IWC 100 (NDN): Final Drafts and Reflections

I can't believe how bad I've been about reporting on my classes this year.  I'm just going to blame it on the incredible mental energy required in starting a new job, with new classes, while also being on the job market.  And once again, I'm writing this as we're under another blizzard threat, this one of the Out Like A Lion variety.  I'm supposed to go to Aberdeen, to Northern State University, to read--a reading that was rescheduled from last fall because of a blizzard.  If I can't get there, again, the blizzard might have bruises from my temper.  But we'll see.  I'm glad I haven't taken the winter survival kit out of my car yet.

Mostly, it's a week of readings--and it's been long enough since I've read that I'm way too excited about it. Especially since it's my first reading since my first book, Water and What It Knows, was accepted by the University of Minnesota Press!  How exciting is this?!  So, I'm reading in Aberdeen Tuesday/Wednesday and then I'm part of the Faculty-Student Reading Series at Concordia on Thursday night and I'm reading with seniors Lisa Streckert and Heather Burtman.  And we're all reading some form of travel writing--it should be awesome.

Anyway.  To the classes.

A few things have happened in the NDN class lately.  They turned in their final drafts, with their Prezis, last week, and I've been working my way through them.  And I am incredibly humbled by the work that they've done, to the point where I don't care if they're brown nosing me in their reflections with what they've learned.  I don't care.  This field research project, which asks them to research a disaster that happened in their hometown and create not only a written paper but a Prezi that will be attached to their local library/historical society/newspaper, is heavily dependent on interviews and primary research.  Most of them have never done interviews before and one of the things I've been most impressed with them is watching them get over their fear of talking to people.  The ones who have gotten the furthest out of their comfort zones and emailed mayors and other people they don't know have produced the most interesting projects.  The ones who only interviewed family and friends are definitely lacking the truly fascinating perspectives.  I had a couple of projects that went generationally with their interviews, interviewing somebody from their own generation, their parents' generation, their grandparents' generation--and that was likewise fascinating.

In their reflections, many of my students wrote that they're no longer afraid of talking to people they don't know, that the risk involved in calling up the mayor or somebody who works for the DNR is worth it.  They might say no, but they might say yes.

One thing I learned:  next time I do this, I might require that they talk to somebody in the government, somebody outside their family/friend memory bank.

Another thing I learned:  next time, I'm going to ban the phrase "the community came together" or "we learned what we were made of" or anything remotely resembling that cliche.  In one paper, I counted "the community came together" 12 times. The sad thing is that those cliches mask the truly interesting moments.  What does it mean that the community came together?  For that student, part of it was that the community housed students from the local colleges.  In another paper, it meant new networks that brought together disparate groups of people.

Another thing I learned:  next time, I'm going to focus more on how what happened in that place is different from any other time and place. For instance, I had many students writing on the various Red River floods, from Fargo to Grand Forks to Valley City, from 1997 to 2009.  What's the difference between Fargo's experience in 1997 and Grand Forks' experience?  Between Fargo and Valley City?  Between Fargo and Oxbow?  They're absolutely different--but how?  We're going to spend more time on that.  In hindsight, I'd do more with examining how the Tri-College affected the Fargo-Moorhead flood efforts; I'd do more with the Air Force Base in Grand Forks.

Something that freaked me out:  when my student writing on the 1997 flood in Grand Forks wrote that he was two years old when it happened.  When did I get old?

The goal of this project is to create new knowledge that has never existed in this form before.  And for me, the real risk of this project is the public Prezi, which I've never required before--because I want that community engagement.  I want my students to understand how what they do in a classroom is much larger than an assignment, that they are a part of something larger.  Concordia is committed to Being Responsibly Engaged in the World (BREW)--and right here, for this project, that's what that means for us.  I'm so ridiculously proud of my students, even the ones who clearly didn't care and didn't put in the time or effort--such is the life of a teacher of required composition.  Because these Prezis are public, I'm sharing a few of them as they come in (attached to their local organizations) and I'll post more as I get them.  Several of my students will be interviewed about their projects by their local newspapers and have parts of their papers published.  One of my favorite moments has been watching their faces (and reading this in their reflections) when they hear from these places, that anybody actually wants their work--and is excited about it.  They've never considered that anybody might be interested in what they're doing.

So, here's the Prezi on the 1972 flood in Randall, MN:  click here.

I learn things every time I teach.  Learning from my students is my favorite part of the job, even as another favorite part of my job is hearing "I never thought about it that way before."  During this project, I watched one student learn that all the tornado prep we all take for granted (tornado drills in schools, going to the basement, etc) came about because of the 1965 tornadoes through Minneapolis, not too far from where she lives.  I watched another student pore into the archives of her town's newspaper and discover that the majority of the photographs she'd been looking at were taken by a great-uncle who had changed his name.  I watched student after student question how memories turn into history and why it's important to preserve what we know, even if it's a storm that took place six months ago--because it's history.  It formed us, even if we're not completely aware of all the ways.

My students in these two classes have been remarkably resilient throughout this semester.  It's been A LOT of work for them, but I cannot believe how much they've grown and improved.  But it's also a test to spend an entire semester on natural disasters, which is one of the most not-cheerful subjects in the world.  I'm so proud of them.

Last week, we watched Donald Worster's lecture on water and the Great Plains--and a huge kudos to my students for not falling asleep.  I had to preface the lecture with why I was torturing them with it (and I pushed pause several times for us to discuss what he was saying, so we broke it up), but it's really hard to watch a guy standing behind a podium and he doesn't move and the camera doesn't move.  We'll start discussing Eric Reece's book The Lost Mountain tomorrow, about mountaintop removal coal mining, and last week and this week, my students are bringing to class examples from news sites about current human-caused disasters going on right now.  So far, we've had articles on the Casselton, ND explosion, the Galveston oil spill that happened last week, and the mudslide in Washington.

We're approaching this last project--on human-caused disasters and why the subject of them is so complicated--from the perspective of exploring complications.  My brilliant sister Kim Babine, who is the legislative liaison for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED).  She's going to Skype with us in two weeks, to bring us another set of complications to think about.  What's the state's interest in subjects like this?  The Sandpiper pipeline that's proposed to run across Lakes Country (and too close to the Headwaters of the Mississippi River)? What about the PolyMet mine in the Iron Range?  How does the state balance economic development and making sure there are jobs, so people can feed their families, with natural resource management and conservation?  It's not as easy as saying Keystone Pipeline Good (or Bad).  So, what are the complicating factors?

And my final thought today is that the Hjemkomst Center has an exhibit right now on Minnesota Disasters.  Be still my ridiculous heart.  I wonder if there's a way to get my students up there.  Hmmm.

IWC 100 (NDN): Special Guest Star, Ted Kooser!

I've had a couple of really spectacular classes this week, not only in my Natural Disaster Narratives (NDN) classes, but yesterday in my Place and Community class (also IWC) was also really great.  This morning, our sunshine is back and I don't quite believe the Weather Channel when it says it is two degrees and there isn't any windchill.

This morning, we had a bit of shuffle with my NDN classes, because Ted Kooser (we read his book of poetry, Blizzard Voices, last week) had to reschedule our Skype, which was supposed to be Monday.  So we talked about interviewing on Monday and today we mashed the beginning of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time with our phone conversation with Kooser.  We basically did it, but Friday's going to be a day full of Dust Bowl.  It's true, just like all these other disasters, I get too excitable about it.  I had to give my students the disclaimer that the Great Plains is a subject I get very excitable about, I have soapboxes and opinions, and this does not mean that mine is the only opinion, that I am trying to convince them of something, or that they cannot disagree with me--in fact, I would like to be disagreed with.  

Grasslands!  Bioregions!  History! Why should anybody care?

I can feel myself getting excited just typing.  It's a problem.  I did recommend Google for those terms and places they don't recognize, so we'll see how that goes.  Also, there's a certain level of inexpressible glee that only comes from teaching books that have that many Post-It notes in them, that many notes in the margins, the book that you guard with your life and never let anybody touch, because those notes are not replaceable.

But why should anybody care?

I look forward to pressing them on this question as we keep going.  History is only boring when you forget that it's about real people.

Then, about 9:00, we called Ted Kooser, who's just about the nicest person on the planet.  We started off with some questions about the blizzard itself, about the poems (why he chose to not name the voices, where Ron Hansen's short story gave them names), we asked about the poetry as preserving something that might otherwise be lostwe asked about his writing process--AND HE READ US A BRAND NEW POEM HE WROTE THIS MORNING.  Be still my little teacherly heart.  We talked on Monday, as we were going through some interviewing things, about getting the interviewee to say something new, and it doesn't get much better than that.  He talked about getting up at 4:30 to write, suiting up for the work, and I think it made an impression on my students that he considered it work.  He talked about writing every day, and he talked about failing most days, that only a couple of days out of the month does he end up with anything that's usable, but he needs to show up.  He talked about working in the insurance agency and the importance of being able to write--not creative writing--but just clear communication.  

After we hung up with him, and we were debriefing, my students seemed a little stunned that he read us a new poem, that he apologized for its rough form before he did (and I said, remember that first workshop we did when I told you no apologizing for your work (they nodded), and I said, it doesn't go away...).  They also seemed very taken with the idea of failure and that he allowed himself the failure.

This blog post is indeed today's love poem to Ted Kooser.  I love the guy.  What I didn't know is that a jazz musician named Maria Schneider put some of his poetry to music and she just won a bunch of Grammy's.  Poetry is alive.

And the world is beautiful.

Special Guest Star: Joy Castro!

It's been a while since I've posted--and I realize I've posted nothing as we've been reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation and talked about true crime.  I will remedy that.  Soon.  But there's fun news to talk about:  Joy Castro, one of our delightful creative writing professors at UNL, came to my English 180 class on Friday to talk about her debut noir thriller, Hell or High Water, which came out this summer.  When it came out, I was getting ready to head to Montreal for IASIL and couldn't get it in print before I left, so I got it for my iPad and read it on my trip.  So great.  

I'd paired the first three chapters of her novel with Lee Horsley's "Regendering the Genre" chapter from Twentieth Century Crime Fiction, to take what we'd been talking about with Vowell and our concepts of crime literature as they've been evolving over the course of the semester.  My students are turning in their final essay on Friday, so I'm excited to see what they write about.  I'd asked my students, as they were in their groups, to consider how Horsley sees the ways that gender works in contemporary crime fiction, but what's really interesting is how she draws that lineage back even to the Golden Age of crime fiction, where women like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reigned supreme.  As Horsley breaks down the binaries associated with gender on the page, I asked my students to consider how regendering affects the four main areas of the text:  the author, protagonist, victim, and perpetrator.  Horsley writes, "The recovery of female subjectivity is more complex than [changing the male protagonist to female]:  there are other key roles that female characters occupy.  The revisionings of the female transgressor--and indeed victim--are as significant as the better known series which recast the investigative role."  It was with this in mind that I wanted us to talk with Joy about her novel, which reinvisions the role of women in all these areas.  (My students were uncharacteristically quiet, but as we talked on Monday after they'd had time to process, they had quite a bit to say.)

We started with these questions:

• What are the large scale issues that this book addresses (or will address)?  What about large-scale questions this novel presents?  How are they presented in a way that provokes conversation and debate different from other modes of fiction?
• Issues of social order/disorder?
• What are the societal fears that drive this novel?
• Creation of suspense?  Where do you see elements we’ve discussed before?  
• Joy Castro (from an interview with Amelia Montes):  “For readers, true suspense comes from caring about characters.  When you really care about a character—when that character feels real on the page—then his or her fate matters to you.”
• Where do you see the intersection of this novel with Lee Horsley’s ideas about gender and regendering?  (Specifically, your group’s assignment: victims/perpetrators/protagonists/authors.)
• Issues of place:  place as active character, place/displacement/out-of-place, movement and stasis, natural and built environments?

This is a book I wish I could have taught in its entirety and next time I get to teach a crime lit class, it's definitely going to be on the list.  Issues of place/displacement/out-of-place were some of the things that stood out to me as I reread these first three chapters, trying to look at them as if I'd never seen them before.  The drawing of both the built and natural environments contributes to this, the buildings of various parts of New Orleans, a natural environment that is itself a built environment that affects every single cell of those who live there.  I want to talk gendering of Nola, Joy's protagonist, and I want to talk about things that I can't reveal here for spoiling the plot.  I want to talk more about the creation of suspense that we talked about with Agatha Christie, the use of breaking the reader's trust, reader's assumptions, control of the clock, and more.  What's more suspenseful than issues of violence against women and children (that social fear we've been talking about all semester), combined with the rapists that Nola is interviewing--many in positions of power and authority, men who should be absolutely trustworthy, clergy and assistant principals and more.  I want to talk about the craft of fiction, the craft of crime fiction, and I want to talk details--especially the layering of sensory details.  It's not enough just to have a scent-drenched paragraph; what makes Joy's work great is that those senses are layered.  Smell with color, tactile details with taste.  That's the mark of a truly great writer. Here's a link to Joy's blog post on "The Fragrance of Fiction."

One of my students missed Friday (traveling to play in the marching band for UNL's Big Ten Championship...or whatever it was that turned out to be on Saturday) and unfortunately, she'd also missed Kent Krueger's Skype for marching band as well.  Because I didn't want her to miss out completely on the conversations with writers we'd had this semester, Joy kindly consented to answer my student's questions via email.  

As we have been studying, place is extremely important in crime fiction.  With this in mind, why the setting of post-Katrina New Orleans?  What elements of this setting made your story unique? What questions does this setting raise (in relation to social disorder/societal fears)?

Hell or High Water is a story about aftermath:  the aftermath of sex crimes (for both perpetrator and survivor), and the aftermath of a natural catastrophe.  The reason that New Orleans felt like the perfect setting to me is that my fictional thriller is rooted in a real-life fact:  that over 1300 registered sex offenders went off the grid during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation, and by 2008, around 800 were still missing.  The novel's protagonist investigates that specific crime situation in the midst of a city that's still reeling from hurricane damage. The fears most invoked by the setting of Hell or High Water have to do, I think, with the power of nature to devastate our cultures and communities, and with the power of a criminal to devastate our psyches.

But New Orleans is also a uniquely rich setting in that it's a very complicated city with a racially troubled history.  Even today, it has many different neighborhoods that reflect extreme, racialized differences in wealth and access to political power.  The societal fear of the poor Other is part of what the protagonist Nola, a Latina who grew up in the Desire Projects in the Upper Ninth Ward (historically a poor African American area) and who now works primarily with white, middle-class people, must contend with.

We have also spent a lot of time talking about gendering. What does the woman protagonist, Nola, have to do with this image of gendering and how does having a female protagonist change the crime novel? Nola is also young. What does age say and change about the protagonist in this crime novel?

I enjoyed reading the chapter "Regendering the Genre" from Lee Horsley's book Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction that your instructor assigned.  The most significant ways Hell or High Water plays with gender and genre is that its protagonist combines or conflates all three of the typical roles for women in crime fiction that Horsley mentions:  femme fatale and victim, as in traditional crime novels, and detective, as in later crime novels, especially those written by women.  Without giving too much away,
I'd say she also functions as a perpetrator.  I wanted to undo some of the false bifurcations or compartmentalizations of women's identities that traditional crime fiction perpetuates.

On the issue of age:  Nola is only 27 in the novel, and she has some problems with ageism.  Because she chafes at the control her section editor Claire exerts, and Claire's seniority is an easy signifier to latch onto, Nola frames her resentment in terms of Claire's age.  This ageism melts away at the end of the novel, when she's able to empathize and imagine herself in Claire's shoes in years to come.  I made Nola prejudiced toward an older female colleague because I wanted to give Nola, who's so sensitive to inequalities of race, class, and gender, an ideological blind spot.  I didn't want her to be too perfect.

Nola is not a hired investigator, an ex-sheriff, or an experienced lawman. Instead, she is a middle-class journalist. How do her career and social class also shape the way the crime investigation unfolds?

I'd nuance this observation and note that Nola's currently--barely--middle-class, but that she comes from a background of poverty, which she does not disclose to her colleagues and friends.  This background of economic difficulty and living with chronic danger both creates tension for Nola as she tries to "pass" among her colleagues and friends and makes her keenly aware of class difference as she navigates the different neighborhoods of New Orleans.  The inequalities form part of what she reports.

The fact that she's a writer, rather than someone professionally involved with law enforcement, changes the angle of access.  She's not a medical examiner, so we don't get forensic details.  Hell or High Water is not a police procedural.  Nola's a journalist:  a trained, persistent researcher who's good at interviewing people, uncovering facts, and shaping a coherent narrative.  That's where the focus of the novel lies:  in character, in psychology, in the facts and statistics concerning sexual crimes.

The fact that Nola is a reporter also leaves room for her to reflect on the constructed nature of stories, even supposedly objective news stories: what we include, what we leave out, and the fraught issues of power that surround and inform those choices.  By making her a journalist, the novel allows Nola to engage meta-narrative considerations.

On a personal note: What is it like having your novels read by famous authors? I saw a quote about your book from Dennis Lehane and The New York Times Book Review, and wondered how this must feel as an author living in the often-ignored city of Lincoln, Nebraska.

It's nine kinds of wonderful.

I'm very, very lucky that my first book has gotten this kind of attention. Authors are busy people, and I'm grateful that Dennis and other writers, as well as critics at great newspapers and magazines, made time to read my book.  I recently got to do the same for first-time mystery author Stephanie Cha, and I felt very happy to be able to help a new writer out a little.

***

So, I'll just save up these moments as they're spinning in my head and hope I'll get to teach to them someday soon.  I'm hoping to be able to do a more focused interview with Joy in the very near future, so stay tuned!  As it is, I'm working on planning my Intro to Creative Writing (250) and Intro to Fiction Writing (252) for spring, and I've just lined up Sean Doolittle to come to my 252 to talk his suspense novel Rain Dogs.  One book always leads to another!

Eng. 180: William Kent Krueger Skypes With Our Class!

Seriously.  Getting my students actively connected to the larger world around them, the world outside their classroom, is truly one of the best parts of my job.  Today, in my Crime Lit 180, we talked with William Kent Krueger, author of Iron Lake (the first in his Cork O'Connor series)--the thirteenth Cork, Trickster's Point, has just been released and Kent is on tour.  Yes, that means he took time from his book tour to talk to my class of undergraduate literature students. (Followers of this blog may also recall that a year ago, Krueger was kind enough to talk to my fiction writing class and for me, it was interesting to hear two different conversations--one about fiction craft, the other about the novel as literature.)

We talked to Kent for about 40 minutes, an incredibly generous space of time, considering he's off to the north country in about half an hour.  As we hung up and collected ourselves in the last few minutes of the class, my students were so incredibly thrilled, that bubbly kind of excitement.  They were so excited that he answered their questions, had great answers that went deeper into the questions, illuminated parts of the story and the process that had been dark to them before.  Of course, we hadn't actually gotten to the part where a certain character dies, so it was a spoiler when he asked "Do you want to know why [this character] dies?"  (And if you click the above link, my fiction class had a great answer when he asked that question of them.)  Methinks that a great majority of my class will read the rest of the book this weekend to find out what happens...  Which is not a bad thing...

So, here's what we talked about.

What was your biggest challenge in writing Iron Lake?
Kent said that beyond the challenge of working full time was that he knew nothing about writing a novel, nothing about writing a book.  "Words are jewels," he told us, "and when you set them on a page right, man, do they sparkle!"  Writing every day is essential for him, that writing takes practice.  He talked about needing a good editorial eye (an eye that does not belong to the writer).  And it was most important, he said, that he needed to learn about what motivates ordinary people to do the things they do, how they live their lives, because those motivations are the heart of any story.

What did you originally include in Iron Lake that you took out?
Originally, he said, Iron Lake was a 500 page manuscript and his agent told him that she couldn't sell a 500 page manuscript.  So in the process of trying to cut a hundred pages, he went through the book and looked to see what whole chapters he could cut, then what whole scenes could be cut, then lines, then down to cutting individual words.  In the process, he lost Jo's backstory that illuminated quite a bit about her character and why she is the way that she is.  That backstory didn't disappear completely, though, and it became part of the next two books.

Do you know how a story ends when you start it?
There are two camps, he said.  Some writers know and some don't want to know.  His process works like this:  he starts with a seed of an idea, leaves it in his head for a few weeks, maybe months, and lets it grow.  Over the course of those weeks, the plot works itself out in his head, the characters, the motivations.  At the end of that process, he knows how the book is going to go.  In the first seven or eight books, he said, he went to a computer at that point and outlined the books.  He hasn't done that in the last several, hasn't needed to.

Is there anything you'd change about Iron Lake if you could?
Laughing, he said he'd change the name of the town.  There is a real place up on the Iron Range called Aurora, but it is not his Aurora, and it is about 40-50 miles from the fictional Aurora.  He says this confuses readers who know Minnesota well--and when he did an event in the real Aurora, he said he had quite a bit of explaining to do.  He also said he'd make the relationship between Jo and Sandy Parrant more nuanced.

How did you go about writing the Ojibwe culture, since you are not a part of it?
When he started, he said, he knew nothing at all about the Ojibwe culture.  And like the cultural anthropology student he used to be at Stanford (before they kicked him out), he started where all academics start:  by reading.  He read all the early ethnographies, works by Ojibwe writers.  Then, when he's finished a draft of a book, he gives it to several Ojibwe friends to read, to correct him on what he got wrong.  The response from the Ojibwe community, he said, has been overwhelmingly positive.

In a separate question (see further down) about literary influences, Krueger mentioned his indebtedness to Tony Hillerman, who was really the first to write about another culture in a mystery novel.  He mentioned Margaret Coel (and some other names I couldn't write fast enough to catch).

Minnesota has become quite a place for mystery writers--why do you think that is?
The flip answer is cabin fever, he said, laughing.  (We all spent quite a bit of this conversation laughing.)  At the end of a cold winter, it could make you want to kill somebody.  But in all seriousness, he said that the choices and values that Minnesota has come to cultivate contribute to this:  Minnesota has decided that the arts are important and Minnesota spends a lot of money on the arts, from film and theater to visual arts and writing.  Minnesota has made itself into a place that cultivates and supports artists, which is why there are so many fine writers coming from and writing about the state.  He said that he's tried to write about other environments where he's lived--Colorado, California--and they simply haven't inspired him in the same way that Minnesota has.

Do you base your characters on people you know?
Most of his characters are Frankenstein creations, bits and pieces of real people, human nature, that sort of thing.  Every once in a while a real person does show up in a book, but that usually happens as a result of things like charity auctions, and he creates a character in a book specifically for that person.  When he asks them, "Would you like to be a good person or a bad person?" the overwhelming answer was that people wanted to be bad--even his wife's cousin was thrilled to be written in as a prostitute.  :)

Do you think about the block element of "too little information" when creating suspense?
Though I'm not sure he knew exactly what we were asking, Krueger said that the willing suspension of disbelief in a mystery novel is based on one thing:  that a reader believes that a character is desperate enough, greedy enough, scared enough to commit murder.

What writers influenced you as you were starting to write mysteries and who do you read now?
He said that his father, being an English teacher, raised his kids on Literature With a Capital L.  (And I anticipate this aspect being a part of our classroom conversation as we continue to discuss "what is literature?") So he was raised on the classics, not even reading the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.  So when he started writing mysteries, he read Tony Hillerman and other contemporaries, and now he's going back to read the classics, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Ross McDonald and James M. Cain, those ones.  (I wanted to talk to him more about this classic aspect, because we've read some of the same works--Poe and Conan Doyle and Christie--and Krueger did say to send him an email when we finish the book (this was in the spoiler alert about the character who died) and I might ask him to elaborate on this at that point.)

We asked other questions, about the role of the Windigo, about revision and drafting, about writing a series.  We finished up by talking about his new non-Cork novel, Ordinary Grace, which is set in southern Minnesota in 1961 (it's being released in March) and I asked about the difference in writing a novel set in northern Minnesota and a novel set in southern Minnesota.  For myself, I know these two areas fairly well and I know there would have to be some differences.  He said in reality, the sense of place is just as important in Ordinary Grace as it is in the Cork novels, and we didn't really have time to get into the ways that the flat, agrarian, very-German aspects of the Minnesota River Valley shape people differently than the wooded areas of the Iron Range, other than he said that the very individualistic aspects of people in the north contrast very strongly with the need for community conforming in the more agrarian south.

At the end, we thanked him, signed off, and in the remaining few minutes, my class and I talked about what we'd just heard.  They were so excited.  Bubbly kind of sparkle in their eye kind of excited.  A few of my students stayed after class as I packed up my bag, seemingly unwilling to want the experience to end.  Yes, my dear students, this is learning at its best, where the conversations and the learning and what you know and what you don't know crosses the boundaries of the classroom and you take that energy with you into the rest of your day.

Eng. 180: Interview with Dennis Lehane!

Last week, we finished up Dennis Lehane's Mystic River and my class and I formulated some questions that he agreed to answer via email.  I was not expecting to get answers so fast, but last night, I come home from a truly spectacular conference in Milwaukee (which, as many of you know, "spectacular" generally does not denote a low-energy affair, so I was exhausted, which may have been exacerbated by the 10-hour drive from Lincoln to Milwaukee and back)--and what should be waiting in my inbox, but our interview!  I can't wait for class (later) this morning to share this with my students!  And, yes!  That's a lot of exclamation points for this early in the morning!

Enjoy!

***

How do you go about writing your novels?  What is your writing process like?  Do you write longhand?  Computer?  What was your specific inspiration for Mystic River?  How many drafts did you go through for this novel?

I write in the mornings or late at night. Always hit the chair every morning for at least 3 hours. I write longhand and/or on laptop. Completely depends on my mood. The inspiration for Mystic River was moving to Charlestown in the early 90's, a historically clannish, 100% Irish, mostly poor-to-working-class neighborhood of Boston that had just been discovered by the real estate frontiersmen and yuppies looking to live closer to downtown. When I first lived there it still had plenty of rough edges but I could read the tea leaves, and I wrote myself a note: "What happens when Pat's Pizza becomes a Starbucks?" That's Mystic River in a nutshell. It took my another six years to begin writing the book because I didn't have the necessary muscle when I first came up with the idea. The book took about four or five drafts if memory serves. 

When creating characters, do you ever favor one over another and do you find yourself becoming attached to a certain character?  How much control do your characters have over the plot?  Do you let them free and write wherever they take you or do you know from the beginning what will happen in the story?

I usually have prior knowledge of three or four things that have to happen in my novel--one beginning thing, one middle thing, one end thing. Everything else is discovery. Sometimes characters pop up who speak to you with a lot more clarity and volume then others. Sometimes they're minor characters who present their case to become major ones. When that happens, I listen, because so much time is spent chasing characters down and begging them to talk to me. When one does so, freely and unbidden, I treat that like a gift from the gods.

How do you create a character’s dialect in a way that adds to the flavor of the story without being distracting?  What sorts of local knowledge—like dialect—are you conscious of writing into your characters?

I always had an ear for dialogue, probably because I came from a place where people spoke in a very vivid manner. I'm not conscious of writing it, though. It's just innate and organic. 

How did your upbringing affect the ways you use setting and character attitudes in Mystic River?  How are you aware of the ways you use the natural and built environments in this novel to create suspense?  What ways do you see this story as rooted in this place, that it could not take place anywhere else?

The neighborhood is a character in the novel, quite possibly the most important. It couldn’t take place anywhere else because East Buckingham doesn’t exist; it’s my amalgam of all the urban Boston neighborhoods. It was my way to look at the tribalism that defined the city for decades, for good and ill. Since I grew up very much a part of that tribal culture I certainly felt comfortable writing about it.

How do you go about writing societal fears, such as violence against children and violence against women?  Are you conscious of having an overall agenda as you write a novel, an overarching principle you want the reader to come away with?

I never bring an agenda into the book. If it bubbles up organically—as I assume it will—I deal with it as seems appropriate but I’d prefer to come bearing questions not answers. I’m not a big fan of the novel-as-scold. As a reader I’m there to be entertained and learn something about the human condition, not to be hectored or lectured. 

The relationship between law and justice and punishment is extremely complicated in Mystic River, a relationship that is essential to crime literature (crime disrupts the social order and and something must happen to restore order by the end of the tale) and causes the reader to question what constitutes justice.  (We just finished reading Rebecca, where a murderer went unpunished (at least by legal standards) and we were rooting for that murderer to go free.)  Can you respond to the complications of law/justice/punishment in Mystic River and how you created them, as a writer?

It’s playing around with American myths regarding regeneration through violence and the outsider who rights the wrongs society is unable or unwilling to. Jimmy Marcus is the classic American gunslinger hero—he follows his gut; he avenges the sins no one cares to avenge; he is absolutely sure he is right. Punch line is—he’s wrong. The novel is something of an assault on the idea that might can equal right or that we should forego trust in our institutions and the better angels of our nature simply because our emotions are boiling hot enough.

Many are critical of genre literature and crime fiction (recently Jeffrey Eugenides in the By the Book interview in the New York Times).  What position do you believe genre literature occupies in the larger world of writing and literature?  What do you see as it offering that other modes of fiction do not?  What do you see as the value of crime fiction?  (And we are noting that you use several different modes in your own work—from the PI in the Kenzie and Gennaro novels to a complication of that mode in Mystic River, etc.) 

The issue isn’t genre. The issue is whether something is formulaic or not. If I pick up a genre book where the hero cop and his family are targeted by the serial killer because this time it’s personal, well, I’m tossing that book aside. But if I have to to choose between, on one side, THE BIG NOWHERE or CLOCKERS—both books in which the main characters are policemen who, on some base level solve crimes—and, on the other side, the latest dirge about “the vaguely dissatisfied in Connecticut” or some piece of clever meta-fiction wholly unconcerned with character or story, it’s no choice at all. The former is literature, the latter is “literary fiction.” I’ll take the literature, thanks very much.

What authors did you read when you were starting out, writing your books?  Which authors were influential—and in what ways?  What current practitioners of crime literature do you think are doing particularly good work these days?  Where do you see the genre going?  What are you reading right now?  What books would you recommend to us?

I was most influenced by urban novelists like Richard Price, Pete Dexter, Elmore Leonard, William Kennedy, and Hubert Selby. I also looked up to those who’d transformed the crime fiction genre in the late 70’s and through the `80s—James Crumley, James Ellroy, and James Lee Burke. Then, because I’d studied to be a short story writer for so long, I’d say Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Andre Dubus, and Hemingway’s short fiction left a mark. Graham Greene cast an enormous shadow. The people who are currently doing great work in crime fiction are legion but ones who spring immediately to mind are Daniel Woodrell, Ken Bruen, Gillian Flynn, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Laura Lippman, Michael Koryta, Stuart Neville, and Val McDermid.

Interview with Ken Bruen

Over the course of a couple of days (21-23 Sept. 2012), I had a delightful email exchange with the Irish noir novelist Ken Bruen about his work, his craft, and the ways that place moves on his page.   Some really cool moments here, for anyone interested in either side of the page, the writer's perspective and the reader's perspective, the place of crime literature in the world of Literature, love of cities, love of bookstores.  

Ken Bruen is a prolific novelist of crime and noir fiction, with nearly three dozen novels to his name.  I first became interested in his work not just because he was writing Irish thrillers, which was electrifying to myself as a reader and myself as a teacher, but also because his Jack Taylor novels are set in Galway.  I started researching Irish noir (I really hate the term "Emerald Noir"), got deep into some cool scholarship, and then the expected happened:  I pulled out a blank syllabus on my computer, started putting a class together.  Then a Call for Papers from Eire-Ireland on Irish crime comes across my inbox.  A paper on Irish crime lit?  Yes, please.  So the next logical thing to do was strike up a conversation with this writer that is occupying so much of my thoughts and bookshelf.  In some places I changed punctuation to clarify, but in other places, I left his words as he wrote them, because the voice evoked is just awesome.

Lots to talk about here--enjoy!

***

What is your process like as a writer?  Do you write everyday?  What is your drafting process like?  Do you write longhand, with a computer, a combination of both?  

I write everyday, same time and so it's built in like ritual.  For certain projects, I write longhand to really get the feel, the frisson, the direct flow.  The laptop for speed and ease. 

What is your revising process like?

I read in to a recorder every night and if the music isn’t there, the beat to count cadence, I bin it. 

I'd like to follow up on you reading your work aloud.  It's something that I do as a writer--nothing gets sent out without me having read it aloud--and it's something that I recommend to my students, no matter if they're first-year composition students or creative writing students.  Reading it into a recorder, however, is a step I've never taken myself.  So, for practical purposes, the work takes on a doubling:  you're not only hearing the work as you physically speak it aloud, but you're also listening to it when you play it back?  How did you develop that strategy?

It's the failed actor in me and also, I used it a lot in my days as a teacher. It really helps develop how to write in different accents and tones. Walter Mosley does it also.

Are you conscious of how you structure these novels?  I've noticed a trend for your Taylor books to end at a place that the reader wishes for another hundred pages--yet it ends right in the middle of the action, a very important action.  What are your thoughts on your narrative structure?  

There is a point in my read, like a piece of Irish traditional music when the next move is a vacuum so you are done, it can be jarring but if you read the narrative again, like real life, this is where it cuts off, rather, get's cut off. 

What you said about ending a narrative at what might seem like a jarring point--but it's like real life, where it gets cut off.  Do you consider this a function of the genre in which you've chosen to write, this emphasis towards realism that noir prides itself on?  What do you consider the functional craft-of-fiction difference between realism and what is realistic?

If this doesn't sound too lame, the characters dictate the timing, as in, say a Jack Taylor, he literally won't talk to me any more, he's told me and that's it, no frills. In my life, realism is confined to the books I read, realistic is what confronts me every day I venture out and let the world have a shot.

Declan Kiberd famously wondered where the literature of the Celtic Tiger was, something that Andrew Kincaid in his essay "Down These Mean Streets: The City and Critique in Contemporary Irish Noir" argues that was being written, but not in the capital-L Literature that Kiberd seemed to be looking for.  The literature filling that need was appearing in this particular sub genre.  What are your thoughts about how stories always seem to fill the void and the need of society?  Just in terms of the crime-literature world, from Poe to Conan Doyle to Christie to Chandler to du Maurier to Mosley to Lehane to Paretsky and on and on (I realize my list is very Brit-American-centric), each of those new modes of telling the crime tale was in response to a very specific societal fear--and the storytelling easily adapted itself to it.  How do you see your work fitting into this societal fear and need?

I don't. I rarely fit the requirements of the analysts and thank fook for that. Crime fiction is pouring out of Ireland now, be it literature or not, who cares, I think for young writers, crime fiction is like the Punk movement, a chance to say screw you to the Custodians of The precious Irish Lit heritage and the rarefied few who wish to keep the jackals, and guttersnipes ( as I've been called) from their ownership of Joyce et al.  I read religiously (pun intended) and almost fervently the lit posturings and lit mags and want to shout, 'for fooksake, who cares, the barbarians are indeed at he gates and don't give a toss about your supercilious posturing.' 

What have you read lately that’s set your world on fire?  One thing I’ve read about you is that you and Jack Taylor share your love of books—what are you reading right now?

A slew of biographies, the dark ones, what made they so dark and how did that fire their art , followed by the Anne Sexton's poems then a motley crew of philosophers, throw in some Crews, Tom Waits and my head is ready to jolt.

On a similar note, I’ve read interviews where you’ve mentioned you share your love of books with Jack (which is, for me as a reader, one of the only things that redeems that character and keeps me reading until the next book--well done)—but I’m curious about where and how your experiences of the city match or do not match Jack’s.

Jack spends much of his energy on the past, me, not so much.  Jack doesn't do progress, me I try, a bit. 

Interesting what you said about "Jack doesn't do progress"--considering the movement of progress (and the movement backward, as well) and "obliterating" the cultural tropes that seem to still linger.  I read quite a bit of memoir as I worked on my comprehensive exams for my program and I started to wonder if the Miserable Irish Childhood Memoir is the literary antidote to that romanticism (something noir also offers) because it offers the consequences to the romantic tropes:  if the romantic view of Ireland is one of drinking and dancing and singing and such, these miserable Irish childhood works show that drink costs money and how rampant the poverty was, that sexy accents do not make for a good marriage and bad matches (and the gender roles and expectations enforced by society and the Catholic Church) cannot be reversed.  (As an essayist, I have issues with the memoir genre, but that's a different conversation--I much prefer Tim Robinson and Chris Arthur…)  Thoughts?

The Misery memoir industry continues to thrive here and I'm constantly being attacked due to my belief in Nature over nurture. I know close wonderful people who've had the most horrendous childhoods and are the best in the world and others who ‘Had it all’; and are the scum of the earth. True evil which is my main preoccupation is in my opinion something that begins at birth and peaks.  I correspond a lot with Andrew Vachss and it's worth your time to google him.

Are you aware or conscious of Galway as being as much of a character as Jack Taylor?  How do you, as a writer, construct the city to be more than setting?

The city is the fourth main character, shapes, coddles, beguiles and seduces and to do this, it has to be  ever present, like a banshee, just slightly in the mist, keening.

How do you notice that Galway has changed over your lifetime?  Physical changes to the city and the landscape, mental/emotional changes?  What have you noticed that is the most dramatic or the most interesting?  What specific changes do you think are the most visible tracks of the Celtic Tiger, both for good and ill?

Prosperity brought drugs, greed, obesity and the developers brought ugliness, luxury apartment buildings on site of lovely old homes. The very air is now one of....... money............ the stench of it, once it were the aroma of home stew and hope.  Now, we're like a dead end suburb of bum fuck nowhere in Des Moines.

How much of Galway is your own inherent knowledge of the place and how much is research specific to the book?  I mean, when you put Jack on a specific street at a specific time of day, do you walk it yourself?

I walk it every day, feed the swans, let my dog run in the Claddagh, light a candle in the churchs that don't have electronic one's, so I can use a taper and match and not electronic like a celestial vegas.  I get me books in Charlie Byrnes, have a pint in Garavans, and side skip the road kill of the literary bullshite they pedal. 

I'd like to hear about your affection for Charlie Byrne's, as a place.  How did you first come to it?  Why do you return?  I always feel like the best bookstores--and I prefer used bookstores to ones that sell new ones--always seem to give you the book you never knew you couldn't live without.  My sister once sent me a postcard from San Francisco that closed with the line "I'd like to travel by bookstore."  It was at Charlie Byrne's that I first found Synge's The Aran Islands, back when I was in college, and reading that book out there still remains one of the incredible moments of my reading life, that chemistry of reading a book in its setting.  Do you have other bookstores that hold a similar place in your imagination?

Vinny and Charly who own the shop began with a market stall over 20 years ago as my first novel had just come out, they thought I was a shady character, with a pea jacket and always travelling. Each year, I'd have a new book and they'd move to a premises then a bigger one so we kind of grew together which is a brilliant opportunity for a writer to literally grow with bookstore, like Larry Mc Murty in reverse.

My fav bookstore was The Black Orchid in NY

I did readings there with Ed McBain. 

The romance of Sylvia Beach and her Parisian store, and stores like the famous one in Charing Cross Road make me yearn.

What is it like to write Galway?  Is there a difference between writing a city and writing about a city?  I’ve read interviews where your purpose with Jack’s character—and, for that matter, Galway’s character—is to obliterate the tropes and assumptions about Irish men and their mothers, for instance.  The dark rendering of Galway (and Ireland in general) certainly seems to serve that purpose as well.

I want to obliterate the Ireland of The Quiet Man and merry priest and lovable Mum's and all that horseshite we lay under for generations, to have a cool unique city that young people can feel is theirs and not some relic from the years of grinding poverty.

As for the "cool unique city," can you point to any specifics that you see are leading to this?  I laughed a little at your comment about "a dead end suburb of bumfuck nowhere in des moines," simply because one of my favorite opening lines of all time belongs to the travel writer Bill Bryson, who wrote an essay titled "Fat Girls in Des Moines," which begins with "I come from Des Moines.  Somebody had to."  Because I'm interested in place, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that suburbia is The Great Unplaced, because suburbs are basically indistinguishable from another.  What do you see as the unique aspects that Galway has to offer, that makes it different from any other place?

Nice serendipity. I was a huge fan of Bryson and John Cheever. I quite madly think Mad Men owes a lot to Cheever!  My favourite cities have a vibe, it's in the very air like a charge, a jolt, an electrical frisson that is almost impossible to articulate and my cities are

Galway

Assisi ( a village in truth)

New York

Sydney

Venice

Madrid

Marrakesh

Hong Kong

Kyoto.............purely because I had my first young brush with fame there when I walked right into David Bowie who said

Hello

The test of a great city is if you wake in the wee hours and think, Thank fook I'm in this place.  “A Movable Feast” seems to me to convey that extraodinary sense of place that is unique to some cities. Too, Galway has a sense of irony and that is rare to rarest found and even better, the city would deny any such high falutin claim.

To apply the sublime test, on leaving a city, does it, like a great love affair, break your heart in smithereens and the dread you will never return. I'm haunted always by Macavafy's poem on Alexandria and Thompson's Hound of Heaven, they are part of my constant hand luggage.

I've read a 100 tomes on writing and the best advice to writers for me was from Paul Theroux who said

'Leave home'

Love that.

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: 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.