Montreal Prep!

I think I just finished cutting down my paper for the IASIL conference, so I don't become one of those annoying people who goes over her time...  But in the process of that, I'm also packing and such, having texting conversations with Dawn Duncan, for last minute help (going both ways).  I think we're pretty much ready!

I'd been sent this video weeks ago, and meant to post it--better late than never.  It's a video profile of her from Concordia and it's just wonderfully done, captures what makes her such a great teacher, a great colleague, and a good friend.

 

Eng. 252: Cross-Class Interview with Joseph O'Connor

Here's our cross-class interview with Joseph O'Connor, who kindly answered our questions about Star of the Sea.  Some of these questions came from my 252; some came from Dawn Duncan's 346 (though I can't remember which is which anymore).  Enjoy!Here's our cross-class interview with Joseph O'Connor, who kindly answered our questions about Star of the Sea.  Some of these questions came from my 252; some came from Dawn Duncan's 346 (though I can't remember which is which anymore).  Enjoy!

The Process:

Q: How many drafts of Star of the Sea did you write? How long did it take you to go from first word to the last edit?


A: I wrote up to forty drafts of some chapters and perhaps only three or four of others. The opening preface was a sequence for which I wrote only a few drafts because it presented itself to me more or less as it appears. The concluding chapter and some other sequences took a lot more work. Yeats says that all poetry comes from “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." I believe that’s where novels come from, too. 



Q: What was the hardest part about writing the novel?


A: Finding an architecture that would work. I think the challenge of art is to make what is difficult look easy. I wanted to make Star of the Sea, which is a very complicated story, a page turner. To that end, I used some of the techniques of Victorian fiction: cliff-hangers, chapter headings, illustrations, melodrama. My hope was that it would be a book that would work by a kind of osmosis, that the reader would absorb whatever it has to say about politics and history and sexuality without even noticing. One of my most beloved novels, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (mentioned in Star of the Sea) has a structure that is in fact extremely complicated, but the reader doesn’t notice. That book was a kind of household god to me when writing Star of the Sea.



Q: Did you craft your story in order by chapter (or did you focus on one character's plot and then cut it up and piece it back together)?


A: I wrote the beginning, and then the end, and then I stopped writing and designed the shape for the whole book before I wrote very much more.

The Form:

Q: Did you write the novel with a goal of social commentary or was that aspect a natural development throughout the writing? Did you intentionally write the novel to critique laissez faire and Free Market principles?

A: I wrote the novel in the hope that it would be an involving experience for the reader, and, hopefully, that it would be beautiful, even though its subject matter is dark. I think the first duty of a novel is to be beautiful. I dislike novels that set out with social commentary as a goal. We don’t go to fiction for that, but to be touched and moved. If I feel a novelist is telling me how to think, or how to vote, I immediately switch off. That is the worst form of sentimentality: manipulation. 

Q: How did the form develop? Did you start off with an idea of a book within a book, the changing POV and form, or did that evolve gradually? Or did you make a decision halfway through and go back and change it?

A: I started with the picture of Pius Mulvey that is presented in the opening preface, and then I had an image of the reader watching the action unroll from various points of view. And so, I constructed the book around that general image: that the reader is not sitting in the audience, receiving the authorial pearls, but is glimpsing the far more interesting things that happen as the kaleidoscope turns. I wanted it to be a book that would argue with itself. 

The Characters:

Q: Do you trust any of your characters? How did you see the purpose and function of your characters' unreliability?

A: I think Captain Lockwood is a reliable narrator (I am very fond of him), and almost everyone else is unreliable to some degree or another. 

Q: How do you know that you can add in your humor into grim situations and still have it be believable for the characters to act like that?

A: As a reader, I think a dark story needs to have humor here and there, otherwise it becomes unreadable and therefore a waste of everyone’s time. Star of the Sea would be a truly awful book without its moments of levity and lightness, for example the Dickensian buoyancy that I hope happens when Mulvey goes to London. Those moments sort of puncture the heaviness of the background, I hope.

Q: As a writer, some of the characters we love the most can be the ones who should be most hated (as a reader). I'm wondering who (if any) is/was your favorite character to develop in Star of the Sea? 

A: I couldn’t distinguish between them in that way. I was fond of all the characters, to some extent. It’s important, when writing a villain, to find something to like in him or her. And it’s equally important to show the flaws of your heroes. The person in the book for whom I feel the most empathy is Mary Duane, but I have a human sympathy, for want of a better phrase, for everyone else.

Q: These characters are so fully realized: what is your best method and advice for getting to know your characters so completely?

A: A writer needs to know absolutely everything about a character. You don’t reveal everything, of course, but you do need to know it. Then, you cut. The more you cut, the more believable the character becomes. It’s one of the loveliest little miracles of fiction.

The Plot:

Q: What made you decide to reveal both the murderer and his victim immediately, in terms of creating suspense and momentum? So, if the plot is no longer "who gets killed" and "who is the murderer," what do you see as driving the plot and the story?

A: The momentum of the ship’s journey. Some of my favorite novels are stories about journeys: As I Lay Dying, The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, even The Catcher in the Rye. A journey always infuses a story with a kind of investment because we want to know at some fundamental level if the protagonist(s) ever make it to the destination. Think about some of the oldest and most lasting stories our culture possesses: the Greek myths, the bible stories, the Canterbury Tales, the Native American folktales. Life itself is a journey, a metaphor acknowledged by every form of storytelling from high literature to the popular song. 

Q: How many of these conflicts in the characters' lives just appeared naturally as the book "wrote itself" versus ones you knew from the outset were essential to the story?

A: It’s hard to know. I would say, from memory, that it was fifty-fifty.

Miscellaneous:

Q: Do you like the novel? Have you tried to reread it as if you were not the author?

A: Yes, I like the novel. I am very proud of it. I wouldn’t say that I have tried to reread it as though I were not the author, because that is obviously not possible, but I tried to write it as a reader, as I always do. The most important person in any novel is the reader, not the author. I dislike novels in which the author is too visibly present. A novel should never EVER be about the author. 

Q: Pius Mulvey very much embodies music in this story. Are you yourself musically inclined, or did you seek music out to help develop his character?

A: I thought of each of the characters as having a sort of private sound track. It’s something I always do when constructing a character. I believe music is the highest art form, the only truly international language, and all prose should have musicality.

Eng. 252: Wrapping up Star of the Sea

It's a rainy Saturday morning in Lincoln and we've got one week left to go in our semester.  I'm not sure which of these makes my Assam taste better, putting me back in Galway on a day when the air is so wet but not raining.  I have a lot to do this weekend, with my own rhetoric class as well as the classes that I'm teaching, but right now, I'm wrapped in all kinds of things that are just more fun.

It's been an exciting 24-hours in terms of our collaborative wiki project (click here to see what's going on!).  My fiction class finished talking about the novel last week and this week, we've been working on putting together the master document for the wiki (ours will be posted tonight; Dawn's class will post tomorrow).  Dawn's class finished talking about the novel yesterday.  But in addition to the really cool things that our students have been posting, two other major things happened:  Joseph O'Connor, the author, wrote yesterday to answer the questions that my students had posted for him (I confess that I was very worried that he would not do so (or do so in time), after agreeing to earlier in the semester)--but he did and I can't wait to talk to my students about what he said.  Click here for that "interview."  But here's a sampling:

Q: What was the hardest part about writing the novel?


A: Finding an architecture that would work. I think the challenge of art is to make what is difficult look easy. I wanted to make Star of the Sea, which is a very complicated story, a page turner. To that end, I used some of the techniques of Victorian fiction: cliff-hangers, chapter headings, illustrations, melodrama. My hope was that it would be a book that would work by a kind of osmosis, that the reader would absorb whatever it has to say about politics and history and sexuality without even noticing. One of my most beloved novels, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (mentioned in Star of the Sea) has a structure that is in fact extremely complicated, but the reader doesn’t notice. That book was a kind of household god to me when writing Star of the Sea.

Q: What made you decide to reveal both the murderer and his victim immediately, in terms of creating suspense and momentum? So, if the plot is no longer "who gets killed" and "who is the murderer," what do you see as driving the plot and the story?


A: The momentum of the ship’s journey. Some of my favorite novels are stories about journeys: As I Lay Dying, The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, even The Catcher in the Rye. A journey always infuses a story with a kind of investment because we want to know at some fundamental level if the protagonist(s) ever make it to the destination. Think about some of the oldest and most lasting stories our culture possesses: the Greek myths, the bible stories, the Canterbury Tales, the Native American folktales. Life itself is a journey, a metaphor acknowledged by every form of storytelling from high literature to the popular song. 

Q: Pius Mulvey very much embodies music in this story. Are you yourself musically inclined, or did you seek music out to help develop his character?


A: I thought of each of the characters as having a sort of private sound track. It’s something I always do when constructing a character. I believe music is the highest art form, the only truly international language, and all prose should have musicality.

But this morning, the inimitable Dawan Duncan answered the questions that my students had posted for her (click here for that) and she gave some terrific insights into how she and her class approached the novel, what they talked about in terms of postmodernism, post colonialism, the role of the artist in society, and more.  Here's a sampling:

Q:  Are there any unusual observations your class is making in discussion that we aren't seeing on the wiki?


A:  Hmmm...probably quite a few. I have the advantage of reading their longer think pieces, which in the future might be what we want to place on the wiki. In class they make many more ties to what they have learned about postcolonialism (especially the ontological struggles) and to the hallmarks of postmodernism. I suppose the paragraphs get to these main points in some measure. We have also discussed the recurring theme in our class of the role of the artist, including what happens to the artistic nature that is kept from its true vocation (Pius Mulvey and David Merridith, perhaps even Dixon, though we question his artistry).

Q:  How do you find the reading experience differs from someone with an extensive knowledge on the time period and history within the novel, versus a new coming to Irish lit who has little to no knowledge of the historical background? And do you feel as though this difference is significant enough that it takes away from the story itself?


A:  While I recognize that the difference is significant, I do not think it takes away from the story. Rather, I would say that when I or Karen point something out in the text (how much land the Kingscourt's have, given the extended title; that the preacher at Verity's service is actually WB Yeats' grandfather, etc.), then the text gains richness. The novel is already so beautifully constructed and subtly layered that someone coming to it without extensive background knowledge can be pulled into the story and learn to want to understand even more about the characters. I would hope that a curious reader would also be drawn to do a bit of research into the context and certain aspects that interest them most.

Q:  In Ch 14, Dixon covers his hardships concerning his own writing and in this chapter there is a lot of mention of the aesthetic movement. On p. 120, Dixon makes reference to John Ruskin's "Modern Painter" as the ideal definition of art for the purpose of beauty and pleasure, and p. 127, there's mention of Laura as a love of the "aesthetics." I also noticed on our wiki page, under Duncan Class Essentials, you term postmodernism as "an attempt to retying a number of concepts held dear to Enlightenment humanism; also refers to the aesthetic/cultural products that treat and often critique aspects of postmodernity." I'm wondering how these specific references to the aesthetic movement reflects a postmodernism ideal?


A: This question is much tougher to answer without a deep study, or at least lecture, of artistic theory. I will say that I think there is irony at work here. The aesthetes, like Pater and Wilde, thought the goal of art should be to bring beauty to the world, that any message cannot be the motivating force for an artist (which is not to say that their work is devoid of such). Laura believes she can judge true artistry, yet the two men she marries are both flawed artists (David is good at landscape but idealizes the human portrait; Dixon wants to write fiction but writes more like a journalist) and both construct false images that they portray to the world. So how good can she be at judging truth and beauty? On the other hand, when we hear O'Connor speak of his work, we do hear hints of the aesthetic preference for beauty before message. He wants to write a ripping good story, first and foremost. But I cannot help but be fascinated by the embedded social commentary that comes through the story. I think he succeeds on the second point too, giving us something that rings true.

Q: What do you think the most interesting aspect of this novel is? (And what do your students think is most interesting, most fascinating, etc?) There is so much going on in my mind as I'm reading--it would be interesting to see what stands out for you as you, personally, are reading it.


A:  I cannot speak for my students since their own responses would vary. For me the most interesting aspect it its utter humanity. O'Connor has given us flawed characters but made us enter into their lives in such a way that we feel their pain and understand their motivations. He has also subtly shown how we are all responsible for caring for one another. I think the humanity of his vision, of this work, is remarkable.

Dawn and I are going to Skype later today and debrief each other, talk about the project, things that went well, things we'd change, and I'm just excited to talk to her about it in general.  Technology has proven to be an awesome thing for this project.  As I said, you'll want to check out the full interviews--and keep an eye on the wiki today and tomorrow for what our students will be posting as their final master documents.  And then by Friday, our students will be posting their reflections on the project and reflections are always fascinating to me.

Eng. 252: Special Guest Star, Dawn Duncan!

On Wednesday, our fiction class was graced by my dear friend, colleague, and counterpart, Dawn Duncan. Last week, I Skyped with her Contemporary British Literature class about how our fiction class was going to approach Star of the Sea, how that might be different from how they would approach it. I talked about my own background, why I'm interested in Ireland, place studies, and the written word. It was great fun, so I was glad to bring Dawn into my classroom. Thankfully, the technology sort of worked and the internet cooperated.

Here's the link to our Imagination and Knowledge wiki, if you want to check out what we've been doing. This week, our students have been posting their "paragraphs of insight" to the appropriate pages (on characters/characterization, narrative movement, plot, conflict, etc) and it's been thrilling to see how each class is approaching this book so differently. It makes my little teacher heart go pitty-pat.

Like I did with her class, Dawn started off with some introductory remarks about how she got interested in Ireland and Irish literature, how postcolonialism was becoming popular about that time, what a postcolonial perspective meant, that some measure the "post" colony as after the colonizers leave, some measure "post" by when the colonizers arrive (Dawn is in the latter group). Dawn described it as being about power, an alien Other encroaching on the native. Studying a postcolonial perspective, then, is not about race or skin color, but the way that power is exercised on the native population.

Her description of postmodernism, too, was easy to understand, that it's a recognition that we do not live in a world of certainty, and language and identity is a part of that. One school (the negative one) says that the uncertainty of language means we can never hope to understand each other, but the positive school (Dawn's perspective) is that it's a great opportunity, because that means we live in a world that recognizes that there is no one right way to know, one right way to understand, no one right answer. The uncertainty of language brings layers of richness and meaning to any reading of a text, that what one person gets out of a reading might be completely different than somebody else--and not only is that okay, it's something to be celebrated.

Which is the major reason we're doing this project.

One of the things I most appreciate about Dawn and her critical perspectives (which come out of her personal perspectives as both a critic and a creative writer, though she mostly does criticism these days) is that what others see as a drawback or a problem, she sees as an opportunity. We bring together these pieces of knowledge and knowledge evolves.

My students then were able to ask her questions and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but the questions were amazing, thoughtful, and deep. (You can see some of them on the "Questions for Dawn Duncan" page on the wiki--she hasn't answered them there yet (as of this morning), but she will. (And we posted some questions for Joseph O'Connor himself and Dawn and I will send them to him this weekend and hopefully we'll get some answers!)

After we hung up the Skype, my students were fairly buzzing with energy. They were really excited to have been able to talk with her, to hear firsthand how she approaches the book (though they found, as I did once upon a time, her breadth of knowledge intimidating--but we're looking at it as inspirational, rather than intimidating). They expressed concern that her class would think that we're doing the simplistic analysis of the book, where they're doing the more complicated (and thus important) analysis of the book--but I said that they're probably thinking the same of us. They nodded and the anxiety in the room went down.

So far, this project is going so much better than I anticipated it would, which is not to say there haven't been snags here and there, but I'm just thrilled by what's happening in my classroom, what's happening in Dawn's classroom, and what's happening in the combined digital space of our wiki. Not too shabby for the last three weeks of the semester.

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 2

I'm just going to give a blanket statement about today's class: I love my classes, I love my students, and I'm more thrilled than I can say that they're loving Star of the Sea. I feel like I have very little to say other than these sorts of joy-reactions, but that's all I've got right now. When you get to the point in the semester and you know your students don't want to be there, the weather is really nice at 12:30 on a Friday, it's easy to get excited when your students actually come to class, so excited that they're tripping over themselves and each other to talk about what they noticed. To quote one of my students in his Think Piece, "This book was not quite what I was expecting, but when you think about it, all books that are worth reading are never quite what you are expecting."

But instead of reporting what we talked about in our discussions, I'm going to direct you to our class wiki, Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea: Imagination and Knowledge, and I'm going to relate how our class started this afternoon.

First, I mentioned stress tics and how, when we discussed them some weeks ago, I told them how one of mine is tiny houses. Well, another is planning new classes. As a result, I'm currently in love with Dennis Lehane, so while we aren't reading him this semester, I wanted to play this interview clip:

And then I asked them to consider for the rest of the semester what they would put on their own 3x5 card. I'd mentioned earlier that I have my own, in the form of a Post-It Note stuck to my sightline on my desk. It contains two quotes: "Just write the fucking thing," courtesy of the inimitable Jonis Agee. And then right below it: "That story won't unfuck itself," from Chuck Wendig.

I did this on purpose, because I had a plan. I don't often drop four letter words in class, though they do appear occasionally. First, we're reading some of the most depressing material in human history and this would make them laugh. And it did. Second, I wanted to segue into O'Connor by playing a clip of O'Connor reading, on the subject of swearing (although as you can see, not much swearing in it):



And from there we had a second day of stupendous discussion.

So, what's on your 3x5 card of writerly wisdom?

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 1

We start the real part of our collaborative project today! I got to Skype with Dawn Duncan's class at Concordia College and I'm really excited about how it went, though I don't know if her students were able to take too much from it. Part of it is just the thrill of today, that we're starting Star of the Sea in my class and her class is starting the book as well and I'm really excited about the discussion that I'm anticipating will be awesome. Part is caffeine. Good morning, world!

So, I asked my class (Intro to Fiction) what they thought Dr. Duncan's class should know about what we're doing, how we're going to approach Star of the Sea. (Her class will do the same for us.) And the basic question is this, for both classes: What do we see when we look at a piece of writing? What's the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer?

The difference is important. As readers, at the most basic level, we want a story to take us to a place we've never been before, to meet new people, to learn of the world outside of our lives right now. As writers, we want to know what the writer has done to effect that reaction. For instance, I bet that Duncan's class will talk about fragmentation and identity in the postmodern novel (which Star of the Sea is) and how that plays into a postcolonial reading of the novel--but in my class, we'll talk about how O'Connor constructed that fragmentation. We'll talk about the shifts in POV, the shifts in form (from traditional narrative to ship's log to newspaper editorial and more). We'll talk about the way that O'Connor develops and constructs his characters to represent the questions of identity. The fact that it's a murder mystery is genius, of course, and something we'll talk about in my class as well. But a lot of our time as writers is spent at the sentence-level.

I asked my students about what I should tell Duncan's class and here are the top things:

• The form of what is on the page is deliberate (the function of it is what the reader brings to the page). Diction and dialogue, even punctuation, is so deliberately considered through countless revisions that you have to assume it's deliberate, because nothing in writing happens by accident. So, for readers, if O'Connor is using semicolons frequently (something that is common to British/Irish authors), why would he use them, rather than other forms of punctuation? My students find themselves heavily influenced by Noah Lukeman's book A Dash of Style, which looks at the way that punctuation affects the reading of a text.
• A reader will ask "what is happening?" and a writer will ask "how did the author create this?" A reader--and the scholars in Duncan's class--will talk about symbolism and other thematic issues; writers will ask how that symbolism and that theme is constructed. If Duncan's class is talking about identity as fluid in the text, my students will ask how O'Connor constructed the characters and the setting to affect that reading. For instance, how is the setting crafted through character in the preface, how the character of The Ghost moves through the landscape, a landscape that is also moving? How does how O'Connor craft both the character and the setting mirror the changing perspectives and the reader's understanding of those characters? And what does it mean that the movement is of a crippled character and a coffin ship?
• And the final thing my students would like to pass on is the importance of place in fiction, that it is more than the physical description of a setting. Reading Eudora Welty's classic "Place in Fiction" is a good place to start. Setting involves atmosphere, the air a character breathes. Place, when it is done right, is as much an active character on the page as anyone who breathes. It's the reason that I was so disappointed with Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan, which I listened to on CD last week--and the reason I'm so in love with Dennis Lehane right now. Setting and place can never be neutral. (One of the reasons why last semester, the craft paper I got on William Kent Krueger's use of cold in Iron Lake turned out so brilliant.)

Her class asked some good questions too, about why they should read Eudora Welty, what was my best moment of studying in Ireland and how does that play out in my reading and writing and teaching, and other excellent questions. I talked about only being able to take history classes over there and how all classes feed the writing, no matter what they are. But history class, as well as others, just make the context of reading and writing richer. History and literature are so closely linked as to be nearly indistinguishable for me sometimes. Some of Duncan's students are studying abroad in Galway in the next few years--and I'm really excited for them.

Then, in my class, we started talking about the preface and the first three chapters. We set up the perspective shifts that the epigraphs provide, the realization that there is no one right way to tell this story--which is immediately followed by the "fake" title page, that this is a book within a book. We talked a bit about reliable narrators and how that is constructed, how we're not sure whose voice we're supposed to trust. We moved through the four chapters we read for today and some important questions we asked:

• How many ways does O'Connor manipulate the landscape of the text, the actual form that the pages take (fake title page, footnotes, etc)?
• What's the effect of switching POV so completely between chapters? Why does he choose to change form, rather than just change voice? How does the ship's log work a different perspective on place and setting? How does it continue to set up the ship as a character?
• In the 2nd chapter, we get the first real dialogue of the book--and what purpose does the dialogue serve? How is it what characters do to each other?
• In the 3rd chapter, another POV, another form: what purpose does this editorial serve that could not be delivered by any other form? On one hand it gives the reader the background information necessary to understand some of the characters, but it also serves a larger purpose of developing Dixon's character t00--how does that happen?

We almost ran out of time today and this brief synopsis isn't even close to mentioning all the things we talked about today. The class was pretty excited and engaged and thrilled and we were picking out nuances around every little corner, like the mention of the red sky in the morning during the Preface, the old sailor's ditty about danger coming--and we really came away at the end of class with a new appreciation for a writer's skill, how many ways a writer can take control of a text (we specifically talked about O'Connor's diction) and make it do exactly what the writer wants. I can't wait for Friday.

Here's the interview with O'Connor that we started with today--very interesting in a lot of ways, so feel free to comment and contribute to the conversation!

Post-Spring Break

It's gorgeous (albeit windy) out there in Lincoln today and I've spent most of my day inside, unfortunately. But it's been a really good day, even the first day after Spring Break. It was good enough that I came home, bubbling with energy and thrill when I knew I didn't have any energy to back it up with. I love my job, I love my classes, I love my students.

Two major things happened today: we started the third and final writing project in my English 150 class. I'm almost done grading their second WP, which are turning out to be really good. The first was on Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife and they wrote about how a character (an individual person) can be shaped by a natural disaster, even a hundred years or more after it happened. Then in the second project, we moved out a little and considered how the student's own community was shaped by a natural disaster. As they moved through this project, they started to ask--without any prompting from me--what do we do about this? It made my little heart go pitty-pat. Unbeknownst to them, the third project is designed to address exactly that question.

This third project is about human-caused disasters (yet another cheerful topic in a semester of cheerful topics) and we're reading Erik Reece's The Lost Mountain, about radical strip-mining and mountaintop removal. The purpose of the project is to find a human-caused disaster and propose a solution (of some sort); part of this will involve arguing why it's a disaster, because obviously the coal companies don't see mountaintop removal as a problem. The situations are much more complicated than that. As my students did their final two author presentations of the semester (on Reece and Don Worster, who's giving a lecture my students are going to on Wed night), I asked my students to consider a few things as we start reading this book:

It's not as simple as saying that places should be protected because they're pretty, because they mean something to us, because they represent something in the mythology of our country or our world. The world is a lot more complicated than that, so we have to get beyond our emotional reactions. I asked them to consider the role that the economy and class play in Reece's book--because these areas of Appalachia are extremely poor--and we'll continue to add to our list of complications. I like complications. They make life--and class--much more interesting.

In my 252 today, we started Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea and our awesome collaborative project with Dawn Duncan's class at Concordia. The truth is I'm extremely nervous. I've never done something like this before and between Dawn and myself, between our two classes of students, this could go really well or it could fail spectacularly. Add into that that I've never done a wiki before and new technology scares me. If you want to check out our wiki, click here for Imagination and Knowledge. I hope it turns out well.

Today was the Famine background power point in 252 and I thought it went fairly well, considering the subject matter. But as I was putting the power point together, it occurred to me the juxtaposition of politics and ecology, particularly The Little Ice Age and revolutions. I recommended Brian Fagan's awesome book The Little Ice Age, which I spoke of in tones I don't normally use for climate books. He's got an incredibly awesome chapter on An Ghorta Mor. And then also Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire, which contains his chapter on control and potatoes. I brought up the winters during the American Revolution and the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. I brought up the French Revolution. (I brought up Stradivarius and the theory that the Little Ice Age partly explains the superiority of his instruments, which made a few students nod in interest.) I mentioned Mt. Tambora's eruption in 1815, the Year without Summer (and with a mention of Frankenstein), and then we get into the Famine itself. The lecture was more complicated and more linear than this, but strangely, this is what my students seemed most interested in. A lot fewer of them looked bored than I thought they would. Go figure.

We start the actual book on Wednesday and I can't hardly wait. The book is freaking awesome. The landscape of the text, the manipulation of the form, the switching POV--sigh. I asked my class if anybody had started reading yet, some had, and those that had were so raring to go, with so much to say, so many questions about it, that I really, really can't wait for Wednesday.

It's the point in the semester where I have too much to do, not enough time, but I still can't wait for the next class. That's a good sign.

Eng. 252: John Banville and other Literary Crushes

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.

Short Mini-Interview With Joseph O'Connor

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:

Digital Spaces: Preparing for Spring 2012

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!