IWC 100: These Things I Know

To tell the truth, I'm slightly terrified.  I've never done a Writing Marathon before and I'm not convinced that doing my first one with my 8:00 class full of sleepy freshmen was a good place to start.  But live and learn.  I will do this two more times (at 2:40 today and 1:20 tomorrow) and I'm very interested to see how it all goes.

(If you've never heard of Writing Marathons or the National Writing Project, start here.)

We're thinking about communities and knowledge these days (and I say "these days" because I have one class that's on a MWF schedule and two that are on a TR schedule) and when I ask them to free write about "something that they know," I get blank stares and after they've written for a while, it's been pulling teeth to get them to say things out loud, because even if they can't verbalize it, what they're reacting to is that some forms of knowledge are valued and others are not.  They're afraid of sounding dumb, like a thing they know will get them laughed at.  These classes are all fairly talkative, so this is a brand new wrinkle for them.  But then somebody gets the ball rolling.

So far, they've started out with bodies of knowledge that are fairly valued.  I know how to play basketball.  I know how to solve a Rubik's Cube.  But then, as I've learned, somebody shouts out something less valued.  I know how to jump start a car.  I know why my hometown can only grow potatoes, strawberries, and edible beans (because the soil is sand).  I know how to knit.  I know how to make a "mean corn chowder," one of my students said yesterday, to which I replied:  "Why do people always say that?  Why is it always 'mean'? Why don't people make 'nice' corn chowders?"  This made my class laugh.  Then, because the class is getting more comfortable, they shout out things that are less and less valued as bodies of knowledge, but are still important.

How do we come to know these things?  We've read a few pieces from Paul Gruchow's book Grass Roots--and we talk about the different ways that Gruchow has come to specific knowledge.  Sometimes it's personal experience, sometimes it's a mentor, sometimes it's basic, gut-level curiosity that leads us to Google or to the library.  Who owns various bodies of knowledge?  What do the women in a community know?  How is that different than what the men know?  What do insiders know that outsiders don't?

Today, I brought to class two different articles that considered the relationship between place and community in very different ways.  The first was an article from the Huffington Post about the "25 Healthiest and Happiest Cities in America" and Minneapolis-St. Paul was #3 (for scores in heart health) and surprise of surprises, Fargo was #6, for strength of faith.  Also of interest was what HuffPo labeled as the "Happiness Hub," the Northern Plains Botanic Society.  I know where I'm going with my camera when I get some (make some?) free time.  But this idea of Our Place (and by that I'm including Moorhead with Fargo) as being a healthy and happy place--rather than being in the middle of a wasteland, a piece of flyover country, a place considered of little value to Those of Discerning Taste, is incredibly interesting.

My friend Jeannie also posted this article about Cleveland: "The American Grandeur of Cleveland."

But the other article I brought was from MPR:  "Minnesota Food Insecurity Still at an All-Time High."  How do we, then, measure happiness?  What are the obstacles to creating strong communities?  How can we truly be a place that measures high on happiness indices but still has more than ten percent of its citizens not knowing where their next meal is coming from?  What is the obstacle to all Minnesotans--and Americans in general--having adequate food?  My parents' church in the Cities participates in Kid Pack, which packs weekend food for kids whose only meals might come from school.  On the weekends, then, those kids might go hungry until Monday, when they can get lunch at school.  Then my friend Mandy posted an article about New Jersey throwing food away if a child cannot afford lunch.  I have no words for that.

Not true.  I have lots of words.

But thinking about this:  what do I know?  What do I know that is inherent and unique to the place?  How do I see things in a way that nobody else does?  This is why I'm jumping off the high dive, pedagogically speaking, and sending my students on a Writing Marathon (I hope to God it works and they're not screwing around out there):  what do they see that nobody else does?  How do their own bodies of knowledge affect what they see and how they think about it?  And what questions does it raise for them?

I'm looking forward to finding out.  The debriefing from my first class described the experience of doing the Writing Marathon as awesome and fantastic, freeing.  Because they didn't have to worry about comments of any sort, they could--and did--let themselves write anything they wanted.  They talked about the places they felt comfortable in, places they felt very uncomfortable in (other dorms, etc.) and then we talked about the difference between insiders and outsiders and what do those communities need to know, to feel comfortable?  I will admit to being surprised that they had such positive experiences with the Writing Marathon, since I had absolutely no idea how it would go and what they would gain from it.  But I am heartened, bolstered, intrigued, and thoroughly eager to see what my other two classes make of the experience.

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?

State of Mind: Fast-Paced Summer

• Happy Father's Day--to all the fathers and grandfathers, by blood, by choice, by serendipity.  There are so many ways we create family.
• I'm really hoping to finish my Tim Robinson article today, a prospect that is being hampered by the atmospheric pressure inside my head.  Apparently there will be storms in Lincoln today.  No matter:  Excedrin and a lake of water have taken the edge off, so I can work.  I'm hoping that the lingering pressure in my head will dissolve my writing-filter, knock out the self-censor, so I can get this bad boy done.  It's turning out to be much more of a beast than I thought it would.  Write a paper on Tim Robinson and Chris Arthur and argue for more Irish nonfiction writers to write Montaignian essays?  Sure, no problem.  Piece of cake.  Ugh.  Not so.  It'll be good when it gets done, but it's proving to be harder than I anticipated.  
• I can officially announce now that I've taken a one-year position teaching composition at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, starting in August!  That means that I defend my dissertation on Tuesday the 25th and I will graduate!  I'm seriously excited about it, getting back to Minnesota, teaching at this spectacular institution, and seeing what cool things will happen in the next year.
• This means I have to move!  And pack up my tiny little apartment while still teaching my summer class.  My parents were coming down this week to bring me boxes, pack up my books, and take them North, so I would have some floor space to pack, but those plans have become tentative.
• The draft programme for IASIL is out!  How cool does my panel look?  Of course, I haven't started writing the paper, because I've been working on my Robinson article, but this should be a really cool experience.  This also means that I can back off using Benjamin Black and Stuart Neville in my paper and concentrate on some other writers.  Bring on the Ken Bruen! 

• My 254 class continues to go well, as we all adapt to the 5-day schedule and the longer hour and a half class period.  They turn in their rough draft of their first project on Tuesday.  Should be interesting.  We went to Morrill Hall on Thursday--which was, as usual, wonderful--and they used it as practice for doing place observation and writing up a field report.  We had a great time talking about their experiences in class on Friday.  I'm really going to miss Morrill Hall when I move to Moorhead.

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.  

State of Mind: Boston, Doolittle, Crime Fiction and the Necessity of Fiction in Tragedy

When I was in high school, the welding shop in our small town exploded.  A spark landed where it shouldn’t have and my hometown got its first taste of this kind of tragedy.  Those who were inside survived, but not easily.  Randy Rhodes had third-degree burns over 90% of his body and even at the hospital, he needed to be revived several times.  I didn't know him well, but I knew who he was.  Over the course of several months, he received skin grafts and fought infections, his fingers and toes had to be amputated, but he survived.  I remember seeing him once and the large diamond shapes on his arms, the result of the skin being pulled tightly to cover him.  I remember when he was finally well enough to remake his life and he started making wooden toys.  He joked that they were handmade—no fingers involved.

Last week, Sean Doolittle came to UNL to talk with my fiction class about his novel Rain Dogs—which begins with an explosion in a small town in western Nebraska.  It was an incredible time in my classroom, getting to talk with a writer about the book we’d just finished, to ask him all that we’d been wondering about process and craft, the line between crime fiction and literary fiction.  That afternoon, I assembled a diverse group of panelists to talk about crime literature in the academy—from the fiction writing side, with Sean and Joy Castro, the literature side, with Wendy Oleson and Jackie Harris, and the critical theory aspect, with Roland Vegso.  Bailey Library was full, to my very great surprise and pleasure.  The discussion was lively, lively enough that I didn’t want to cut it off to shift to the Q&A portion—and that provided some incredibly interesting perspectives I wish we’d had more time to explore.  Overall, though, it signaled to me that we have a lot to talk about—and I hope we can continue the discussion in another time and place. (I'll post separately about my class's conversation with Doolittle.)

But as I got up this morning to the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombings, afraid to pull up the news on my computer—because I don’t have a television or cable—I couldn’t shake my 9/11 flashbacks, the cold, the nausea.  When 9/11 happened, I was living in Spokane, unpacking my first apartment, and I didn't have cable then either and the entirety of my first impressions was my imagination.  When classes started, we were all hyper-aware of how our students would be dealing with the aftermath and this morning, as I prepare for my classes today, I want to teach them how to channel what they're feeling into their writing.  Partly, it's catharsis, but partly, it's also using the energy of that grief that has nowhere to go.  When 9/11 happened, I ended up writing thirty, forty, fifty pages in my novel, channeling all that grief and impotent rage into one of my characters.  How do we make sense of the senseless?  (It’s another conversation entirely that this was my first disaster that I followed solely via social media.  That’s an interesting way of telling a story—I wonder what that would look like, on a page, if the story was told in tweets.)

In my 252 class, though, we're going to be talking about Sean Doolittle's visit to our class last week—and I want to ask them to consider some other aspects:  Rain Dogs begins with an explosion and the (eventual) death of one of the boys caught in it.  We're doing the second workshop of their short stories (which are due next week) and it's become a running joke in that class that it's very dangerous to be a character in our class, because nearly every single story has killed off at least one character, if not all of them.  Why do we consider violence to be entertaining?  What is our responsibility as writers?  It's not the Boston Marathon Bombings that's the hot point—it’s the fear and the grief and the motive and the aftermath that's the hot point.  There is more to conflict and drama than death—even incredible acts of terror like we saw yesterday. 

Is tragedy necessary for fiction?  And is fiction necessary during a tragedy?  (I do not mean conspiracy theories.)  Is fiction what we need to give voice to things we cannot say?  It's an interesting question.

The point is not that this week is the most dangerous time in America—from 15 April to 20 April—that Patriot’s Day (the 3rd Monday of April) to Hitler’s birthday is the time when the majority of terrorist activity happens inside our borders.  It’s Waco, it’s Virginia Tech, it’s Oklahoma City, it’s Columbine, it’s Boston.  The conflict and the drama is what happens after the terror subsides:  it’s how we trust and distrust, it’s how we respond to the people around us.  9/11 really did change us—and not all in good ways—and it was something I noticed before I had to turn off the looping video of the bomb:  this is the first American bombing (that I’m aware of) where our instincts are now to run towards the bomb, not away, and those who were not close enough to run towards the bomb found their first instincts were to donate blood.  I don’t want to make any sweeping statements about how tragedy brings us together, how we’re all Americans and we won’t be cowed—because that’s not the point either and actually, that rhetoric isn’t particularly helpful. 

The reality, as I see it, came to me as I was driving to campus this morning, on the sixth anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings that reminds me that I am not safe even in a learning environment:  one of the interviews I saw this morning was with one of the emergency trauma surgeons at one of the Boston hospitals and he was talking about the types of injuries he was seeing.  Traumatic amputations, shrapnel, lower limb trauma.  The kinds of injuries you see in a war zone.  He said that the other surgeon he works with is a military surgeon, with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And all I could think was we’re not at war—these types of war injuries should not be feeling familiar.  But then, we are at war.  We’re at war with ourselves.  It’s impossible to listen to the news anymore—and it doesn’t matter if you lean left or right—without hearing incredible and dangerous rhetoric.  Language matters.  This is what happens when we forget that what we say and how we say it matters.  And as writers, what is the responsibility and the opportunity of art to respond to these situations?

I don’t know what to make of violence as entertainment.  I don’t know what my students and I will talk about later this morning, but I’m looking forward to the conversation.  Maybe it’s not that we’re writing violence to be entertaining—maybe we’re not reading crime literature to be entertained—but maybe it’s that we need to write our greatest fears, write through them so they’re not stuck inside us.  If crime literature is based in the greatest fears of a society, than individual works must be based in the greatest fears of a writer.  Maybe the act of writing gives us some way to reconcile the senselessness we see in front of us and forging a way forward when the way is filled with smoke and blood.

But really, I don't know.  And I don't expect that feeling will go away anytime soon.  Fellow teachers and writers, how will you address Boston in your classes?  In your writing?

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.

State of Mind: Newtown, CT and the Power of Fiction

There's a redhot ball of grief in the center of my chest right now, grown prickles overnight, an absolute inability to voice the grief I am feeling over every new detail coming out of Newtown, Connecticut and all those families facing life without all those incredible people, adults they knew and loved, children who will never be who they could be.  My Facebook feed yesterday was full of parents wanting to pull their children out of whatever school they may be in, hug them, and never let them go.  My niece is only two, not old enough for school, home today with her mom, but the same urge still applies.  This morning, I looked at the headlines and absolutely could not force myself to click on the articles.

There are many other discussions filling my Twitter and my Facebook right now, most wanting real, solid, productive conversations about gun control, the desire to talk about the culture that fuels these killers, ignores their mental health because there are no programs to help them, and more.  But this afternoon, all I can think about is how I spent the last four months talking with my literature students about a genre of literature that deals with this very thing.  How crime literature is the literature of social order, how it responds to our greatest fears as a society, and how we have raised violence to the level of entertainment, rather than the unacceptable action it actually is.

We fear violence against children.  It is one of our greatest societal fears.  Columbine was a defining moment of my world in 1999, Virginia Tech as well.  Schools are supposed to be safe places.  Children are supposed to be safe.  My students and I saw it in Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, in William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake.  Yesterday morning, I saw an article about the stolen babies in Spain and thought that sounded like the basis for Ken Bruen or Benjamin Black's new novel, this link between real life and fiction and the ways that life influences fiction, makes us talk about things that we wouldn't necessarily talk about any other way.  That article seems so distant now.  But it still fits into this larger societal fear of violence against children, the forcible separation of parents from children.  I don't know what to feel, how to feel about the role I've played as an educator in the glorification of this kind of violence.  I teach this literature, after all.  Yesterday, I was working on fleshing out my Irish Noir class that I hope to teach someday (because I have ideas and a brand new binder) and once news of Newtown trickled in, I had to put it away.  I had to go do something, read something, watch something that reminded me of the best parts of being human.

But I am a writer, not only a teacher, and the semester is over.  And this morning, I'm trying to deal with this grief that does not belong to me in the same way I tried to deal with 9/11, all those years ago, in my first apartment in Spokane, days before I began my MFA experience.  My memories of 9/11 are largely sightless, full of September heat on my skin, the voice of Tom Brokaw over the radio in my ear.  I had just moved into my apartment two days before and I had not had cable installed yet, so the images in my head of 9/11 were a product of my imagination and what other people were telling me, via radio, what was going on.  At the time, I was working on my novel, the story of four sisters set during the Irish Great Famine, and in those first days after 9/11, I pounded out so many pages in Brighid's chapter, pouring all my grief and fear and horror into what this sensitive healer was feeling about watching her family and community rot during those days of Black '47.  Today, this morning, I wish I could work on my dissertation, bask in the joy and delight of Galway and the goodness of that city, but for all the healing powers of nonfiction, today I need the healing powers of fiction.  Fiction is how we deal, how we heal, how we operate in a world that we can understand.  It's how we can imagine the grief of those parents, what those children would have heard in those hallways, the color of those hallways, and ask ourselves where do we go from here?  What do we do? And fiction allows us to actually answer those questions, form the path forward ourselves, one brick at a time, one sentence at a time.  By the time we're finished, we have something that might allow us to create that path in this world under our feet.  Fiction is the vehicle that allows us--those of us to whom this story does not belong--to find healing, through imagination, to find the restoration of the social order that the crime has ripped apart.  Whose stories aren't being told?  Whose stories of Columbine do we not tell anymore?  Whose stories of Virginia Tech?  Who has stories we aren't listening to?  And I was reminded that dear friends of our family are burying her mother today, how the most healing part of losing my grandfather six years ago was all the stories in the air.

I went looking for quotes, because my friend Matt Bell posted a quote this morning from the late poet Jack Gilbert:  "If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil."  At what point can and should we not feel guilty about delight?  About joy?  Like the aftermath of 9/11, when we wondered when it would be appropriate to laugh again?  And the inimitable Joan Didion—“we tell ourselves stories in order to live”—and this was the moment I needed.  We tell ourselves stories in order to live.  Not just survive, not just endure, but to live.  We need stories to move us from one place to another, even if that place is the internal movement of grief.  We need to tell stories to make order out of the disorder, find light in the darkness.  Sometimes those stories are stories that actually happened, the nonfiction that my writerly self so often gravitates towards, trying to make meaning out of what has happened.  But there are times when nonfiction is not the right vehicle, not the right answer to the questions in my head, that I need to create characters and storylines that give voice to whatever it is that I am feeling, because what is inside me needs to find an outlet in some way. 

Grace Paley writes, “You can’t write without a lot of pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from anger, which then changes into a pressure to write. It’s not so much a matter of getting distance as simply a translation. I felt a lot of pressure writing some of those stories about women. Writers are lucky because when they’re angry, the anger—by habit almost—I wouldn’t say transcends but becomes an acute pressure to write, to tell. Some guy, he’s angry, he wants to take a poke at someone—or he kicks a can, or sets fire to the house, or hits his wife, or the wife smacks the kid. Then again, it’s not always violent. Some people go out and run for three hours. Some people go shopping. The pressure from anger is an energy that can be violent or useful or useless. Also the pressure doesn’t have to be anger. It could be love. One could be overcome with feelings of lifetime love or justice. Why not?”  

There is a lot of pressure inside me this morning, with no place for it to go, and when I write fiction, I write it best under pressure, when I can give this pressure to someone else, a fictional someone else who can do something productive with those emotions in a way that I cannot. The pressure inside me right now, the fear and the anger and the guilt and the injustice and the slivers of hope and joy and delight and laughter, they are important and I need to put them to the page to work through the rips in social order, the incredible societal fears that Newtown now—most recently—represents.  Fiction can do this in a way that no other medium can, in a way that real life cannot.  Nonfiction has its place and in many instances is exactly the right way to work through things that don't make sense.  But fiction has its place too.  Fiction is incredibly powerful, incredibly real, incredibly important, in both the reading and the writing.  We should never take it for granted, because we tell ourselves stories in order to live.