State of Mind: On Aunting

(I wrote this on Saturday, but I didn't have permission to post it until today.)

I don't recall my first memories of my great-aunt Katherine (or my great-uncle Dick).  She is my paternal grandmother's older sister, older by three years, and as I grew up with (two) sisters of my own, I'm not sure how two sisters could be more different than Marion and Katherine.  We often describe Katherine as the most right-brained person we've ever met, whose creative talents never led to culinary success.  We also often say that Katherine could burn water.  A couple of weeks ago, she sent my father an email that ended with "Gotta go change clothes.  Going dancing tonight." and nobody was sure if she was kidding or not.  She has neuropathy in her legs and can't feel them, but it's entirely within her character to go dancing anyway.  She and Uncle Dick were married for 55 years before he died in 2007 at the age of 94, almost one year to the day after my maternal grandfather died.  Today is her 90th birthday.

Dad and Katherine

Katherine and Dick never had any children of their own, though Dick had two daughters from his first marriage who I've never met.  But my grandmother had five children and there are thirteen of us grandchildren and so many great-grandchildren now that I have to sit back and count them all out.  Whether it was because my father was the oldest or some other reason, our branch of the tree has always been close to Katherine (and Dick, whose impish little smile I still miss).  I'm the one who has taken up Katherine's duties as family historian and every time I visit, she sends me home with more pictures, more objects, more pieces of the puzzle.  The thing about visiting with Aunt Katherine is that she is always beyond thrilled to see us (this is not to say that our grandparents were not this way, but aunts and uncles are a special kind of energy), even when my sisters and I were little and annoying in the way that only little kids can be.  She and Uncle Dick always greeted us like we were important, always asked about what we were doing and actually cared, they played with us, they wanted to know.

Aunting, as an active verb.  

Katherine and us, 2008

When I finally brought my Scamp (my little 13-foot camper) home, Katherine was more excited than anyone.  I’m sure that some of the genetic predisposition for movement comes from her as well, she who had a private pilot’s license in the 1940s, she who worked for Ryan Aeronautics, she who traveled everywhere imaginable with Uncle Dick, she who had always wanted a Scamp for herself.  To say that Katherine is independent is not completely accurate.  Unpredictable might be a better description--but that doesn't cover it either.  When she worked for Ryan in the 1950s, as the family stories go, they were laying off men with master's degrees in engineering and keeping her on, even though she was a woman.  

My dad's favorite Christmas story to tell of Katherine and Dick takes place when they lived in Ramona, CA and is more a story of Dick than Katherine, but there's a reason I'm telling it:  when my dad was little, Katherine and Dick spent the Christmas Eve night at their house and due to the distribution of beds, Uncle Dick ended up in my father's bed and my father slept on the floor.  All night long, as the story goes, my father would pipe up, "I think I hear him, Uncle Dick!  I think I hear Santa!"  And the incredibly patient Uncle Dick would answer back, "Go back to sleep, Danny."  A few minutes of quiet, then, "I think I hear him, Uncle Dick!  I think I hear Santa!"  "Go back to sleep, Danny."  All night long.  I tell this story of my father and his uncle because it was from Katherine and Dick that I learned how to be an aunt.  

But I also learned how to be an aunt from my father's sister, my Aunt Teresa, who is twelve years younger than my dad.  My earliest memories of her involve being in my grandparent's house and running into her room in the dark of the morning and jumping on her bed.  I couldn't have been more than three or four.  I remember the curtains pulled against the morning and I remember the red of the Tab cans.  When she married Uncle Robin, I remember being really disappointed that I couldn't go to the wedding (I was, maybe, six).  But from them, I learned again how to be an aunt.  Aunt Teresa (and by extension Uncle Robin) was always glad to see us (my two sisters and me) and it was never the perfunctory hug that adults often give kids.  She wanted to do things with us, to sit at the kitchen table with us, playing with rubber stamps, tie dying, or whatever other craft or activity that she was excited to share.  She wanted to be with us, not just around us, and I remember how that made me feel as a kid and how it makes me feel as an adult to have this relationship--and I want that for my niece(s) and my nephew(s).  Uncle Robin recently passed away, unexpectedly, and among the many facets of loss I am still grieving, today I grieve that C. and her new brother won't get to grow up with that sunshine in their lives.

It's not an easy role to play, not if you want to live up to their example.  I do not have children and do not plan to have any children.  I've never wanted them, even back to high school.  But I like kids.  When my friends started having babies (which all seemed to happen in the same six month period in 2007), I assumed the role of aunt.  Most particularly to my dear friends L. and J., which really started, emotionally, for me when L. told me she suspected she was pregnant, back when our offices were next door to each other.  When H. was born, it was like my own sister had given birth.  I love that kid something crazy (something that spills over to her sister, V., who I've only met in person once.)  But there was something about knowing that I could go home to my own house that didn't trip any of the triggers that set off these new parents.  I actually didn't care if the babies screamed--it didn't raise my blood pressure (still not sure how that miracle happened); I didn't mind changing diapers (though, when my blood-niece C. was born, I had to get used to cloth diapers); I had some gag-issues with spit-up, but after a while, that was routine too.  Now that H. is in kindergarten (still not sure how that's possible) and she's got a two-year-old sister V. and a surprise of a brother due in July, there's this security in the family you create on purpose, by choice, that is as important as the family of blood.  

H. and me, 2010

In addition to today being Katherine's birthday, it's also L's birthday.  Two important people in my life, two important women of my family, and it seems fitting to think about what they've taught me about being an aunt on this dark, early Saturday morning, the 26th of January, this day that my sister will be induced and my nephew born.  This was not planned--H. isn't actually due till the end of February. This is Week 35.  But my sister went for her appointment yesterday and the doc gave her a choice: induce today or tomorrow.  K2 chose tomorrow (which is now today).  He's about stopped growing, so they want him out, so he can get nourishment.  He's perfectly healthy, just tiny--right now about four pounds.  I'm just bummed that I'm not there, with the whole rest of the family, so far away from the memory making.  But I get to Go North for C's birthday in two weeks and hopefully H. will be out of the hospital by then.  In the meantime, I hope to make use of the magic that is Skype on smartphones.

C. and me, Summer 2012

These last three years being Aunt Kinny to C. have been more fun than I could have anticipated.  Not that she's any more special to me than my non-blood-nieces (and impending nephew), but just in a different way.  As I did with H. and V., I've channeled Aunt Katherine to try to create for them and with them the kind of memories that stick.  What was so special about our relationship with Katherine? How can I pass that down?  When K2 and M. announced in the summer of 2009 that they were expecting, I set up a monthly system of gifts for K2--and the first one was a memory box.  I found it at a local antique store and my purpose was I wanted my niece or nephew (we didn't know if she was a boy or girl until she was born) to have something uniquely hers, a physical place for her to put her favorite rocks or diary or anything else special to her, something that could grow with her and be as appropriate for a child as it would be for an adult.  I wanted her to be able to look at that when she's in her twenties, thirties, forties, and say, "Aunt Kinny gave that to me."  When she was born, I bought a Belleek teapot to celebrate and my plan is to give that teapot to her on one of her special milestone birthdays (haven't figured out which one yet), but I want her to grow up knowing that one is hers every time she comes to my house for tea.  

I want to do the same for H, but his early arrival has thrown my plans into a tizzy:  I don't have his memory box yet and I don't have his teapot.  But I will.  I can't wait to make memories with this new addition to our family, to my own tiny branch of the tree.  In the meantime, I will sit by the phone, sit by the Skype, and wait for news that he as arrived.  Though I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to tell by the new brightness in the day.

Welcome to the world, my sweet nephew!  You've picked an incredible day to be born.

Update. H has arrived!  4 lbs, 9 oz, 18" at 3:47 pm--and he's perfect!  Doc says he has to maintain his weight and get to five pounds before they'll let him go home (probably in a week or so).  The family has been wonderful about keeping me updated with pictures and little videos and I can say--without bias--that he's ridiculously cute.  I can't wait to meet him!

A most unexpected update:  my dear friend A. is expecting!  As I am currently in Aunt Mode and can't turn it off, it's lovely that I keep being handed new nieces and nephews to spoil, making my family-by-choice even bigger!

State of Mind: On the Importance of NTTF

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the absolute importance of introductory classes.  I have taught introductory classes in composition, creative writing, and literature over the course of my entire career--on purpose--and I have worked with special learning communities comprised of first-generation college students.  I do not view the teaching of undergraduates as a stepping stone to teaching in a graduate program, nor do I view this work as "paying my dues."  Sometimes my work has been as a graduate student; sometimes my work has been as a non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) member.  Given this experience, I feel as strongly about the work that graduate students do as I do about NTTF, both full-time (as I was) and adjuncts.

I was a full-time instructor of composition at Bowling Green State University for seven years (2003-2010), teaching a 4/4 load of required composition classes to first-year students.  Our department saw 4,000 students every semester across our three classes (1100, 1110, and 1120); we are often the first teachers that students meet--and often we are the only teachers who know them and know their names, despite each of us having 90+ students every single semester.  The importance of introductory classes--and small introductory classes--and the faculty who teach them is incalculable.  It goes beyond teaching students about college writing, or how to do MLA citations, or how to research.  The faculty who teach those classes (especially writing classes, where personal experience and expression are foundational) become the ones to teach first-year students how to be college students, how to cope with being away from home for the first time, we help them deal with roommate issues, financial issues, deaths of loved ones.  It isn't by design that this happens (none of us have any formal training in those sorts of counseling needs), but simply by being the teacher who knows them, knows their names, and cares about them and their writing, this is the role we are asked to play--in addition to our jobs as teachers.

I still remember the moment when I realized that being a teacher of first-year students was absolutely integral to my work as a teacher, to my work as a writer, to my work as a human being:  M. was a student in my 1120 class (the research paper class, the second of the required courses in the sequence), a football player from inner city Cleveland, smart, articulate, kind.  There were five or six football players in my class that semester.  M. was good, but his writing wasn't yet living up to its potential.  And then he started missing classes--he came back to class before he had accrued enough absences to fail, but he looked terrible.  Something was not just wrong, but incredibly wrong.  One of his friends told me that he'd lost his NCAA eligibility (didn't say how) and that he'd lost his football scholarship.  I asked M. to come to my office and when he did, I told him how truly excellent his writing was, his ideas, how much potential I saw in him.  I will never forget the look on his face when he finally pulled his gaze up from the floor:  he didn't believe me.  I knew he didn't believe me.  I told him that there was more to him than football, that he was an incredibly talented writer, that maybe he should consider an English major.  Still he said nothing.  When he did speak, he said, "Nobody ever told me that before."  His entire life, he said, nobody had ever told him Go read a book, Get A's.  It was always Go throw a ball around.  His entire life, he'd been taught that his only value as a human being was as a football player.  And who was he now, now that he wasn't a football player anymore?  And all I could think was Good God, I'm the first teacher--the first person-- to tell him that there was more to him than that?  M. stayed in my class, passed with flying colors.  I left BG soon after that, so I don't know what happened to him, but his story is just one of many I could tell.  Everybody I know who teaches first-year students is full of stories like this.

The way that composition is set up at BG is unique:  General Studies Writing is its own department, separate from the English department, and comprised entirely of NTTF on full-time contracts.  Most of us were on 3-year contracts; some were on 1-year.  The director of the program had worked tirelessly in the years before I got there to shift the part-time adjunct faculty to full-time status, to move the 5-year non-renewable contracts to 3-year renewable contracts, among other moves that added to the strength of the department as a whole.  The department of GSW became a place where a majority of the instructors chose to make a life, marrying, buying a house, having children, setting down permanent roots--rather than seeing this job as a stepping stone to something greater.  (And doing so without any sort of permanent job security.)  Perhaps it is cliché to say that we--a department of forty full-time instructors and dozens more graduate students--became like family, but we did.  We recall the Baby Boom of 2007, where the 4th floor saw the birth of five babies within a couple of months; this fall, from Bowling Green to wherever we are now, we all grieved the loss of Scott Gallaway (whose 40th birthday was yesterday) from cancer; and now, across the distances, we are facing the proposed cuts of 10% of the University's NTTF by the end of spring semester, which amounts to 100 faculty members (while President Mary Ellen Mazy has publicly stated her desire to increase student enrollment from 19,000 to 25,000).  And, you may recall, GSW is made up entirely of NTTF.  These proposed cuts will be devastating, not just to the university, but to this specific department that is so important to student success--and student retention.

As I was preparing to leave BG to pursue my PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, BG was suffering through a series of short-lived presidents who had no interest in the health of the university as a whole, viewing it only as a business.  This current president, Mary Ellen Mazey, is someone I have no personal experience with, as she came in after I left.  As I was leaving, the faculty voted to form a union; the administration was not pleased with that, to the tune of collaborating with Ohio state lawmakers to pass SB5, Ohio's union busting bill that passed the legislatures, but was eventually recalled by voters.  As it stands now, the faculty is still working without a contract, more than a year after it was promised.  This cutting of 100 NTTF will bring the faculty-to-administrator ratio to 1:1, quite a distance from the Chronicle of Higher Education's recommendation of 3:1.  In addition, the faculty has not seen a raise in three years, not even a cost of living increase; the president continues to be awarded raises.  BGSU's faculty remain among the lowest-paid in the state.

I am not naive about the realities of life in academia, the cuts that have to be made because of funding shortfalls from various sources.  But I don't think that turning Bowling Green State University into the University of Phoenix (as Mazey has publicly stated her admiration for, as an educational model), especially at the expense of NTTF who are often, as I have said, the first line of defense for students, both in terms of student success and student retention.  There is no way, absolutely no way, that cutting faculty and increasing students (and class sizes) will not have an effect on the quality of education at BG.  It's a good goal, for that not to happen, but it's not realistic.  Especially not in a writing classroom.

A university is only as strong as those who teach its most vulnerable students, the ones at risk of dropping out, the ones at risk in other ways.  Job security of the faculty, even the NTTF faculty, is essential to their success--and where the students succeed, the university succeeds.  If NTTF are worried about not having a job for the next year, the time spent on the job market takes away from what they would rather be doing in their own classrooms.  Moving full-time NTTF to part-time adjuncts takes away from the success of the university and its students, as some schools are doing to avoid paying for benefits via Obamacare.  Education matters, on both the student and teacher sides, when we remember that real people are involved, real human beings who are affected when the conversation becomes only about money. Only good things can come from valuing the work that graduate student teachers do (at Bowling Green and elsewhere, where graduate students often do the work of NTTF in introductory classes) and the work that NTTF do.  But the largest moment is this:  if we value our teachers, if teachers are shown that they are valued, that their health matters (with health insurance), that their work in the classroom radiates out from those students in ways they may never know, that can only add to the success of the university as a whole and the larger society, as we send those educated students out to make a difference in their own way.

Please sign the petition, even if you have no personal or educational connection with this university, whether you are a teacher or a student.  It is important for all of us in academia--no matter our position or rank--to support others when they are facing arbitrary cuts that will undoubtedly destroy the integrity of the institution.  We are all in academia.  We are all vulnerable.  This is important--to all of us.  Please sign, please make your voice heard.

Eng. 250: The Sonnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Day of the New Semester!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Lee Burke and Voice in Fiction

Happy New Year!

I'm back in Lincoln, getting ready for the new semester, sitting in my lovely red desk chair on a floor that is not quite level, so that if I tuck my feet up (like I'm doing right now), my chair slides away from my computer.  The joys of old houses, I guess.  I'm putting away the very thoughtful presents my family gave me, including a post-Christmas gift from my sister K3 at a Christmas-Clearance sale.  It makes me miss my Scamp and long for summer.  Part of my present from my sister K2 was tea from Teavana, so this morning I'm drinking my new Raspberry Riot Lemon Mate in my favorite pottery teapot and waiting for my mother to Skype in with my niece's sunny little face.

When I'm on the road, between Lincoln and the Great White North (as an Ohioan friend used to call it), I've become very fond of listening to books on CD.  This is not new or groundbreaking.  Audiobooks are not new.  But in the last few trips north, I've been treating them less as the entertainment they provide on those miles and more as a writer should.  This time, I listened to James Lee Burke's Tin Roof Blowdown, one of his Dave Robicheaux novels set in Louisiana--this one takes place in the days before and after Katrina.  As I'm also rereading Joy Castro's amazing Hell or High Water, apparently I'm in a Katrina state of mind.

Most of my readings of Burke have been in my Jeep, not in paper form, which lends itself to a really interesting consideration of fiction.  Will Patton never does anything for me as an actor, but he's the voice to read Burke's books and in that medium, I'll follow him anywhere.  Most of us writers read our work out loud at different stages of the drafting process, sometimes in a more professional setting of an organized reading.  But I've never really considered what this kind of listening can do for me as a writer.  Generally, when I'm listening to someone else read their work, I'm concentrating on things other than dissections of craft.  Maybe it's because most of my experience with Burke has been auditory that I'm able to concentrate on more than plot.

Listening to Burke during this time when I'm working on revising my dissertation-book, I'm reminded that voice, whether it is in fiction or nonfiction, is all about the sentence.  Even more specifically, it's about the verbs.  On this last revision of my Irish novel, The O'Connor Women, before I tabled it indefinitely, I had worked incredibly hard on voice, to distinguish these four first-person narrators from each other.  After Jonis, my advisor, read it, she looked at me and said, "The voice is all the same."  I wasn't exactly crushed, but more bewildered.  She said, "The sentences are all the same, in each section."  And, of course, they were.  So, shifting the sentences is the next step of revising that novel.  In the margins of my printed copy of my dissertation, which I'm revising longhand before I go back to the computer, most of the notes are about tone and diction, paying attention to sentences, making sure that the approach to the sentences and language match the effect I want the reader to have.  I've been a writer for most of my life, yet the power of sentences still surprises and delights me.

But James Lee Burke.  I enjoy Burke for his position in the world of crime fiction and I enjoy him as much as a writer as a reader.  Someday, I'd like to pick his brain.  Burke's voice--and for that matter, the first-person narrator of Dave Robicheaux-- is characterized by incredible verbs, as well as almost a complete lack of contractions, a combination that results in a more formal voice that suits Robicheaux's Southern character.  This construction of the sentences requires the reader to slow down, to match the pace of reading to the pace of the writing.  This slowing-down of the pace also suits the Southern quality of the prose.  (The shifting of first to third person narrators is something to address in a different post.)

From The Glass Rainbow:  "Two weeks ago the remains of one of [Clete Purcel's] bail skips had been found in the bottom of a recently drained canal, her decomposed features webbed with dried algae, as though she had been wrapped in a sheet of dirty plastic" (21).  This is not to say that more passive verbs are not present in the prose, but the distinction between descriptions that require active verbs, to make the sights and smells and sounds inside Burke's head real to the reader, and the passive verbs are usually confined to technical information (guns, geographical information, etc.).  In the exposition we find the more formal constructions of sentences, even towards not ending sentences with prepositions where they might naturally fall in our speech.  I'm fairly certain that Dave Robicheaux would never end a sentence with a preposition.

I'd like to do a more sustained exploration of Burke's sentences and his voice, the effect on pacing, where and when and how different verbs and different sentence constructions appear in the text.  Maybe it's just an excuse to spend more time with Will Patton's voice.  But the discussion of voice, how it's constructed and the way it functions on a page are not simply helpful for me as a writer, but next week, when classes start, it's going to be forefront on my mind.  Not a bad way to start off a couple of creative writing classes.  As writers, we should learn from everything we read.  If we're not picking up elements to imitate, we're picking up What Not To Do.  If, as writers, we're not paying close enough attention to put down that book a different writer than we started, that's problematic.  Of course, does that mean that as writers we can't just pick up a book for pleasure, without analyzing it?  Maybe, at some level.  But the two aren't mutually exclusive.  Best are the books that make us want to write when we finish reading them.

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.

On the Incredible Importance of Introductory Classes

It's the dark of the morning, the first real cold day we've had in Lincoln thus far, and I seem to have forgotten what seven degrees actually feels like on my skin.  And, for once, my office in Andrews Hall is toasty warm.  My Stanley thermos is full of piping-hot, sunshine-in-tea, the delightfulness of Earl Grey Supreme on the Monday of finals week, when I'm sitting in my office, waiting for my students to come by to pick up their final papers.  It seems an appropriate time to put thoughts to page, thoughts that have been twirling around my brain for the last month, slightly solidified as I've read my students' finals (in both the comp and lit classes) and their reflections.  

In what might be my best moment of the semester, one of my composition students is changing his major to English, because he learned over the course of our class the power of the written word.  Yes.  This is why I do what I do, the reason I love teaching composition even though I identify myself as a creative writer.  In my literature class, the reflections of my students are equally enlightening--and the number of them who have decided to take more English classes (now that their ACE requirements have been fulfilled) or seriously consider English majors or minors just makes my little teacher heart go pitty pat.  This semester has been incredibly stressful for a number of different reasons, but here's the part of the semester when I'm specifically reminded why I do what I do.  I love reading their reflections.

A sampling of their reflection comments:

“I’ve learned a lot about literature and reading this semester, probably the most I’ve learned since actually learning to read.”

“Much of the information people know is not from first-hand experience.  Literature has the power to educate people on cultures and areas of the world that they wouldn’t otherwise know about.”

“Literature can shape our beliefs and mental capacity, making us smarter and more valuable human beings.”

“I am excited to have learned that there is still much to learn about the area of reading and literature, and I hope to continue exploring the area by reading more in my free time.  In general, taking this course sparked my interest in reading more.  This was definitely in part due to the passion for reading displayed by the instructor.  By reading and reflecting so many times on different texts, it was a reminder that great authors or people of any profession, are really great beause they love what they do.  It is not only by extreme effort and focus that people become wonderful at what they do, but by a love for what they are doing.”

“I had never taken a class that went through as much detail as we did this semester.  I had no idea, and never even thought that there was such a thing as social class, natural or built environment, or even gendering.”

Nearly all of the students in my literature class told me in the first week that they don't really like to read, that they were only in my class because it fulfilled one of their core requirements.  It didn't surprise me.  I'm used to it.  For my entire teaching career, I've taught the required core curriculum classes, from my composition work at Bowling Green and the classes that I've been able to teach here at UNL.  The general consensus seems to be--from both the teaching and the student perspectives--that those required classes are a waste of time.  Nobody wants to teach those classes, so they’re farmed off on adjuncts or non-tenure track faculty (which is what the General Studies Writing program was comprised of and who are currently fighting for their job security) or graduate students, at larger institutions.  Of course, this demeans both the classes, the students, and the faculty, especially since I actually like teaching these intro classes.  How many hundreds, thousands of students do we see through these introductory classes--that for these students, these might be the only humanities courses they ever take?

“I had never really cared about literature before I took this class to be quite honest.  I wasn’t something that I deemed as important to my life; however, after taking this class, I have grown a solid appreciation for what literature stands for and how it molds your mind into something greater.”

In a recent article in theChronicle of Higher Education, Jeff Selingo advocates for “flipping the curriculum,” that “Introductory courses should be just as good as the Capstone experience.”  He writes, “A few weeks ago, at a conference on the future of higher education held at George Mason University, the topic of large introductory courses came up several times during a panel discussion on how to engage students and strengthen learning. As one audience member described a stimulating capstone experience for seniors, one of the panelists, Mills Kelly, asked why the university makes them wait four years to get it.”  And this was one of those moments that resonated with something I’d heard six weeks earlier, at the American Conference of Irish Studies, where history professor Tim Mahoney from Marquette University argued that the way we structure our curriculum is backwards.  Instead of starting broad in survey courses in the first years and narrow to specific courses in upper-level classes, why don’t we teach those narrow courses (which are often on topics that appeal to students) in the first years?  Especially in these days of declining enrollments in majors like English (and the push in places like Florida to make English majors pay more for their degree than a STEM degree), why are we not putting our time and energy into those introductory classes, the first line of defense (so to speak) where we have the most focused face-time with students?  Selingo’s plan is—at least in theory—brilliantly easy:  “In the spirit of “flipping the classroom,” I call his suggestion “flipping the curriculum.” It would call for small classes in the freshman and senior years and larger classes for sophomores and particularly for juniors. The profit that the university makes right now on introductory classes would remain, but just shift to the junior year.”  Obviously I’m not so naïve to think that completely restructuring a curriculum would be easy, but this idea is so incredibly awesome.

“I realize throughout the semester, that reading a book and making a connection with it, doesn’t always mean you have to be relating to the story.  Relating is not always possible, so when it’s not that doesn’t mean you have to put the book down, it means you should keep reading until a connection is made.”

I came from an undergraduate experience where the entire English department, from full professors down to the adjuncts, all taught composition.  They considered introductory classes so important that everybody in the entire department was required to teach them.  I’m sure that some of them grumbled about it, but the philosophy was one that shaped my ideas of what we consider important in undergraduate education.  And as I started my teaching career in various different environments (Eastern Washington University is much different than Bowling Green is different than UNL), always teaching in the required courses, part of my commitment to my students involved a commitment to the classes I was teaching, because I believe so fervently in the power of the written word.  My students are, most often, not majors.  What does it do to a teacher to consistently teach in an environment where they students don’t want to be there?  In a word, it’s tough.  But it’s my job—and because I believe the written word is essential to life—and it’s my job to teach them that they can write, that they can read, that there is more in heaven and earth, and heaven and earth are incredibly interesting places.  I am never surprised when my students tell me they hate writing.  Or they hate reading.  It hurts to hear that, that somewhere along the line they decided that reading was something to be avoided. 

This semester, teaching these two brand-new classes, I was reminded again of why it’s important to meet students where they are, that there are so many incredible moments to be had when those light bulbs go off in their heads, when the meteorology major sees the role that weather plays in the plot of a novel, when a finance major says he’d rather be reading books than taking calculus, when students realize that they’ve written something amazing that they never thought they could.  It’s been obvious to me this semester, teaching this crime literature course, that one book really does lead to another.  I started my interest here just a year ago, when I taught William Kent Krueger’s Iron Lake in my Intro to Fiction class, studying how a novel is put together, and my students told me they didn’t like mysteries until they read that book.  It was accidental that the novel I chose for the next incarnation of that fiction writing class (the Irish version) was another mystery, Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea.  In that same semester, I took a Women’s Rhetoric class, in which a friend did her project on sex trafficking as represented in popular fiction—and that was a turning point for me.  What happens when we analyze the texts we read for entertainment?  How does that type of literature raise questions in the way that Capital-L Literature does not or cannot?  And thus this Crime Literature class was born. What happens when we teach very narrowly specific classes in the first year courses?  Do we encourage more majors to join us or do they join us after taking general survey courses?  (I don't know, I haven't done the research on the effect of those survey courses.)

In the same way, I crafted this particular English 151 (Rhetoric as Argument) class around the idea of the Rhetoric of Science, hoping to meet my STEM students where they were, to teach them how to look at the rhetoric of the texts they saw around them every day.  (I think that about half of my 151 class had some sort of science or social science majors.)  Writing isn’t just confined to English departments, ideas and stories are not confined to Andrews Hall.  I wanted to give them not just academic-type nonfiction to read (like we read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), but I wanted to give them science fiction—not otherwordly science fiction, but Andrea Barrett’s science fiction.  Maybe the next time I teach a literature class, maybe I’ll theme it on Science Fiction (and find a better way to title it so that it’s not confused with aliens).  Why don’t we have more communication between departments, to cross-list classes that might be of interest to students in other majors?  What about asking the biology department, the hospitality management department what they might like to see in an English class for their majors?  Reading Andrea Barrett in a science lit class, reading M.F.K. Fisher or even checking out these two awesome works (one on hotels in the arts, the other a critical book on hotelsin German and Austrian literature).  There are so many possibilities here that it makes me tingle a little, though that might be the Earl Grey. 

We get one shot to reach these students in these introductory classes.  This is not a problem or a challenge; it is the greatest kind of opportunity.  Maybe two shots, given how many required English classes a curriculum requires.  Flipping the curriculum--and empowering both the faculty who teach those introductory classes and the students who take them--might be a way to solve some of the apathy problems we see from both faculty and students, especially as budgets are getting slashed and academia becomes a much harder place to be.  Creating--and flipping-- our curriculum so that our teachers are as incredibly excited about the intro classes they're teaching as they are about upper-level classes seems to be a logical step.  Teaching specific courses at the upper-level is fun and important, but there's also great fun to be had when students are just starting to think about these ideas.  We need to trust our intro students to have the same sort of instincts that our majors have, to give them an entry to writing and literature that meets them where they are, empowers them to recognize their life on the page, recognize how other lives function on the page.  There is great benefit in expecting the best of our students, especially in the intro levels.  It really does boil down to remembering that if we're bored, there's no way we're going to be able to inspire our students to make the kind of connection we know they can make, take the kind of risks we know will lead to great things.  And this is the best kind of opportunity for all of us.

“Literature allows you to expand your boundaries and think in ways that you typically would not.”

Special Guest Star: Joy Castro!

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

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

We started with these questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's nine kinds of wonderful.

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

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