Gary McDowell: On Using Hybrid Texts to Lead the Creative Writing Classroom

Bonus Double-Post Tuesday! Here's a great post from my friend Gary, who teaches poetry at Belmont University. Some great thoughts here for teaching how to read like a writer, no matter your genre. The original post can be found at HTML Giant.

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In the Creative Writing classroom, I don’t teach so much as I lead. Discussions. Close-readings. Deep-readings. Free-writings. Whatever it is, I keep minds attuned to construction rather than destruction. Destruction is better left to the literature classroom, where it has its purpose, surely. We don’t read to answer what or who but rather why and how. We read widely, and we imitate shamelessly; we invent, therefore, with an existing form as backbone before we learn to invent forms of our own. We string words on the page like Christmas lights across the roof; we have purpose and design in mind, but mainly, we just want shit to glow brightly. The goal: limit the variables, at least at first. As we learn to construct within the preconceived frames, we increase the variables beyond simple imitation, and the possibilities to invent then grow considerably. We understand, ultimately, that poetry can exist in many physical shapes, and we strive to keep the language malleable within whatever shape it takes.

T.S. Eliot told us that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” The goal in the beginning of any semester then is to get the students invested in communicating in this foreign language of image, tone, metaphor, parataxis, association. Vision, therefore, comes before technique. And then, once we’ve forged an explanation of vision, vision and technique exist together, however haphazardly at first, deus ex machina be damned. We do, though, care about technique. For instance, this semester I’m teaching Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, and I care that the students understand what the poem is trying to do, but I care more about how it works, what its engine can tell us about our own engines, what we might learn by considering how Mayer built the poem as a vision rather than as a pile of techniques. Through the study of texts like Mayer’s, I’ve had success in leading students to identify their visions and find the techniques necessary to construct them. To put it simply, I believe in experiential learning in the creative writing classroom, and it’s for certain that we can communicate our experiences before we can understand them just as we can communicate a vision before we have the vocabulary to articulate it.

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Poems are built from what we know, but what we know is limitless. We have assumptions about what we know, and my goal is to break those assumptions into workable aesthetic arguments. We can know anything. We can use research, experience, and imagination to know something and anything. Perhaps Larkin had he right: “Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.” But maybe he had it backwards; perhaps poetry is everybody’s business, is the business of shared knowledge and experience. To that end, and on the more pragmatic side of things, I strive to create an inclusive environment in which students can test ideas and broaden their understanding of our texts. This allows them to build their own opinions free of being “right” or “wrong,” at least temporarily. Of course there might be a right way and a wrong way to read a text when one’s writing a literary interpretation or a close-reading essay, but as writers the students benefit most from internalizing the text first and applying their own fledgling aesthetics to their reading of it. While it’s important for the students to learn how to write, it’s just as important that they learn how to be writers, and so the classroom becomes a place of experimentation, of close-reading, and of aesthetic defining. After all, helping the students learn to read as a writer is one of our most important goals.

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Through the reading and study of hybrid texts, which, in my experience, lend themselves to a form of active reading that allows students more freedom, the students begin to stress visionover technique, and I am able to instill in them that they can know anything and communicate in forms of their own creation before they even understand the basis and need of those forms. After reading hybrid texts, the students’ work is more explorative and care-free because they aren’t worried about staying left-flush or maintaining a certain meter—though it should be mentioned that in a Techniques class these elements of prosody and poetics are crucial! In the past, and in the future, I’ve taught everything from prose poems, flash fictions, lyric essays, long poems, original forms, and confusing forms by writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Diane Williams, Bernard Cooper, David Shumate, Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Claudia Rankine, Joe Brainard, Carole Maso, Eliot Weinberger, C.D. Wright, Maggie Nelson, John Ashbery, Harryette Mullen, Russell Edson, Italo Calvino, and on and on. I tend to think of these works as echoes across genres, forms, and time. We read them with an eye toward construction, and we learn to mimic their moves and then discuss how and why some moves work and some moves don’t.

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Carl Sandburg wrote, “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” That seems about right to me. By spending time immersed in these texts that are neither this nor that, students begin to see the echo of form and content, association and disjunction, intellectualism and lyricism; in other words, they start forming their own shadows, their own echoes in their writing. In C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining they might find docu-poetics at work whereas in Maggie Nelson’sBluets they might come to understand the power of obsession and meditation. The moment they start to see how these elemental ways of writing impact one another and build off each other is the moment when the magic happens. It’s like Ken Bain’s idea of building “scaffolds of knowledge.” The learning here is happening on a pyramid-like scale wherein the students accumulate knowledge and experience simultaneously. They build their visions and techniques as writers one toe-hold at a time. But the toe-holds aren’t as structured as they would be if we were reading more traditional verse—which, once again, certainly has its place. But if poetry is, as Edmund Burke tells us, “the art of substantiating shadows,” then through the reading of hybrid forms, we learn not to chase our shadows aimlessly but to capture them and put to use their shapes.

Gary L. McDowell is the author of American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Orphic Prize, and co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press, 2009). His poems and essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, New England Review, Quarterly West, and others. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Belmont University in Nashville, TN.

Thinking Ahead: Natural Disaster Narratives

I should not be thinking about this now, but why is it that the best ideas come when you don't have time or energy to explore them? This morning is, for instance, brought to you by Excedrin Migraine. But I'm starting to put together my basic syllabus for this class I'm thinking of on "Natural Disaster Narratives."

Fascinating article: Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?" Definitely worth reading, if only because it's interesting.

Here's my preliminary idea for the course (which I'm thinking to design as either a 101 class (Rhetoric as Reading) or 150 (Rhetoric as Inquiry)):

"This course is designed around a theme of natural disaster narratives and their place in literature. What function does the natural world serve in the written word? How does it affect the subject of a piece of written work (in whatever genre)? How do humans find meaning in natural disasters--and how has that (or has it?) changed over time? (Natural disasters used as morality tales, for instance.) How does it affect the peripherals of a piece of writing? (Frankenstein would not have been written if not for the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.) Our purpose in this class is to develop a greater understanding of the natural world and its effects not only on as as human beings right now, but also how the events of the natural world have affected literature throughout its history.

My idea right now is to structure the class chronologically in units of time: Ancient Literature; Renaissance/Medieval Literature; Enlightenment/Industrialization; Age of Technology. That way, we can trace how natural disasters are represented in literature and how that changes (if it does).

And so my goal right now is to make a master list of writings of natural disasters, both literature (canon and contemporary) and journalistic explorations. If you've got suggestions, please post them! If you have experience teaching these books, I'd like to hear it!

Agee, Jonis. The River Wife. (New Madrid earthquakes.)

Egan, Timothy. Worst Hard Time (Dust Bowl)

Epic of Gilgamesh/Biblical Flood.

Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. (tides/cyclone)

Laskin, David. The Children's Blizzard. (1888 Midwestern Blizzard)

MacLean, Norman. Young Men and Fire. (1949 Mann Gulch Fire)

O'Flaherty, Liam. Famine. (Irish Great Famine)

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. (1815 Mt. Tambora)

Solnit, Rebecca. Paradise Built in Hell. (New Orleans/Katrina)

Varley, Jane. Flood Stage and Rising. (1997 Red River Flood)

Suggestion from my mother: "The ideas brought to mind "The Great Hinckley Fire of 1894." I have no idea of literary accounts to recommend, but I remember studying about it in 6th grade, when Minnesota history was our social studies curriculum. Whether the fire was started by lightning or sparks from a passing train, no one will ever know, but the damage was catastrophic." Sounds like the beginnings to a major writing project for this class: find and research a local natural disaster. Thanks, Mom!

Eng. 992: Week 5 Response

This week's readings could not have come at a better time for me, since I had gone looking this week for the theory and critical pedagogy to go along with what we've been reading--and this weeks' readings were full of it, full of names and citations to go track down. Reading about the KCAC project (Keeping and Creating American Communities) was great, from LeeAnn Land's article about her class's project, Sarah Robbins' introduction, and then I spent a great deal of time on the KCAC website and most of the page is now bookmarked on my computer or printed out for inclusion in my growing binder of teaching place-writing resources. Since I posted on "Rosewood Township" a few weeks ago, I'll concentrate on another aspect of the readings. (His last name is pronounce grew-koe, if you weren't sure.)

What stood out to me most was the idea of movement, of active engagement, even of physical movement outside the classroom. I've been trying to incorporate active learning into my classrooms, but only so far in getting my students to be able to talk to the writers they've been reading. I have not done much with physical movement outside the classroom, as a part of active inquiry. Definitely something I want to work on. The website for Nebraska tourism--focusing here on road trips--made me want to pull my Scamp out of its dusty sleeping place and take off for parts unknown. (Won't happen anytime soon, unfortunately.) Someday I'd love to camp the Lewis and Clark route. And someday, as I discussed with a friend yesterday, I'd love to teach a class on the Great American Road Trip. Lewis and Clark will be along for that ride.

When Land writes that her class's "project developed out of my conviction that historians (public or academic) should advance public discussion about the state of their community, nation, or world," and soon after she discusses what information she felt she needed to cover in order to uncover other things, I was right back in Mark Sample's recently posted article on"Teaching for Uncoverage rather than Coverage." The KCAC principles of interdisciplinary work, research based in inquiry, public writing, and active citizenship are, now, familiar concepts we've been discussing so far this semester. The very idea of interdisciplinary work, getting students in our English classes outside the English classroom, is something it seems we're all working towards. We want our students to be able to think outside themselves, which seems to work best when they're physically working outside themselves.

This movement outside themselves helps to facilitate the ideas of global and local, something I started studying for the first time a year ago, reading Ursula Heise and Mitchell Thomashow. I can foresee revising my present syllabus to include a progression of major papers that takes the students from working inside their own local communities to researching how their community functions in the larger global community. It seems like the first step is to teach students the value of their own community, then teach them how they're connected to other communities, that what is now didn't appear out of thin air. It was created, deliberately, for a purpose. And this benefitted some people and destroyed others.

I'm also interested in this idea of diverse local texts (all possible definitions of "text") that "help[ed] construct the frameworks, fashion the metaphors, create the very language by which people comprehend their experiences and think about their world" (Lauter, qtd. in Robbins). This is an area I'd like to explore further, because it's an area I have not done much with and it has a lot of promise. The recent readings we've done about photography projects and such have provided a good beginning for me, as I think about how communities are preserved through various texts and what those texts say about those places. Robbins writes of "uncover[ing] and critique[ing] forces that have shaped their own local cultures, as subcultures in national and international contexts" and one thing I have not done--at all--is do any kind of critique of those forces. We've barely talked about them in my class. We'll probably get to it in some fashion in the second and third writing project, but I see it as a failing of the course right now as it stands. Mostly because I don't have the experience or vocabulary to have these conversations with my students.

I'm definitely intrigued by many of the writing assignments the KCAC posted: "Reading and Writing Poems About Place" (I tend to use prose, because I'm a prose writer); "Something Important Happened Here!" and I thought that using this assignment in conjunction with a class blog might be interesting, if we're exploring digital space as well as other types of place, also something that might go well with Robert's "Vanishing" prompt; "House and Home,"because Sandra Cisneros is awesome; and I absolutely LOVE the idea of student generated writing prompts. So much so that I'm incorporating this into my classes (where appropriate) from here on out.

Teaching for Coverage/Uncoverage

Aubrey sent me this link and I thought it was a very interesting article, especially one to consider in light of our place-conscious discussions. Seems like it fits exactly what we've been talking about in this class.

"Teaching for Uncoverage Rather than Coverage," by Mark Sample.

Any thoughts?

Yesterday, in our place studies meeting, we briefly touched on how different disciplines within the English/writing community see place studies, and I'm pretty excited for upcoming brown bag sessions on place pedagogy in undergraduate English courses--but I'm also interested in what discussions we might have in the future for how place studies can find its, well, place in literature studies and creative writing as well, especially in the UNL English department.

And so this week, as I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next semester (yes, I know, thinking too far ahead), I think I finally got a handle on how to structure this class I have in my head about Natural Disaster Narratives (those that deal directly with natural disasters as well as books that are influenced by them)--and I think I'm going to structure it chronologically, starting with the biblical flood/Epic of Gilgamesh. Anyway. I'm not too far into this planning yet, but I'm definitely going to have these ideas of coverage/uncoverage in my head as I do.

And, as I love how thoughts come out of the woodwork at just the right moments, Robert Brooke (professor of my 992 class) posted on Bret's blog about Sharon Bishop's assignment for her high school students involving the Nebraska photographer Wright Morris, as an entry into an oral history project in their town. Robert posted a version of the Wright Morris assignment, which he calls "What's Just About To Vanish." In light of today's thinking about coverage and uncoverage (which I feel like I will be exploring further in my Week 5 response), this writing assignment seems particularly timely:

"Following in Morris's intellectual footsteps, go out into your community landscape and photograph some cultural artifact that you believe is right now in the process of vanishing. Work on the photo until you get one that really resonates with what that thing is and the fact of its transitoriness. Then write the essay that goes with the photo. Why is this thing just about to vanish? What does its vanishing mean, both for the folk who really used it, and for the folk who don't need it any longer? Where do you fit in relation to these other people?"

I love this idea. I think it'll absolutely find its way into some future curriculum (maybe into Writing Project 1 of this particular 150 syllabus, should I teach it again). Part of me just wants to do it myself, which I just might.

Eng. 150: A Place to Start

It's true that Sara Evans' song "A Real Fine Place to Start" was going through my head during class today. My 150 turned in the rough draft of their first writing project, a personal essay that's designed to explore an aspect of a place they feel connected to. I'm pretty excited about what they're writing about.

Today's workshop is one I'm still in the process of developing. It mostly works, but I feel like it's going to be one of those that gets better with age. The idea is to find the energy and the heart of the text.

So, in their small groups of three, they brainstorm what might constitute "energy" in an essay. If I said, "Hey, where's the energy in this essay," what would you say? Once they had some ideas floating around, we put them on the board. Things like action/movement (which could be physical or mental or emotional); something personal, constructed with dialogue/scene; a vibrant voice (might be the result of dialogue or word choice); sentence structure that slows the reader down or speeds them up, depending on what the writer wants the reader to feel in those places; contradictory images or feelings.

Then I had them take one of their drafts, pass it to the person next to them in their group, and the group member was told to read quickly through the draft and mark in the margins/underline/star places of energy. However they defined it, mark the places which had some sort of energy.

When that was completed, I had them pass it to the next person and the new reader was directed to read quickly, but to mark scenes of action (with dialogue, etc. that put the reader right there next to them) and scenes of summary (where we're being told something happens). That's it.

When the author gets his/her paper back, they looked at the margin comments and they looked to see if what one person marked as energetic was echoed by the other person's marking of scenes of action or summary. I told the author to choose one of those moments of energy and flip their paper over and write that moment/scene with that kind of energy, as if they were going to start their paper with it--you don't actually have to start here when you revise, but I want you to write this moment as if you were going to. You always want to start from a place of energy, I told them.

I gave them time to do some writing and when we came back together, I asked what would change if you decided to start here: and they came up with ideas like restructuring chronologically, require more physical details, require more background information, etc. Some students did identify that those kinds of things were actually missing in this draft.

Next week, we'll talk more specifically about the rhetoric of beginnings and endings, with a packet I made up that takes the first page of quite a few essays and the last page. More on that next week. It's a fun day.

Eng. 150: What is Lost, What Can Never Be Lost

Today, we're reading two Gruchow pieces out of Grass Roots ("Visions" and "Bones"--which are two of my favorites) and Elizabeth Dodd's "Underground." The quest of the day is to examine what is lost and what can never be lost. We're transitioning from reading and discussing essays to drafting our own--and they're turning in rough drafts of their first essay on Thursday. I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with.

We'll talk about how to handle writing about loss, that it's easy to write about loss, but harder to make people care about yours. That there's a difference between writing as therapy and writing as literature. We'll talk about Sue William Silverman's "Voice of Experience" and "Voice of Innocence," online at Brevity, in a longer form in her recently published book on memoir.

Writing Exercises:

1. Write about a place that seriously challenged your view of the world. Start with physical detail. What is this place? Stay on that level for now.
2. Who were you before--and who were you after?
3. Write about a place that should have challenged you, but didn't. Think of Jon Krakauer in the first pages of Into Thin Air. For him, not caring was a process. Other reactions may be more immediate--and that's also worthy of exploration.
4. How did this make you feel, physically? (Gretchen Legler's Exercise #4)

Eng. 992: Week 4 Response

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farm Tours

Today, I went with my friend Aubrey on a tour of three local farms. It was sort of an open-house kind of day for them and I like farms, I like food, I like local food, so she let me tag along as long as I agreed to navigate. I thought this was a fair trade.

We started at the Caruso-Rozzano farm, which specialized in Italian heirloom tomatoes, among other things. We looked at the rows of different tomatoes, noting differences in shape, mostly, because the ripe ones had already been picked. Aubrey bought a pint of cherry tomatoes from a little blonde girl selling the tomatoes at her own Fisher-Price stand that was right next to her parents' larger table of goodness. The tomatoes tasted like candy. And it's impossible to say no to little five year olds when they're selling anything.

Leaving Caruso-Rozzano, a B-2 flew overhead, came around and made another pass. At least I think it was a B-2. Could have been an F-117, I suppose, but as my Air Force father tried to teach his three daughters about planes, the only one I can identify on sight is a C-130, which he navigated while he was in the Air Force. But going with him to any place there are planes is always great fun. Lincoln is having an air show today and tomorrow and I bet he'd like to be here.

From there, we went to Common Good Farm, where Aubrey gets her summer CSA. This was the most interesting of them to me and I wish I'd been smarter and packed a hat and some sunblock because I only made it through part of the farm tour before I had to get out of the sun. But we walked the rows of kale and tomatoes and peppers, sampled fresh pesto and rhubarb jam. When the farm tour started, that's when things got really interesting. We saw two pens of chickens and they get moved every so often to fresh grass and grasshoppers, free range and running around. They got very excited when the little kids threw lettuce to them. We learned about the owner's reliance on non-kill methods of protecting his chickens from hawks, because Fish and Wildlife won't let you kill them. But as the farmer told us about the noise cannon things he used to scare the hawks--now they won't come near the farm--that also means that the ecology of the area is still intact. Just because you may kill the hawks that stalk your chickens doesn't mean that your problems will go away just because you kill the hawks. If you remove the predator, that has effect further down the line. (This chicken looks sketchy because of a protein issue, nothing else.)

I won't remember everything he said about his pigs (about a half dozen of them) and how he's using his pigs to get rid of bindweed--the whole process is just brilliant. He'll never be completely rid of bindweed, but the pigs have done a better job of taking care of the problem than any of the chemicals that other farmers use. Even if you spray for bindweed, you'll still need to do it every year. So that doesn't solve any problems. The pigs fertilize and chew up the soil, benefiting the soil itself, and in the fall, they're quite tasty.

From there, we went to Branched Oak farms, lured in by cows. Cows = excellent cheese, ice cream, and more. We didn't stay too long here. The reality is that cows also equal more flies. It just reminded me of stories my grandmother tells of the cows she grew up with, the milking, the dedication required, how even things like the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services were set around the milking schedules of the local farmers.

Aubrey and I also talked briefly about Wendell Berry (she's an expert on him; I am not) and advocating for solutions in terms of systems, rather than one solution for a problem. We also talked a little about my canning/urban discussion that I almost had with my class and we discussed how the local food movement has been criticized for being elitist--and how that relates to this rural/urban mindset when it comes to food. When does something like a CSA become a political choice, rather than what you do because you must? Of course, we did not fail to notice how many Priuses we saw in the parking areas of each of these farms.

Eng. 150: Preservation

I keep saying this, but I think once the semester gets going, I won't be posting this often. But for now, I have ideas (whether or not they're useful to anyone else is another issue entirely). Today, in my English 150 class, we discussed four Gruchow essays in the context of Preservation. Last week we talked about how we create places for ourselves and today we talked about how those sorts of things are preserved. But, before we could even get to that, we had to talk about how we come to know, truly know, what's important in our lives.

On the board: Further Reading (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire; Sharon Bishop, "The Power of Place"; Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses; the documentary King Corn.)

In "Corn is Not Eternal," I tried to tease out that the corn has become for us what the buffalo was to various Plains tribes, but my class--stubbornly, perhaps--persisted in thinking that corn gives us more than the buffalo did to the Plains tribes. I haven't watched King Corn completely yet, but I've started it. Since it's instant on Netflix, I recommended it. But we haven't completely reconciled what we've lost by giving corn this much importance in our lives.

Between "Remember the Flowers" and "Putting Tomatoes By," which works through what his father considers important (and how he preserves it for the future) and what his mother values (and how she preserves it), we talked about how these things (issues of pesticides/herbicides, monocultures, overdevelopment/conservation, migration from rural to urban/surburban, self-sufficiency, loyalty) come out of various mindsets. We talked about how the parents, who would certainly have gone through the Depression and the father probably served in WW2, formed their work ethics and such. I brought in Silent Spring, how the problems that Carson brings up come out of this post-WW2 mindset: warlike language (eradication), American exceptionalism, absolute trust in the government, etc. I was pleased that I got a few surprised looks, nods, like I'd just given them something new (and, I hope, interesting) to consider.

In "The Transfiguration of Bread" and "Putting Tomatoes By," the ideas of homemade vs. manufacturing were brought up, the values that each of those represent, and how the trend is going back towards homemade, that people are canning again, etc. Ironically, there's an article on the main UNL page today about canning.

But the way I ended class today is directly related to the readings we did for 992 this week. Because this book is largely rural in context and there are a great deal of my students who come from urban/surburban places, we ended with this question (which we started out in discussion, but then I took them to paper, to write about it):

• How does all this function within an urban/surburban context?
• How does that environment (in all definitions of that term) affect the ideas that Gruchow brings up across these essays?
• How do these ideas apply to those places too?
• How does that urban/surburban environment shape what you consider important and how you preserve it?
• How much of that is access and availability vs. necessity? Are you more likely to go buy a can of organic tomatoes than to grow them yourself?
• Because you have access to things like a farmer's market, does that change your perceptions?
• What happens when things like homemade bread and canned vegetables become political choices (consumption, environmental, waste), based on a certain level of affluence, vs. what you do because you have no other choice?

Since I've been thinking about my city students and what they think of reading such rural writings, I'm glad that we were able to consider these questions today. Hopefully they'll bear fruit by the time the rough draft of their first paper is due next Thursday.

House Writing Exercise #2

So, because Bret told me he was stealing the dream house writing exercise (and because Kelly was talking about houses today), I figured I should probably post the second part of it. Related, but not together. This one is courtesy of the lovely Dr. Joy Castro, UNL's nonfiction professor.

Draw the floor plan of the house you grew up in. Draw in everything from doors to furniture placement. Take a classmate on a tour. Put an X on the emotional hotspot of the house and write from there, using lots of sensory details. If you want to write the story of something that happened in that hotspot, go for it. When you're done, go back, reread and find what essay you could write from this little micro-narrative. If I wrote about making Christmas cookies with my grandma, the larger idea could be something like how traditions are handed down. I once had a student write about his mom's cinnamon rolls that she made every Sunday and the essay that came from that was about how people don't take time to slow down anymore.

On a separate note, Kelly and I had a micro-conversation about houses this afternoon, wondering why do we need closure with places? We can understand needing closure with people, but why do we need it with physical places? Not a question we were able to answer.

And, perhaps the best part of the day, on a house level, was this essay context that came across Brevity's blog (the short-short nonfiction journal): an essay contest (three hundred words), for the chance to win a tiny house. I'm smitten. I love tiny houses anyway and have been obsessed with them for years (though I can't figure out where to put all my books). But these, built of 99% salvaged materials, are just works of art. I want one. Particularly the Canyon Lake one, because I just can't get over how awesome the stairs and the loft are. And I'm just in love with the potential energy efficiency, as well as smart design. I want to have enough room for a couple of people to stay over (sorely lacking in my current apartment) and I think there's good potential here. Of course, I'm way too mobile right now to be able to handle such permanence as a real house (of any size), but it's a lovely dream to bookmark and return to at odd moments.