State of Mind: 3rd Crow Wing Monday

I've only been Up North for two weeks now, in this weird space of childhood memories and adult responsibilities, making new traditions and habits for myself in this place that holds so much of my identity and my memories.  The parentals have been in and out in the last two weeks, and I puppy-sat Daisy one of those days.  Right now, they're back in DL, Daisy has a spa appointment and puppy class today, then she gets spayed tomorrow.  The cats are quite glad to see her gone for a while.  Daisy has been trying to make friends, but it's not working--and frankly, from a human perspective, it's freaking hilarious.  Picture this:  energetic puppy, cranky Maeve.  Maeve growls and hisses, Daisy cocks her head, sits down, and echoes the noise back.  Maeve is not amused.  So, then, energetic puppy meets neurotic Galway:  Galway bats a paw (a claw-less paw) at Daisy, sometimes rather forcefully bats at her, Daisy sits down, bats a (much larger) paw back at Galway.  Galway is not amused.  Me, I think it's the best entertainment one can have, since the Cabin doesn't have cable or internet.

We're teaching Daisy to swim in the very shallow waters of 3rd Crow Wing, and as you can imagine, that's pretty funny too. She doesn't quite know what to do with herself when she splashes herself.  Instead of walking in the water, she likes to bounce like Tigger, like she's got springs in her ankles.  It's a really good way to wear out a puppy who's got more energy than my parents.  And I'm remembering summers here, swimming (only with an adult) and not being allowed to go past the end of the dock.  To my adult legs, that's barely knee deep.  And as we chase Daisy in the water, I point out a birch leaning over the ice ridge on the neighbor's property and comment that would make an excellent pirate ship.  We'd long ago lost our shoreline trees to erosion (before we put rocks there).

On the way up to the Cabin, I point out the baby white pines I've found.  When I'd told my mother about them last week, she exclaimed, "Oh, you found some Kermit trees!"  And I thought that was the best name in the world.  My grandparents were farmers by blood, but conservationists by heart.  I'd always thought that their conservationist ethic came from my grandfather, with his master's degree in agricultural economics and his work as a vocational agriculture teacher, but my mother says that it came from Gram.  My grandparents would find these little baby trees on their property and my grandfather would put stakes beside them, so nobody would trip or mow over them.  He would take care of them until they were large enough to transplant to another location with more sun, so they would have a better chance of growth.  Right now, the view to the lake is fairly well filled in with trees of 20-30 years, planted when I was a kid.

I can report to my grandmother that her prized pink and white showy lady's slipper did not get devoured by deer this spring, though it won't bloom till June (if we're lucky).  I put some chicken wire over it to protect it and I'll keep an eye on it while I'm up here.

When I walk the dirt road from the Cabin to the mailbox each day, I check the soft edges of the road, because that's where we find the best deer prints.  Or, in the case of three little girls with walking sticks, where it's easiest to fake deer prints.

This is the place I know.  This is the place that I return to when I need to be reminded of what I know and who I am.  This is a place where my knowledge of the world is solid.  Rural knowledge is not backward knowledge, something that has become extraordinarily important to teach my students in which ever class I happen to be standing in.  I know that the rain we got this weekend was a good rain, for fire danger and for the newly planted fields.  I know that the soil here at the Cabin is sand and erosion is a problem.  I know what poison ivy looks like and where I'm most likely to find it.  I know the difference between a red pine and a white pine and I know how to calculate how old a particular white pine is.

And then I start to think that how can you know a place if you don't know its water?  (Or its soil?)  This is water I know, this rain, this water, this lake.  I know 3rd Crow Wing.  I know how far I can walk out into its shallows without getting my shorts wet.  I know that because it's so shallow, it'll warm up much faster than most of the area lakes.  I know what we need to do on the hill to stop the rain from washing the soil--which is sand--down to the lake.  I know what this water tastes like, the water from our well.  It's not fresh and bright tasting, it's fairly flat and gray in flavor.  But it's ours.  And I know it's ours.

There's no better place in the world than to be sitting on my grandparents' ancient couch, staring out at 3rd Crow Wing and the leaves and needles that mostly obscure the view of the lake.  We just put out bird feeders this weekend, so hopefully that will start to attract birds and squirrels and other entertaining creatures.  Because the loons woke me from sleep this morning, after singing me to dreams last night.  I used to know which birds were which, but I've been gone from here for too long.

I need to get a bird book before I leave town.

What do you know?  And where do you know it?

Stress Tics and Tiny Houses

This semester, discussions of stress tics in both of my classes have been prevalent, especially in my 252 class, where we've talked about using them to create characters who are alive (even if they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing). So maybe that's why I'm recognizing my avoidance techniques more often than I might have otherwise done. I've got Gaelic Storm on the iTunes, because I'm of a mood to sing harmony this morning.

This morning, I Skyped with my sister K2, my brother-in-law, M., and my 2-year-old niece. (There are three of us K sisters, I'm the oldest, K2 is the middle, and K3 is the youngest.) That was a fun avoidance technique. C., as usual, was her adorable self, looking at my face on the screen and requesting instead to see the cats (I'm third fiddle), then turning to her mother and not just requesting chocolate at 9:30 in the morning, but when told no, C. shifted gears and started to negotiate with K2 for the chocolate. Watching K2 during this negotiation was just as adorable as C. doing the negotiating. Of course, C. still has eyeliner on her face from yesterday's episode of digging through my sister K3's purse, finding her eyeliner, and drawing on her face with it. (And then K3 sent us pictures, which would have been cute just with C.'s face, but since C. is potty training, C. is running around without pants these days (with leggings (and sometimes boots)) to keep her warm.

I did request of K2 support and recipes from herself and K3, because I'm trying really hard (since Wednesday) to be a vegetarian, because I know that meat consumption puts an unsustainable strain on the biology of the planet. It's really hard, because I like meat (and M. reported that he'd used his birthday gift from me to buy sirloin and beef jerky at their local meat market). But I'm trying to live what I've been preaching to my students, that it's the little ways that we're going to make a difference in our world, because realistically, we're not going to be the ones going up against the Keystone XL people.

When we hung up, I booted up my rhetoric paper (I still don't know what I'm doing, really) and then checked Facebook (I'm very good at avoidance...) and Tiny Texas Homes posted new pics of what they've been doing in March. I love these guys. They're building these tiny homes with 99% salvaged materials. Drool. Here's my favorite one: Canyon Lake.

And while I was at it, I hit up Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, because their Harbinger is my favorite, dream house in the world. Because they don't build the Harbinger or the rest of the small houses, I hadn't seen an actual Harbinger until Bethany posted hers here on the Tiny House Blog. Want, want, want. I also like their Whidbey, but I don't fancy my bedroom being right next to the front door.

In other moments, when I'm thinking even smaller, 130 sq ft small, I want the Fencl.

And the question that anyone asks when I mention tiny houses is always the same: where will you put your books? A good question. But a better question this morning: which tiny house can you imagine yourself in? Which do you like? Could you ever live in a tiny house? What would prevent you from doing so?

Eng. 150: Reflections on WP2

I meant to write and post this post last week, but Spring Break started and I just got back last night from my whirlwind trip to Minneapolis to visit K2, K3, M. and C, then up to visit my parents and Gram (who had a bad fall last week and broke her nose and wrist), and then I came back down to Lincoln last night. It's 9:15, I'm up, showered, my pot of Maritime Mist is a quarter emptied, and I've got my books in front of me so I can get some work done before classes start back up on Monday...

On Friday, my 150 students turned in their 2nd writing project, which was on the subject of how their community was shaped and affected by a natural disaster. (Click on the 150 page at the top of the blog to see the class overview.) We started the project with the idea that every community has a disaster story, somewhere in its history. Chicago and the Fire, San Francisco and the 1906 Earthquake, just to name two. My students initially struggled with thinking that their communities in Nebraska had a story like these, because they didn't know of any. And this stressed many of them terribly.

Eventually everyone found a topic and we started reading Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, about the Dust Bowl, and David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard and Ted Kooser's Blizzard Voices, about the 1888 Children's Blizzard. My class is a William H. Thompson Scholars section (I have fourteen students in there right now), which means that all these students have won the WHT scholarship, one that goes to low income and first-generation students from Nebraska. So, most of my class comes from Lincoln or Omaha, though some come from other towns. Four or five chose to work on the 1975 Omaha tornado, I had one on the 1993 East Coast blizzard (this student was born during that blizzard in Georgia), one did the 2004 Jackson, NE tornado, another did the 2006 Arkansas tornadoes, and I also had one on the 1952 Misssouri River flood.

The project included many different components (some of which I was very nervous about, never having done these things before): they were required to do interviews (this, I'd done before), but I was nervous about the blog component. Because the focus of the project was to examine how their own community was affected by a natural disaster, I wanted them to use a platform that would serve their community. I envisioned links to these blogs from their local libraries and such, to be a resource for others. When I do this again, I like the blog aspect of it, but I know better how they work and what I need to do to ask students to reply meaningfully to their group members' blogs. (I'll also spend a day more specifically talking about what makes a blog a credible source, not just for their own research, but how to make their own blogs appear credible to others.) But the blog part did offer the opportunity for students to post YouTube videos of the disasters (if they found them) or articles they found. I did have them post their interviews, as well as their interpretations of their interviews.

Something I'll do differently next time: I'll more clearly point out how our texts (the Laskin and Egan) incorporated interviews--it was something I thought we'd covered well enough, but when I saw their rough drafts, apparently that was not the case. Another thing I'll do differently: making explicit connections between the Think Pieces they posted to their blogs (which offered some really excellent critical thinking and insights) and making sure that the students transfer those to their papers. Somewhere along the line, they seemed to think that they couldn't use their Think Pieces or other things they'd posted to their blogs in their paper.

The main problem I had in teaching this project was getting my students to think about how their community was affected by this disaster--and this is something that didn't pop clear for them until I handed back their rough drafts and gave my "I'm so disappointed" speech (and this is also where I spoke about them not using their blogs and in-class writings in their papers, because that was the point...). But between the rough draft and the final draft, things started to move: they started to understand what and who their community was--and they needed to get beyond the cliches of "we found out what we were made of" and "we all came together and helped out," because that's not the point.

I used north Minneapolis as an example: last summer, a tornado hit north Minneapolis, just blocks away from where my sisters, brother-in-law, and niece live. When I went back in February for C's birthday, there were still houses that had blue tarps for roofs. In Minnesota. In February. I let that image sink in, and then I continued: north Minneapolis is historically low income, historically African-American, and most people rent their houses. It makes a difference if you live in a trailer or a stick-built house when a tornado comes through. It makes a difference if you own your house or rent. It makes a difference if you have insurance or not.

My student who did the 1993 East Coast blizzard was the key here to making this clear for my students: it's not just a blizzard, it's a blizzard in a place that doesn't have blizzards. Georgia is largely rural and there's a lot of low-income families there. What happens if you lose power and you live in a trailer? What happens if you can't buy a thousand-dollar generator to power your house? The people who lived around him were predominantly low-income and predominantly retired. It makes a difference. And by the time they turned in their final drafts on Friday (which I haven't graded yet), this really started to become clear (so when I teach this again, I'm going to start this conversation much earlier). And I'm so proud of them, I can't stand it.

Here are a few moments from their reflections that I think are amazing (and since they posted these to their blogs, which are public, I'm not crossing any privacy boundaries):

• "The whole point of our class is to view disasters and not just to know they happened but how how they have impacted people. It's our job to not only learn about them but find ways to stop them from happening, finding ways to prevent them or just having a plan that when and if they happen we can come together as a community and help each other out."
• "Throughout writing this paper I realized that the whole point of this paper isn't necessarily an assignment to get us a good grade in the class, it's an assignment for us to realize history in the places we come from, and what we can do in the future to help our community. It's a paper to realize that not everyone gets the same help even if they experience the same disaster. It was a paper for us to realize that the community we live in is shaped by the certain people who live there. We all have a different story to tell and we all live different experiences. That is what makes us different from everyone else. And it's our duty to learn about our history because our history is a part of us as well."
• "Although this project was overall very stressful and difficult, it really gave me an opportunity to explore more of where I come from and even gave me the chance to meet a new family member. This project also I believe allowed me to come out of my shyness shell. The fact that I called and had a long personal conversation with a woman that I have never met in my life was actually a huge deal to me. If it was not for this project, I most likely would have never in my life taken that step."
• "I found out so much and my reaction was a subdued elation. I felt awesome, being able to bring my mother into my work. That was one of the most exciting things about this project. I was able to show my mom what I work on and the pride that she had was immense. I could hear it in her voice while we were doing interviews. Another thing that I really liked was being able to open up the lines of communication between my extended family. After we moved from Georgia, we never really talked. I was able to get past the past and everyone was all the more excited. Old ties of friendship were renewed and that is a big thing in a family like mine."
• "I learned more about my community and where I come from than I thought I would. It is weird to think that my grandfather and I both experienced a flood of the Missouri River. They were almost 60 years apart, but it was interesting to see how history can repeat itself. This sounds crazy, but I have learned more about Nebraska history in this English class than I have ever learned in any history class I have been enrolled in."

So, in hindsight, as much as I wanted to emphasize different ways of knowing and valuing those different experiences, I think I underestimated the value of doing the interviews and the value of the students interviewing family members. Not everything went as well as I wanted it to, but in the end, I'm really proud of my students and their progress and efforts, I have new ideas for the next time I teach this, and I'm really excited to start the next project on Monday, on human-caused disasters. And the truth is, I get more excited about what my students are doing and the conversations we've had this semester--and the conversations I know we will continue to have--every time I think about it.

Why I Love My Job, Thursday Edition.

Taking a Step to the Side

Things are wrapping up nicely here at the end of the semester and the panicked emails from my students haven't been that bad. I got final portfolios from my 252 class last night and I'm really looking forward to seeing the revisions of their short story and their craft papers, because I suspect they're very good. I get final drafts of Writing Project 3 from my 150 tomorrow. Whee!

But we got our first snowstorm of the season this last weekend and since Lincoln isn't great about plowing its streets, I was grateful for my four wheel drive. My winter survival kit, however, is still in my bedroom. Three years ago, when I hurt my back, that's what I was carrying, so it always makes me a little nervous to lug it around--even though I know it needs to go in the Jeep.

Because.

Here's the story from Monday: I'm looking for a parking spot in the four hour meters and see this car spinning its tires on the ice in its parking spot, going nowhere. So, I get out, the guy rolls down his window and I offer to help. It's an orange Camaro. New. Leather seats, top of the line sound system. Vanity license plate. The guy driving it probably isn't more than twenty and from his accent and what's on his vanity license plate, I assume he's an international student from a place not used to ice and snow. He gets out to push and I slide into the driver's seat before I realize it's a stick shift (of course it is) and I can't drive a stick shift. We get that little problem taken care of and he tries to push and nothing happens. I say that I've got some kitty litter in my Jeep that might help and he doesn't know what that is (another thing that makes me think he's an international student) and so I take the kitty litter out and pour some behind his tires, to get some traction. It's the Tidy Cats for my actual cats, not the non-clumping stuff in my survival kit that's much better for traction (larger particles)--and it doesn't work. I feel like a failure as a Minnesotan. Maybe this winter, I need to get a chain for my Jeep and have my dad teach me how to use it. I do know the difference between 4-high and 4-low, at least.

But this is the reason you don't see a lot of sports cars in Nebraska (or Minnesota or the large of the Midwest in general). They're not great on ice. And if you're driving a rear wheel drive vehicle, like that gorgeous Camaro, you're going to want to go to the hardware store and stock up on sandbags.

Dear students. This is place. This is what it means to live in this place, today. Place means wearing your winter boots to school and then changing into your regular shoes when you get there. Place means not letting your gas tank get below a quarter tank. Place means remembering the difference between which way you turn into a skid, depending on if you've got front or rear wheel drive. Which I always forget, because I'm directionally dyslexic. And I know you're in college and invincible, but there is no shame in wearing a hat and mittens.

And to close with my favorite weather-related quote: "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing." Happy winter! Happy last week of classes!

State of Mind: 150 (again) and MN State Volleyball Championships.

The good news is that in the wee hours of Thursday night, when all seemed darkest (and perhaps influenced by the necessity of Benadryl to my allergies), I woke up in the middle of the night with the solution to my Eng. 150 problem for next semester. Hallelujah. It was enough that instead of just turning over and thinking I'd remember it in the morning, I got up out of bed, leaving behind the lovely electric blanket, and found my notebook in the living room. I jotted down what was in my head, because the subconscious was clearly at work here and I was clearly not awake, and then stumbled back to bed.

The idea was this: to more fully embrace place-conscious inquiry tenets, I reformed my class to function better at the 100-level. We're going to start with reading fiction, Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife, which starts with the 1811 New Madrid Earthquakes. It is no coincidence that I'm using this book as we pass the 200-year anniversary of those earthquakes. It's sometimes easier to see how place affects character and plot if we're looking at fiction, rather than our own lives. The goal here is to explore the natural disasters that have formed This Place, what's under our feet that we might not know about. We'll go to Morrill Hall and see how those bones and such can illuminate our ideas.

Then we'll shift into modern disasters: the 1888 Children's Blizzard (reading David Laskin and Ted Kooser) and then into the Dust Bowl (reading Timothy Egan). This writing project will be an oral history type of project in which the students will investigate how local disasters of recent memory (and it does not have to be those two) formed the identities of those who live in that place, in that community. Where I come from, the 1991 Halloween Blizzard is still indicative of my hometown (which I'll get to in a moment), because the town was empty to go watch the Tigers play in the football playoffs in the Twin Cities. That event says a lot about who Nevis is as a community.

The third project will investigate modern, human-caused disasters, because another tenet of place-conscious education is to move beyond the personal and immediate and into the larger world and the larger community. This week, Obama put the kibosh (basically, we hope) on the Keystone XL pipeline. The environmental catastrophe that would have resulted from this pipeline is incalculable. On this same day, a report surfaced that the chemical used to frack in Pennsylvania was showing up in the aquifer. So, we'll read Erik Reece's The Lost Mountain, about mountaintop removal for coal mining. We'll talk about the wetlands of the Mississippi being destroyed (and, maybe, get some face time with my favorite musician, Tab Benoit?--we'll see...). And we'll approach the topic--whichever one the students choose to write about--from a position of conservation or prevention.

I feel better about this.

I also believe it's no accident that after way-t00-long of trying to set up a Skype date with my friend N. (whose older sister J. was my good friend in high school and I'm J's daughter's godmother; and said daughter turned ten yesterday) the Skype finally happened. And not only did I get to talk to N. and her 2-yr-old E., who was rocking the little blonde pigtails, who should pop into the frame, but N.'s dad, Mr. Smith, my high school history teacher, one of my favorite people in the world. We talked a little about teaching, a little about Nevis volleyball--because, get this, NEVIS IS PLAYING FOR THE STATE CHAMPIONSHIP IN VOLLEYBALL TODAY!! IN LESS THAN AN HOUR!!!--and see previous comment about the 1991 football, because I'm guessing most of Nevis is in Minneapolis today. Being in Nebraska makes watching MN high school volleyball difficult (even if the Huskers weren't playing Penn State today--another interesting example of community and disaster)--but the good news is that it's going to be streamed live on various websites, both radio and video. I'm sure I don't know any of the kids playing, but that doesn't matter.

It all comes full circle. Communities don't just exist in thin air. They are created and they must be fostered. All members of the community must contribute. Places influence who we are--even if we specifically reject that influence, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But it's valuable to look back to see how we got to where we are--as well as look forward to see where we're going.

Stay tuned for the results of the volleyball game!

(We lost the game 3-0, but I'm so proud of them!)

State of Mind: Post-Election and Week 12 Meltdown

A lot of things are on my mind, place-related, this morning, some of them pedagogical, some political, some personal--and some food-related.

My 150 students and I are not connecting well with each other right now and I'm supremely disappointed in them, for several reasons. The last straw was yesterday, when we went to Morrill Hall, the natural history museum on campus, to get some ideas for our third Writing Project, and when I asked them what they found, if they learned anything new, they just stared at me. Even "what was the weirdest thing you saw?" elicited blank stares. There will probably be a come to Jesus meeting with them tomorrow if this continues. Guess how much I'm looking forward to that. As a result, there is much stress in the Babine household today--and I'm going to cook my way out of it. Roast chicken, chicken stock, baked oatmeal, carrot ginger soup, and chocolate chip cookies.

My 252 is continuing to discuss Kent Krueger's Iron Lake and Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map. They're loving both books, for different reasons, and that just makes me happy. We discussed the middle section of Iron Lake last night and I love how discussing a book with students helps me to see things I never noticed before. The discussions last night of how many ways place and landscape and weather are active participants in the plot were spectacular. Next week, Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell are visiting campus and their reading is during our class time, so we're going to go hear them read. Should be a good time.

On a completely separate place-related note: at the grocery store this morning, the produce is displayed so it's the first thing you see. It's still apple season, so the apples are front and center. I am an apple nerd. Not an expert, but a nerd. My grandparents managed an apple orchard in New Ulm, MN in the 1950s and I've learned quite a lot about Minnesota apples. Earlier in the fall, Hy-Vee was selling Haralsons--and it's been years since I've had a Haralson, let alone seen them anywhere outside Minnesota. And then today, there were Firesides. It's been even more years since I've had a Fireside. I was so excited that I had to call my mother.

"Don't get the green ones," she said.

"I know," I said, "or it'll taste like a potato."

"Your grandmother will be so proud that you remembered," she said, laughing. Firesides are late apples and they have to ripen fully on the tree or they have no flavor at all.

The depths of my apple nerd-ity were also confirmed as I was watching ABC's new show Once Upon a Time. The evil queen--in her mayoral persona--was telling Emma that she has her own special apple tree, of Honeycrisps, though the link to the poisoned apple is obvious. However, the apples she has in her basket--and the ones that are on the tree in later scenes, are absolutely not Honeycrisps. They're not the right color or the right shape. The evil apples are Red Delicious, which in my own apple snobbery, seems about right.

I am a nerd.

But I'm also conscious of politics this morning and what it means to live in a place at a certain time. Yesterday, Ohio overturned SB5, which severely limited collective bargaining power. And Mississippi failed to pass its Personhood initiative, which would legislate that a fertilized egg is a person, with all the legal rights guaranteed to a person who has been born (except, as I saw one article say, a woman of childbearing age...). Dear students, if you don't think that place influences you, you only have to look at how different places define what it means to live there, or not live there, or the living conditions you are entitled to--or not--while you live there.

I hope Thursday's discussion in my 150 can convince them that the bubble they think they live in doesn't exist--and the world's a lot more interesting out here than it is in that bubble.

Eng. 992: Week 7 Response

The various articles we read for this week, along with the "Stories of Home" project, leaves me with a series of intersecting ideas and questions. The idea of the "tragedy rhetoric" of rural studies seemed to be dismantled by these different ways to take action in one's community, no matter if that is rural or urban. Tragedy rhetoric resonates in urban contexts as well.

What is the effect of separation (and all its definitions and contexts) in the context of place-conscious pedagogy? At what point is physical action required of a place-conscious classroom? And, is it absolutely necessary? Are there forms of mental action that are just as effective? Is writing enough of a physical action?

I started thinking about the idea of separation being a vital part of considering how and where and why we belong after I read the section of "Sustainable Pedagogy" where Charlotte discusses urban students thinking they can't relate to a nonfiction piece about a "hick," yet that is exactly how those same urban students are viewed when they are in LA. As this essay also discusses, the separation of our first-year students face between their high school home and education and their college home and education is again, vital, for them to discover how and where they belong. Without this separation, they cannot begin to consider the answers.

But it's also seeming necessary to separate students from long-held assumptions and beliefs--not that educated teachers are trying to fill the empty vessel, to paraphrase Paolo Freire, but to give the students enough room to articulate why they believe the way they do, about whatever it is they're considering. College is not a place where blind faith in ideas can flourish. Faith and ideas, yes, but blind--no. Units like the food politics unit are excellent facilitators of this kind of separation. The food politics unit is one that I've seen used before, both here at UNL and where I came from at Bowling Green State University. It's an excellent way to move beyond simple explorations of an issue and discover all its complexities--especially in rural universities like UNL or BGSU. But I can imagine that it could be very interesting to use in an urban setting as well.

All of the authors addressed ways of belonging and how that belonging is constructed. Part of it is simply valuing the students' existing experiences and knowledge and part of it is an active participation in the issues of the communities they are connected to. I appreciated Charlotte Hogg's idea that for her students in Texas, they are all temporarily Texan, just by virtue of choosing to attend that particular college. That seems like a useful way to convince students that they need to be involved in their community--however they define it--wherever they go, but I also see little light bulbs going on, I never considered that before. Maybe it's also useful to consider that one can belong to more than one community, as well as understanding that community doesn't happen magically. Effort is required to make a community and they have a part in that making. The "Stories of Home" project, taken as a whole, complicates the idea of what it means to belong--and what it means to be separated from your place (physical, cultural, emotional, political, etc.). Anne Harrison, the Orphan Train orphan, wondered where and how she belonged. The stories of the refugee families were full of being a part of more than one place. The stories of disability and courage gave another view of what it means to define yourself in one way and to have the world view you in another way. I appreciated articulation of trying to belong to a place that doesn't want you, not just in the stories of the refugees, but also in the story of Lin and Barb. In another way, Lela Knox Shanks illustrated another way of trying to find a place in a world that doesn't want you. I didn't know about this project before this week, but I can see myself incorporating this collection of stories into a class.

Donehower, Hogg, and Schell's article concentrates on separating both students and teachers from mutual bias over their own knowledge and perspectives, towards a goal of mutual inquiry. Swan's "Three Generation Work History" sounded very interesting, especially in its effects of breaking down assumptions, especially the fictions that are constructed by families--or by imagination that fills in the gaps in knowledge. Those separations are absolutely useful to begin thinking about what constitutes a community and what's been done in the past to break up certain communities or prevent communities from forming.

Using Bill Bryson's "Fat Girls in Des Moines" and Kathleen Norris's "Status," was brilliantly articulated to address these goals. Maybe I should not be surprised any longer when writers I admire crop up in our readings. I used the first page of "Fat Girls in Des Moines" just last week in my 150 class (see previous post on Beginnings and Endings), because the rhetoric of "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to" is a great discussion starter for how he makes the reader want to turn the page. Part of it is voice, part of it is pacing. But using the memoir form as an assignment for students to engage these ideas is excellent--but I wonder if using the essay form, in the Montaignian sense of the term, would be more appropriate than memoir, for the simple reason that I think that writing can be its own form of action, and the essay a more effective form than memoir (but that's my own bias towards the essay coming forward).

In my place-based English 150 I've been using the Montaignian definition of essay, since that is what I write, what I study, and what I read. I think the form itself is particularly suitable for place-based inquiry. This type of essay is not an academic work, nor a five-paragraph essay. It is a fluid, malleable form that combines narrative, exposition, and high exposition as the canvas upon which the writer's mind moves its brush. Scott Olsen defines the essay as "the witnessed development of an idea." What makes an essay work is the writer's mind, which means that an essay on the smallest subject can become the largest essay. An essay is not strictly narrative--though that is and can be a part of it--but it is the perspective that the writer brings to the subject that is important. The writer needs to make the subject matter relevant to the reader, which is not simply "relating." The writer needs to actively make the reader care. Patrick Madden is a particularly fine practitioner of this form these days.

I just finished grading the first Writing Project, which was on an aspect of a place they're connected to. I got essays on high school (yet the essay was not a straight narrative of their memories there--it was about how communities are constructed); an essay about a student who goes to her best friend's grave on the 5th of every month was not about the student herself--it was a meditation on the tangibility and intangibility of grief. What makes an essay work is "the story behind the story," as Swan writes, which "reveals the logic, motivations, and implications visible only through insider perspectives." I use the essay to illustrate to students that not only are their experiences important, valuable, vital, but that their thought processes are as well. English 150 is called "Rhetoric as Inquiry" and the essay itself is a natural written expression of that kind of inquiry.

All of these pieces move the conversation of place and belonging beyond Donehower, Hogg, and Schell's premise that effective teaching units that engage the world beyond the physical classroom do address race-ethnicity-gender-class (that most of the composition textbooks try to promote) in ways and contexts that expands the conversation, which moves beyond simple preservationist rhetoric. Students are then able to understand that these diversity questions actually do exist in situations where they consider the community too heterogeneous to support any separations like race-gender-class, especially as students consider their own contributions towards perpetuating certain divisions as well as having those divisions perpetuated on them.

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.

Where I'm From: A Minnesota Babine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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