technique exist together, however haphazardly at first, deus ex machina be damned. We do, though, care about technique. For instance, this semester I’m teaching Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, and I care that the students understand what the poem is trying to do, but I care more about how it works, what its engine can tell us about our own engines, what we might learn by considering how Mayer built the poem as a vision rather than as a pile of techniques. Through the study of texts like Mayer’s, I’ve had success in leading students to identify their visions and find the techniques necessary to construct them. To put it simply, I believe in experiential learning in the creative writing classroom, and it’s for certain that we can communicate our experiences before we can understand them just as we can communicate a vision before we have the vocabulary to articulate it.

Poems are built from what we know, but what we know is limitless. We have assumptions about what we know, and my goal is to break those assumptions into workable aesthetic arguments. We can know anything. We can use research, experience, and imagination to know something and anything. Perhaps Larkin had he right: “Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.” But maybe he had it backwards; perhaps poetry is everybody’s business, is the business of shared knowledge and experience. To that end, and on the more pragmatic side of things, I strive to create an inclusive environment in which students can test ideas and broaden their understanding of our texts. This allows them to build their own opinions free of being “right” or “wrong,” at least temporarily. Of course there might be a right way and a wrong way to read a text when one’s writing a literary interpretation or a close-reading essay, but as writers the students benefit most from internalizing the text first and applying their own fledgling aesthetics to their reading of it. While it’s important for the students to learn how to write, it’s just as important that they learn how to be writers, and so the classroom becomes a place of experimentation, of close-reading, and of aesthetic defining. After all, helping the students learn to read as a writer is one of our most important goals.

Through the reading and study of hybrid texts, which, in my experience, lend themselves to a form of active reading that allows students more freedom, the students begin to stress visionover technique, and I am able to instill in them that they can know anything and communicate in forms of their own creation before they even understand the basis and need of those forms. After reading hybrid texts, the students’ work is more explorative and care-free because they aren’t worried about staying left-flush or maintaining a certain meter—though it should be mentioned that in a Techniques class these elements of prosody and poetics are crucial! In the past, and in the future, I’ve taught everything from prose poems, flash fictions, lyric essays, long poems, original forms, and confusing forms by writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Diane Williams, Bernard Cooper, David Shumate, Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Claudia Rankine, Joe Brainard, Carole Maso, Eliot Weinberger, C.D. Wright, Maggie Nelson, John Ashbery, Harryette Mullen, Russell Edson, Italo Calvino, and on and on. I tend to think of these works as echoes across genres, forms, and time. We read them with an eye toward construction, and we learn to mimic their moves and then discuss how and why some moves work and some moves don’t.

Carl Sandburg wrote, “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” That seems about right to me. By spending time immersed in these texts that are neither this nor that, students begin to see the echo of form and content, association and disjunction, intellectualism and lyricism; in other words, they start forming their own shadows, their own echoes in their writing. In C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining they might find docu-poetics at work whereas in Maggie Nelson’sBluets they might come to understand the power of obsession and meditation. The moment they start to see how these elemental ways of writing impact one another and build off each other is the moment when the magic happens. It’s like Ken Bain’s idea of building “scaffolds of knowledge.” The learning here is happening on a pyramid-like scale wherein the students accumulate knowledge and experience simultaneously. They build their visions and techniques as writers one toe-hold at a time. But the toe-holds aren’t as structured as they would be if we were reading more traditional verse—which, once again, certainly has its place. But if poetry is, as Edmund Burke tells us, “the art of substantiating shadows,” then through the reading of hybrid forms, we learn not to chase our shadows aimlessly but to capture them and put to use their shapes.

Gary L. McDowell is the author of American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Orphic Prize, and co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press, 2009). His poems and essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, New England Review, Quarterly West, and others. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Belmont University in Nashville, TN.

Thinking Ahead: Natural Disaster Narratives

2011-09-20T10:41:00.000-05:00

I should not be thinking about this now, but why is it that the best ideas come when you don't have time or energy to explore them? This morning is, for instance, brought to you by Excedrin Migraine. But I'm starting to put together my basic syllabus for this class I'm thinking of on "Natural Disaster Narratives."

Fascinating article: Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?" Definitely worth reading, if only because it's interesting.

Here's my preliminary idea for the course (which I'm thinking to design as either a 101 class (Rhetoric as Reading) or 150 (Rhetoric as Inquiry)):

"This course is designed around a theme of natural disaster narratives and their place in literature. What function does the natural world serve in the written word? How does it affect the subject of a piece of written work (in whatever genre)? How do humans find meaning in natural disasters--and how has that (or has it?) changed over time? (Natural disasters used as morality tales, for instance.) How does it affect the peripherals of a piece of writing? (Frankenstein would not have been written if not for the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.) Our purpose in this class is to develop a greater understanding of the natural world and its effects not only on as as human beings right now, but also how the events of the natural world have affected literature throughout its history.

My idea right now is to structure the class chronologically in units of time: Ancient Literature; Renaissance/Medieval Literature; Enlightenment/Industrialization; Age of Technology. That way, we can trace how natural disasters are represented in literature and how that changes (if it does).

And so my goal right now is to make a master list of writings of natural disasters, both literature (canon and contemporary) and journalistic explorations. If you've got suggestions, please post them! If you have experience teaching these books, I'd like to hear it!

Agee, Jonis. The River Wife. (New Madrid earthquakes.)

Egan, Timothy. Worst Hard Time (Dust Bowl)

Epic of Gilgamesh/Biblical Flood.

Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. (tides/cyclone)

Laskin, David. The Children's Blizzard. (1888 Midwestern Blizzard)

MacLean, Norman. Young Men and Fire. (1949 Mann Gulch Fire)

O'Flaherty, Liam. Famine. (Irish Great Famine)

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. (1815 Mt. Tambora)

Solnit, Rebecca. Paradise Built in Hell. (New Orleans/Katrina)

Varley, Jane. Flood Stage and Rising. (1997 Red River Flood)

Suggestion from my mother: "The ideas brought to mind "The Great Hinckley Fire of 1894." I have no idea of literary accounts to recommend, but I remember studying about it in 6th grade, when Minnesota history was our social studies curriculum. Whether the fire was started by lightning or sparks from a passing train, no one will ever know, but the damage was catastrophic." Sounds like the beginnings to a major writing project for this class: find and research a local natural disaster. Thanks, Mom!

Eng. 992: Week 5 Response

2011-09-18T10:31:00.000-05:00

This week's readings could not have come at a better time for me, since I had gone looking this week for the theory and critical pedagogy to go along with what we've been reading--and this weeks' readings were full of it, full of names and citations to go track down. Reading about the KCAC project (Keeping and Creating American Communities) was great, from LeeAnn Land's article about her class's project, Sarah Robbins' introduction, and then I spent a great deal of time on the KCAC website and most of the page is now bookmarked on my computer or printed out for inclusion in my growing binder of teaching place-writing resources. Since I posted on "Rosewood Township" a few weeks ago, I'll concentrate on another aspect of the readings. (His last name is pronounce grew-koe, if you weren't sure.)

What stood out to me most was the idea of movement, of active engagement, even of physical movement outside the classroom. I've been trying to incorporate active learning into my classrooms, but only so far in getting my students to be able to talk to the writers they've been reading. I have not done much with physical movement outside the classroom, as a part of active inquiry. Definitely something I want to work on. The website for Nebraska tourism--focusing here on road trips--made me want to pull my Scamp out of its dusty sleeping place and take off for parts unknown. (Won't happen anytime soon, unfortunately.) Someday I'd love to camp the Lewis and Clark route. And someday, as I discussed with a friend yesterday, I'd love to teach a class on the Great American Road Trip. Lewis and Clark will be along for that ride.

When Land writes that her class's "project developed out of my conviction that historians (public or academic) should advance public discussion about the state of their community, nation, or world," and soon after she discusses what information she felt she needed to cover in order to uncover other things, I was right back in Mark Sample's recently posted article on"Teaching for Uncoverage rather than Coverage." The KCAC principles of interdisciplinary work, research based in inquiry, public writing, and active citizenship are, now, familiar concepts we've been discussing so far this semester. The very idea of interdisciplinary work, getting students in our English classes outside the English classroom, is something it seems we're all working towards. We want our students to be able to think outside themselves, which seems to work best when they're physically working outside themselves.

This movement outside themselves helps to facilitate the ideas of global and local, something I started studying for the first time a year ago, reading Ursula Heise and Mitchell Thomashow. I can foresee revising my present syllabus to include a progression of major papers that takes the students from working inside their own local communities to researching how their community functions in the larger global community. It seems like the first step is to teach students the value of their own community, then teach them how they're connected to other communities, that what is now didn't appear out of thin air. It was created, deliberately, for a purpose. And this benefitted some people and destroyed others.

I'm also interested in this idea of diverse local texts (all possible definitions of "text") that "help[ed] construct the frameworks, fashion the metaphors, create the very language by which people comprehend their experiences and think about their world" (Lauter, qtd. in Robbins). This is an area I'd like to explore further, because it's an area I have not done much with and it has a lot of promise. The recent readings we've done about photography projects and such have provided a good beginning for me, as I think about how communities are preserved through various texts and what those texts say about those places. Robbins writes of "uncover[ing] and critique[ing] forces that have shaped their own local cultures, as subcultures in national and international contexts" and one thing I have not done--at all--is do any kind of critique of those forces. We've barely talked about them in my class. We'll probably get to it in some fashion in the second and third writing project, but I see it as a failing of the course right now as it stands. Mostly because I don't have the experience or vocabulary to have these conversations with my students.

I'm definitely intrigued by many of the writing assignments the KCAC posted: "Reading and Writing Poems About Place" (I tend to use prose, because I'm a prose writer); "Something Important Happened Here!" and I thought that using this assignment in conjunction with a class blog might be interesting, if we're exploring digital space as well as other types of place, also something that might go well with Robert's "Vanishing" prompt; "House and Home,"because Sandra Cisneros is awesome; and I absolutely LOVE the idea of student generated writing prompts. So much so that I'm incorporating this into my classes (where appropriate) from here on out.

Teaching for Coverage/Uncoverage

2011-09-17T13:02:00.000-05:00

Aubrey sent me this link and I thought it was a very interesting article, especially one to consider in light of our place-conscious discussions. Seems like it fits exactly what we've been talking about in this class.

"Teaching for Uncoverage Rather than Coverage," by Mark Sample.

Any thoughts?

Yesterday, in our place studies meeting, we briefly touched on how different disciplines within the English/writing community see place studies, and I'm pretty excited for upcoming brown bag sessions on place pedagogy in undergraduate English courses--but I'm also interested in what discussions we might have in the future for how place studies can find its, well, place in literature studies and creative writing as well, especially in the UNL English department.

And so this week, as I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next semester (yes, I know, thinking too far ahead), I think I finally got a handle on how to structure this class I have in my head about Natural Disaster Narratives (those that deal directly with natural disasters as well as books that are influenced by them)--and I think I'm going to structure it chronologically, starting with the biblical flood/Epic of Gilgamesh. Anyway. I'm not too far into this planning yet, but I'm definitely going to have these ideas of coverage/uncoverage in my head as I do.

And, as I love how thoughts come out of the woodwork at just the right moments, Robert Brooke (professor of my 992 class) posted on Bret's blog about Sharon Bishop's assignment for her high school students involving the Nebraska photographer Wright Morris, as an entry into an oral history project in their town. Robert posted a version of the Wright Morris assignment, which he calls "What's Just About To Vanish." In light of today's thinking about coverage and uncoverage (which I feel like I will be exploring further in my Week 5 response), this writing assignment seems particularly timely:

"Following in Morris's intellectual footsteps, go out into your community landscape and photograph some cultural artifact that you believe is right now in the process of vanishing. Work on the photo until you get one that really resonates with what that thing is and the fact of its transitoriness. Then write the essay that goes with the photo. Why is this thing just about to vanish? What does its vanishing mean, both for the folk who really used it, and for the folk who don't need it any longer? Where do you fit in relation to these other people?"

I love this idea. I think it'll absolutely find its way into some future curriculum (maybe into Writing Project 1 of this particular 150 syllabus, should I teach it again). Part of me just wants to do it myself, which I just might.

Eng. 150: A Place to Start

2011-09-15T11:46:00.000-05:00

It's true that Sara Evans' song "A Real Fine Place to Start" was going through my head during class today. My 150 turned in the rough draft of their first writing project, a personal essay that's designed to explore an aspect of a place they feel connected to. I'm pretty excited about what they're writing about.

Today's workshop is one I'm still in the process of developing. It mostly works, but I feel like it's going to be one of those that gets better with age. The idea is to find the energy and the heart of the text.

So, in their small groups of three, they brainstorm what might constitute "energy" in an essay. If I said, "Hey, where's the energy in this essay," what would you say? Once they had some ideas floating around, we put them on the board. Things like action/movement (which could be physical or mental or emotional); something personal, constructed with dialogue/scene; a vibrant voice (might be the result of dialogue or word choice); sentence structure that slows the reader down or speeds them up, depending on what the writer wants the reader to feel in those places; contradictory images or feelings.

Then I had them take one of their drafts, pass it to the person next to them in their group, and the group member was told to read quickly through the draft and mark in the margins/underline/star places of energy. However they defined it, mark the places which had some sort of energy.

When that was completed, I had them pass it to the next person and the new reader was directed to read quickly, but to mark scenes of action (with dialogue, etc. that put the reader right there next to them) and scenes of summary (where we're being told something happens). That's it.

When the author gets his/her paper back, they looked at the margin comments and they looked to see if what one person marked as energetic was echoed by the other person's marking of scenes of action or summary. I told the author to choose one of those moments of energy and flip their paper over and write that moment/scene with that kind of energy, as if they were going to start their paper with it--you don't actually have to start here when you revise, but I want you to write this moment as if you were going to. You always want to start from a place of energy, I told them.

I gave them time to do some writing and when we came back together, I asked what would change if you decided to start here: and they came up with ideas like restructuring chronologically, require more physical details, require more background information, etc. Some students did identify that those kinds of things were actually missing in this draft.

Next week, we'll talk more specifically about the rhetoric of beginnings and endings, with a packet I made up that takes the first page of quite a few essays and the last page. More on that next week. It's a fun day.

Eng. 150: What is Lost, What Can Never Be Lost

2011-09-13T10:16:00.000-05:00

Today, we're reading two Gruchow pieces out of Grass Roots ("Visions" and "Bones"--which are two of my favorites) and Elizabeth Dodd's "Underground." The quest of the day is to examine what is lost and what can never be lost. We're transitioning from reading and discussing essays to drafting our own--and they're turning in rough drafts of their first essay on Thursday. I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with.

We'll talk about how to handle writing about loss, that it's easy to write about loss, but harder to make people care about yours. That there's a difference between writing as therapy and writing as literature. We'll talk about Sue William Silverman's "Voice of Experience" and "Voice of Innocence," online at Brevity, in a longer form in her recently published book on memoir.

Writing Exercises:

Write about a place that seriously challenged your view of the world. Start with physical detail. What is this place? Stay on that level for now.
Who were you before--and who were you after?
Write about a place that should have challenged you, but didn't. Think of Jon Krakauer in the first pages of Into Thin Air. For him, not caring was a process. Other reactions may be more immediate--and that's also worthy of exploration.
How did this make you feel, physically? (Gretchen Legler's Exercise #4)

Eng. 992: Week 4 Response

2011-09-11T11:03:00.000-05:00

I started this week's readings by watching the NE-TV piece and that formed a guiding principle for how I took Robert's questions this week: what we know about our places and how we come to know it.

The 5th graders from Aurora drew the map of their town without streets, which I thought was brilliant, but what really caught me was how they described their courthouse, the heart of their community: "We call it the Square," they said. They know what their town smells like, what it sounds like, probably better than any of the adults who have lived there their entire lives. To discount what children know is the first step to Gruchow's point, that rural education is not "real" education. These kids know that their fire department is completely volunteer (as was mine in the town I grew up in--and still is). In Ogallala, those kids also had a consciousness that's not measured in state standards. Just like the Aurora 5th graders, they knew the place they came from. Of the lake created by the dam, they said, "We call it Big Mac." They're conscious of changing priorities when it comes to the water and they wonder what happens when the water gathered in their community doesn't stay there. This is a beginning that can be applied anywhere: kids who grow up in a place know that place. At the very least, they know its nicknames and its inside jokes. I bet that you'd get a more complete answer to "tell me about your town" from a ten year old than you would from an adult. This feels like an excellent exercise for a beginning fiction class. Might have to try this myself.

To combine a couple of Brooke's guiding principles for place-based education, the active citizenry and the spiraling-outward nature of the curriculum, there's a brief mention of Sharon Bishop designing a unit she created between English and biology. That idea just stopped me dead in my mental tracks. Collaboration between disciplines is a great way to begin, beyond the obvious, but because the subject we teach students (at least at a K-12 level) is usually taught to be completely separate from others. Combine science and history? Unthinkable. (But tell that to Stephen Jay Gould.) Literature and biology? Absolutely not. (Might as well burn the Annie Dillard, then.) We teach students that writing is only confined to English classes--and in English classes, there's a certain definition of what you can write about and writing about the place you come from isn't going to be interesting to anybody else. What would have happened, if as Sharon Bishop does with her regional literature, if we had been taught in high school that Will Weaver, award-winning Minnesota novelist and short-story writer, lived five miles away? (As it was, I didn't learn about him until college.)

As I consider Robert's suggestion to start considering a place-conscious teaching units in our own places, what I notice as missing from what I've been doing is an active component. I do take my 100-level students to the Morrill Hall museum during our third writing project, but that's about it. Other friends at other institutions have incorporated service learning components. A friend who focused a class around food had her students participate in the community gardens. It feels easier to have that citizenry component--the interest in social justice--attached to composition classes.

Putting that active component into a creative writing or literature class seems more difficult, beyond having students go to readings. A former undergraduate nonfiction professor of mine actually takes his students on a 100-mile hike through the Scottish Highlands (see the video here--it's pretty awesome). I'm really interested in travel and travel writing, so I'd like to do something similar--even if it's a local sort of field trip. Actual study-abroad kinds of trips are one of those beautiful, nebulous dreams that I hope are an option when I finish my PhD.

But I run up against the problem of literature and creative writing being such sedentary pursuits--how do I incorporate that kind of activity, something new and different and exciting and relevant? Maybe it's just a matter of themed classes, readings and writings based around a specific area or idea. Irish literature is a big part of my literary interest and a good place to start, as is regional literature in different parts of the country. I still go back to Bishop's commitment to regional literature--and Bret's idea of making sure that the regional literature we teach is contemporary.

So far, the best I've been able to manage is that I've been working hard to get my students every semester, whichever class I'm teaching, to meet a writer they've been reading in person--or have a conversation via Skype. (I just set up a Skype date with William Kent Krueger for my fiction class later in the semester and I'm just thrilled.) I have other ideas (that I haven't pondered fully yet) that involve students interviewing various authors and reporting back to the class. Most writers are nice people who love to talk writing. I like the idea of upper level classes doing interviews with various literary journal editors.

As I consider those ideas, they don't help solve the problem that we're seeing in our college students, who feel transitory and not connected to Lincoln (or to Nebraska at all), who feel like there's nothing for them back in their hometowns, even if they wanted to go back. Even the study abroad idea takes students out of their place and puts them elsewhere, as if what's important cannot be found where you are--and you have to go several thousand miles away to find it. You could pick up their education, put it down in any part of the country, and it won't have changed much at all. It bears further thinking about what I can do as a teacher here, in this place, to make sure that what my students get out of my classes cannot be repeated (or repeated easily) in any other place.

Farm Tours

2011-09-10T17:25:00.000-05:00

Today, I went with my friend Aubrey on a tour of three local farms. It was sort of an open-house kind of day for them and I like farms, I like food, I like local food, so she let me tag along as long as I agreed to navigate. I thought this was a fair trade.

We started at the Caruso-Rozzano farm, which specialized in Italian heirloom tomatoes, among other things. We looked at the rows of different tomatoes, noting differences in shape, mostly, because the ripe ones had already been picked. Aubrey bought a pint of cherry tomatoes from a little blonde girl selling the tomatoes at her own Fisher-Price stand that was right next to her parents' larger table of goodness. The tomatoes tasted like candy. And it's impossible to say no to little five year olds when they're selling anything.

Leaving Caruso-Rozzano, a B-2 flew overhead, came around and made another pass. At least I think it was a B-2. Could have been an F-117, I suppose, but as my Air Force father tried to teach his three daughters about planes, the only one I can identify on sight is a C-130, which he navigated while he was in the Air Force. But going with him to any place there are planes is always great fun. Lincoln is having an air show today and tomorrow and I bet he'd like to be here.

From there, we went to Common Good Farm, where Aubrey gets her summer CSA. This was the most interesting of them to me and I wish I'd been smarter and packed a hat and some sunblock because I only made it through part of the farm tour before I had to get out of the sun. But we walked the rows of kale and tomatoes and peppers, sampled fresh pesto and rhubarb jam. When the farm tour started, that's when things got really interesting. We saw two pens of chickens and they get moved every so often to fresh grass and grasshoppers, free range and running around. They got very excited when the little kids threw lettuce to them. We learned about the owner's reliance on non-kill methods of protecting his chickens from hawks, because Fish and Wildlife won't let you kill them. But as the farmer told us about the noise cannon things he used to scare the hawks--now they won't come near the farm--that also means that the ecology of the area is still intact. Just because you may kill the hawks that stalk your chickens doesn't mean that your problems will go away just because you kill the hawks. If you remove the predator, that has effect further down the line. (This chicken looks sketchy because of a protein issue, nothing else.)

I won't remember everything he said about his pigs (about a half dozen of them) and how he's using his pigs to get rid of bindweed--the whole process is just brilliant. He'll never be completely rid of bindweed, but the pigs have done a better job of taking care of the problem than any of the chemicals that other farmers use. Even if you spray for bindweed, you'll still need to do it every year. So that doesn't solve any problems. The pigs fertilize and chew up the soil, benefiting the soil itself, and in the fall, they're quite tasty.

From there, we went to Branched Oak farms, lured in by cows. Cows = excellent cheese, ice cream, and more. We didn't stay too long here. The reality is that cows also equal more flies. It just reminded me of stories my grandmother tells of the cows she grew up with, the milking, the dedication required, how even things like the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services were set around the milking schedules of the local farmers.

Aubrey and I also talked briefly about Wendell Berry (she's an expert on him; I am not) and advocating for solutions in terms of systems, rather than one solution for a problem. We also talked a little about my canning/urban discussion that I almost had with my class and we discussed how the local food movement has been criticized for being elitist--and how that relates to this rural/urban mindset when it comes to food. When does something like a CSA become a political choice, rather than what you do because you must? Of course, we did not fail to notice how many Priuses we saw in the parking areas of each of these farms.

Eng. 150: Preservation

2011-09-06T12:42:00.000-05:00

I keep saying this, but I think once the semester gets going, I won't be posting this often. But for now, I have ideas (whether or not they're useful to anyone else is another issue entirely). Today, in my English 150 class, we discussed four Gruchow essays in the context of Preservation. Last week we talked about how we create places for ourselves and today we talked about how those sorts of things are preserved. But, before we could even get to that, we had to talk about how we come to know, truly know, what's important in our lives.

On the board: Further Reading (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire; Sharon Bishop, "The Power of Place"; Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses; the documentary King Corn.)

In "Corn is Not Eternal," I tried to tease out that the corn has become for us what the buffalo was to various Plains tribes, but my class--stubbornly, perhaps--persisted in thinking that corn gives us more than the buffalo did to the Plains tribes. I haven't watched King Corn completely yet, but I've started it. Since it's instant on Netflix, I recommended it. But we haven't completely reconciled what we've lost by giving corn this much importance in our lives.

Between "Remember the Flowers" and "Putting Tomatoes By," which works through what his father considers important (and how he preserves it for the future) and what his mother values (and how she preserves it), we talked about how these things (issues of pesticides/herbicides, monocultures, overdevelopment/conservation, migration from rural to urban/surburban, self-sufficiency, loyalty) come out of various mindsets. We talked about how the parents, who would certainly have gone through the Depression and the father probably served in WW2, formed their work ethics and such. I brought in Silent Spring, how the problems that Carson brings up come out of this post-WW2 mindset: warlike language (eradication), American exceptionalism, absolute trust in the government, etc. I was pleased that I got a few surprised looks, nods, like I'd just given them something new (and, I hope, interesting) to consider.

In "The Transfiguration of Bread" and "Putting Tomatoes By," the ideas of homemade vs. manufacturing were brought up, the values that each of those represent, and how the trend is going back towards homemade, that people are canning again, etc. Ironically, there's an article on the main UNL page today about canning.

But the way I ended class today is directly related to the readings we did for 992 this week. Because this book is largely rural in context and there are a great deal of my students who come from urban/surburban places, we ended with this question (which we started out in discussion, but then I took them to paper, to write about it):

How does all this function within an urban/surburban context?
How does that environment (in all definitions of that term) affect the ideas that Gruchow brings up across these essays?
How do these ideas apply to those places too?
How does that urban/surburban environment shape what you consider important and how you preserve it?
How much of that is access and availability vs. necessity? Are you more likely to go buy a can of organic tomatoes than to grow them yourself?
Because you have access to things like a farmer's market, does that change your perceptions?
What happens when things like homemade bread and canned vegetables become political choices (consumption, environmental, waste), based on a certain level of affluence, vs. what you do because you have no other choice?

Since I've been thinking about my city students and what they think of reading such rural writings, I'm glad that we were able to consider these questions today. Hopefully they'll bear fruit by the time the rough draft of their first paper is due next Thursday.

House Writing Exercise #2

2011-09-05T14:41:00.000-05:00

So, because Bret told me he was stealing the dream house writing exercise (and because Kelly was talking about houses today), I figured I should probably post the second part of it. Related, but not together. This one is courtesy of the lovely Dr. Joy Castro, UNL's nonfiction professor.

Draw the floor plan of the house you grew up in. Draw in everything from doors to furniture placement. Take a classmate on a tour. Put an X on the emotional hotspot of the house and write from there, using lots of sensory details. If you want to write the story of something that happened in that hotspot, go for it. When you're done, go back, reread and find what essay you could write from this little micro-narrative. If I wrote about making Christmas cookies with my grandma, the larger idea could be something like how traditions are handed down. I once had a student write about his mom's cinnamon rolls that she made every Sunday and the essay that came from that was about how people don't take time to slow down anymore.

On a separate note, Kelly and I had a micro-conversation about houses this afternoon, wondering why do we need closure with places? We can understand needing closure with people, but why do we need it with physical places? Not a question we were able to answer.

And, perhaps the best part of the day, on a house level, was this essay context that came across Brevity's blog (the short-short nonfiction journal): an essay contest (three hundred words), for the chance to win a tiny house. I'm smitten. I love tiny houses anyway and have been obsessed with them for years (though I can't figure out where to put all my books). But these, built of 99% salvaged materials, are just works of art. I want one. Particularly the Canyon Lake one, because I just can't get over how awesome the stairs and the loft are. And I'm just in love with the potential energy efficiency, as well as smart design. I want to have enough room for a couple of people to stay over (sorely lacking in my current apartment) and I think there's good potential here. Of course, I'm way too mobile right now to be able to handle such permanence as a real house (of any size), but it's a lovely dream to bookmark and return to at odd moments.

Eng. 992: Week 3 Response

2011-09-04T12:43:00.000-05:00

Anything that includes Paul Gruchow, I'm automatically going to be predisposed to. It's so rare to find anybody--let alone anybody outside Minnesota--who knows his work that when I read Sharon Bishop quoting him, I already figured that I would like the rest of what she had to say. (I'm teaching Grass Roots myself this semester and we read "Home is a Place in Time" as one of our first readings.) As I'm very interested in forming my own pedagogy of place, reading how hers functioned within the context of rural education struck a chord.

When Bishop argues that if a "community loses a school, it may also lose its identity," I can bear first-hand knowledge of that. When the great Consolidation/Open Enrollment happened in Minnesota in the 1990s, the goal was to close down as many small schools as possible. Students could go to any school in the area they wanted. Politicians thought that students from places like Nevis would go to Park Rapids, just as students from Akeley went the other way to Walker. As a result, Akeley lost its school and as a result, its economy has been terrible. Nevis, on the other hand, did just fine. And it's still the place, as Bishop describes, where the community gathers.

As I considered Sobel's practical advice for setting up place-conscious education in rural schools, I thought about how such a thing might work in the high school that I graduated from, but realized almost immediately that while his ideas were sound and exciting, since I'm not a public school teacher, there was little I could implement myself. It did remind me of a failed experiment when I was in high school, a student-run business. We called our pizza restaurant Tigerelli's (after our mascot, the tiger) and I worked there during the two-ish years it was open. It was great fun, but even as we were aware of the financial problems it was creating and the community issues it was raising, we students were powerless to do anything about it. The business was seen as competing with "legitimate" business in town and some community members were upset that tax dollars were paying for it (though it was privately financed by investors). Had we had Sobel's advice back then, Tigerelli's might still be in business. And it really was good pizza.

The differences between the rural (Bishop and Sobel), the urban/suburban (Brooke) and what deficiencies each of them faces in terms of place education were the most interesting to explore. I come from a rural background, but my professional life has been in urban areas of varying size (Fargo/Moorhead, Spokane, Bowling Green, Lincoln). Because I grew up in a town of 300, anything bigger than Park Rapids, the next town over (2000 people), strikes me as urban. I have, as I mentioned in a previous post, that everywhere I've lived has felt transitory, complicating my sense of belonging--something that Brooke identifies as crucial to any sort of place-consciousness: "Both aspects of belonging--a robust sense of history and a vision for the future--are at present missing in the contemporary suburban landscape." My students, as first-year college writers (in my 100-level courses) could rephrase this observation to include the bubble of college. Somewhere along the line, my rural students have been taught that their places don't matter (or don't matter to anyone else) and my urban students have no idea how they've been shaped by their environment. And, perhaps most importantly, they have no idea why any of it matters, why we're wasting our time talking about such inconsequential stuff.

Part of my goals for changing these modes of thinking in my students is wrapped up in Bishop's commitment to regional literature. I'm not teaching literature; I'm teaching composition--but the premise still stands. We're reading Paul Gruchow for this first writing project because I want them to understand that places matter, even urban places. Even though Brooke identifies an established history--and continuing history--as a problem of suburbia, there's still opportunities for students. Last semester, in Fran Kaye's Great Plains Lit class, we read William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, about Chicago, and the far-reaching effects of that city were just plain astounding to me. From there, I speculated that the demand for white pine that Chicago started was the reason why my hometown, tiny little Nevis, was settled--because the Crow Wing Lake chain led directly to the Mississippi. There are little pieces of wonder and connection like that everywhere, even in the suburbs, I think. At least I hope so. When Gruchow wonders if you can call a place home if you don't know the names of the plants and such--that applies to my urban students as well as the rural ones. We've talked about place in class in the last two weeks, how we come to form attachments, what we attach to, and why that might be valuable to share with someone else--and how we do that is the composition part of the class.

I get the feeling that my students--perhaps it has to do with their millennial status--don't feel grounded in many places and that complicates their belonging, because they either don't recognize their own history or they don't want to be the next link in the chain. Or, they recognize both their history and do want to be the next link, but they don't know why. That's a tremendous opportunity for me as a teacher. And when they write on their reading responses "I never realized that essays could be anything besides boring!"--because I'm teaching them a more Montaignian idea of essay, rather than 5-paragraph argument--my little teacher-heart goes pitty pat. Teaching them that history isn't boring either is a great accomplishment for me, when it happens. If they can see value in things that never held value for them before, that's the beginning of some great conversations.

While Writing a Lecture on Setting for 252

2011-09-04T10:30:00.000-05:00

I realize that I'm treating this blog as more of a blog-blog than just a record of things for this class. So, to make things easier, I've tagged the assignments as "992" and clicking on the Tags list on the right will take you right to those responses.

It's the first time in a long time that I've been able to open my one functional window in my apartment and get some fresh air in here, and how fresh it is! The cats are particularly excited to sit in a window, though Maeve is feeling evil and keeps chasing Galway out of it. Such is life in the Babine household. I just finished grading reading responses for my fiction class and I'm moving onto the next thing on my list: finalizing the power point lecture for Tuesday. I'm still nervous enough about that class that I'm over preparing, so as not to be left with an hour to go and nothing to do. I'm a little excited about that class, because we'll be talking specifically about scene and setting...and Place! (My excitement right now might be completely related to the level of caffeine in my blood.)

So, in my preparing for this class, two things happened across my internet in the last couple of days. The first is a blog entry by my friend James Engelhardt, who just moved with his family from Lincoln to Alaska. This blog entry has everything to do with place--and the complications of trying to figure out new places. You can find "Writer as Listening Body" here.

The other unexpected awesomeness was coming across a geography course description from Dartmouth: "Landscapes of Murder: The Geography of Mystery Fiction." I just about hit the roof when I saw that. I want to teach that class. Badly. Look at the reading list--not just literary fiction, but popular fiction too. If I were to have designed this class, I would have also chosen Evanovich, for the brilliant way she uses Trenton as a character (and Stephanie Plum is just awesome anyway). And I just adore Nevada Barr. Firestorm is a good one, though I might have chosen a different one. Since I'm teaching William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake this semester, this idea just is wonderfully exciting.

Eng. 150: How Do We (Re)Create Places For Ourselves?

2011-09-01T12:50:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I probably won't be posting this much once the semester really gets underway, but so far in this class, things have been going so well that I need some sort of outlet.

First, I stumbled on this website that features great place-writing things by the amazing Gretchen Legler. She's the author of On The Ice, about Antarctica, and it's great. I met her a few years ago when we were on a panel about Women and Travel Writing at AWP. If you haven't read her book, put it on your list. In the meantime, check out these great exercises and ideas.

Today's Readings: Short-shorts by Tim O'Brien, Judith Kitchen, Emily Hiestand, and Cynthia Ozick.

Quest of the Day: How do we create places for ourselves?

Goals of the day: connect any of these pieces to ones we've already read--where is the conversation between them? (How many noticed that Ozick used "quotidian" in her piece?) Start being able to identify narrative, exposition, high exposition. How do these pieces fit into the themes of the class.

Activities: write around. I did this in groups of 3. Each student writes a paragraph, an initial comment. Write for a specific length of time. Pass to the person sitting next to them. The 2nd person reads the initial comment, then continues the conversation. The 2nd person can elaborate on those ideas, ask new questions, or take the conversation in a new direction. After a specific length of time, the paper gets passed to the third person, who reads what's already been written and continues the conversation. At the end, the third person writes something to bring the conversation full circle back to the originator. When the paper gets back to the originator, they read their own, highlighting or underlining strong, interesting, questioning moments. In their groups, they briefly discuss what they came up with, then bring it back to the big group.

Writing Exercise: Take me on a tour of your dream house. No expense spared. Take me down to the tiniest details--no detail is too small. Your dream house, since we're talking about creating a place for ourselves. (10 minutes, give or take.) Pass to the person next to you, read it, and jot down a note or two about what you can tell about what the author values, given this house. Value family, environmental ethics, solitude, etc? What details give you that impression? (This went over very well. We didn't have time to do the second half of the exercise, which we'll do next week.)

English 150: You Are Here

2011-08-31T09:09:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I taught W. Scott Olsen's "The Love of Maps" and two Paul Gruchow essays, "Rosewood Township" and "Naming What We Love" out of his 1995 Grass Roots. The purpose of the class was to explore what it means "You Are Here" and how many possible ways there are to be somewhere. We talked about how many ways Olsen answers the question he poses in the first sentence: "Why are you here?"--and we talked about philosophical, historical, physical, theological, historical, and other answers to that question. We talked about how the two authors fit together, how they both wrestled with the question of what it means to be somewhere, what is necessary to know a place, what is necessary to call a place home. We discussed that Olsen is writing what amounts to a place essay through the vehicle (pun intended) of a road essay. We wondered if it is true, as Gruchow argues, that you cannot know a place unless you know the names of the things that surrounds you.

Here's the writing exercise we did, designed to reinforce the elements of essay I want them to learn (narrative, exposition, high exposition) as well as start to think about their first writing project.

1. Describe a place you connect to--any place, could be home, could be a place you've been once--with every sense except sight.

2.What significance does this place have for you? Why is it important? What do you like or dislike about it? (If you connect to the place because it holds memories, dig deeper: why do you want to hold onto those memories, what do those memories represent for you?)

3. How long did it take for you to form this attachment?

4. How does what you know about this place play into your connection?

5. Now: how would you tell someone else about how amazing and special this place is? How would you make someone else care? (This is the "so what?" factor.) Why should anybody else care about your place? Why do you want them to feel the same way about it as you do?

I want my students to learn about writing details and descriptions, as well as beginning to articulate why a particular place has any sort of meaning--but that's only half the battle. The other half, as they will soon learn, is in making anybody else care about what they're doing. Without this exposition and high exposition, what they're doing is a basic journal entry and everybody has journals and nobody cares about yours. But making something that is personal relevant to readers takes practice. And there's no better time than the present to start.

National Geographic Writing Exercise

2011-08-24T13:17:00.001-05:00

I did this last night in my Intro to Fiction class (not my English 150), but the exercise went well enough that I thought I would share it. I got the original idea to use National Geographics from the epic awesomeness that is Jonis Agee (about three hours before class, so I really made the whole thing up as I went along), so I went to various thrift stores around Lincoln, looking for anybody who had National Geographics. The ARC on 27th and O had a great stash and I bought 60 of them, spanning four decades. I couldn't have been more thrilled, except that they weighed a ton and I did not account for this as I was getting them to my office.

I had my students choose an issue and flip through it, looking for something that caught their eye, whether it was an article or an image. Since the day's focus was on details, I first had them write a basic snapshot description of the image. Basic details: this is what I see.

The next slide on my Power Point was a definition of synesthesia and I strongly recommended that they read Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses if they considered themselves any tiny bit a writer. That book should be required reading for everybody. I directed my students to look at the basic description they'd just written and I wanted them to incorporate at least one sense-switching detail.

From there, I read them the first paragraph of Andrea Barrett's "The Forest," contained in Servants of the Map, which is one of their assigned books for the semester. I wanted them to turn that basic description into a scene, like they might find in a story.

The next step was to consider perspectives, points of view, and characters. I told them to look at the article itself, other photographs in the article, and make a list of possible characters. I was looking at an article about the Ice Man, the 5,000 year old mummy found in the Alps. My character list included the Ice Man, the hikers who stumbled over him and thought he was an accident victim, the archaeologists who were digging him up, the journalist covering the story. And there could have been more. Who has the most interesting story to tell? I asked my students.

I did not do any more with the exercise to pull out characters or plot points, since the idea was to work on details. But I pulled back a little bit and asked the class how many of them were looking at an article they found pretty interesting. Almost the entire class raised their hands. I asked if anybody was willing to share and two did: one was reading an article about the Iron Curtain and the environmental destruction that had gone on behind it, because there was no regulations and such on steel plants. He was looking at a photograph of a man whose job it was to walk a four-inch balancing beam and open and shut vents at the steel plant all day. If he fell off his beam, he died. Another student was interested in his article on the Korean DMZ.

These are the stories to tell, I told them. These are where the interesting ideas are. These are the stories they should tell. Nobody's really interested in dorm stories. The world is a very cool place and there are stories around every corner. It's the writer's job to find them, make them real to the reader, no matter where or what or how or why. I would like to read a story about the man who shuts the vents at the steel plant. I would like to read a story about the hikers who found the Ice Man. There's a reason why we're told to Write What We Know, because that's how we get the details of what it feels like to be on a sailboat--but there are lots of stories in other details that are often left untold.

This class has a place focus, just like my 150 does, but we're going to be approaching it in ways that while they're important to me, may not be relevant to my focus in this 992 class. We're reading William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake, set up in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. Place, in that book, is as much a character as any of the humans. It has just as much agency. It is absolutely more than setting. We're reading Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map, which I want my students to read with an eye towards writing the untold stories of science and place. And we're reading John Keeble's short story collection Nocturnal America, in which place is a driving force of those stories, affecting everything from action and plot to character development and identity. These are conversations that I'm fairly sure my students have never had before--and I'm really looking forward to hearing what they have to say.

Where I'm From: A Minnesota Babine

2011-08-20T18:16:00.001-05:00

No matter how long I live elsewhere, if you ask me where I'm from, I will always say northern Minnesota. I left there after college, for a MFA in creative writing in Spokane, a job teaching composition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, then here to UNL to do a PhD, and everything about living in those places has felt temporary. My family (which consists of two younger sisters, my brother-in-law, 18-month-old niece, my still-married parents, and my mother's mother) all live in Minnesota and we're all very close. (They're conscious of their privacy, so I won't post pictures or their full names.) In one very real sense, it is my family that defines home for me, but in another way I'm only starting to understand, the physical place is important as well. After all, when we visit my father's family in California, we are the Minnesota Babines; they are the California Babines.

My grandmother had emergency surgery a week ago and since she's 88 and this was fairly major surgery, we all dropped everything and went North. My sisters, K2 and K3, my brother-in-law, M., and K2 and M's daughter, C., all live together in Minneapolis and by the time I arrived at our grandparents' Cabin, they were already there. (I'm the oldest of three K sisters and our father has long called us #1, #2, and #3.) Our parents were already asleep in their fifth wheel camper, parked in the driveway. The knotty pine panelling is familiar, the bedroom where I slept still smelled faintly of my grandfather, who has been dead for five years. Raspberries were growing along the sides of the road, only enough to give C. for her breakfast the next morning, and we took seriously the poison ivy report K3 gave us. She would know. That weekend, I slept with the window open, waking to the sound of loons, running into layered memories of childhood around every corner. It's harvest time and we talk about sandy soil on the way to the hospital, discuss colors of tractors, point out immature bald eagles over County Rd. 6. Gram is pleased to hear about the eagle, miffed when I tell her that the deer got her showy lady's slippers.

This place, this Cabin, more than any other spot on the planet, is home. Enough so that when we discussed our parents moving to Minneapolis after retirement and selling the Cabin, I had a fairly extreme reaction to parting with the Cabin. In our discussions, we wondered what is home? Is it the place or is it the people? Both, I think. When I'm not in Minnesota, I miss the lakes and trees as much as I miss my family. But I've felt enough like a nomad for the last ten years that the thought of losing this particular place, the only permanent place in my life, was awful. For the time being, the discussion has been shelved and I am a bit relieved.

Driving the seven hours back down to Lincoln, or wherever my address labels say my home is, there's always enough of a pull back to my own bed that I'm grateful for this home too. I've said before, flippantly, that home isn't where I hang my hat--home is where my books are. I've long contended that if you want to know a writer (or a person), look at their bookshelves. Mine will tell you that I'm very fond of books written by or set in Minnesota. Paul Gruchow is my favorite, as you might be able to tell from the three copies of Grass Roots on my shelf. If I know a writer, I cannot leave a book of theirs in a thrift store. You'll be able to tell that I'm equally fond of Ireland and Irish literature, especially contemporary Irish literature. The essayist Tim Robinson, in particular. My genre of choice is nonfiction and it occupies more space on my bookcases than any other genre, though I'm working on beefing up my fiction collection. I'm fond of travel writing, which I don't often separate too far from what is more place-based. If you look at my fluffy shelves, you'll be able to tell that I like mystery and suspense, with what seems like incongruous historical romances next to them (not as incongruous as one might learn to look at them, as the author is the daughter of Carol and Robert Bly). I like to cook and I love Jamie Oliver, as evidenced by several of his cookbooks.

This 450 sq. ft. apartment is filled with furniture that's been handed down, creating an established history. There's familiarity here. I'm typing this on my grandfather's desk; my grandparents' bedroom set graces my bedroom; the tea cabinet I built with Dad last summer is filled with tea, teapots that represent certain events in my life, and teacups that belonged to my dad's grandmother. I could tell you a story about nearly everything in my home, from brilliant Goodwill finds to furniture I've refinished to reproduction of a 1651 map of Galway, Ireland and the clay replica of the Cross of the Scriptures at Clonmacnoise to remind me how much I adore the smell of the Corrib River, the feel of Galway's cobblestones beneath my feet, how the smell of cigarette smoke and the taste of chocolate-orange puts me right back there. I could tell you how I prefer small spaces, what living in them does to my sense of place, how it fits with the environmental aesthetic that I don't always do so well with.

Yet with all of this impermanent permanence, there's still a part of me that would like to load all I own in the back of my Jeep and take off for parts unknown on the spur of the moment. I like to plan things too much to do that, but I've compromised with my 13-foot Scamp camper.There's a significance to being able to hitch a home (of sorts) to the back of my Jeep, pack the cats in the backseat, and wherever I stop for the night, I can sleep in my own bed, but change the view outside the windows. There's a inconsistency between travel and home that doesn't seem to bother me. Right now, while I'm at UNL, finding time and money to Scamp has been difficult, but that's life. After I'm done, I hope to take a great trip somewhere. Perhaps Nova Scotia. Perhaps it's just going to be the easiest and most economical way to get Up North, wherever I get a job after I'm finished here.

All of this comes together--at least for the purposes of this class--in the classes I'm teaching. My English 150 class, Rhetoric as Inquiry, is place-based, focused on ideas of home and away. We looked at aspects of home, the languages of place, and how place and human affect each other and these ideas comprised the three major writing assignments. I'm teaching English 252 (Intro to Fiction) for the first time as well and even the fiction we're writing and reading will be heavily influenced by place: Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map, John Keeble's Nocturnal America, and William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake. I have ideas for future classes that focus on themes like Literature of Natural Disasters, Irish Environmental Literature, and more. I'm hoping to change up my syllabus and books I teach every semester while I'm doing this program.

It's important to me to start my students thinking about where they are and how that contributes to who they are. Most of them have never considered if you live differently if your bedrock is granite or if it's limestone. Before I came to UNL last year, I spent seven years teaching composition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which had a very interesting mix of urban students from Detroit, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland as well as rural students who had never been very far away from their family farms. The basic mix of students at UNL is similar, but the place-consciousness is different. Their places influence who they are, but what they know instinctively is not yet accessible. At BG, students were more aware of how where they came from influenced who they are, like the student who, through no fault of his own, lost his NCAA football eligibility and broke down in my office, because his entire family was counting on him to get his degree, play football professionally, and keep them out of poverty because he was the man of the family. At BG was more common for me to encounter students who like him, who had never been told that they had anything else to offer the world other than athletic talent. At UNL, what my students learn about their places has, at least so far, been less heart-breaking. But no less fascinating.

This semester, I will tell them that I'm in the middle of plotting my next novel (so when I'm finished with my dissertation and comps in 2013, I can write it...) and my main character is a geologist in Fargo--and yes, you farm and live differently on the clay of the Red River Valley than you do on the sand of Hubbard County. You can understand why the Red River floods, if you know that the Red River is only about 10,000 years old and isn't old enough to have its own flood plain. But how many of my students--wherever they might come from--have ever considered why things like that are important?

I'm an essayist, so my idea of Where I'm From, won't be a poem. Everything I consider important in my life is tied to a place, both the big-important things like my family, or small-important things like my favorite blues music. The strawberries that grow so well in Hubbard County don't taste the same as strawberries grown anywhere else. Irish butter doesn't taste the same as any other butter. The sound of wind in the maple tree outside my Lincoln bedroom doesn't sound the same as the wind in the white pines at the Cabin. Every time I travel, I get a little closer to knowing where I belong. Each new book on my shelf tells a different story of what's important to me. And I will, very soon, need another bookcase.