Eng. 180 and Beyond: For the Love of Irish Noir

I’m finding my academic ADD to be particularly irritating right now.  I’m three weeks out from my deadline to finish my Focus portfolio for my comps (the one on contemporary Irish prose) and for the most part, I’m on track to do that.  Of course, that does not preclude the stress dreams of late (I’m mostly prone to the ones where the brakes in the car fail or my teeth fall out).  But then I get up in the morning, make my tea, sit down in the brown chair in my grandparents’ living room, listen to the wind in the leaves, the loons on the lake, try to ignore the irritating buzz of boat motors and jet skiis, drink my tea, and remember that my life is pretty dang good.

My ADD right now has to do with this corollary thing I’ve picked up in the last few months (mostly because the book I’m writing my paper on, what I’ll present to the IASIL conference in three weeks, is on Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, billed as a murder-mystery)—Irish crime literature.  Naturally, I see this as a gorgeous hybrid of the crime literature class I’m teaching in the fall and my focus list.  Contemporary Irish crime literature?  Yes, please.  I’m reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in my spare time (yes, that’s sarcastic) to get ready for the class, as well as anything else I can get my hands on to build up a better base for what I’m going to teach.  But I keep getting side tracked into Irish noir.  I don’t have time to be side tracked, but I can’t stop, so I’m trying to make a productive something out of it, so I can justify the time I’m spending on it.

This is not a small genre either, as I’m learning—enough going on there that I’m going to work up a syllabus on the subject, partly for the fun of it and partly to build up my folder of ready-to-go classes to teach.  I’ve got a creative writing class worked up (which I taught Spring 2012) and I will work up an introductory Irish lit class for my Focus Portfolio requirements—but I also want to work up an advanced Irish lit class.  The dream class, as it were.  Just as I think that teaching crime literature—both classic and popular—provokes us to conversations that we might not have otherwise, narrowing that idea to a specific place is right up my place-conscious alley, so to speak.

But when I came across Andrew Kincaid’s article “‘Down These Mean Streets’: The City and Critique in Contemporary Irish Noir,” a couple of puzzle pieces I hadn’t known I was missing fit into place.  Kincaid wrote of the eminent Declan Kiberd’s questioning (in 2005) where the literature that reflected the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger—and Kincaid argues that the literature has been written, but not in a form that Kiberd recognized:  crime literature.  Crime literature, especially of the noir/hard-boiled variety (pioneered, of course, by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others) is the genre that reflects the “violence, ugliness, the distrust, the moral conflicts, and tempo that are inherent in the moment” (41).  Later, Kincaid writes that “In noir the city is not a mere physical backdrop in which the plot can unfold; the city itself functions as a central character, frequently determining the emotions of the hero as much as in any naturalist narrative” (41).  This is true.  And something I’ve based a lot of my teachings on, no matter what kind of text we’re looking at and no matter what type of class I’m teaching (composition, creative writing, or literature).  Looking at any type of writing through the lens of place studies then opens up the opportunity for students to question how place functions in their lives, what kind of role it plays.  Of course, this type of looking-outward is the goal of any class.

I’ve written here before of my deep and abiding adoration for John Banville and his crime-writing alter ego, Benjamin Black.  I found Elegy for April in a thrift store recently, which was rather exciting, and was a welcome return to the world of Quirke (since I was disappointed by The Silver Swan, though I might have to reread it to be sure I disliked it as much as I remember).  And also the amazingness of Tana French’s In the Woods.  I haven’t gotten a chance to read more of her work, but I can’t wait till I do.  I picked up Declan Hughes at the library yesterday (surprised that the little library had any of the names on my list), but I’m only a few pages in, so I have no opinion yet.  I did lend Christine Falls and In the Woods to a lady I’m cleaning cabins with this summer—and she was nearly speechless with adoration for Christine Falls when I saw her the next week.  She said she’s halfway through In the Woods and will be hard-pressed to say which one she likes better.  (This, given my Chocolat savant dreams, made me exceptionally happy.) 

What teaching—or taking—a class in such a narrow area offers is beyond the benefits I’ve mentioned, because one place is not like another place.  Crime fiction set in Los Angeles is not the same as that set in Boston or northern Minnesota or Dublin.  Each place has its own character, its own particular set of cultures and problems.  It’s like I wrote when I posted on Benjamin Black’s Silver Swan—I know that 1950s Dublin is a very specific place with its own very specific issues and cultural expectations and gender roles.  (Which is why I loved Christine Falls more than Silver Swan, because those pieces played a role in the plot.)  And being able to teach these things on a literature level (or a creative writing level) means giving them the tools to be aware of everything they take for granted when they read a book “for fun.” 

A friend did her project in our Women’s Rhetoric class this last semester on sex trafficking in popular fiction and in her presentation, she talked about who the protagonists were, what they tended to do for a living, how the law was involved (cops, lawyers, or journalists, generally made up the bulk of careers)—but the thing that stuck with me was how she said even if a woman was the protagonist, trying to stop this trafficking, she more-than-frequently fell into the hands of the bad guys herself and needed the male protagonist to save her.  So even though we had a strong female in the lead of the story, she still needed to be saved by a man.  And now I’m on the lookout for whenever I see that happening in any story I read—and awareness is the largest challenge of academia, that moment where my student says, “I never thought about it that way before” the sweetest.  If our students don’t recognize that something is happening, we can’t have any sort of a discussion about it.

Eng. 252: Cross-Class Interview with Joseph O'Connor

Here's our cross-class interview with Joseph O'Connor, who kindly answered our questions about Star of the Sea.  Some of these questions came from my 252; some came from Dawn Duncan's 346 (though I can't remember which is which anymore).  Enjoy!Here's our cross-class interview with Joseph O'Connor, who kindly answered our questions about Star of the Sea.  Some of these questions came from my 252; some came from Dawn Duncan's 346 (though I can't remember which is which anymore).  Enjoy!

The Process:

Q: How many drafts of Star of the Sea did you write? How long did it take you to go from first word to the last edit?


A: I wrote up to forty drafts of some chapters and perhaps only three or four of others. The opening preface was a sequence for which I wrote only a few drafts because it presented itself to me more or less as it appears. The concluding chapter and some other sequences took a lot more work. Yeats says that all poetry comes from “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." I believe that’s where novels come from, too. 



Q: What was the hardest part about writing the novel?


A: Finding an architecture that would work. I think the challenge of art is to make what is difficult look easy. I wanted to make Star of the Sea, which is a very complicated story, a page turner. To that end, I used some of the techniques of Victorian fiction: cliff-hangers, chapter headings, illustrations, melodrama. My hope was that it would be a book that would work by a kind of osmosis, that the reader would absorb whatever it has to say about politics and history and sexuality without even noticing. One of my most beloved novels, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (mentioned in Star of the Sea) has a structure that is in fact extremely complicated, but the reader doesn’t notice. That book was a kind of household god to me when writing Star of the Sea.



Q: Did you craft your story in order by chapter (or did you focus on one character's plot and then cut it up and piece it back together)?


A: I wrote the beginning, and then the end, and then I stopped writing and designed the shape for the whole book before I wrote very much more.

The Form:

Q: Did you write the novel with a goal of social commentary or was that aspect a natural development throughout the writing? Did you intentionally write the novel to critique laissez faire and Free Market principles?

A: I wrote the novel in the hope that it would be an involving experience for the reader, and, hopefully, that it would be beautiful, even though its subject matter is dark. I think the first duty of a novel is to be beautiful. I dislike novels that set out with social commentary as a goal. We don’t go to fiction for that, but to be touched and moved. If I feel a novelist is telling me how to think, or how to vote, I immediately switch off. That is the worst form of sentimentality: manipulation. 

Q: How did the form develop? Did you start off with an idea of a book within a book, the changing POV and form, or did that evolve gradually? Or did you make a decision halfway through and go back and change it?

A: I started with the picture of Pius Mulvey that is presented in the opening preface, and then I had an image of the reader watching the action unroll from various points of view. And so, I constructed the book around that general image: that the reader is not sitting in the audience, receiving the authorial pearls, but is glimpsing the far more interesting things that happen as the kaleidoscope turns. I wanted it to be a book that would argue with itself. 

The Characters:

Q: Do you trust any of your characters? How did you see the purpose and function of your characters' unreliability?

A: I think Captain Lockwood is a reliable narrator (I am very fond of him), and almost everyone else is unreliable to some degree or another. 

Q: How do you know that you can add in your humor into grim situations and still have it be believable for the characters to act like that?

A: As a reader, I think a dark story needs to have humor here and there, otherwise it becomes unreadable and therefore a waste of everyone’s time. Star of the Sea would be a truly awful book without its moments of levity and lightness, for example the Dickensian buoyancy that I hope happens when Mulvey goes to London. Those moments sort of puncture the heaviness of the background, I hope.

Q: As a writer, some of the characters we love the most can be the ones who should be most hated (as a reader). I'm wondering who (if any) is/was your favorite character to develop in Star of the Sea? 

A: I couldn’t distinguish between them in that way. I was fond of all the characters, to some extent. It’s important, when writing a villain, to find something to like in him or her. And it’s equally important to show the flaws of your heroes. The person in the book for whom I feel the most empathy is Mary Duane, but I have a human sympathy, for want of a better phrase, for everyone else.

Q: These characters are so fully realized: what is your best method and advice for getting to know your characters so completely?

A: A writer needs to know absolutely everything about a character. You don’t reveal everything, of course, but you do need to know it. Then, you cut. The more you cut, the more believable the character becomes. It’s one of the loveliest little miracles of fiction.

The Plot:

Q: What made you decide to reveal both the murderer and his victim immediately, in terms of creating suspense and momentum? So, if the plot is no longer "who gets killed" and "who is the murderer," what do you see as driving the plot and the story?

A: The momentum of the ship’s journey. Some of my favorite novels are stories about journeys: As I Lay Dying, The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, even The Catcher in the Rye. A journey always infuses a story with a kind of investment because we want to know at some fundamental level if the protagonist(s) ever make it to the destination. Think about some of the oldest and most lasting stories our culture possesses: the Greek myths, the bible stories, the Canterbury Tales, the Native American folktales. Life itself is a journey, a metaphor acknowledged by every form of storytelling from high literature to the popular song. 

Q: How many of these conflicts in the characters' lives just appeared naturally as the book "wrote itself" versus ones you knew from the outset were essential to the story?

A: It’s hard to know. I would say, from memory, that it was fifty-fifty.

Miscellaneous:

Q: Do you like the novel? Have you tried to reread it as if you were not the author?

A: Yes, I like the novel. I am very proud of it. I wouldn’t say that I have tried to reread it as though I were not the author, because that is obviously not possible, but I tried to write it as a reader, as I always do. The most important person in any novel is the reader, not the author. I dislike novels in which the author is too visibly present. A novel should never EVER be about the author. 

Q: Pius Mulvey very much embodies music in this story. Are you yourself musically inclined, or did you seek music out to help develop his character?

A: I thought of each of the characters as having a sort of private sound track. It’s something I always do when constructing a character. I believe music is the highest art form, the only truly international language, and all prose should have musicality.

Eng. 252: Wrapping up Star of the Sea

It's a rainy Saturday morning in Lincoln and we've got one week left to go in our semester.  I'm not sure which of these makes my Assam taste better, putting me back in Galway on a day when the air is so wet but not raining.  I have a lot to do this weekend, with my own rhetoric class as well as the classes that I'm teaching, but right now, I'm wrapped in all kinds of things that are just more fun.

It's been an exciting 24-hours in terms of our collaborative wiki project (click here to see what's going on!).  My fiction class finished talking about the novel last week and this week, we've been working on putting together the master document for the wiki (ours will be posted tonight; Dawn's class will post tomorrow).  Dawn's class finished talking about the novel yesterday.  But in addition to the really cool things that our students have been posting, two other major things happened:  Joseph O'Connor, the author, wrote yesterday to answer the questions that my students had posted for him (I confess that I was very worried that he would not do so (or do so in time), after agreeing to earlier in the semester)--but he did and I can't wait to talk to my students about what he said.  Click here for that "interview."  But here's a sampling:

Q: What was the hardest part about writing the novel?


A: Finding an architecture that would work. I think the challenge of art is to make what is difficult look easy. I wanted to make Star of the Sea, which is a very complicated story, a page turner. To that end, I used some of the techniques of Victorian fiction: cliff-hangers, chapter headings, illustrations, melodrama. My hope was that it would be a book that would work by a kind of osmosis, that the reader would absorb whatever it has to say about politics and history and sexuality without even noticing. One of my most beloved novels, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (mentioned in Star of the Sea) has a structure that is in fact extremely complicated, but the reader doesn’t notice. That book was a kind of household god to me when writing Star of the Sea.

Q: What made you decide to reveal both the murderer and his victim immediately, in terms of creating suspense and momentum? So, if the plot is no longer "who gets killed" and "who is the murderer," what do you see as driving the plot and the story?


A: The momentum of the ship’s journey. Some of my favorite novels are stories about journeys: As I Lay Dying, The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, even The Catcher in the Rye. A journey always infuses a story with a kind of investment because we want to know at some fundamental level if the protagonist(s) ever make it to the destination. Think about some of the oldest and most lasting stories our culture possesses: the Greek myths, the bible stories, the Canterbury Tales, the Native American folktales. Life itself is a journey, a metaphor acknowledged by every form of storytelling from high literature to the popular song. 

Q: Pius Mulvey very much embodies music in this story. Are you yourself musically inclined, or did you seek music out to help develop his character?


A: I thought of each of the characters as having a sort of private sound track. It’s something I always do when constructing a character. I believe music is the highest art form, the only truly international language, and all prose should have musicality.

But this morning, the inimitable Dawan Duncan answered the questions that my students had posted for her (click here for that) and she gave some terrific insights into how she and her class approached the novel, what they talked about in terms of postmodernism, post colonialism, the role of the artist in society, and more.  Here's a sampling:

Q:  Are there any unusual observations your class is making in discussion that we aren't seeing on the wiki?


A:  Hmmm...probably quite a few. I have the advantage of reading their longer think pieces, which in the future might be what we want to place on the wiki. In class they make many more ties to what they have learned about postcolonialism (especially the ontological struggles) and to the hallmarks of postmodernism. I suppose the paragraphs get to these main points in some measure. We have also discussed the recurring theme in our class of the role of the artist, including what happens to the artistic nature that is kept from its true vocation (Pius Mulvey and David Merridith, perhaps even Dixon, though we question his artistry).

Q:  How do you find the reading experience differs from someone with an extensive knowledge on the time period and history within the novel, versus a new coming to Irish lit who has little to no knowledge of the historical background? And do you feel as though this difference is significant enough that it takes away from the story itself?


A:  While I recognize that the difference is significant, I do not think it takes away from the story. Rather, I would say that when I or Karen point something out in the text (how much land the Kingscourt's have, given the extended title; that the preacher at Verity's service is actually WB Yeats' grandfather, etc.), then the text gains richness. The novel is already so beautifully constructed and subtly layered that someone coming to it without extensive background knowledge can be pulled into the story and learn to want to understand even more about the characters. I would hope that a curious reader would also be drawn to do a bit of research into the context and certain aspects that interest them most.

Q:  In Ch 14, Dixon covers his hardships concerning his own writing and in this chapter there is a lot of mention of the aesthetic movement. On p. 120, Dixon makes reference to John Ruskin's "Modern Painter" as the ideal definition of art for the purpose of beauty and pleasure, and p. 127, there's mention of Laura as a love of the "aesthetics." I also noticed on our wiki page, under Duncan Class Essentials, you term postmodernism as "an attempt to retying a number of concepts held dear to Enlightenment humanism; also refers to the aesthetic/cultural products that treat and often critique aspects of postmodernity." I'm wondering how these specific references to the aesthetic movement reflects a postmodernism ideal?


A: This question is much tougher to answer without a deep study, or at least lecture, of artistic theory. I will say that I think there is irony at work here. The aesthetes, like Pater and Wilde, thought the goal of art should be to bring beauty to the world, that any message cannot be the motivating force for an artist (which is not to say that their work is devoid of such). Laura believes she can judge true artistry, yet the two men she marries are both flawed artists (David is good at landscape but idealizes the human portrait; Dixon wants to write fiction but writes more like a journalist) and both construct false images that they portray to the world. So how good can she be at judging truth and beauty? On the other hand, when we hear O'Connor speak of his work, we do hear hints of the aesthetic preference for beauty before message. He wants to write a ripping good story, first and foremost. But I cannot help but be fascinated by the embedded social commentary that comes through the story. I think he succeeds on the second point too, giving us something that rings true.

Q: What do you think the most interesting aspect of this novel is? (And what do your students think is most interesting, most fascinating, etc?) There is so much going on in my mind as I'm reading--it would be interesting to see what stands out for you as you, personally, are reading it.


A:  I cannot speak for my students since their own responses would vary. For me the most interesting aspect it its utter humanity. O'Connor has given us flawed characters but made us enter into their lives in such a way that we feel their pain and understand their motivations. He has also subtly shown how we are all responsible for caring for one another. I think the humanity of his vision, of this work, is remarkable.

Dawn and I are going to Skype later today and debrief each other, talk about the project, things that went well, things we'd change, and I'm just excited to talk to her about it in general.  Technology has proven to be an awesome thing for this project.  As I said, you'll want to check out the full interviews--and keep an eye on the wiki today and tomorrow for what our students will be posting as their final master documents.  And then by Friday, our students will be posting their reflections on the project and reflections are always fascinating to me.

Eng. 252: Special Guest Star, Dawn Duncan!

On Wednesday, our fiction class was graced by my dear friend, colleague, and counterpart, Dawn Duncan. Last week, I Skyped with her Contemporary British Literature class about how our fiction class was going to approach Star of the Sea, how that might be different from how they would approach it. I talked about my own background, why I'm interested in Ireland, place studies, and the written word. It was great fun, so I was glad to bring Dawn into my classroom. Thankfully, the technology sort of worked and the internet cooperated.

Here's the link to our Imagination and Knowledge wiki, if you want to check out what we've been doing. This week, our students have been posting their "paragraphs of insight" to the appropriate pages (on characters/characterization, narrative movement, plot, conflict, etc) and it's been thrilling to see how each class is approaching this book so differently. It makes my little teacher heart go pitty-pat.

Like I did with her class, Dawn started off with some introductory remarks about how she got interested in Ireland and Irish literature, how postcolonialism was becoming popular about that time, what a postcolonial perspective meant, that some measure the "post" colony as after the colonizers leave, some measure "post" by when the colonizers arrive (Dawn is in the latter group). Dawn described it as being about power, an alien Other encroaching on the native. Studying a postcolonial perspective, then, is not about race or skin color, but the way that power is exercised on the native population.

Her description of postmodernism, too, was easy to understand, that it's a recognition that we do not live in a world of certainty, and language and identity is a part of that. One school (the negative one) says that the uncertainty of language means we can never hope to understand each other, but the positive school (Dawn's perspective) is that it's a great opportunity, because that means we live in a world that recognizes that there is no one right way to know, one right way to understand, no one right answer. The uncertainty of language brings layers of richness and meaning to any reading of a text, that what one person gets out of a reading might be completely different than somebody else--and not only is that okay, it's something to be celebrated.

Which is the major reason we're doing this project.

One of the things I most appreciate about Dawn and her critical perspectives (which come out of her personal perspectives as both a critic and a creative writer, though she mostly does criticism these days) is that what others see as a drawback or a problem, she sees as an opportunity. We bring together these pieces of knowledge and knowledge evolves.

My students then were able to ask her questions and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but the questions were amazing, thoughtful, and deep. (You can see some of them on the "Questions for Dawn Duncan" page on the wiki--she hasn't answered them there yet (as of this morning), but she will. (And we posted some questions for Joseph O'Connor himself and Dawn and I will send them to him this weekend and hopefully we'll get some answers!)

After we hung up the Skype, my students were fairly buzzing with energy. They were really excited to have been able to talk with her, to hear firsthand how she approaches the book (though they found, as I did once upon a time, her breadth of knowledge intimidating--but we're looking at it as inspirational, rather than intimidating). They expressed concern that her class would think that we're doing the simplistic analysis of the book, where they're doing the more complicated (and thus important) analysis of the book--but I said that they're probably thinking the same of us. They nodded and the anxiety in the room went down.

So far, this project is going so much better than I anticipated it would, which is not to say there haven't been snags here and there, but I'm just thrilled by what's happening in my classroom, what's happening in Dawn's classroom, and what's happening in the combined digital space of our wiki. Not too shabby for the last three weeks of the semester.

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 2

I'm just going to give a blanket statement about today's class: I love my classes, I love my students, and I'm more thrilled than I can say that they're loving Star of the Sea. I feel like I have very little to say other than these sorts of joy-reactions, but that's all I've got right now. When you get to the point in the semester and you know your students don't want to be there, the weather is really nice at 12:30 on a Friday, it's easy to get excited when your students actually come to class, so excited that they're tripping over themselves and each other to talk about what they noticed. To quote one of my students in his Think Piece, "This book was not quite what I was expecting, but when you think about it, all books that are worth reading are never quite what you are expecting."

But instead of reporting what we talked about in our discussions, I'm going to direct you to our class wiki, Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea: Imagination and Knowledge, and I'm going to relate how our class started this afternoon.

First, I mentioned stress tics and how, when we discussed them some weeks ago, I told them how one of mine is tiny houses. Well, another is planning new classes. As a result, I'm currently in love with Dennis Lehane, so while we aren't reading him this semester, I wanted to play this interview clip:

And then I asked them to consider for the rest of the semester what they would put on their own 3x5 card. I'd mentioned earlier that I have my own, in the form of a Post-It Note stuck to my sightline on my desk. It contains two quotes: "Just write the fucking thing," courtesy of the inimitable Jonis Agee. And then right below it: "That story won't unfuck itself," from Chuck Wendig.

I did this on purpose, because I had a plan. I don't often drop four letter words in class, though they do appear occasionally. First, we're reading some of the most depressing material in human history and this would make them laugh. And it did. Second, I wanted to segue into O'Connor by playing a clip of O'Connor reading, on the subject of swearing (although as you can see, not much swearing in it):



And from there we had a second day of stupendous discussion.

So, what's on your 3x5 card of writerly wisdom?

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 1

We start the real part of our collaborative project today! I got to Skype with Dawn Duncan's class at Concordia College and I'm really excited about how it went, though I don't know if her students were able to take too much from it. Part of it is just the thrill of today, that we're starting Star of the Sea in my class and her class is starting the book as well and I'm really excited about the discussion that I'm anticipating will be awesome. Part is caffeine. Good morning, world!

So, I asked my class (Intro to Fiction) what they thought Dr. Duncan's class should know about what we're doing, how we're going to approach Star of the Sea. (Her class will do the same for us.) And the basic question is this, for both classes: What do we see when we look at a piece of writing? What's the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer?

The difference is important. As readers, at the most basic level, we want a story to take us to a place we've never been before, to meet new people, to learn of the world outside of our lives right now. As writers, we want to know what the writer has done to effect that reaction. For instance, I bet that Duncan's class will talk about fragmentation and identity in the postmodern novel (which Star of the Sea is) and how that plays into a postcolonial reading of the novel--but in my class, we'll talk about how O'Connor constructed that fragmentation. We'll talk about the shifts in POV, the shifts in form (from traditional narrative to ship's log to newspaper editorial and more). We'll talk about the way that O'Connor develops and constructs his characters to represent the questions of identity. The fact that it's a murder mystery is genius, of course, and something we'll talk about in my class as well. But a lot of our time as writers is spent at the sentence-level.

I asked my students about what I should tell Duncan's class and here are the top things:

• The form of what is on the page is deliberate (the function of it is what the reader brings to the page). Diction and dialogue, even punctuation, is so deliberately considered through countless revisions that you have to assume it's deliberate, because nothing in writing happens by accident. So, for readers, if O'Connor is using semicolons frequently (something that is common to British/Irish authors), why would he use them, rather than other forms of punctuation? My students find themselves heavily influenced by Noah Lukeman's book A Dash of Style, which looks at the way that punctuation affects the reading of a text.
• A reader will ask "what is happening?" and a writer will ask "how did the author create this?" A reader--and the scholars in Duncan's class--will talk about symbolism and other thematic issues; writers will ask how that symbolism and that theme is constructed. If Duncan's class is talking about identity as fluid in the text, my students will ask how O'Connor constructed the characters and the setting to affect that reading. For instance, how is the setting crafted through character in the preface, how the character of The Ghost moves through the landscape, a landscape that is also moving? How does how O'Connor craft both the character and the setting mirror the changing perspectives and the reader's understanding of those characters? And what does it mean that the movement is of a crippled character and a coffin ship?
• And the final thing my students would like to pass on is the importance of place in fiction, that it is more than the physical description of a setting. Reading Eudora Welty's classic "Place in Fiction" is a good place to start. Setting involves atmosphere, the air a character breathes. Place, when it is done right, is as much an active character on the page as anyone who breathes. It's the reason that I was so disappointed with Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan, which I listened to on CD last week--and the reason I'm so in love with Dennis Lehane right now. Setting and place can never be neutral. (One of the reasons why last semester, the craft paper I got on William Kent Krueger's use of cold in Iron Lake turned out so brilliant.)

Her class asked some good questions too, about why they should read Eudora Welty, what was my best moment of studying in Ireland and how does that play out in my reading and writing and teaching, and other excellent questions. I talked about only being able to take history classes over there and how all classes feed the writing, no matter what they are. But history class, as well as others, just make the context of reading and writing richer. History and literature are so closely linked as to be nearly indistinguishable for me sometimes. Some of Duncan's students are studying abroad in Galway in the next few years--and I'm really excited for them.

Then, in my class, we started talking about the preface and the first three chapters. We set up the perspective shifts that the epigraphs provide, the realization that there is no one right way to tell this story--which is immediately followed by the "fake" title page, that this is a book within a book. We talked a bit about reliable narrators and how that is constructed, how we're not sure whose voice we're supposed to trust. We moved through the four chapters we read for today and some important questions we asked:

• How many ways does O'Connor manipulate the landscape of the text, the actual form that the pages take (fake title page, footnotes, etc)?
• What's the effect of switching POV so completely between chapters? Why does he choose to change form, rather than just change voice? How does the ship's log work a different perspective on place and setting? How does it continue to set up the ship as a character?
• In the 2nd chapter, we get the first real dialogue of the book--and what purpose does the dialogue serve? How is it what characters do to each other?
• In the 3rd chapter, another POV, another form: what purpose does this editorial serve that could not be delivered by any other form? On one hand it gives the reader the background information necessary to understand some of the characters, but it also serves a larger purpose of developing Dixon's character t00--how does that happen?

We almost ran out of time today and this brief synopsis isn't even close to mentioning all the things we talked about today. The class was pretty excited and engaged and thrilled and we were picking out nuances around every little corner, like the mention of the red sky in the morning during the Preface, the old sailor's ditty about danger coming--and we really came away at the end of class with a new appreciation for a writer's skill, how many ways a writer can take control of a text (we specifically talked about O'Connor's diction) and make it do exactly what the writer wants. I can't wait for Friday.

Here's the interview with O'Connor that we started with today--very interesting in a lot of ways, so feel free to comment and contribute to the conversation!

Post-Spring Break

It's gorgeous (albeit windy) out there in Lincoln today and I've spent most of my day inside, unfortunately. But it's been a really good day, even the first day after Spring Break. It was good enough that I came home, bubbling with energy and thrill when I knew I didn't have any energy to back it up with. I love my job, I love my classes, I love my students.

Two major things happened today: we started the third and final writing project in my English 150 class. I'm almost done grading their second WP, which are turning out to be really good. The first was on Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife and they wrote about how a character (an individual person) can be shaped by a natural disaster, even a hundred years or more after it happened. Then in the second project, we moved out a little and considered how the student's own community was shaped by a natural disaster. As they moved through this project, they started to ask--without any prompting from me--what do we do about this? It made my little heart go pitty-pat. Unbeknownst to them, the third project is designed to address exactly that question.

This third project is about human-caused disasters (yet another cheerful topic in a semester of cheerful topics) and we're reading Erik Reece's The Lost Mountain, about radical strip-mining and mountaintop removal. The purpose of the project is to find a human-caused disaster and propose a solution (of some sort); part of this will involve arguing why it's a disaster, because obviously the coal companies don't see mountaintop removal as a problem. The situations are much more complicated than that. As my students did their final two author presentations of the semester (on Reece and Don Worster, who's giving a lecture my students are going to on Wed night), I asked my students to consider a few things as we start reading this book:

It's not as simple as saying that places should be protected because they're pretty, because they mean something to us, because they represent something in the mythology of our country or our world. The world is a lot more complicated than that, so we have to get beyond our emotional reactions. I asked them to consider the role that the economy and class play in Reece's book--because these areas of Appalachia are extremely poor--and we'll continue to add to our list of complications. I like complications. They make life--and class--much more interesting.

In my 252 today, we started Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea and our awesome collaborative project with Dawn Duncan's class at Concordia. The truth is I'm extremely nervous. I've never done something like this before and between Dawn and myself, between our two classes of students, this could go really well or it could fail spectacularly. Add into that that I've never done a wiki before and new technology scares me. If you want to check out our wiki, click here for Imagination and Knowledge. I hope it turns out well.

Today was the Famine background power point in 252 and I thought it went fairly well, considering the subject matter. But as I was putting the power point together, it occurred to me the juxtaposition of politics and ecology, particularly The Little Ice Age and revolutions. I recommended Brian Fagan's awesome book The Little Ice Age, which I spoke of in tones I don't normally use for climate books. He's got an incredibly awesome chapter on An Ghorta Mor. And then also Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire, which contains his chapter on control and potatoes. I brought up the winters during the American Revolution and the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. I brought up the French Revolution. (I brought up Stradivarius and the theory that the Little Ice Age partly explains the superiority of his instruments, which made a few students nod in interest.) I mentioned Mt. Tambora's eruption in 1815, the Year without Summer (and with a mention of Frankenstein), and then we get into the Famine itself. The lecture was more complicated and more linear than this, but strangely, this is what my students seemed most interested in. A lot fewer of them looked bored than I thought they would. Go figure.

We start the actual book on Wednesday and I can't hardly wait. The book is freaking awesome. The landscape of the text, the manipulation of the form, the switching POV--sigh. I asked my class if anybody had started reading yet, some had, and those that had were so raring to go, with so much to say, so many questions about it, that I really, really can't wait for Wednesday.

It's the point in the semester where I have too much to do, not enough time, but I still can't wait for the next class. That's a good sign.

Stress Tics and Crime Fiction

We're to the point in the semester where I have more things to do than time to do them in--and my stress tics are no help. This semester, we used our stress tics to help us write awesome characters and right now, on this absolutely gorgeous Saturday that should be in June, rather than April, I got my page quota on my rhetoric paper, prepped my quota for Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, which we start on Monday in my 252, and my reward to myself was to work on my syllabi for fall, even though I don't know what I'll be teaching yet.

Yes. I know. I am not normal. Funny the things that help you relieve stress...

So, here's the current idea for a 101 (Rhetoric as Reading) or a 180-ish (Introduction to Literature): "Literature of Place: Crime Fiction." I've been wanting to put together a crime fiction class for a while now, but I've never sat down to do it. (I wonder why...) But as we're moving into Star of the Sea, which is, for all intents and purposes, a murder mystery, and I was listening to Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan on the way up to MN last weekend and to Dennis Lehane's Moonlight Mile on the way back down, I've got mysteries on my brain. And I've got place-based mysteries on the brain.

The sad part was that I was actually pretty disappointed by The Silver Swan and I'm hoping when I break into some of his other works Dublin will play more of a role on the page. The series takes place in 1950s Dublin, but from the way the novel unfolded, it could have been anywhere in any time, which should not be the case. Dublin--and Ireland in general--is a very specific place and the 1950s is a very specific time in the history of Ireland. It's not just a matter of landscape, but atmosphere, and the way that the place affects and shapes the characters. By the time the story finished, I knew--just from my experience with Ireland and Dublin--that the story itself could not have been set elsewhere, that the plot couldn't have happened that way without this time and place, the characters and their actions dictated by the time and place, but rather than seeming timeless, it felt generic. And for Black--aka John Banville, who I adore--it seemed too easy. So we'll see if that changes when I read some of his other books.

Here's the current reading list, with a goal towards hitting the parents of the genre, and then spending the rest of our time in contemporary crime fiction that works really well with place. The goal is to examine place and the role that place plays not only on the page, but to the reader--what do we take away from this reading? How does the author create atmosphere? How does the author use the landscape (both natural and built) to advance the story? How are heroes and villains hampered or aided by the landscape? How are characters Othered? How are women portrayed? What is their role on the page, in the story?

Trying to narrow things down has been excruciating so far--and even narrowing to authors down has not been helpful. I just got off Skype with my mother, who's read most of the books I want to assign, and we couldn't decide between various books. Maybe when my stress gets really bad, I can have two or three crime fiction syllabi in rotation... And I'm not happy right now with the overload of men vs. women here.

Okay, here's the preliminary reading list:

• selections of Edgar Allan Poe;
• Arthur Conan Doyle, a Sherlock Holmes to be determined;
• Agatha Christie, short stories;
• Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon;
• Nevada Barr, to be determined (taking suggestions!);
• William Kent Krueger, Iron Lake;
• Dennis Lehane, Mystic River;
• Janet Evanovich, One for the Money

I don't know about this. Not sure how many books I can get away with requiring of my students, even if they could probably get them for a penny on Amazon. We'll see. And again, since we're largely reading contemporary authors, I'm going to see if I can get any of them to Skype with my students. Krueger is wonderful and he Skyped with my 252 class last semester, so maybe he'd be willing to do it again, but I'm curious what would happen if I emailed any of the other living writers. Got nothing to lose, right?

If it's a 101 class, then we'll be writing three papers; if it'a a 180 (or the like), then I might just do a midterm and final paper. Because of this, I might have to cut a book, but we'll see. Sigh. So many books, so little time.

So, what do you think? Thoughts about who I should add or subtract from my preliminary list?

Short Mini-Interview With Joseph O'Connor

My Eng. 252 class is reading O'Connor's short story "Mothers Were All The Same" for Monday and so I sent O'Connor an email, wondering if he could give us some insight into the writing of the story. (My class is collaborating with him and Dawn Duncan's Eng. 346 class at Concordia College, so we've set up this communication beforehand.) We're studying POV this week in our fiction class, so we'll be talking about that, as well as other areas of craft (dialogue, setting/place, character development, etc.) It's true, the story is fairly old (for himself), but he was willing and so here's our exchange. Some interesting insights here.

Karen Babine: "I'm wondering if you could talk about the process you went through to get to the final draft we're reading. How many drafts did you go through? Any particular struggles you went through to revise?"

Joseph O'Connor: "I wrote "Mothers Were All the Same" about 25 years ago, perhaps before many of your students were born, and so you will understand that I no longer remember all the precise steps (and mis-steps) that I took during the process of that particular story. But generally, back in those days, my approach to a story was fairly instinctive. In a first draft I would simply splash the words down onto the page and not worry about anything like grammar or spelling, or even logic. I probably focussed on something like finding a 'voice', the actual sound of the person speaking. Then, when I had written perhaps four thousand words, I would start into the process of refining and shaping them. Usually, I would do maybe forty drafts of a story. Anything less than twenty drafts doesn't work for me."

Karen Babine: "We're studying POV next week, so it might be beneficial for my students to hear something about how you chose a first person narrator over a third person narrator (even a 3rd person limited narrator). (We'll talk more about POV when we get to Star of the Sea.) When you're writing, how do you decide what POV to choose? Do you ever change POV in a story when you go back to revise (like 3rd to 1st or 1st to 3rd), if you find that one works better than another?"

Joseph O'Connor: "I am not conscious of ever choosing a point a view for a story. Instead, I try to let the story choose its own point of view and then go with that. Your students will have realised that point of view changes everything in a story. 'Mothers Were All the Same' would be a very different thing were it written by the young woman he meets on the train. And it would be equally different if narrated by an all-seeing eye. It simply felt to me as though the ACTUAL subject of the story, as opposed to the plot it outlines, is the naivety of the young man narrating events he scarcely understands. For that to come across, I must have felt it would be better told from his point of view."

Karen Babine: "This week we're studying dialogue, so I'm wondering if you could speak to your use of direct vs. indirect dialogue in this story. How did you choose the way that you presented the dialogue? Was it a matter of pacing and tone, voice, or something else?"

Joseph O'Connor: "Again, you ask about my 'choices', but I am rarely conscious of making any choice, as such, when writing a piece of fiction. I mean, I do make choices, as every writer must, but I tend to go by instinct. My approach, perhaps a rather idiosyncratic one, is that I assume the story already exists 'out there' somewhere, and what I am doing is trying to see it more clearly so that I can write it down. That sounds insane, I know. But that's what I do.

I feel dialogue is truly essential to get right in a story. Nothing trips the reader up more severely than bad or unbelievable dialogue. When I wrote that story, I was myself young, and so I wrote the dialogue through a process of listening how my friends talked. Every writer needs to be a listener, and a watcher, before being anything else. That's far more important than literary 'style'. In fact, no style is possible without it. And as writers, we need to read like writers, not simply readers. So, when we encounter the work of a writer who does dialogue well (for example, James Joyce) we need to study every nuance.

You ask about the issue of 'reported' dialogue, as opposed to noting down exactly what someone said. The answer is very simple. I just don't believe any of us remember entire conversations word-for-word with total precision, so when a writer asks me to believe that he or she does, I don't believe it, and then I lose interest. Everything we do as writers needs to be focused on making readers stay with us, not driving them away."

***

If you're interested in more of our collaborative project, check out our wiki-in-progress (it's very in-progress...).

I also think this interview is a good one:

State of Mind: Linguistic Ecology and its Implications

There's a moment that usually happens on the Sunday before a semester starts, where stress and worry turns into excitement for the semester to begin. Today it's happening in that space between my migraine existing and starting to go away. The weather is changing around here--they're forecasting flurries or some such nonsense--and that almost always gives me a headache. Add to that two late nights of short sleep with weird dreams and I just want to curl into a ball and wait for all that pain to go away. So, today has been a cocktail of Excedrin, Advil, tea, rice bags, and every other remedy I know to relax my muscles. Of course, there's no cure for the weather.

Now that my headache has started to go away, the stress of tomorrow leading to excitement, I'm really excited to teach my Natural Disasters 150 and my Irish 252. I hope I can interest my students and teach them to think about the world just a little bit differently. I have my box of books ready to go to the office tomorrow, and my bag will be packed tonight. One of the greatest things about teaching college is that the first day of school happens twice a year (of course, this is also a drawback...)

Here's the greatest part of the day: I've been stressing about what to do to propose for the IASIL Conference this summer (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature), the kind of stress that leads to this delightful headache. But yesterday, it all popped clear for me. I've been working for a while to create this space where environmental ideas and creative writing and literature can come together and it occurs to me that the ideas of linguistic ecology that I explored with my recent paper on the Irish essayist Tim Robinson (recently published in New Hibernia Review!) is something that I would like to keep working on. So, what if I continued that idea and kept trying to apply it to other pieces of contemporary Irish literature, and see where it leads me?

My current idea, which is in the fiddling-with-language stage of the proposal process, is to take Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea and filter it through my linguistic ecology to see what the choices he made as a creative writer have done to effect a particular ecological perspective. What interests me most right now is not just the sentence-level awesomeness that I love to do, but I also want to examine the physical form that the narrative takes as well. This is a very interesting book, craft-wise. It's written as a book within a book, with very interesting character/voice/POV movement, that uses different forms to move the narrative forward (footnotes, letters, newspaper accounts, etc.). The prospect is extremely exciting, only some of which is relief at filling the Void of No Idea.

And then, I enter the realm that has become familiar territory for me: nobody else does this kind of creative writing/linguistic ecology thingy, to my knowledge. If I take my Tim Robinson essay, add to it my impending essay on O'Connor, write a couple more (especially given my also-impending Focus List on Irish environmental prose), I could have a book before too long. That would be excellent, a larger project, something to work towards, rather than random essays here and there. And because I also always do this, I wonder what it would be like to teach a class on the subject? Hm. Might keep that in mind for my focus portfolio, the syllabi that are required as a part of it, and hmmmmm. The possibilities are endless. So many classes, so little time--time to focus on the ones I'm actually teaching!

Bring on the new semester!

Digital Spaces: Preparing for Spring 2012

I'm putting a "mostly done" label on my two classes for spring, which is a great feeling. Some tweaking, I'm sure, will be required, as well as printing and proofing, before I deliver the babies off to the office to be copied. It's about the only thing I'll be printing for my classes, so I don't feel too guilty about it.

But as it's my goal to try something new every semester--at least while I'm at UNL--this coming semester is going to be an exercise not only in new themes and texts, but I'm experimenting with digital spaces as an extension of my classroom. Seeing these in play as I'm writing these syllabi is pretty exciting. It's also challenging me to do research on digital space as a place, to aid in my place-conscious pedagogy. I won't say I'm technologically challenged, but sometimes I find technology quite challenging.

So: today I set up the wiki that Dr. Dawn Duncan of Concordia College-Moorhead, MN and I will be using to teach our respective classes Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea. She's teaching "From Empire to Independence" (contemporary British literature) and she's using O'Connor--and I'm teaching the book in my Intro to Fiction (252) at UNL. Dawn's a dear friend of mine, dating back to my undergrad days at Concordia. There's no one I'd rather collaborate with than her. So, the goal is to approach this one novel from a scholarly, critical, readerly perspective and the perspective of a creative writer. The wiki is barely functional right now, since I don't know much about wikis, but we have until the 2nd half of the semester to figure it out. We're going to group our students across classes, have them post and discuss, and enrich each others' readings of the novel. Dawn and I also sent an email to Joseph O'Connor himself, wondering if he might be interested in being a part of this collaboration. As it's a large part of my own teaching philosophy and pedagogy to have my students talk and interact directly with the writers they are reading, I hope-hope-hope O'Connor's intrigued enough by what we're doing to want to be involved. Fingers crossed!

In my 150 class, which is a W.H. Thompson Scholars section (a UNL learning community comprised of first-generation/low-income students who have won the Thompson scholarship), we'll be talking about natural disasters in a variety of ways. The new, digital space thing here is that their second writing project, an oral history project that researches a disaster where they come from, is going to be a largely online project. They will create a blog designed to aid in their community's knowledge and understanding of this event. As I was working through the assignment, it made no sense to have my students do interviews and other oral-history-type-research and translate that oral quality into the written form. They will do written work, of course, but I think something too important would have been lost in the translation. Because they're creating a blog, they can post audio files, video files, and more. And the form that the project takes will be much more accessible to their communities. Should be exciting!

I'm pretty excited about both of these classes and I'm ready for them to begin! Well, ready for them to begin on the first day of the semester. Happy New Year!

Looking Ahead: Spring Eng. 252

I'm lucky enough to be able to teach another section of Intro to Fiction next semester, a spectacular opportunity on so many levels. I've mentioned before on this blog that because my time at UNL is short, it's my goal never to teach the same syllabus twice. This next semester, with my Natural Disasters 150 I'm halfway to that goal. With this new 252, I have another opportunity to stretch myself and make the most of the experience.

The first thing that's obviously different is that the class is MWF, not just once a week. And while I taught a variety of place-based fiction this semester, next semester we're reading contemporary Irish fiction. We'll be using the Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (ed. Dermot Bolger) and Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea. I'm coming to understand, practically, how important it is for students to read both short fiction and novels in fiction classes, something I've only known intellectually. I'm really excited to broaden their perspectives about what writing is happening in the world, as well as my own.

So, the other stupendous opportunity is that--as it stands right now--I'm going to be collaborating with my delightful friend Dawn Duncan, who is a brilliant Irish Lit/postcolonial scholar, who is also teaching O'Connor's Star of the Sea in her Contemporary Brit Lit class. So we're putting together some ideas about how we can foster cross-over between her literature class and my creative writing class, reading the same book. Her class is in Moorhead, MN and mine is in Lincoln, Nebraska. That also provides some challenges.

I've never done anything like this before and I would love some feedback from those of you who use more technology than I do in the classroom. Would you suggest a blog? Pen pals? Skype dates with both classes? How would you best foster an environment where one class who is studying this book as literature can easily converse with a class who is studying this book as writers?

What fantastic ideas could you suggest?