Eng. 254: Community, Field Reports, and a Sense of Place

Today, my students are turning in their Field Reports that they did over the place they chose for their first Writing Project (the rough draft of which is due tomorrow).  They did place observations, first-hand field research, interviews and such, and I'm very excited to see what they turn in tomorrow.  My class--which has ten registered, nine who came to class today--is very smart, willing to talk, and that's such a nice change of pace from my first-year students who I have to teach to trust themselves, that what they have to say is valuable.  It says a lot for these students (most of whom are upper classmen), but it also says a lot about the community we've been able to create in our class in just the last week.  On Friday, it was that spectacular moment when the class feels comfortable enough to call each other by name.

As I handed back the Field Reports they wrote on our Morrill Hall excursion last week, we talked about the danger of using "there is/are" sentence constructions when describing things, simply because verbs are important--and they should always make their verbs do double duty.  Spark is a much better verb than is.  They nodded at me.  Excellent.

We did a bit of a write-around, with my students writing on their Field Reports for today, helping their group member push their details and descriptions harder, looking for where to expand and push analysis (brain work) and reflection (personal/emotional) work.

And then we hopped into a guided free write to get them moving on their rough draft, due tomorrow:

1. What is unique or compelling about this place?  What drew you to it in the first place?  Is it visually compelling?  Is it emotionally compelling?  What about it creates the curiosity that you are feeling?
2. How would you describe the sense of place?  What is it, on an existential level?  What purpose does it serve?  What major questions does it pose for you?
3. What contributes to that sense of place?  What is the physical structure?  Spatial?  Auditory?  What goes into making that place what it is?
4. What function does this place serve?  Is it practical?  Entertainment? Existential?
5. What are the other senses inform how you perceive this place?  Unpack what "noisy" and "quiet" sound like.  What individual sounds can you identify?  What is the acceptable noise level of this place?  Why do we have that perception?  Why must museums be quiet?
6. What is your purpose in this paper?  What are the curiosities and questions and such that are propelling your investigation of this place?  What do you want your readers to understand when they finish your paper?
7. Are you uncovering some universal truths, given your exploration of this place?
8. How does your primary research add to the texture of your exploration?
9. Who has access to this place?  Who is denied?  What is the reasoning between who is allowed access and who is not?  What are the reasonings behind who is allowed and who is denied?  Is it safety, privacy, exclusivity, etc?  How does that influence your perceptions and experience of the place?  How does it affect the place itself? Does it make the place more compelling, less compelling, or something else?

I'm really looking forward to seeing these rough drafts.  My students are exploring places like Memorial Stadium, the Lincoln Blood Bank, Goodwill, Village Inn, and others.  Should be a spectacular mix of ideas and places!

Eng. 254: What Constitutes Community?

Yesterday was the first day of class for the first summer session and I met my 254 class for the first time.  I had eleven registered, nine were there.  Most of them are upper classmen and that should be interesting--I've never taught this many upper level students (in a 200-level class) before, I've never taught a summer class before, and I've never taught such a condensed schedule before.  But I'm really excited about the class, so I hope they will be too.

I started yesterday with a variation on SueEllen Campbell's "Layers of Place," which was published in ISLE in 2006.  It's an exercise she says takes about 45 minutes, so that's about how long I planned for.  I added some of my own questions and didn't use all of hers, but the purpose is to consider how layered our relationship with place is--and can be.  I know that most of my students have never thought about place and probably never thought about the ways that place shapes their identity.  So, I asked them to think about a place that means a lot to them.  It can be a place they call home or it can be a different place.

• What do you actually see, with your eyes, right now?  Forget what you know and think only about what you see.  Be concrete, detailed, and straight-forward--the visual facts, but precise.  Avoid metaphors.
• Consider your perspective as a lens.  What happens if you zoom close?  Do you see streets?  Houses?  Veins on leaves?  Cracks in foundations?  What happens if you zoom back?  What do you see from space?  (I showed them this photograph of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado track (from a very cool article on Slate) and I also told them about the Missoula Floods, the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington, and the ripple marks visible from space).

• How, why, do you know this place?  How do you feel about it?  Think about the story of your relationship with this place:  when did you first meet?  How did your relationship develop?  Was it love at first sight?  A gradual friendship?  Any quarrels, rough spots, temporary separations?  
• Do you think your own identity, or your sense of yourself, the shape of your life, how you matter to yourself, is somehow tied up with the identity of this place?  
• What people do you see?  What do they look like, individually?  What groups do they form themselves into?  How many different communities make up the human element of this place?
• What human events have happened here?  Who has lived here, or spent time here, and how?  How has this place been tied to events happening elsewhere, through commerce or politics?  Who owns it, or controls what happens to it?  How have different parts of our culture thought about this place?  Is it a kind of place we have typically valued, or not?  
• What threatens the place?  Pollution, poverty, warfare, invasive species, habitat loss, climate change, strip mining, deforestation, desertification, suburban sprawl, volcanic explosions, hurricanes, golf course or ski area development, disease?  
• When people in your community talk about this place, what words and terms do they use?  What is the insider language of this place?  When outsiders talk about this place, what terms do they use?

We used this free write as our springboard to get to know each other and my students' choices of places were as varied as I expected.  One student wrote about the digital space he occupies between his birthplace in Germany and his life in the United States and how Skype and such gives him a better foothold in two worlds; another wrote about his grandfather's birthplace in Rhode Island and how he wants to go to law school up there, because of the sense of history; another wrote about the house she lived in for fifteen years.  It was a terrific start.

Then I had them make a list of all the communities they belonged to:  academic communities, athletic, religious, etc.  What are the characteristics of a community?  What makes a community different than a group of people all standing in the same place at the same time?  We got a good list going on the board:  similar foundation (experiences, knowledge, beliefs, etc.), similar purpose and goals, a common language, common location (even if it's digital).  This turned out to be a great start to considering who we are together in our class and where we will go from there.  For class today, I assigned Paul Gruchow's "Home is a Place in Time" from Grass Roots, Evelyn Nieves' "Public Libraries: The New Homeless Shelters" from Salon, and W. Scott Olsen's "The Love of Maps," published in Weber Studies.

As I finished prepping for class this morning, I also found this article from The Guardian, "The Complexity of Defining Community," so I copied it and I'll bring it to class to talk about, as we get into some of the very cool nitty gritty of our large-scale questions and goals for the class:  how do we define community?  How do we define rhetorical practices?  What different communities do we all belong to? What issues are important to those communities?  How is language used and valued in those communities?  

I'm pretty excited to see where we go from here.

Eng. 250 & 252: Spring Break to the End!

Today, in both of my classes we start new units and I'm ridiculously excited about both.  

In my fiction class, we started talking about Sean Doolittle's novel Rain Dogs in preparation for their final craft paper due at the end of the semester.  I structure this class around short stories at the beginning of the semester and a novel in the last part, because while they're writing short stories for me, most of the time, they'll pick up a novel for fun.  So, it's important for us as writers to pick apart how a novel is put together.  The crime lit aspect of it is a bit of an accident.  This is the third time I've taught this class--the first time, when I chose Krueger's Iron Lake, its mystery-nature was an accident.  I chose it because I wanted to teach it.  The second time, with O'Connor's Star of the Sea, I was coordinating with a friend and I picked the book because she'd already chosen it and submitted her book order.  That it was a murder mystery was an accident.  This time, I figured the universe was trying to tell me something, so hence, Doolittle's Rain Dogs, set in the Nebraska Sandhills.  Crime happens everywhere--and other than crime, stuff happens everywhere--and that's all fair game for writers.

We talked about the difference between novels and short stories (beyond the obvious length) and the discussion was terrific.  We talked about the visual rhetoric of the cover (dark colors and block font)--and since I was passing around a few Irish noir books (my proposal on the craft of the urban in contemporary Irish noir was accepted this weekend for the annual International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures conference), the similarities between Declan Hughes' The Color of Blood and Doolittle's were striking.  We talked about long strands of narrative, short strands of narrative.  We talked about the imbalances that keep us reading.

Then we hopped into groups and started talking craft:

• What is the voice here?  How would you characterize the tone?  On the sentence level, what do the sentences look like?  Some of my students commented on how the tone and pacing seemed lethargic, so we talked about how Doolittle did that--and why he did it.  We talked about Tom's drinking and the (below) very distant POV.
• How are the characters introduced, on a craft level?  (Refer to notes on characterization.)  How do we come to know what we know about these characters?  What is the POV?  How does the psychic distance of the lens affect the telling? 
• How is the place—Valentine, Nebraska—created as a character in these beginning chapters?  How are the characters crafted in relation to it?  How is it already acting as much on the characters as they are acting on it?   We talked about the beginning, where every time Tom tries to speak, eighteen wheelers and other traffic on the road outside drowns out what he would say.  So, on a very active level, the town doesn't want to hear what he has to say.
• Contrast the direct dialogue, the indirect dialogue, and the use of silence and gestures.  How does Doolittle craft these?  What flavor does this give the narrative?  Why did Doolittle make the choices he did?  We talked about the lack of speech tags and the use of gestures, how they create this feeling of empty dialogue.  

I can't wait to get further into this book!

In 45 minutes, I'll head down to my 250 class and we'll start our nonfiction unit--the first time I've gotten to teach nonfiction in a creative writing class since my MFA.  To say that I'm excited is not even in the ballpark.  Right now, I've got thirty nonfiction books on my officemate's desk, each with certain parts marked with orange Post-It's.  Here's what the lesson plan will look like:

1. Pass out books, ask students to read the marked passages.  Allow 10-15 minutes.
2. If they don’t finish, that’s okay.
3. Talk about the versatility of the genre.  Can do anything from memoir to personal essay to history to science to travel to nature writing.  There’s nothing you can’t do in nonfiction—except lie.
4. “How many of you were reading something kinda cool?”
1. What about it was cool?  Subject matter?  Writing style?  Approach to the subject?
2. Small subjects (Dirt); short-shorts
5. Subject matter is often the first thing that attracts us, but it won’t hold us without the craft.
6. “So how many of you were reading something that you could detect craft?—anything from writing style and language to structure to a unique perspective on the topic?
7. Essential to nonfiction—truth, not fact.  Contract with reader.  Use of memory.
8. Essential:  warrant.  Not only is it essential to know why you’re writing something (just because something happened to you isn’t a good enough reason), but it’s also essential to establish, somehow, why the reader should care.
1. How many of you can discern the writer’s warrant?
2. Is it obvious (can you underline it) or is it intuitive?
3. What about why the reader should care?  Why should the reader care?
9. How many of you were reading something that you really want to finish?
10. Prompt:  Best Opening Line Ever:  Bill Bryson, “I come from Des Moines.  Someone had to.”  Start there—write that piece.  You may think your hometown is borning, but that doesn’t mean that someone else won’t be fascinated.
11. Essential:  Read everything.  Read the work you like—read it as a writer, not just as a reader.  But be careful.  If you read too much of the same writer, you’ll start to sound like that writer, rather than developing your own style.  (The same is true of your teachers—don’t just take one teacher.  Don’t do more than one degree in one place.  Ie, if you get your bachelor’s somewhere, don’t get your masters there.  Same for a masters/PhD.)
1. As you read, learn which writers will teach you—which ones will teach you about language, the ones that will teach you about narrative, about structure.  You’ll not find one writer who will do all of that.

And then we will do this writing exercise from Mimi Schwartz:  ¨

• What is your name?  Write only the verifiable facts of your name:  what it means, how it’s spelled, what your nickname is, who else has your name.  What is the image presented by your name (sexy, no-nonsense, boring, etc.)?  Leave your POV and what you think about your name out.
• Now write about your name from the inside out.  Make it as subjective as possible.  How do you feel about your name?  Do you like it?  Is who you are with your full name different than you with your nickname? 
• What does your name have to do with your identity?  

And watch this video of the awesome Dinty Moore, because it follows the writing exercise:

Eng. 250: Narration, Dialogue, and Breakfast

It's been a while since I've posted, busy-busy-busy around here.  But this morning has slowed enough that I can consider what I'm doing in my Creative Writing class.  Last week we had a snow day that turned out to be nothing, very disappointing on all kinds of levels, so today is playing catch up.  I was supposed to talk narration and dialogue last Thursday (the day that got cancelled) and today was supposed to be the awesome day of beginnings and endings, but I think I'll push the beginnings discussion to Thursday, when this class hands in its short stories.  

Because of the snow day, I modified our syllabus a bit, so today we're reading Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," John Edgar Wideman's "Fever," an article that breaks down the sentencing of Hemingway's story and the true brilliance that is Noah Lukeman's A Dash of Style.  It's one of my favorite moments when my students come to class after reading Lukeman's first unit, surprised that they liked it--and what they're able to apply to the stories is fantastic.  I use it in every class I teach, from composition to all forms of creative writing to literature.  Wonderful.  I'm excited to see what my students have to say about these stories, particularly because so far they've had a hard time with non-traditionally-structured stories.  But this class also knocked their poetry unit out of the park, reflections coming in that surprised me with how much they learned and how much they took away from the forms we studied and wrote.  Makes my little teacher heart go pitty-pat.

In my 252 class, we're start workshopping short stories today and the first round of stories is pretty weak in terms of dialogue, so this moment in my 250 will show up again in my 252 (even though we've already discussed this).  Dialogue is something that takes practice, lots of practice, so reiterating what we've talked about is never a bad thing.  

But here's what I'm planning for my 250 class today:  

First, a friend posted this article from the Guardian:  "'The Sexiest Meal': What a character's breakfast says about them" and this is going to be the writing exercise that starts us all--and in honor of today's narration and dialogue, I'm going to ask them to put their character in a situation where the scene is composed of direct dialogue, gestures, silence and all the other elements we've been talking about.  Their character could be ordering in a restaurant, cooking at home on a Saturday morning, or any other scenario where breakfast is involved.  

"When we do witness breakfast, it is usually because the author is trying to tell us something about the person eating it. Breakfast is the most habitual meal of the day, a routine so key to inner wellbeing that Hunter S Thompson called it a "psychic anchor", drawing, uncharacteristically, on an image of weighty predictability. If somebody is having toast with marmalade this morning (or, in the case of Thompson, "four bloody marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half pound of either sausage, bacon or corned-beef hash with diced chillis" plus quite a few other things), it is a safe guess that they had it yesterday and that they will have it tomorrow as well.

For this reason, breakfast is the ideal barometer of normalcy, the meal that tells us who a person really is. An example: in the fifth chapter of Moby Dick (simply called "Breakfast"), Melville offers a morning scene at a bar-room in a whaling town, as a way of painting us a picture of Queequeg, a Pacific islander who "eschewed coffee and hot rolls" – savagery! – and "applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare". And in The Hobbit, Tolkein reveals much about the implicitly decadent nature of Hobbithood when he has Bilbo Baggins consume a second breakfast – an occurrence that has somehow become one of the most recounted parts of the entire book.

Their character could be ordering in a restaurant, cooking at home on a Saturday morning, or any other scenario where breakfast is involved.  Last week, when we were talking about characters, I asked them about which fictional characters they would want to go get a beer and burger with, a character they would want to go on a road trip with, which character they would want to wake up next to in the morning.  The only two brave souls who answered when I asked answered "Hermione Granger" and "Mr. Darcy."  I think I will ask my students to reprise that writing exercise with the breakfast conversation.  

This is making me drool a little, thinking of Fat Nat's Eggs in the Twin Cities, my parents' new-traditional after-church brunch place.  In April I will reluctantly celebrate a year of being a vegetarian and so the first time that I went to Fat Nat's with my parents over Christmas, I asked if I could get their Bacon Avocado Eggs Benedict without the bacon.  (A side note:  I have given myself special dispensation to eat as much bacon as I want, when I am in Ireland...)  When it arrived, the English muffin was layered with a slice of tomato, their "spicy avocado verde," the poached egg, and the Hollandaise sauce.  I'm a Swede, so that means my heat quotient is fairly low, but the spice in the avocado was life-changing.  If it had been socially acceptable to lick my plate clean, I would have done so.  On another subject, brinner is a favorite in our family (breakfast for dinner)--and it came up in conversation with my mother yesterday.  Rhubarb Bundt Cake is our traditional special-occasion breakfast/brunch go-to.  When I was with my family for my niece's third birthday (and the first time I got to meet my brand-new nephew), my brother-in-law (for whom the Rhubarb Bundt Cake has become really, really important) lamented that they hadn't had any for a while.  Since I usually cook when I'm at their house, I asked, rather skeptically, if they had any rhubarb.  "Not the point!"  he declared.  "We can get rhubarb.  What we can't get is somebody to make it!"  I foresee a rhubarb bundt cake in my spring break future, when I Go North for my grandmother's 90th birthday.

This group of students (my 250 class, which is all three genres) has an overwhelming number of journalism students and criminal justice students, with very few English majors.  This is not anything surprising to me, but it does highlight the importance of meeting students where they are, sometimes shoving them forcefully out of their comfort zone--and why this particular class has had a really hard time with non-traditional fiction.  My 252 class loved Ron Hansen's "Nebraska"; the 250 had no idea what to do with it.  I suspect the same thing will happen when we get into discussing John Edgar Wideman's "Fever," which is one of my favorite stories of the moment.  I did suggest my students compare that story to Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever," so that should be interesting.

But here's why I love to teach "Fever," especially in conjunction with Hemingway.  The conversation between sections and voices in "Fever" lends itself well to a discussion I'm looking forward to having.  I'm going to bring up stories we've read already, so we can talk about them in a different way.  

• First, a free write:  apply Link and Lukeman to these stories.  What is going on on the sentence level?  What is the difference between them?
• How does "Fever" subvert what we think we know about dialogue?  How many voices are involved in this story?  How does this turn into a conversation between these voices?
• What do you make of the lack of narration in Hemingway
• How does Hemingway construct his dialogue--as a writer--so that the characters are talking at each other, past each other, not to each other?  
• What is the effect at the end of these two stories?  Why does each author choose to write his story this way?  What would have been lost if "Fever" had been written in a more traditional way?  What would have been lost if "Hills Like White Elephants" had been written with more exposition and narration?
• What is the relationship of direct to indirect dialogue in "Ship Fever"? Compare to "The Things They Carried"?

Last week we had the "sentences are awesome" and "language is your greatest weapon" speech, which made my class look at me like I'm crazy.  It's okay.  I don't mind.  They had the same look on their faces when we started form poetry.  It's part of the fun of teaching to watch that look morph into something more confident.   

Eng. 180: On the Student Need "To Relate" to "Like"

On Monday, the first day of class, I assigned "A Short History of Your Reading Life" to my Intro to Lit class, due yesterday (Wednesday).  The assignment served several purposes for myself as the teacher--diagnostic, to see if they could follow basic instructions (like MLA formatting), as well as getting insight into what they were bringing into my classroom.  I just finished reading and commenting on their histories--and the results are mostly what I expected, but a few things that shouldn't have surprised me did.

Across the board, the number of students (a great majority of them) admitted to flat-out hating reading.  Some of them used that as a springboard to talk about a parent or a teacher who then inspired them to the greatness of reading--but even as I wrote "have you told your teacher thank you?" in the margins (because I know that most of us don't thank our teachers, since we're so far gone from that atmosphere when the reality of what they did for us kicks in), I kept getting stuck at "I hated/I hate" reading.  (I got a lot of "I hate nonfiction," which was disconcerting to me as a nonfiction writer, though I'm pretty sure they have no idea that creative nonfiction exists, that they have a similar mindset to my sister K3, who once told me that "When I think of nonfiction, I think about books about sharks.")

What was clear, though, wasn't that they actually hate reading--they hate being told what to read.  And they're completely unaware of the irony of some of their favorite books (that they've identified) as coming in a class where they were required to read it...)  But I just wanted to write "tough shit" in the margins, because who says that who cares if you actually a like a book or not?  For myself, as I have said elsewhere, I loathe Norman Mailer, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn how to put a sentence together from him.  Sometimes there's a great teacher who teaches them that Shakespeare is relevant, that To Kill A Mockingbird is brilliant--but if these students can't relate to the character or the plot, then their default reaction is hate.  And this disturbs me on many levels, on a word-choice level as well as the default reaction itself.  One great observation was "I don't always enjoy assignments over lame books in class."  Sigh.  Not an isolated opinion.

When they talk about hating books and hating reading, about lame books that have no relevance to their 21st century life, the reality I am coming to understand is that that means the books should always be written to entertain them, on their terms.  The main characters should be people that my students should be easily able to slip into.  If you can't relate to Odysseus in The Odyssey (and they're reading that in high school these days???), who's fault is that?  How much responsibility do you, as the student, bear for making something relevant, important, thought-provoking?  But as their teacher, I see that as part of my great opportunity and challenge.

I suspect this mentality started in my generation and has trickled down to this Millenial generation, but I have no research to back this up--and I haven't done any research to see what we as teachers do to combat it, except teach better.  And since this is my first time teaching literature--having only taught creative writing and composition before--it's something I hope to gain more insight about as the semester goes on.

So, for those of you who are following along at home, here's your writing assignment for today:  in the comments section, write me a paragraph or two that encapsulates "A Short History of Your Reading Life."  You could choose to concentrate on a single book, a single person, a specific episode in your reading history--but really, it's wide open.  Can't wait to see what our histories look like!

Eng. 150: The 1888 Children's Blizzard, Day 1

It's been a while since I've posted about my English 150 class, mostly because the last two weeks were a whirlwind of rough drafts, conferencing about said rough drafts, workshopping, and final drafts. On Monday, my students turned in their final drafts, I'm in the midst of grading them, and we started our second Writing Project. Quite serendipitous though, that we had a really great snowstorm over the weekend, before we start reading excerpts from David Laskin's awesome book The Children's Blizzard.

Here's the goals of WP2: Use primary and secondary research to investigate a local disaster where you come from. You will use all tools available to you to complete this project, which will include doing personal interviews with people from your community who witnessed this disaster first-hand or have another sort of primary knowledge. You will also investigate other texts like photographs and artwork, personal artifacts, and more to consider all possible angles of how this event affected this community. You will put together a digital space (a blog) that details what you've discovered, one that allows your community (as well as other digital communities) to share in the knowledge.

So. On Monday, each student created a blog, where they will post their Think Pieces, their interviews, their interpretations of those interviews, videos and articles they find, videos they may choose to make, etc. This will be capped with a five page paper that takes all they've learned and puts it together. They don't have topics yet, but they will by the end of next week. They seem kind of skeptical about it--even strangely hostile--but I hope that will change soon. Otherwise it's going to be an uncomfortable few weeks.

Today was the first day of WP2 and we had our Author Presentation on David Laskin and the Children's Blizzard. Like the presentation on Jonis Agee a couple of weeks ago, it was great. Great information on the author, great information about the disaster itself.

Then, we wrote: as I mentioned earlier, we had a great snowstorm this weekend, which left behind 12+ inches of snow on its way. It started Friday night, ended Saturday. Gorgeous. Of course, there were plowing issues (as always happens in Lincoln), as well as some power outages. So here's the prompt I gave them: How did you handle this storm? What did you do, what did you think, what did you see when you looked outside? I said that I'd gotten self-righteous about my four-wheel drive, which made them laugh. And then, after I'd given them a good chunk of time to write, I asked them How was what you did, what you didn't do, what you thought, etc. influenced by the community you come from?

We talked for a while about their writings, what they did, what they feared about the storm, what they didn't fear, and more. What was particularly interesting, though, was the connections they were able to make about their community's influence and the place they come from. I said that when I went out on Sunday to dig out my Jeep, a guy had gone into the snowbank across the street and was stuck. So I lent him my shovel, because I was using the brush. He was grateful. But the place where I grew up valued winter survival kits--extensive ones--with kitty litter, shovels, and more. Our communities are where we learn how to look at the world, how to stay safe in it. For this particular Wednesday, the wheels were turning, but it was slow. Hopefully this gives them something new to think about as we continue with this project.

Then we shifted to Laskin. I started with a little bit about why we're doing this, why it's so important to find these connections--that this blizzard and this book is not just about snow and people who died. It's a lot more complicated than that. It rubs up against the American Dream, Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism--even to the myth of the Great Plains and how that was sold to immigrants who didn't know any differently. We considered how we define tragedy.

I showed them a clip of Galloping Gertie, which collapsed in 1940 as the beginning of the storm system that would become the 1940 Armistice Day Blizzard in Minnesota, then would go on to wreak havoc over the Great Lakes. Most of them had never heard of either event, but I didn't expect that they would have, so I showed them the video clip of Galloping Gertie. It elicited the reaction I wanted from them.

We worked our way through the first 26 pages of Laskin, I gave them some things to think about as they continue to read, complications they might not have considered, reminded them of the Think Piece they have due on Friday, and sent them on their merry way. Unfortunately, I did also have to remind them about reading the assignment and even if they choose not to print it off, they still need to have a good enough grasp to discuss it in class. I hate it when I have to give that speech. But all in all, a great start to WP2.

Dear Students, the world is a much more fascinating place than you could ever imagine.

Eng. 252: Stress Tics and John Edgar Wideman

This morning I wondered how Galway looked so much like Lincoln. The rain was hard, sideways, the wind feeling like it was right off the Atlantic. I brewed my Assam "strong enough for a mouse to trot across," filled my big Stanley Thermos, and off I went to campus. I was glad for my awesome jacket (waterproof, windproof, and good to 20 degrees), but my jeans were soaked by the time I walked from the parking garage into Andrews Hall. I contemplated my Thermos, remembering a comment a student made on Wednesday, wondering if those things were like military issue in the English department. I liked the juxtaposition of those ideas. But then I thought it would be much more convenient to have a tea spigot right here in my office.

It's the final day of two days of conferences. Fairly good all around. I like conferences and I find I like them better when I forget the sign-up sheet at home, so I don't know who's standing me up. Better for my stress level. And so I was thinking about stress when I walked into 252 this morning. I knew my students were stressed and I was feeling it myself. Figured I might as well channel that energy into something productive--and teach my students how to do the same. I went through the daily housekeeping as I usually do--to a very hardy few who braved the weather--and then our writing exercise for the day is one I was particularly proud of :

What is your stress tic? What is that thing you do when you're particularly stressed--that you might not even recognize as being caused by your stress? I gave them the example of my freshman roommate in college, who came home one day to a spotless dorm room, looked at me, and said, "Did you have a bad day?" And when I thought about it, I had. "Why?" I asked her. She looked at me. "Because you clean when you're stressed." Huh, I thought. I guess I do. Never realized that before.

When they finished writing, we talked about some of the things they do and we move to talking about how they need to view their characters as real people. Your characters will have stress tics too. They may pick the skin on their fingers, they may drive to Kansas City for no reason, they may play the same music over and over on the piano. Very rarely do our stress outlets turn out to be passive. We usually have to do something to combat our stress. So do your characters.

I also talked about channeling their stress into their writing. When I was starting my MFA, 9/11 happened and I didn't have cable yet. So I channelled all that uncertainty, all that fear, all that stress into the character I was writing. When I was writing of the death of a different character, it was how I dealt with watching my grandmother fall down the steps (she did not die, but she broke her collarbone) and me not being able to catch her. Writing is a very good stress relief, because we can channel that onto the page. Sometimes it turns into something awesome, sometimes we write our way through it, burn the page, and we feel better for it. Of course, things like this sound a lot like the "therapy" that Anis Shivani was raging about a couple weeks ago, but the reality is that fiction (like other genres) is real life. And emotions and actions and motivations and stress tics are also real life. It's how we get to the real heart of whatever it is that we're writing.

It was from there that we switched to talking about John Edgar Wideman's short story "Fever." I love that story, but I wasn't sure how my students would take it. Since this week we're talking about dialogue, I wanted to see what they'd say. There isn't a whole lot of dialogue-dialogue in it, but the switchings of POV/voice/character puts forth a dialogue of its very own. And there was a moment in class when I asked why Wideman did it this way, why he didn't just write one main character in a traditional sort of narrative--and what would have been lost had he done that? And my students all popped in with ideas about how the story was like the fever, all sort of dreamy, that you never quite knew what was going on, how you never quite knew who was speaking, but that's the whole effect of the story. He wanted that dreamy fever-like stage, which he couldn't have gotten any other way. I think they're starting to understand what it means to read like a writer, which makes me so happy I could just dance around the office. I love my job.

And I also have to mention that several of my 252 students signed up for conferences too and I hope I've been able to talk them out of thinking their first draft has to be perfect, like the things we've been reading in class. I think they're just starting to understand that the story in front of them is absolutely not the first draft that author made of that story. It doesn't happen. And so they're starting to turn off that internal censor that tells them ugly things. At least I hope so.

(Feel free to post your stress tics in the comments!)

Eng. 252: Awesome Videos on Writing

Need a writing pick-me-up? Check out these videos I used in today's 252 lecture. (And I just figured out how to embed video. Prepare for more videos on this blog, now that I know how to do it.)

We're not reading Colm Toibin yet (CHOI-bin is how I'm told his last name is pronounced), but we will later in the semester. And in here, he's got a great line about Mary Lavin and writing the least-likely story. And in the second video, about the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer (and listening, actually). Brilliant. And in the third, Junot Diaz has great advice about comfort zones, mapped territory, and writing something new.

But here's the fun part. These were part of my lecture on narration and dialogue--and I always think it's valuable to hear the writers we're reading, see them (almost in person), because we often forget that it's an actual person who wrote what we're reading.

So we finished watching the second clip of Colm Toibin (my students made me repeat his name a couple of times) and then I told them to write that conversation as if Toibin were a character. You don't have to get the lines and the dialogue right--just write the dialogue. Write his eyebrows, write his jowls, write the tone of his voice, write his inflections. One of the big goals of yesterday's discussion of dialogue was to get them beyond attributive verbs (hissed, was one brought up). Hopefully it works. We ran out of time to talk about John McGahern, but we'll combine him with Edna O'Brien tomorrow. Whee!

Eng. 252: Sean O'Faolain, "The Talking Trees"

We jumped into 252 with both feet today, with Sean O'Faolain's short story "The Talking Trees." O-FWAY-lun is how I'm told his name is pronounced. My knowledge of Irish things is largely written, not verbal, so my pronunciations are not what I would wish them to be.

We started class with a writing exercise out of the What If? book, Exercise #22 for those of you with the 3rd edition, which has a goal of creating a child narrator: "Using the present tense, write an early memory in the first person. Choose something that happened before you were ten. Use only those words and perceptions appropriate to a young child. The memory should be encapsulated in a short period of time--no more than an hour or so--and should happen in one place. Don't interpret or analyze; simply report it as you would a dream. When you can't remember details, make them up; you may heighten the narrative so long as you remain faithful to the "meaning" of the memory--the reason you recalled it in the first place." We wrote for ten minutes and then we talked about what we did to create this voice, how the sentences worked, the word choices, how we wrote about what we noticed, how we didn't interpret what we saw. It was a useful starting point to talk about O'Faolain, whose story is that of four teenage boys. The way the narrative starts is in the voice of a fifteen year old boy.

I divided the class into five groups of four and gave each group a specific question to consider, they would talk in their groups, and then we would come back together as a large group. Most importantly: what can we learn as writers from this story?

1. Plot and conflict: what is this story about? (How many things is it about?) How does the story move? What moves it?
2. Class and Gender: we can see that the author is working with class issues and gender issues, but we're interested as writers. How are these issues brought up, represented, constructed on the page?
3. How does the POV shift between characters? How are the characters constructed on the page?
4. Place and setting? How does it function?
5. Voice. How is it crafted? Look at the first page, think Noah Lukeman and A Dash of Style.

When we came back together, we had a great discussion. We talked about the way that the setting reflects what's going on there, how the story starts in a candy shop and moves to a darker place, how that reflects the childlike characters and their childishness and moves into a more grown-up place. We talked about the way that class and gender work on the page, how that's constructed in dialogue, in characterization, in the tone. We talked about how Gong Gong is where the story rests, because it's his character who takes the conversation out of the candy shop and moves it from thought to action and it's Gong Gong who becomes the point of the story by the end, shedding the nickname that others gave to him and becoming himself ("Tommy"). We talked about music and class, we talked about how where Gong Gong was prone to bursts of dialogue (as he's described at the beginning) and how by the end of the story, he's lost that childish-outburst type of style. We talked about how the subject matter (teenage boys being afraid to talk to girls) is as relevant today as it is in the story, that while the place/setting itself is essential to the story, the universal quality of the story itself is what makes it resonate.

And then there's the final paragraph. Dear students, never underestimate your sentences.

We concluded class thinking about what this story can teach us, as writers and my students piped up with things like not being as afraid to use younger characters; that there's as much drama in the teenage years as there is outside of them; that just because the drama isn't Death, that doesn't mean that it won't make a good story; and once again, I walked out of that classroom thinking that 50 minutes is a really short amount of time.

For Friday, we're reading Bridget O'Connor's "Postcards"--and this always throws me for a loop because one of my characters in my novel is Brighid O'Connor. All in all, quite a good day teaching.

Eng. 150: Jonis Agee, Special Guest Star!

Mornings like this remind me that I'm a morning person and there's a reason for it. Of course, a good night's sleep helps too. But this morning, I'm in my windowless office on the 3rd floor of Andrews Hall, drinking Assam "strong enough for a mouse to trot across," my feet propped on my desk, new, awesome shoes on the floor. The lamps are on, it's cozy in here, and all is right with the world. I love my life.

This morning, in my 150, Dr. Jonis Agee came to visit. We've been reading her novel The River Wife in that class, talking about identity and characters and the New Madrid earthquakes. As I mentioned to my friend Jacob on my way down to class, this is one of the moments of teaching they never tell you about, when your students come into class, absolutely beside themselves with surprise that the liked the book you assigned. Because of scheduling, we're actually going to finish the novel on Friday. I knew my students would love her, because she's one of the biggest personalities I know, she laughs like the world is full of joy and jokes, and she doesn't pull her punches. What I won't tell my students is that I have a Post-It note on my sightline at home, so when I look up from my computer I see this admonition: "Just write the fucking thing. -Jonis Agee." And that makes me put my eyes back on my computer screen. She's a writer whose voice you can hear on the page with perfect pitch. I admire her a lot, and not just because she's my advisor.

She started out by telling us how the story started, what led to it, and she was visiting a bootmaker in the Ozarks who had just returned from New Madrid. "I always drive through New Madrid fast," he said. "Why would you do that?" she asked. Because that place still has quakes every day, little shivers. When Jonis started doing research--"because that's what writers do"--she learned the story of a girl who would morph into the character of Annie Lark in her book, a girl who was trapped in her cabin by the New Madrid earthquakes and left to die. Jonis describes this as "haunting," that the story of this girl haunted her--"and if you're a writer, you have to do something about it." And do something she did.

Here are some of the questions my students asked and the conversations that came out of those questions:

1. Who killed Baby Jula, really? Whose fault was it, Jacques or Annie's? Jonis said that she considered them both guilty, because they both played a part in it; my student blamed Jacques more. Jonis said that she considered that even the core event that destroyed their marriage, an event that started with Jacques being willing to buy and sell human lives, being willing to do anything after that.

2. Annie's death. Jonis said that she always felt Annie was living on borrowed time, that sooner or later everything that Jacques touched would be destroyed. She asked a very pertinent question that seems to resonate in many spheres in this book: what does it cost to have dreams? (We didn't talk about this in class, but how would each of those characters answer that question--Omah, Laura, Little Maddie, Jacques, Dealie, Annie, Chabot, Hedie, Clement, and all the others). Jonis said that she saw Annie and Jacques locked together in a passionate dream that would both destroy them both but not let them go.

3. The role of place. The role that the earthquakes and the flood had in the characters' lives is a matter of knowing the place where you live (something that my students and I are starting to talk about in more depth as we become more familiar with the concepts). The river floods. That's what it does. And Jacques, in his quest for control, forgot that. It's interesting how the river bookends Annie and Jacques' relationship--it brings them together and it tears them apart. The river brings both wealth and destruction. When we forget what the place is, that's when things get dangerous. Or when we think we can control a place.

4. Framing structure with Hedie's story (in the 1930s). Jonis said that she always felt like Annie's story wasn't big enough to carry the whole novel, that the first chapter from Hedie's POV was the first thing she ever wrote, the voice that stuck with her--and that chapter was supposed to be a short story. Eventually, though, the story wouldn't go away and it became more important to show this one place through time, through all the people who lived there.

5. The writing process. I love when my students ask this particular question, because it's part of my goal every semester to get my students to figure out their own process, because it's never going to be the same as anybody else's. Jonis has a page limit every day, not a time limit, and she usually writes early in the morning. The River Wife, she said, took between six and eight drafts, and took her eight years to write. I think this, also, is the single greatest moment that my students can hear--that published writers go through the same process they do, of drafting and revision and struggle and joy and all of it. What they see in front of them, perfect though it may be, never started out like that.

She said that she carries around a writer's notebook and that she and Ted Kooser have had a constant conversation about the search for the perfect notebook (Kooser is also coming to our class in a few weeks). Writers, she said, are also on the search for the perfect pen, the kind of pen that makes you feel good when you write.

Jonis mostly writes on the computer, but if something isn't going right, she'll usually switch mediums, to pen and paper. Some writers, she told them, write their first drafts longhand and then transcribe it to a computer and that's their first revision. She told the story of Kerouac writing on a long roll of paper, so he wouldn't lose his momentum. She talked of giving her intermediate creative writing students an assignment to write as fast as they can with no punctuation, no capital letters, nothing--and to write two pages a day for seven days. The goal is to not write backwards. I loved that. How often do we go back and delete what we just wrote when we're working on a computer? I love the idea of not being able to go back, only able to write forward. I might try that myself, just to see what comes of it.

My students were actively engaged in the discussion, leaning forward in their chairs, smiling and nodding, even if they weren't speaking. When class was over--and we probably could have gone for much longer than our allotted 50 minutes--the majority of the class waited in line outside in the hall for her to sign their books. Happy sigh. I just love the days that remind me why I do what I do.

Bonus Double-Post Wednesday: Place-Based Writing Exercises

I called it the Writing Blitzkrieg, which comes on the class period before the rough draft is due in my English 150 class. We've been talking about Mark Tredinnick's The Blue Plateau to complicate our ideas of how humans shape place and how place shapes humans, a conversation that has gotten consistently better as we get deeper into the book. They started out not liking it much, but once we got into talking about it, analyzing it both as readers and writers, they started to become more fond of it. I love it when that happens.

I've done this once before, where I've given them a zillion writing prompts in a very short amount of time and we've spent a maximum of five minutes on them, to give them as much exposure to different prompts as possible. It seemed to work well before, to jar them out of expected modes of thought, so I did it again.

Here are a bunch of the prompts I've used--and a disclaimer here: I got these prompts from somewhere a long time ago and I don't know where, so I'm unintentionally plagiarizing here. If anybody knows who these prompts belong to, please let me know and I'll give credit where it is due.

1. Write a little something that includes the following: the smell of fresh-baked bread, hot peaches, a man in a beret, the words souvenir, clink, and lurk.
2. Write about a time you either very very hot or extremely cold--and try to include something visual in every single sentence (a color, a description of an object, a metaphor). The idea behind this exercise is to combine two senses at the same time--the visual and the tactile.
3. In this exercise, list ten places. (Any place will do.) Then list a smell that comes to mind in each place. After you have those ten places and ten smells, circle the pair that you find most intriguing and start writing.
4. See #3, except do ten places, ten sounds.
5. With specific detail that appeals to all the senses, describe windy weather on a city street.
6. Imagine a body of water. Might be a lake or pond or river, anything. What do you see in your mind? Describe this body of water in detail--detail that addresses all the senses. What colors do you see? Lights and shadows? How does it feel on your skin? What is in it, near it? And in the last minute, write the feelings that this body of water evokes.

Happy Wednesday writing!

Eng. 150: The Blue Plateau

Yesterday was a turn in the weather that made me really happy, even as my eighty-year-old joints protested. It was a good day for my fireplace app on my iPad, some Godiva hot chocolate with ghost-shaped marshmallows left over from Halloween, and as it turned out, some Gay Talese. I'm reading Unto the Sons for an independent study I'm doing this semester (on the subject of Essentials of Mid-Century American Nonfiction). And then there was dinner at Bread and Cup last night, as it was Bread and Cup Wednesday. Local food just tastes better.

This morning, the air was on the cold side of crisp and my neighbor and I had a discussion on the way to campus about how fifty degrees (the high for today) in November is not the same fifty degrees as March. In November, fifty degrees is jacket, hat, and mittens; fifty degrees in March is shorts and a t-shirt.

Today in my English 150 class (Rhetoric as Inquiry), we're starting our third and final unit of the semester, on the topic of how have humans shaped place--and how does place shape humans? We're reading Mark Tredinnick's awesome The Blue Plateau to go along with it. Tredinnick visited UNL last spring and kindly visited my class; this semester we're reading the whole book instead of just excerpts. Next week, my class is going to Morrill Hall, to the natural history museum, and I'm excited to hear what my students find there. Many of them have been there before, on school field trips and such, but this time around, they've got a different purpose, a different way of looking at what's there. Love it. Museums are not boring, people.

So, today's class on Tredinnick will talk about settler culture, difficult landscapes, and more. There are days that I'm more excited to teach than others--but today is one of those days where I'm particularly excited. This book is about wanting to belong--and a book about failing to belong. How and why does he fail--and was that always a foregone conclusion? We'll talk about pastoral landscapes, this particular definition taken from Tredinnick's anthology, A Place on Earth:

The literature of landscape we have made, therefore, has tended to take as its models for literary engagement with landscape the works of other citified cultures--it has written about landscape as Rome's writers did, as London's have... A pastoral engagement with land is sentimental and escapist rather than realist and vernacular. In it, nature is a foreign place to which one escapes, when one can, the stress and grime and world-weariness of the city. Pastoral does not witness; it idealizes or demonizes; and it sounds, even at its best, unrooted in the soil of the places it evokes. The place escapes it. It is an idyll of landscape made in the city. This is the nature of the greater part of our writing about place. Until now" (43).

And on Tredinnick's website, this gem, from his The Little Red Writing Book:

What makes writing worth writing--and reading--is what the story or the poem achieves beyond the tale it tells: its music, its form, the way it makes the ordinary world beautifully strange. A good tale is only good, in other words, if the telling is sound and memorable. It's the voice and mood, the arc and flow, the poetry of the writing that endure when the storyline fades. Literature doesn't aim to tell anybody anything. To tell a story or make a poem that makes sense, of course, you're going to have to convey some information. But that's not really what the work is for. Creative writing makes art out of the stuff of life, it makes it out of the words we speak, and it's for whatever art is for. How a piece of writing becomes a work of art--a plain but unforgettable thing--has everything to do with the integrity and humanity of its voice and the elegant of the work's composition."

It's a good way to start off a chilly Thursday morning in November. At least I think so. And so, to cap off this post, some writing prompts we will be doing:

• What they won't tell you about ___ is ___.
• This is the kind of place where___.
• Describe a place as if it were a person, complete with hair color, height, personality, a favorite book, and more.
• Name something significant that happened in this place--how you define "significant" is up to you.
• If this place were a song, what would it be?
• How do you get to this place? Write your way into this place. What are its boundaries? Theoretical? Natural boundaries (like a river)? Political? Cultural?
• Where is the physical center of this place? Where is the emotional center of this place? Are they the same? Different? Write about that.

Happy writing! Happy reading!

Writing Craft: Beginnings and Endings

This week, I've seen rough drafts from my 150 class and the first round of stories from my 252 class. Oh, the potential held in these drafts. I love my job. Of course, they're drafts , so there's work to be done, but there's something so elementally thrilling about seeing students trying to work through the skills and concepts and ideas we've been talking about for the past five weeks. I love my job. In my 150 drafts, I love that when I give my students a prompt like "an aspect of a place you're connected to" that out of a class of 21 students, nobody writes the same essay. It does my little teacher heart good to see all that creativity, all that unique attention, all of the ideas that they come up with. Mostly, the biggest problem with these drafts is that my students are--as they admit out loud--still unsure of themselves, still not willing to trust what they know, but I know that this is a semester-long process to teach them to trust that their ideas are valuable. But this is a good start.

Today in class, we're talking about Beginnings and Endings. I love this particular activity, which I shamelessly stole (well, after asking permission) from the indomitable W. Scott Olsen at Concordia College. I've photocopied the first page of various nonfiction books and essays and the last page of various books and essays (not the same first and last pages) and we'll talk about the rhetoric of beginnings and endings. I have beginnings from Tim Cahill, Bill Bryson (the best opening line ever: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."), Jon Krakauer, and more. We've already talked about starting an essay from a place of energy--and what constitutes energy--and so today we're going to talk about rhetoric.

What does it mean that Brian Doyle starts "Joyas Voladoras" with "Consider the hummingbird for a long moment"--what do readers do with an imperative? What about starting with some startling observation, stunning in its tone and voice, like Tim Cahill's "This Teeming Ark," which starts with "It was like trying to drink a beer on the subway at rush hour"?

And when we switch to talk about endings, we don't talk about conclusions, like we would when writing a more formal argumentative piece. We'll talk about not putting all the exposition and ideas at the end of a piece, since an essay (to quote Scott again) is "the witnessed development of an idea." We'll talk about what might be right for an essay, to come to some sort of answer (like Lopate in "One Man's Abortion") or leave things ambiguous, like Linda Hasselstrom in "Buffalo Winter."

Since we've been talking about Noah Lukeman's book A Dash of Style, which looks at punctuation from the perspective of a writer and the effect that punctuation can have on the pacing and emotional effect of a piece (rather than rules about how and when to use commas and such), we'll talk about the way these writers put their sentences together in their first and last pages. What's the effect? What are they trying to do? And how are they using their sentences and punctuation to do that?

Yes, indeed. Days like this, I just love my job.

Eng. 992: Week 5 Response

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching for Coverage/Uncoverage

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

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

Any thoughts?

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

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

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

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

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

Eng. 150: A Place to Start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing Exercises:

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

Eng. 150: Preservation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House Writing Exercise #2

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

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

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

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

Eng. 150: How Do We (Re)Create Places For Ourselves?

Okay, so I probably won't be posting this much once the semester really gets underway, but so far in this class, things have been going so well that I need some sort of outlet.

First, I stumbled on this website that features great place-writing things by the amazing Gretchen Legler. She's the author of On The Ice, about Antarctica, and it's great. I met her a few years ago when we were on a panel about Women and Travel Writing at AWP. If you haven't read her book, put it on your list. In the meantime, check out these great exercises and ideas.

Today's Readings: Short-shorts by Tim O'Brien, Judith Kitchen, Emily Hiestand, and Cynthia Ozick.

Quest of the Day: How do we create places for ourselves?

Goals of the day: connect any of these pieces to ones we've already read--where is the conversation between them? (How many noticed that Ozick used "quotidian" in her piece?) Start being able to identify narrative, exposition, high exposition. How do these pieces fit into the themes of the class.

Activities: write around. I did this in groups of 3. Each student writes a paragraph, an initial comment. Write for a specific length of time. Pass to the person sitting next to them. The 2nd person reads the initial comment, then continues the conversation. The 2nd person can elaborate on those ideas, ask new questions, or take the conversation in a new direction. After a specific length of time, the paper gets passed to the third person, who reads what's already been written and continues the conversation. At the end, the third person writes something to bring the conversation full circle back to the originator. When the paper gets back to the originator, they read their own, highlighting or underlining strong, interesting, questioning moments. In their groups, they briefly discuss what they came up with, then bring it back to the big group.

Writing Exercise: Take me on a tour of your dream house. No expense spared. Take me down to the tiniest details--no detail is too small. Your dream house, since we're talking about creating a place for ourselves. (10 minutes, give or take.) Pass to the person next to you, read it, and jot down a note or two about what you can tell about what the author values, given this house. Value family, environmental ethics, solitude, etc? What details give you that impression? (This went over very well. We didn't have time to do the second half of the exercise, which we'll do next week.)