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.  

On Re-Reading Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever"

I returned from Montreal on Tuesday night, after a truly excellent conference meeting of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. An amazing ten days in a city I'd never been to before, exploring not just the newer downtown areas of Montreal but Old Montreal as well, the sites of the World's Fair and the Olympics. But then, after the conference, I went on the post-conference tour to Quebec City and Grosse Ile. It's been nearly a week since I was there and I'm still struggling to find words for the experience. And so, as I'm unpacking my Jeep in Lincoln and trying to remember where things go in my apartment after being gone all summer, I pulled out Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever and felt the need to reread the story "Ship Fever."

 I've written before about that strangely intimate experience of reading a book in its setting--and if you haven't tried it, you must--and that experience doesn't change much if you read something after you've been to the setting.  Most of my memories of Grosse Ile right now are sensory and tactile, the absolute oppression of the sun, the way the wind picked up at a very specific moment (more on that in a moment), the movement of the ferry on the St. Lawrence River, the notes that Patrick pulled from his pipe, his flute.  I have much to write about Patrick, our musician, and Grosse Ile, but that's for another time, another place.

Patrick.

We arrived at Berthier Sur Mer about 45 minutes after leaving Quebec City and we had about an hour before the ferry would take us to Grosse Ile.  Grosse Ile is one of several islands in an archipelago in the St. Lawrence River, not the largest, and it was the quarantine station for the port of Quebec from 1835-1937.  It was never an immigration station, like Ellis Island; its sole purpose was to evaluate the immigrants for illness, specifically the ones most likely to lead to epidemics (cholera, typhus), quarantine them on the island until they passed inspection, and then they could go on to Quebec City or Montreal.  As we approached the island, an immense stone cross dominated our vision.

Grosse Ile, from the ferry.

This is the Irish Memorial Cross, erected in 1909, to honor the nearly 5500 Irish who are buried on Grosse Ile.  Here's the thing about Grosse Ile that stung me first:  In the whole of the island's 105 year history, there are 7553 buried on the island (they are very deliberate about saying buried, not died--more on that later) and 5424 of those died in 1847 in a six-month period.  These were overwhelmingly Irish, fleeing the worst of the Great Famine.  Reread that.  Three quarters of those who are buried on Grosse Ile died during six months, mostly of the typhus epidemic.  Most years, Grosse Ile processed 20,000-30,000 immigrants--but in 1847, the number was closer to 100,000.  There wasn't room for that many healthy people, let alone sick.  This is intellectual knowledge, not knowledge in your bones.  There's a difference.

We got a very brief history of the island from our tour guide, Pierre-Loup, and then we walked in the incredible heat, the umbrellas we'd brought against warnings of rain raised against the sun.  Then the rise of the landscape changed and at first all we could see was a mowed expanse and a picket fence.  And then the wooden crosses inside the fence came into focus, large white crosses placed at odd intervals.  We followed Pierre-Loup up the hill until we could fix the entire expanse in our field of vision.  What we were seeing was still not clear--I mean, I assumed it was a cemetery, but then Pierre-Loup told us what we were looking at.  

Yes, this is the Irish cemetery and there are nearly 5,000 people buried here.  I could probably have figured that out on my own.  But what I couldn't comprehend was what I was looking at and I blamed it on the heat, the fact I had no personal connection to what was happening here.

And then, what Pierre-Loup was saying finally clicked:  yes, this a the mass grave.  That much I could understand.  But I assumed that the people were buried on the raised portions of the cemetery--but that's not right.  Everyone who died on the island got a coffin and they all got their own coffin.  The coffins are buried three deep here.  And when the coffins and the bodies began to decompose, the land collapsed.  So the people are buried in those spaces where the land dips.  For some reason, that froze my mind in place.  I had no more thoughts, no more associations.  

Memorial for the physicians who died tending the sick, 1847.

And then Patrick began to play a lament.  Margaret read a poem.  And some of our group began to weep.  I did not.  But I let Patrick's music grieve for me.

Cholera Bay, 

where ships carrying cholera docked, away from the main wharf

So, then, rereading "Ship Fever" after seeing the landscape for myself was, again, that incredibly intimate experience I've come to recognize as what happens when you know a book's setting.  I tried to imagine the St. Lawrence choked with tall-masted ships, the water thick with debris tossed overboard in an attempt to ease the quarantine inspection, all the human voices, the smells of the bodies, the sickness, the death, the constant burials and the constant hammering of coffins.  But as I read the story of Lauchlin Grant, Nora, Susannah, and the other characters, I knew the landscape of their stories, knew it as it was windblown into the pores of my skin and baked by the sun.  It matters that now I know what the approach to Grosse Ile looked like, felt like.  It matters that now I know what happened here, how it happened, because now I know what Grosse Ile felt like, to me.  It's a type of empathy, but not quite.  And so "Ship Fever" is all the more affective to me, because now I know the bedrock of Barrett's words planted into that soil.

So, today's question:  what works of literature have you read in its setting (or works whose setting you know intimately)--what is your experience of reading when you know the landscape the writer is writing about?

No Name Reading Series: Aran By Foot

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

Enjoy!

Eng. 992: Week 4 Response

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where I'm From: A Minnesota Babine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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