IWC 100 (NDN): First Day of Class!

My MWF classes (two of them) will be my Natural Disaster Narratives (NDN) classes; the TR class will be my Place and Community.  So, I met with my first class this morning, bright and early in a classroom where the digital thermometer on the clock read 63 degrees; the second was at 11:50 in another classroom that wasn't much warmer.  Hard to be professional when you're trying not to shiver and turn blue.  There are only 13 people in that class, eleven of whom where there (the others had Polar Vortex-related travel delays) and already they're talkative and at least beginning to be interested in what we're doing.  The later class is at capacity and it has a noticeably different energy and chemistry.  (Part of it I think is the time of day and the character of student who signs up for an 11:50 class and I actually think the physical make up of the room, which is long and narrow, is partly to blame.  I anticipate moving the desks around a lot in there.)

I warned them that I get irrationally excited about this stuff, so beware, and both classes laughed. Better to weird them out on the first day of class than save it for later.  And I did get excited.  And it was excitement, more than anything else, when my students didn't know where New Madrid was--or who Mitch McConnell is.  Ah, the field is wide open!  Much learning will happen!  (I also gave them my standard speech about checking the news as they left.)

In addition to our Moodle site, I pulled up the spectacular maps by John Nelson of tornado tracks over the last 56 years and left that on the projector as we went through the general First Day of Class housekeeping.  (I'm also fond of his other maps, so you should definitely follow the links to see them.  Gorgeous.)

But then as I scrolled through the F0, the F1, F2, F3, F4, and then stopped on the F5 map, I asked them what they saw.

And then I made circling motions around the northernmost line, that horizontal line that crosses the North Dakota-Minnesota border, and somebody said it:  that looks close to here.  I nodded.  That's Fargo, I said.  Something sparked behind their eyes--they were not expecting that.  Fargo was the tornado (system, as it was a supercell system) that provoked Dr. Theodore Fujita into creating his scale of measuring tornados--and that 1957 Fargo tornado was an F5.

What this map represents, I told them, is more than a record of destruction.  If you could find somebody to tell you about the 1957 Fargo tornado, they'd tell you a story--they probably wouldn't tell you the wind speeds.  If you asked somebody about the 1997 Red River Flood (which I immediately thought of through this Polar Vortex, because the last time that happened, it was January 1997 and we know what happened two months later...), they might tell you how deep the river got, but you're more likely to get a story.  Stories like this matter.  The historical record of them matters.  It's important to know, if you live in Missouri, about the New Madrid fault line, and know its history of a major shake every two hundred years, and know that we are now overdue.  (I said this to the later class and when I said "every two hundred years," 3/4 of them looked down at the syllabus to make sure that I did write that the last one happened in 1811.)  It's important to know that the Red River floods.  We have to know what it means to live here, as opposed to any other place, because the difference matters.
I didn't mention much about Storm Christine wreaking havoc on Ireland, but here's a link to some of the truly awe-inspiring photographs of what that storm did:  click here. Then we did some free writing as a way to do some introductions:  I introduced free writing to them, as the concept and method, and then I asked them to write (and follow their tangents) about what does it mean to live in this place on this day?  After about 5 minutes, I asked them to write about how they learned what they were writing about.  Some grew up knowing, taught by parents or grandparents or even bad experiences.  I told the story about my friend E. and I taking our friend L. shopping for winter gear early last semester, because L. hasn't ever had a real winter, and as we kept loading her down with a good jacket, snow pants (she insisted on them), boots, hats and mittens, we had to teach her that she needed to dress in layers, not just one thick sweater.  We picked up a little pink shovel for her car (which, we learned later, was appropriated by her daughter) and we taught her that she needed to pick up kitty litter--and the cheap stuff, not the Tidy Cats.  At this point in my story, the majority of my later class looked lost, so I asked how many of them had kitty litter in their car--and one person raised his hand.  So we had a mini-discussion about it. All in all, an excellent first day of the semester.  I've about got my housekeeping for the day done, so I'm ready to take off my heels (which always makes me feel like a badass teacher) and put on my Sorel Snow Lion boots (which make me feel equally badass) and head out into the -7 (-20 windchill).  This, a trick I learned from watching my mother put on her boots with her Sunday finery to walk to church and then put her shoes on once she got there.  But also this knowledge that after this weekend and the windchills of nearly -50, -20 doesn't seem so bad.

Teaching Update: Independent Study & IWC

I can't believe it's been so long since I last posted--and I can't believe it's the end of Week 4 already.  But I've been having all kinds of strange intersections of thoughts about community and this campus and beyond, something I'm incredibly grateful for on a personal and existential and professional level.

It's Family Weekend at Concordia, which has put me on an unexpected train of thought these last few days.  This week, it was the one-year anniversary of my beloved uncle's unexpected death, and each memory of him (and pictures that my cousins have posted) chips at my heart a little more for their grief. My godfather died, also unexpectedly, of a heart attack in May.  And then my father ended up with basal cell carcinoma on his ear, necessitating removal, which was followed by chest pains that resulted in stents (and Dad has lost nearly 20 pounds in the time since and this brand-new attention to his health has made the rest of us breathe a sigh of relief).  Too much loss and too much threat of loss in a short time and it makes me incredibly grateful for all the ways we define our families, how we love and support each other in all sorts of ways.

On a building in the "Latin Quarter"

I'm in a particularly good Irish mood today, mostly due to the misty gloom of the morning and the Barry's tea in my mug (I'm in the office, though I'm not generally here till noon on MWF), but also because I've been doing an independent study with a student on (women's) travel/place writing and as we've been reading (just finished Michele Morano's Grammar Lessons, which L. loved, as I knew she probably would) and writing, I've been free writing along with the prompts I've been giving her.  We were writing about "What does Liverpool (insert other place as necessary) eat for breakfast?" and I wrote about "What does Galway eat for breakfast," which was lovely.  Gaelic Storm's "Irish Breakfast Day" never fails to make me grin, especially when that song appears on my playlist as I'm on the roundabout in south Moorhead, on my commute from Fargo to campus.  As a result, I've got some movement on Galway hookers (I got to see the Naomh Bairbre again when I was in Galway in July and the Bonnie Roy was moored on the Claddagh Quays across from my B&B) that will help me revise my beloved Quays essay (one of my favorites, of all time).  I haven't been able to make time to do my own writing since I got back from Ireland, moved to Fargo, and started my new job. I've never done an independent study before, let alone on a subject so close to my heart, so this is exciting on a lot of different levels.

The Bonnie Roy

The Naomh Bairbre

L. and I came to the reading list like this:  I proposed a fairly long list of books that fit with her desires for the independent study (she could also propose possibilities), which is to do some substantial writing about her study abroad in Liverpool last semester, and from that list, she chose four books, plus a craft text.  Here's our reading list:

• Michele Morano, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain.
• Erik Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World.
• Alice Steinbach, Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman.
• Robert Root, ed., Landscapes with Figures: Nonfiction of Place.
• Bill Roorbach, Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature.

Inside the Galway City museum

What's great about this list is that two of these books L. suggested--and I haven't read--so this is as much a learning experience for me as it is for her.  She turned in her first writing yesterday, on the Scouse accent of Liverpool and how that translated (ha) into the culture shock and travel disorientation of her arrival to England and her study abroad.  So much possibility there.  She turned in three pages and one look at it and I know what she has there will be at least twenty pages.  That kind of promise is so exciting.

I've been doing ten hour days in the office this week, unusual for me, since I generally do much of my course prepping and grading at home (and I got rough drafts from all three IWC classes this week, so in the immortal words of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, "What's a weekend?").  It's Family Weekend this weekend, so the campus will shortly be filled with parents and families, all excited to draw the community closer together.  This morning--and this is why I'm here on a morning when I'm not generally here--is because during community time, the English department is hosting Coffee and Conversation for (English) students and their families.  (The way that Concordia's schedule is constructed, on Fridays, time from 9:20-10:20 is left unscheduled for meetings and gatherings and events--very cool.)

My IWC classes have been going very, very well and I'm seriously excited to see these drafts they've turned in.  My TR morning IWC has been a challenge of late, for a variety of reasons, though I'm hoping that we've turned a corner.  Part of the challenge with that class is that the chemistry is wonky, it's at 8:00 in the morning, and it's a TR class, which means the class is 100 minutes long.  Earlier this week, they were not only staring blankly and clearly not paying attention as I was explaining how to use quotations (obviously not the sexiest subject), but a few of them got snarky and aggressive with each other.  They turned in rough drafts yesterday and I sent a prefacing email suggesting bringing some kind of caffeinated beverage or anything else they may need to stay awake--and I walked into class yesterday morning to the most boisterous, nearly-frightening GOOD MORNING!.  Is this the caffeine talking?  I asked.  Yes, they said.  In the immortal words of Dr. Jerry Hathaway from Real Genius, up the voltage.  But the whole situation is a good reminder of what it means to be a teacher of first-year writing and the attitude most students have about writing.

But to bring this reality check back to my point:  there are at least four students in that particular class who are dealing with heavy personal issues, which I suspect is coloring their attitude and performance in that class.  One of them is from Colorado, where his family and friends are all affected by the flooding there, and I started to wonder about the unhealthy bonding this class has done and how we could work together towards a more positive community in there.  I have no idea how to go about this, to make it fit with department expectations, but I started to wonder if this particular class could work on a project together, as a positive community united in outreach, rather than a negative community united in their dislike of my class, to support those Coloradans affected by the flood.  Food for thought.  But I've already changed my activities and approach to that class--hopefully the shift will help.  Can't hurt.

My final thought is this: from the moment I first set foot back on this campus, the transition from long-ago student to faculty, this place has been exactly what I needed, as a teacher and a human being.  It's a place that speaks my language, that the place-conscious pedagogy I so value is reflected in the college's mission and core curriculum; even though the language we use is different, the movement is exactly the same.  Start local, move outward towards the global.  This place so values the first-year experience that the faculty teaching the Inquiry Seminars and the faculty teaching the Inquiry--Written Communication and Inquiry--Oral Communication wanted to have time before the semester started to talk.  Wanted!  This is a place where even full professors teach composition, because they believe it's important.  Creative writing professors, literature professors, journalism professors, rhetoricians--everybody teaches IWC.  This is a place where my department chooses to get together once a month to talk about teaching and pedagogy.

And yet, since I'm on a one-year contract, and the MLA Job List just came out a week ago, I have to apply for all the jobs I can possibly find and resign myself to the fact that I will go elsewhere next year. Way to set the bar too high.

State of Mind: Back to School Reading Edition

I'm back!  This summer has not been a good one for posting, something I really wanted to do during my summer 254 (which was absolutely incredible in so many ways), through the process of getting a job and defending my dissertation, ending my summer class and packing up my apartment and movers coming, to my lovely two-week trip to Ireland to present at the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures on the subject of place in Irish noir, and now the moving-in to my new apartment in Fargo.  I have books on the shelves!  I have internet!  And I think I know where, maybe, half my stuff is.  It's all here somewhere, right?

I may have had a slight breakdown in Target over the weekend as I was shopping for that stuff you need when you move into a new place and the teenage girl in front of me had her shopping cart loaded with college ruled paper, binders, pens, and other assorted back-to-school supplies.  It can't be Back to School yet!  This distressed me on several levels:  an inability to comprehend that we're into the second week of August, that the semester starts in two weeks and I haven't gotten my syllabi done, that I haven't even gotten to enjoy the pleasure of my own school supplies shopping.  But this coincided with my movers good-naturedly complaining about having to lug eighty boxes of books up to the third floor and one of the movers asking if I'd actually read all these books (I said, "most of them.") and the other mover confiding that he hated reading.  "Dangerous thing to tell an English teacher," I said.  He said that he'd dropped out of school, was a slow reader.  I told him what I tell all my students:  reading is a muscle, it's not magic.  You have to practice.  But the reality is that it doesn't matter what you read as long as you read.  You could read car magazines, you could read newspapers, you could read short stories--it doesn't matter.  I don't know if it made any difference, but one effect of teaching first-year writing for so long is that I have to combat this culture of fear around reading as much as I have to combat the fear of writing.  There's an incredible amount of shame I've noticed surrounding those who say that they hate reading (and writing).  Maybe it's partly a culture of exceptionalism that says that if you're going to do something, you have to be an expert at it.  So then, maybe it's easier to say that you hate something and avoid it.

Of course, I didn't tell him that my idea of tourist destinations when in Ireland included Chapters bookstore in Dublin and Charlie Byrne's in Galway...

Maybe it's intimidating to haul eighty boxes of books up three flights of stairs, but if my mover had stuck around long enough to see those books on the shelves, he would have seen that my shelves are the least-intimidating shelves ever.  There are writers that scare me, writers I've never read, and I admitted this to my mover (though I will only admit those writers out loud, not in print), which made him laugh.  But my shelves of nonfiction are incredibly varied, from books on cheese and dirt (two separate books) to books on natural disasters, to memoirs and histories and all kinds of random stuff.  My Irish shelves don't contain much in the way of scary authors (I only have Joyce's Portrait...and I have no shame in admitting that Joyce scares me...)--and if he'd checked out the shelves of literary fiction and crime literature, that's the least scary part of what I do.  Crime literature?  Seriously?  Except for the subject matter, there's nothing easier to get into than mysteries.  Yesterday, I finally decided to get over my distaste for Dashiell Hammett as a human being (I read Lillian Hellman's memoir ten years ago, learned to dislike Hammett for his treatment of her, and refused to read him...)--and finally pulled The Maltese Falcon off the shelf, settled down on my new balcony in my zero gravity chair, and started and finished it in one sitting.  Glorious prairie night.  And it was a good book, as I knew it would be.


But then, today, as I'm crossing all kinds of things off my To Do list (update insurance policies, get paperwork in order for my new job, etc), my friend Karen Craigo posts to Facebook this graphic:  Surprising Book Facts.  My first reaction, as a reader, as a writer, as a teacher, is disappointment and a certain amount of resignation.  But even as I try to crawl out of that hole of despair, I realize that the nature of this graphic is misleading and it goes back to what I told my mover.  Perhaps we place too much value on the books themselves, as a form, rather than what they contain.  It's something I've been thinking about as I've been shelving my books and wondering where to put my One Story archive.  By reimagining the form that reading takes, we put more value on the words, the sentences, the ideas.  With so many literary journals going online, the delivery method of the work and the inherent value we put on that method needs to change.

It doesn't matter what you read, as long as you read.  In a few short weeks, I will tell my students that nothing will teach you more about how to put a sentence together than reading.  Even if you don't like what you're reading, you can still learn something from it.  I will tell them about my dislike for Cormac McCarthy, but there are few who taught me more about language.  I will tell them that "that [wo]man can write a sentence!" is the best compliment I can give a book.  On my flight from Shannon, Ireland to Chicago (where my television didn't work, so I had to read while everybody else watched movies...), I started and finished Declan Burke's Slaughter's Hound and Joy Castro's Nearer Home.  I tweeted a few days later that I felt like my soul had been singed when I landed in Chicago.  Both books were incredible, in different ways, but the result of them was the same:  as a reader, it made me want to read more, to keep following the characters wherever they would go; as a writer, they made me want to write.  I included Burke in the paper I presented at IASIL and as I revise that paper into an article for publication, I can't wait to include Slaughter's Hound in my analysis.

I've also seen this graphic floating around cyberspace too and I think it's going to be the newest addition to my office door.  It's been so long since I've been able to read anything just for the pure pleasure of it and I'm hoping that now that I'm done with my PhD I'll be able to get back to the joy of reading.  For the last three years, I haven't read anything that hasn't been assigned for a class, on my exam reading lists, or something I'm teaching in my own classes.  If I've wanted to explore something new, I've had to justify it by writing something critical on it or teaching a class where I could include it.  That's how I got to read all kinds of natural disaster narratives, that's how I got to read all kinds of fun crime literature.  I might have to justify fun reading to myself this way for a while longer, but such is the life of an academic, though.

It's helpful to see reading, visually, in terms of this graphic, though.  Twenty minutes doesn't seem like a long time at all, though the cumulative effect of all those words and sentences and ideas is so much larger than the equivalent of sixty whole school days of reading.  I didn't have a television while I did my PhD (no physical room in my tiny apartment) and I don't plan to buy one now that I have room.  I have Netflix on my computer and that's enough.  I hope that I can spend my downtime reading the books on my shelves that I haven't read yet.  The Lincoln library book sale has ensured that there are more books on my shelves than I could possibly read--and I see this as a good thing, not a bad thing.  But I also like to reread books (and I don't understand those who don't reread books--but that's another blog post...).  There's always something more to be found, even on my own shelves.

Maybe the disconnect is in differentiating between fun-reading and work-reading, between reading that happens in a long-form book or another form.  I'm not sure how to break that down into something else, but maybe that's the first, necessary step.  There is no bad reading, there is no bad time spent reading.  Even writing that isn't the best (like this book my mother lent me, self-published by a man in her hometown about a crime that went on in his family's business, or even poorly written online work) will teach you what not to do, as well as good writing teaches what to do.  While this graphic focuses on elementary students, the same can be applied to college students.  Who will be better critical thinkers?  Who will be better writers?  Who will be more compassionate human beings?  Who will discover new interests, new curiosities, things they never knew existed?  I never thought about it that way before is my favorite thing to hear as a teacher.

It's time now to get back to unpacking, adding new things to the To Do list, and planning to end for the day around 4:00, so I can sit on my balcony in my zero-gravity chair in the prairie evening with something new to read.  Or maybe something I've read before.  The possibilities are endless.

So, here's today's question:  which authors/books are you afraid of?  And what's on your list to get your twenty minutes of reading in?  What books would you recommend to others to get their twenty minutes?

Eng. 254: Writing and Communities

This morning, as I'm finalizing my syllabus for my English 254: Writing and Communities, which starts next Monday, I'm thinking about conflicts.  At the moment, the biggest conflict is inside my head, the argument of my brain and skull against the barometric pressure changes that have turned my local radar a delightful shade of green and yellow.  But my Excedrin is kicking in, smoothing off the sharp edges, and I'm running my Almond Biscotti tea leaves again.  For the time being, my cats are not in conflict, asleep in their separate spots.  I have to keep an eye on Maeve, because her favorite time to attack Galway is when he's asleep.  

But as I run my leaves again and refill my electric kettle, I am reminded that any community, no matter how large or small, has its own rules.  I've just returned from a month Up North with my family, where one of its most specific rules is if you empty the teapot, fill it.  This either means running the leaves again and filling up the teapot or filling the kettle to heat so when the pot is ready for refilling, the water is hot.  There are more rules to the community of my family (like taking off your shoes when you enter my sister's house), but that's the one I'm thinking of this morning, mostly because for the four weeks I was with my parents, Mom and I were up at 6:00 every morning and we spent a lot of that time with our hands wrapped around our mugs, waiting for their dog Daisy's best friend JoJo to come for their morning romp. Try as she might, Daisy has never been able to make friends with the cats, another eternal conflict when we come to visit.

This is the first time I've taught 254 and the first time I've taught a summer class, so both will be an adventure.  But as I put Post-Its on various pages in my books, ready to take them to campus to get them scanned, I'm getting more and more excited about the class.  (I would not have been able to do this without the help of the awesome Susan Martens, for sure.)  Here's the description of the class:

This course will investigate the relationship of place and community, a lens through which we will develop a way of looking at what and who surround us, physically, intellectually, and emotionally.  Throughout the class, as you study, read, and write about issues important to you, you’ll develop three writing projects through which you will 1) represent a community through your experience of it primarily as a place; 2) represent a community through your study of it primarily as a tribe; 3) represent the combination of personal inquiry and researched inquiry in a final writing project that investigates how humans have shaped this place—and how has it shaped us, the community who lives there? What are the issues important to the stakeholders in this community (which includes you)?  Our purpose in this class is to develop a greater understanding of the ways place influences our community identity, to actively inquire into the ways that community is formed and expressed, and to communicate what we have learned in modes that best suit our audience and purpose.

I'm using Paul Gruchow's book Grass Roots and Debra Marquart's book The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, excerpts from Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere and the anthology The Big Empty: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers.  We will question the relationship between place and identity, we will explore how communities are created and for what purpose, what conflicts are represented by the community, and we will work towards advocating for issues important to the community.  To do that, we will explore how knowledge in a community is created, what forms of knowledge are valued and which are not, and how the distance between what is valued and what is not affects the community as a whole.  I'm looking forward to my students being able to Skype with Deb Marquart, a part of my pedagogy I consider essential, to get my students to talk with the writers we are reading, to more fully understand that we are a community of writers and that the community extends beyond our classroom.

Right now, my class stands at eleven students and their majors (and years) are all over the map, so we'll have an incredibly rich opportunity to explore different communities and places.  

The day before I left Minneapolis to drive back to Lincoln, my sisters' neighborhood in north Minneapolis had their annual community garage sale, which is always immense, always a lot of fun, and I hope it's becoming an annual tradition for us (now that we've done it, as a family, for three years--which includes my brother-in-law's mother and sister as well).  Each year, we've found things we've really needed, and it has been so much fun to walk around those alleys with the family, basking in the community atmosphere, the brats and such that the Lions Club sells, the closing off of a couple of streets so that musicians can set up their equipment.  This year, I got to carry around my four-month-old nephew, wrapped in a sling, snugged against my chest, and I barely felt him, because he hasn't cracked ten pounds yet.  And my niece, three years old, who proudly had dressed herself in a red, white, and blue sundress with plaid shorts underneath, with pink Crocs, (and the really cute white hat my sister put on her head to protect her from sun).  Two years ago, her daddy bought her a little slide for the backyard, which sent her into hysterical tears when we tried to show her what it was for.  This year, I found a loveseat to replace mine that needs replacing at a garage sale where all the proceeds were going to charity.  There were three jars we could choose from:  north Minneapolis, the Oklahoma tornadoes, and I forget what the third was.  I chose the north Minneapolis jar, as it was just about exactly two years since a tornado ripped through the area, only about ten blocks from my sisters' house.  I've used the north Minneapolis tornado as an illustration before in my classes (particularly my Natural Disasters class) to illustrate that not all communities are the same.  When I came back for Christmas of that year, many of the houses still had blue tarps for roofs.  Had the tornado touched down in Edina, roofs would have been repaired immediately.  This usually turns on a light inside my students and they start to understand what community means.

When I finish my syllabus, I'll head to campus, to Andrews Hall, into another of the communities I claim as mine.

Summer Reading: Sarah Bakewell's HOW TO LIVE

All this happened in the span of thirty minutes:

...I packed up my 3-year-old niece and 3-month-old nephew into my mother’s car and drove them the fifteen minutes to their house, after a day of babysitting them;

...while I’m standing in my sister’s foyer (with my brother-in-law), my father calls to say they’d just gotten the news that my godfather, a dear friend of my mother’s from college (married to her college roommate), died this morning from a heart attack at the age of 63;

...on the drive back to my parents’, two cop cars and an ambulance taking care of a bad accident on 42^nd St. in Robbinsdale.

The grief is intense right now, but that’s not why I feel the need to write right now.  It’s because today has been full of those little moments, my nephew’s volcanic puking and my niece’s cheeky adorability, my dad trying to get Henry to sleep, my mother painting with Cora, the brightness of the flowers I brought to my sister’s work to cheer her on her first day of work back from maternity leave, my parents’ dipsy goldendoodle playing ball by herself outside and refusing to come in.  The reason I need to put this all to paper (cyberspace?) right now is because I’ve just finished Sarah Bakewell's National Book Critic Circle Award winning book, How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, and as I close the back cover, I’m responding to this truly excellent biography of Montaigne as a human being as well as an essayist myself.

I foresee that I’m going to be recommending this book to everyone I see, both writers and non-writers.  Bakewell’s book is gorgeously multi-layered:  to learn about the writing means learning about the man and learning about the writing and why his Essais were so brilliant and revolutionary (in terms of writing, not necessarily their ideas, though there is argument for that) is that their purpose spans time and place:  I find echoes of current political attitudes towards civil rights in the rights taken away during Montaigne’s time; Bakewell also mentions Tiananmen Square in the context of Montaigne’s philosophies.  Bakewell’s weaving of biography and criticism and such here is exactly what Montaigne’s essays are supposed to do—and they exist both in and out of space and time.  Especially in light of those three moments of this evening—the children, my godfather’s death, and the car accident—the question of How to Live? is particularly poignant.  And Montaigne’s approach fills in some of the gaps that need to be filled, not just in my life, but others’ too.

But because I am a writer, an essayist, I keep coming back to the writing aspect of things, Bakewell’s discussion of Montaigne and his writing:  “The idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity—has not existed forever.  It had to be invented. […] Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements.  Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done…”  Montaigne, Bakewell argues, "was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention."  I’m in the midst of writing a critical article on two Irish essayists (the essay is very, very rare in Irish literature) and it’s been very interesting to recognize aspects of Robinson and Arthur’s philosophies of writing craft in Bakewell’s observations of the 16th century Montaigne: the belief in the local, the ordinary, the purpose in getting to the minutiae so as to show the universal in a specific place, the specific in the universal experience. 

That’s why my niece and nephew matter, that’s why Bruce matters, it’s why the people still dazed from their car accident matter.  It doesn’t matter that you don’t know any of them—if I write my joy in my family right, if I write my grief right, if I write the fear of uncertainty right, you’ll recognize your universal in my specific.  And if I write an essay that tries to work through my godfather’s sudden death, the grief that my godmother must be feeling, the grief that my mother must be feeling, I will naturally return to the everyday memory-making that is forming my (and my parents’) relationship with Cora and Henry, how it’s the everyday memories of Bruce that will linger longest, how the car accident and Bruce’s heart attack are reminders not just of how quickly life can turn—but why it’s not the dramatic moments that are important.  We won’t talk about Death when we gather to remember Bruce—we’ll talk about his life, the quirks that made him absolutely unique.  And if I wrote that essay, if I wrote it right, you could substitute any name you wanted for the people I’ve mentioned, and the ideas should still work.

This is why essays matter.  This is why essays are essential.  Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live—but we write essays in order to live, as well. 

The whole point of Bakewell’s book—and of Montaigne himself and his writings—is to learn to pay attention.  No other writing form does this in quite the way the essay does.  The uncertainty that the essay relies on—Montaigne’s classic “though I don’t know”—is amplified by the Stoic, Epicurean, and Skeptic philosophies that prized different perspectives as a way to understand the interactions of self and world.  What made Montaigne great—and his Essais what they are—is his absolute commitment to refusing to commit to a side.  His are not arguments—they are explorations.  The multiplicity of perspectives he considers is absolutely unique at this point and this is what allows his work to find that specific in the universal and the universal in the specific.  (Even though it could get him in trouble.)  To find the value in the ordinary, rather than in the dramatic and impressive, is a good lesson for all of us.  She writes of Montaigne using Plutarch’s (fictional) techniques of “stuffing in fistfuls of imagination, conversations, people, animals, and objects of all kinds, rather than by coldly arranging abstractions and arguments.”

But I keep returning to Montaigne’s belief in the power of the ordinary, the power of considering all possible perspectives.  These are the things that are important to me right now, the making of memories with Cora, so that some of her earliest memories of me are things like cooking and baking, even to painting our toenails (like we did a couple of days ago).  Cora was quite upset that I’d taken our matching polish off my fingernails, so it might have to go back on when she gets up.  But this is my life, nothing new under the sun, but it still feels special and wonderful.  Why that is is the beginning of an essay.

Joe Bonomo, in a recent post to the Brevityblog, observes, “Essayists like to quote this line of Vivian Gornick’s, and for good reason: “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” Those quoting her often overlook Gornick’s next sentence: “For that, the imagination is required.” This isn’t the imagination that we associate with a fiction writer conjuring up invented experience; this is the imagination required to see actual experiences as threads in a larger fabric, experience that until it is shaped in language and reflection remains private, the equivalent of the scrapbook or Instagram photo that means so much to me, yet so little to you.”

When Bakewell writes, “Montaigne reminded his contemporaries of the old Stoic lesson:  to avoid feeling swamped by a difficult situation, try imagining your world from different angles or at different scales of significance.”  Bonomo, likewise, has a similar perspective: " It’s the charge of the autobiographical essayist to turn himself slightly, to alter his gaze so that it faces a direction other than inward, to merge with language and another’s self to produce something fresh, startling, and vividly human."  But what the essayist attempts is different, because what we do is not invented.  It may be a play of the imagination, but the purpose is different.  It is a matter of paying attention, at a different angle than what fiction writers or poets do.  All genres are necessary.

I take a break from this to try to convince my parents’ dog, an adolescent, overly-exuberant doodle, to come in and stop barking at people walking by—she won’t—and I spend a good twenty minutes failing to catch her.  (She’ll listen to my parents, but they’re not here.) I come in—without her—and my irritation is poisonous.  Maybe it’s better that I don’t catch her while I’m in this mood.

Then, Bakewell in one of her delightful Montaignian moments, reminds me, “We understand nothing of a dog’s experience: of ‘the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts.’ They understand nothing of ours, when for example they watch us stare interminably at the pages of a book.  Yet both states of consciousness share a certain quality: the ‘zest’ or ‘tingle’ which comes when one is completely absorbed in what one is doing.  This tingle should enable us to recognize each other’s similarity even when the objects of our interest our different.  Recognition, in turn, should lead to kindness.  Forgetting this similarity is the worst political error, as well as the worst personal and moral one.”

The same is true of joy as it is of grief.  All that binds the two are the ordinary moments of life, both absolutely universal and absolutely unique.  And in the waning light of this day, as I sit at my parents' dining room table as rain moves in, a male cardinal on the fence, fire-bright.

Summer Academics: What's on Your Reading List?

It's that time of year, that weekend when classes are officially done and there's a stack of portfolios to be graded (by tomorrow, because somehow you thought that was a good idea), but you're not awake yet because this weekend is also always filled with the intense socializing we've been unable to do since the beginning of the semester.  As a result, it's 9:48 and I'm really not awake, after a lovely night with friends.  I'm definitely an early-to-bed-early-to-rise person--most of the time the alarm goes off at 5:30 or 6:00.  So I have some Maritime Mist in the Bredemeijer and I'm contemplating the wisdom of hopping into these fiction portfolios before I'm fully caffeinated or if dishes might be a better way to ease into it.

I'm heading North this week and I'm excited about it.  My nephew had his three-month birthday on the 26th and he's finally the size of a normal baby.  He hasn't hit double digits yet, but he's getting close.  My parents took my three-year-old niece to the horse exhibition at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, because C. is delightfully horse crazy, but my mother reported that there was something going on in C's brain yesterday, some sort of logic that said she was being disloyal to her favorite horses last summer, if she showed too much interest in yesterday's.  But C. wore her little red cowboy boots and what's not to love about babies in boots?  C. and I have a pedicure party planned for this week, among other things.  My grandmother had a stroke two weeks ago and while we thought (again) that this was the end, she's bounced back, good as new.  Between Gram and Grandpa (who passed away in 2006), we've got some good longevity-genes in our blood.  But Gram was diagnosed with terminal cancer in March, three days before she turned 90, so I want to spend as much time with her as I can.  (And all of this reminds me that life is wonderful and worth writing about--and my family is a constant reminder that real life can be as fascinating to write about as fiction.  Though C. and Gram would make excellent characters...)

But there are things To Do.  Many things.  My list includes:

• Write article on Tim Robinson and Chris Arthur by 1 June.
• Plan Summer 254 class, to start on 10 June.
• Read for and then write paper on Irish noir for IASIL conference
• ...and then turn that paper into a full-length article to submit by 1 September.
• Continue to submit my two books to various presses.
• Get some essays out there into the world.

And that's not even counting my summer reading list, which I haven't even started working on.  Right now, all that's on my reading list is what I need to read for those papers and the class I'm doing.  Which includes (some rereads):

• Tim Robinson, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom.
• I'm probably going to need to reread a fair number of his other books to write this paper...
• Chris Arthur, On the Shoreline of Knowledge.
• Same, as Robinson.
• Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady.
• Dervla Murphy (haven't decided the book).
• Declan Burke, Eightball Boogie.
• Benjamin Black (reread all of them).
• Adrian McKinty, Cold, Cold Ground.
• Arlene Hunt (not sure yet).
• Tana French (reread most of them).
• Ken Bruen (reread most of them).
• Paul Gruchow, Letters to a Young Madman.
• Sean Doolittle, Burn.
• Joy Castro, Nearer Home (even though it's not out yet).
• I won't tell you how many William Kent Kruger books I'm behind... 
• And I really need to read more Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, Emma Donoghue, and Sebastian Barry.

And this morning, hopped up on Maritime Mist (with sugar, because I feel like celebrating), this interview with Theo Dorgan and Colum McCann just gives me all kinds of ideas about writing and place and what does it mean to be a writer-in-a-place, a writer-of-a-place, and why does it even matter? (It does matter, but the question is one worth long hours of consideration.)  And I'm hoping that whatever I read this summer gives me fodder to create a couple of new classes/syllabi to have in my syllabi bank.

Even though I get tremendous joy from rereading books, I really want to plow some new ground here.  I'm hoping that I get to teach Eng. 180 (Intro to Lit), so I hope I can read some new books to bulk up for that.  I want to read more Agatha Christie, more Raymond Chandler--and maybe this is the summer that I make myself read Dashiell Hammett.  My shelves of Crime Lit are full of books I picked up at last year's library book sale--and I haven't read them yet.  I really want to bulk up on my noir, because that's pretty thin in my experience and I find it fascinating.

I haven't even mentioned yet the summer prep required for the extreme sport that is The Job Search.  I need to rework my materials and hope that they will bring me better luck than last year.

Wherever I end up reading and writing, whether it's my parents' basement or their living room, my sisters' backyard, or some other place, there will be much reading.  What's on your Summer Reading List or your Summer To Do list?

End of the Semester Advice to Students

I've given this speech to my students at the end of every semester for more semesters than I can count.  (And I thought I'd posted it to this blog before, but I can't find it, so here it is again.)  I first came across this piece when I was doing my MFA and my friend Matt sat me down on his couch and read it to me.  It was in an issue of Men’s Health and it was an issue on 100 Things to do Before You Die or something like that.  Bob Shacochis’s “Become an Expat” was #16 and it’s also hanging on my office door for anybody to read. 

This time, as I read it, I have plans in the works for a July trip to Ireland to present at the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures conference (a paper titled "'My Kinda Place': The Craft of the Urban in Contemporary Irish Noir," which basically means I'm going to be looking at how several contemporary noir novelists craft urban spaces to be active participants in their narratives.)  But I'll spend a week in Belfast (which I've only been to once and that was with an incredible sinus infection, so I don't think it counts) and then I'll go to Galway for a week to finish up writing my dissertation.  

Not only do I appreciate this little piece for its content, but I love it as a writer.  It never fails to light a little something inside me, as a writer as well as a traveler.  Besides being beautifully written (listen to the internal rhymes in the “here’s the point” paragraph), it makes me a little itchy and makes me want to explore whatever options are available to go live abroad.  It makes my restless soul a little more restless, which is sometimes a good thing.  It inspires me, so I hope it inspires my students to continue to think outside the box—and even to live outside the box.

I don’t remember when I started making this piece a part of my End of the Semester speech to my students, but this is the gist of it.  

***

"When you teach grad students, those brainy, dreamy, slack-ass selves who have been squeezed through the educational intestine into the relatively expansive bowel of never-ending higher education, you have a recurring thought each time you enter a seminar room and scan the robust, nascently cynical faces of the whatever generation horseshoed around the table, receptive to the morsels of your wisdom: When are you guys ever going to get the fuck out of here?

And I don't mean finish the degree, get a job, a life. I mean turn your life upside down, expose it, raw, to the muddle. 'Put out,' as the New Testament (Luke 5:4) would have it, 'into deep water.' A headline in the New York Times on gardening delivers the same marching orders: IF A PLANT'S ROOTS ARE TOO TIGHT, REPOT. Go among strangers in strange lands. Sniff, lick, and swallow the mysteries. Learn to say clearly in an unpronounceable language, 'Please, I very much need a toilet. A doctor. Change for a 500,000 note. I very much need a friend.'

If you want to know a man, the proverb goes, travel with him. If you want to know yourself, travel alone. If you want to know your own home, your own country, go make a home in another country (not Canada, England, or most of Western Europe.) Stop at a crossroads where the light is surreal, nothing is familiar, the air smells like a nameless spice, and the vibes are just plain alien, and stay long enough to truly be there. Become an expatriate, a victim of self-inflicted exile for a year or two. Sink into an otherness that reflects a reverse image of yourself, wherein lies your identity, or lack of one. Teach English in Japan, aquaculture in the South Pacific, accounting in Brazil. Join the Peace Corps, work in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, set up a fishing camp on the beach of Uruguay, become a foreign correspondent, study architecture in Istanbul, sell cigarettes in China.

And here's the point: Amid the fun, the risk, the discomfort, the seduction and sex in a fog of miscommunication, the servants and thieves, the food, the disease, your new friends and enemies, the grand dance between romance and disillusionment, you'll find out a few things you thought you knew but didn't.

You'll learn to engage the world, not fear it, or at least not to be paralyzed by your fear of it. You'll find out, to your surprise, how American you are--100 percent, and you can never be anything but--and that is worth knowing. You'll discover that going native is self-deluding, a type of perversion. Whatever gender or race you are, you'll find out how much you are eternally hated and conditionally loved and thoroughly envied, based on the evidence of your passport.

You'll find out what you need to know to be an honest citizen of your own country, patriotic or not, partisan or nonpartisan, active or passive. And you'll understand in your survivor's heart that it's best not to worry too much about making the world better. Worry about not making it worse.

When you come back home, it's never quite all the way, and only your dog will recognize you."

As our time together is coming to a close, I want to end the semester with the best advice I can give you. And that is to Get Out of Here.  If at all possible, study abroad.  And I’m not meaning a vacation to Europe for a couple of weeks.  I mean living somewhere long enough that you have to go grocery shopping and unpack your suitcase.  Go for a semester or a year.  And if at all possible, don’t share your living space with people who come from the same place you do.  There are things you can only learn by picking up your life and seeing what it looks like somewhere else.  There are things you will never learn in a book, never learn in college.  Some things you have to see for yourself.  The milk will come in a different shaped carton, the vegetables might be called by a different name.  Maybe there will be different flavors, different colors.  But what you learn about yourself will be the most important.  I took great classes when I was in Ireland, some of which remain my favorite classes I’ve ever taken, but I learned what I could put up with and what I couldn’t.  Nothing is too small to learn.

I disagree that you shouldn’t go to most of Western Europe.  I went to Ireland because they spoke English.  At least I thought they spoke English—and that’s something you’ll never learn in a book, that Irish English and British English and American English are not the same thing, barely from the same root language.  You need to learn for yourself what you can handle and what you can’t.  You can’t learn that in a book. 

[Pause:  I’m making myself homesick for Ireland, as always happens when I make this speech…and it’s not helping that the weather outside is damp, I’ve got Irish Breakfast in my mug, and the Chieftains on iTunes…]

If your educational plan or finances don’t allow for studying abroad, when you get out of college, don’t take a job in your hometown or even your home state.  If you’ve got a plan for grad school, choose a place nowhere near anything that’s familiar.  Go somewhere you’ve always been curious about. Go to a place you’ve never been, just because you can—go to a place that you have a crush on. Nobody says you have to stay there forever.  But you should go.  Just go.  Because you can—and you should.  There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.  Throw a dart at a map if you have to and go live there long enough that you make a choice to return.  I’ve known way too many people who are still in my hometown just because they never left. If your dream is to go back to your hometown and take a job there, make it a deliberate choice to return.  Don’t ever end up anywhere by default just because you never left. 

I grew up in northern Minnesota and I went to college in western Minnesota.  But when I got out of college, I went to eastern Washington, a place I had no experience with, where I only knew one other soul.  And you’d think that there wouldn’t be much cultural difference between certain parts of the country, because we’re all Americans, right?  Wrong.  Absolutely wrong.  In the Pacific Northwest, I learned that while they’re friendly people, they’re also very self-sufficient and stay out of each other’s business, to the point where people won’t offer to help you.  You have to ask for it.  Why is this?  Well, I figure that because the Northwest was so far away from government that they had to rely on themselves for survival and now they dislike any kind of interference, telling them how to live.  When I graduated from grad school and moved to Ohio, I thought there wouldn’t be much difference between Minnesota and Ohio, since they’re both Midwestern states, but that’s almost been the worst culture shock I’ve suffered so far.  And you’d never know that unless you experience it for yourself.  I've been in Nebraska for three years now and I could talk to you about all kinds of things that happen in Nebraska that don't happen elsewhere—and this is a good thing.

It’s been many, many years since I left Minnesota and I’m not back there yet—and it's a place I want to return to.  But I need to make the choice to return there.  I don’t want anything in my life to be default.  And neither should anything be in your life.  Be deliberate about your decisions.

The best advice I can give is Get Out Of Here. 

So, Get Out Of Here.  

Eng. 250: The Sonnet

I can't believe how the semester has already gained so much steam that regularly updating this blog as to the really exciting things that are happening in my classes has gotten away from me.  I resolve to be better about that--because there area some really neat things happening there.  On a side note, coming into my 250 (Intro to Creative Writing) on Tuesday, after the inaugural on Monday, was pretty neat, because we got to talk about our national tradition of inaugurating our president with music and poetry--and then we got to talk about Richard Blanco's "One Today."  Terrific discussion.

(I have specific things to report about the contemporary Nebraska fiction we're reading in my 252 class, as we've been reading mostly Ron Hansen's short stories from his new and collected collection, She Loves Me Not, recently released.  My personal favorite:  "Wickedness."  But more on that later.)

In my English 250, Introduction to Creative Writing, we're starting with poetry.  This is the first time I've taught a multi-genre creative writing class since my MFA and I'm so excited about it, hoping this rubs off on my students.  Not only are we starting with poetry, but we're starting with form poetry.  I believe that students need to have a grounding in the history of the genres they're choosing to write in, especially in an intro class, because if they choose to take further poetry (or literature) classes, they're going to be expected to know what these forms are and what they do.  I often think that the wealth of fantastic poetry that happens to be written in form is often overlooked, often dismissed by beginning students--and I want them to be able to appreciate what these forms do (if I can't convince them to love them).  We started out with the villanelle last week, then the sestina.  Tuesday we looked at the pantoum; Thursday (yesterday), we looked at the sonnet.  (We're using Eavan Boland and Mark Strand's anthology The Making of a Poem.)

Each of my students has been divided into groups to present on each of these forms and doing such presentations so early in the semester is deliberate.  First, it gets my students talking to each other in small groups, bonds them early in a way that they need to be to function well in a workshop.  Second, it makes them accountable to the rest of the class, gets them talking to fellow students outside their groups.  And third, it actively involves them in the making of the class.

Yesterday, the sonnet, was my favorite day so far and I didn't see it coming.  The class started with the presentation and this group, like the ones before, picked up on things that have started to be very important--namely, hearing the poetry aloud.  We not only got the specifics of the form, what separates a Petrarchan sonnet from a Shakespearean, but they found Edna St. Vincent Millay reading via YouTube (something we've done quite often these past weeks).  It's become very important to us to hear the writer reading his or her own work, whenever we can.  As the presentation closed, we were talking about Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Carrion Comfort" and we pulled it apart (with a gentle reminder to Google unfamiliar words and references).  What kind, what meter, what rhyme scheme--this is is our first line of inquiry.  My students had some trouble discerning what the poem itself was about, and because we knew it was Petrarchan, we knew that the first octet would be different than the sestet.  So, what's happening in the octet?  Line by line, word by word, we were able to figure it out.  What's the turn in the sestet?  What's the allusion in the final line?  Once we understood the content, we were able to talk about why Hopkins chose a sonnet for this poem, rather than any other form.

I then assigned each group a sonnet with the directions, as has become familiar, to scan the poem to determine meter, label the rhyme scheme, and identify what kind of sonnet it is.  We looked at Shelley's "Ozymandias," Patrick Kavanagh's "Epic," Seamus Heaney's "The Haw Lantern," Denis Johnson's "Heat," and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee."  Having two Irish sonnets in there was unintentional, but they turned out to be the most interesting discussions of the day.  Denis Johnson's "Heat" also provoked an incredible discussion about why he uses this constrictive form to write about the chaos that is August--and what we felt also dealt with the freedom of the 1960s.

And before I get into Heaney, I will say that I got the interpretation of Kavanagh's "Epic" wrong--and as I realized I was wrong (something I will bring up in class on Tuesday), I started to wonder if it matters, to what extent a poem must stand on its own.  My reading of "Epic"--which started with the literal reading of the poem, aloud, by one of my students.  (And as a side note, teaching my students how to read aloud has been interesting, trying to get them to slow down and READ the poem, not just the words--this is an incredible poem to read aloud, over and over again.)  This group had looked at meter, rhyme scheme, format and then we looked at the references--and my thought process identified "that Munich bother" as the 1972 Munich Olympics and Ballyrush and Gortin as sites of conflict during the Troubles in the 1970s.  Kavanagh's closing with Homer's ghost whispering, "I made the Iliad from such/A local row.  Gods make their own importance"--that made sense to me in terms of the Troubles.  Upon further research, the "Munich bother" was the Munich Agreement, which did not result in "peace for our time" and saw WW2 start a year later.  Hm.  "Epic" was published in 1960, so Kavanagh could not have been referencing the Troubles, but I believe that good poetry is porous.  There's a part of me that doesn't want to give up that interpretation.

But the highlight of the day--and I still may be riding this high--was the discussion of Seamus Heaney's "The Haw Lantern."  The group first identified that it's not a real sonnet, because it only has thirteen lines (though it would be Petrarchan if it had that line), and the octet and the sestet are reversed.  They did not mind so much a lack of consistent meter or rhyme scheme, but the line issue irritated them.  We then, as a class, worked through what the poem meant, what a "haw" was, who Diogenes was.  The movement of the little light of hope in the sestet that turns into great cynicism.  But then, my flash was this:  what if the white space between the stanzas isn't actually white space?  What if that is actually the fourteenth line of the sonnet?  My friend Jeannie rightly observed that "Irish sonnets are not accidental," which is incredibly true--and true of any form--and I'm still searching for an answer to this question from anyone who knows poetry better than I do, someone who knows this particular poem better than I do.

Needless to say, the class ended on a really high note.  I have their Think Pieces from this last week (which I don't think will address the sonnet, though it might)--but I'm really looking forward to seeing what they have to say--I can honestly say that my students' Think Pieces are one of my most favorite parts of the week.  Last week, I got pretty excited over how many of my student wrote about no longer being afraid of form, of meter and rhyme, that they could see the freedom that these forms offered.  Glorious.  I also have their first poems they've turned in, so we'll see how those look too.  Next week we study the elegy and the ode--they have poems due next week as well--and then we jump into our first workshop!  

First Day of the New Semester!

I don't actually teach till tomorrow, but today is the first day of what looks like will be a stupendous semester.  Lots of fun things going on, lots of projects and deadlines and such, but all of it is of the Really Exciting variety.  By some fluke of bureaucracy, I have two creative writing classes this semester, a 250 (Intro to Creative Writing) and a 252 (Intro to Fiction).  I will say the degree to which I was disappointed I didn't have a comp class surprised me, since I was really excited to try my Natural Disasters class again (and just have one new class to prep with my dissertation revising and defense coming up in the next two months)--but looking a gift class in the mouth is dumb.  I'm so excited about these classes.

In my 250, we're going to be concentrating on form (for the most part).  I'll be teaching form poetry, using Eavan Boland and Mark Strand's The Making of a Poem, because I think it's really important to disorient my students' ideas of poetry--and my prose students' ideas of language--and narrow their focus down to what a line, what a word, what a syllable, what a sound can do.  I also think that students should have exposure to form poetry in intro classes, even if they choose not to write in those forms.  We'll be writing short stories in the fiction unit, naturally, and the goal is to transition from language and image to the shape of a story, how a story add Language and Shape to Idea, writing Montaignian essays that move away from the shape of experience and give precedence to the shape of thought.  It's the first time I've gotten to teach nonfiction in a creative writing setting--and I'm pretty excited about it.

My 252 is something I've taught twice before, in settings different enough that I hardly consider them the same classes.  The first time was Fall 2011, a weekly night class, a schedule I adored, and I chose texts that were only loosely grouped around place, trying to teach them that they could write about anything, set anywhere.  In this class, I learned that teaching a novel (and by accident I'd chosen a mystery novel) is essential to my fiction pedagogy.  The second time, Spring 2012, the schedule was an afternoon MWF, and I used contemporary Irish fiction to challenge my students to apply what they know about fiction to texts they would usually only find in capital-L Literature classes, not creative writing classes.  This class also provided the opportunity for our cross-class collaboration with Dawn Duncan's British Literature class--as we read Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea.  (The choosing of a novel was deliberate, but by accident, it turned out to be another mystery novel...something that now has become a permanent part of my pedagogy.)  I've scheduled either in-person or Skype visits with various writers we will be reading--and I'm excited about that too.

This time around, it's a TR schedule, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the longer class periods twice a week balance between the once-weekly and the MWF schedule.  Because I knew I'd have to rearrange the schedule anyway, that the two syllabi I already had prepared wouldn't exactly fit the new format, I figured I might as well choose new texts:  so, this time, I'm teaching contemporary Nebraska fiction.  One of the most important moments of my entire educational career came in a Minnesota Writers class when I was in college, where I learned not only about the literature that comes from my home state (I had no idea that the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature was a Minnesotan), but also that I, as a writer, could write about Minnesota.  It was an incredible moment.  As a result, I think it's absolutely essential for both writers and scholars to know the literature of their home state--to the degree that I think a course in Nebraska Writers should be mandatory for all English majors at UNL.

So, I've chosen to use Ron Hansen's She Loves Me Not: New and Selected Stories, which is just out; Ladette Randolph's anthology A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction; and Sean Doolittle's thriller Rain Dogs.  I tried to get Ron Hansen to Skype with us, but his schedule would not permit it.  Sean Doolittle was excited to participate--and the Omaha novelist is actually making the trek to Lincoln to visit my class in person.  Guess how excited I am about that?  And my delightful advisor, Jonis Agee, is coming as well, to talk with us about short stories.

Both classes will become more aware of how they fit into the existing community of writers, not just by talking to established creative writers in person or via Skype, but as we participate in the life of the writing community at UNL.  Sherman Alexie is coming to launch the Winter Issue of Prairie Schooner; Prairie Schooner is also doing a "Global Ireland" event, to which my friend Eamonn Wall is coming; I'm looking forward to in-class and out-of-class excursions to Morrill Hall; Michael Forsberg, the eminent Nebraska photographer, is having an exhibit at the Great Plains Art Museum...and more, and more, and more.

This is also the semester where I revise and defend my dissertation.  I finished the draft of it before I went North for Christmas (a good thing, because the only thing I accomplished Up North was making a zillion Christmas cookies with my seriously delightful niece), which means I revise it over the next six weeks or so, and defend it in March.  (My niece will be getting a brother about the time I hope my revised diss is done, which coincides with my grandmother celebrating her 90th birthday, so that's another time-sensitive goal.) With a TR teaching schedule, that means the bulk of my MWF can be devoted to writing.  I've never had something like this, time-wise, and I'm pretty excited about it.

Today's writing thought, from Matt Bell's website, which is always a good way to start the day:

On Ken Bruen's The Guards

Winter Break is here!  There's not much winter in Nebraska, but I'm soon heading North and there's snow up there.  I can't wait to make snow kitties with my niece (her request) and throw snowballs at my parents' puppy, who is obsessed with snow.  But for now, in the days after submitting final grades and putting together my provisional syllabi for spring, I'm working on the other things that need to get started before I head Up North.  So, I have my experimental chocolate-mint shortbread (didn't turn out exactly right, but it tastes good) on the counter, cooling, and noir-dark Assam in my favorite teapot.  It's Sunday, the Christmas lights are cozy, and I have my fireplace app crackling on my iPad, blues on the iTunes.  A little later in the day, I'll flip on my battery-powered candles and bask in their ambience.  No actual fire in my apartment these days.  Too dangerous.  It is, as my mother said when she saw that my sisters had given me these electric candles for my birthday:  "Well, your apartment is sort of flammable."  Indeed.


But it's a nice day to curl up on the couch with a book, even though that book is one I'm teaching next semester.  Or it's one that I need to read for the two articles I'm writing next semester.  (In addition to revising and defending my dissertation.)

Today, I finished Ken Bruen's first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards.  (Check out the interview I did with him a while back.)  And I'm surrounded by the gritty joy of being back in Galway, even if it's in the company of Jack Taylor--who, I have mentioned, is the most thoroughly unlikeable character I keep spending time with.  I'd read later books in this series, but never the first one.  And since I'm working on this article about the craft of place in Irish crime fiction, looking here at Bruen's first was a good place to start, and this is the joy of being an English teacher, one who gets wrapped up in all incarnations of the page, but in this instance, I'm wrapped up in what I'm reading both as a literature scholar and a creative writer.  It's a heady mixture.

The article itself is starting to take shape in my head, but it's a testament to Bruen (who I unashamedly love) that I keep getting distracted from the real reason I'm reading this book, getting lost in the darkness and the craft of the sentences.  If you've never read Bruen, you must.  It'll take a little getting used to his style--and Jack Taylor himself--but it's worth it.  The darkness of this book comes from the sparseness of concrete details, the lack of sensory images, but I realized on this read that Bruen draws Galway not through the kind of concrete details that writers have come to expect from prose, but through people.  He mentions the Romanian woman blowing on her pipe outside Easons, and I'm pretty sure I've seen her.  It's through these people that he draws the character of Shop Street.  It's through the winos that he draws Eyre Square.  Bruen doesn't need to tell us that the hospital where the wino Padraig ends up is a bleak, horrible place--he doesn't need to tell us the color of the walls.  He just needs to show the orderly giving afternoon tea and biscuits to everyone in the ward except for Padraig.

And then, when you get lulled into the hard quality of what Desi Kenny called "machine gun prose," most of which is contain in Hemingway-spare dialogue, then Bruen hits you with moments like this: "He was one of those skull smokers.  Sucked the nicotine in so hard it made his cheekbones bulge.  He blew out the smoke with a deep sigh.  Whether contentment or agony, it was a close call" (165).  Then you just have to sit back and breathe for a while, because he's just knocked the air from you.  Sentences are amazing, powerful, beautiful things that should never, ever be underestimated.  And this is why.  This is why we read.  This is why we write.

Thinking about the movement between natural and built environments, where the sunshine is something to be avoided and feared, where the entire nature of the narrative is set up in the first lines of the second chapter:  “There are no private eyes in Ireland.  The Irish wouldn’t wear it.  The concept brushes perilously close to the hated ‘informer.’ You can get away with most anything except ‘telling’ (5).  The places so important to the development of characters and development of plots are essential to the Irish peculiarities of telling and not-telling.  Storytelling and secret-keeping.  What we tell and what we don't tell.  And as I'm thinking more specifically about this novel right now, the three main places this story hangs on--various pubs, Rahoon Cemetery, and Nimmo's Pier--each represent a facet of telling or not telling.

Love it.

I'm going to reread other Bruen novels in the course of my work on this article, but I'm feeling good about this start.  And it reminds me why I like to read crime fiction, especially in the wake of Newtown, when I didn't think I could handle any mention of violence--crime fiction gives readers closure, if not a happy ending, then a mending of the rips and tears and gashes that the crime caused.  Whether there's justice or revenge at the end of a novel, that pinhead is ready for the angel's disco.  But the good guys generally win--or win something--at the end.  And sometimes that's what we need.