Why I Teach, Wednesday Edition

I did my fair share of complaining this weekend for having MLK Day off, not because I object to the holiday or the reason for it, but because it comes at such a dumb time in the semester. I have the same problems with Labor Day. I just meet my students, we just get started, just start to create a momentum in our classroom and then I don't see them for almost a week. So my goal yesterday was to get some of that momentum back.

In my 150, we started reading Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife, which my students were excited to tell me how surprised they were that they were liking it. Most of them had read beyond the assigned pages. I'm having small groups do author presentations for the major authors we're reading, so my first group did theirs on Jonis--and it was wonderful. I just love this class so much I can't hardly stand it. Not only was the presentation great, giving information about her, her books, the background on the New Madrid earthquakes, GET THIS: they emailed her to get more information about some things, because they couldn't find it any other way. I just wanted to dance at their initiative. (Of course, I didn't and we were all grateful for it...) So amazing.

Then we talked about the Ryden essay from last week a little bit, because we went to the museum that day and here's the most important moment that came out of that class yesterday: when we talked about how people view the Midwest as backward, wondering if we have malls (as a student mentioned yesterday), wondering if we have running water, my question was: how is this possible? How is it possible that this is still the image of the Midwest that's out there? The point of the Ryden essay is to argue that the Midwest is just as full of history and wonderful things happening right now as any other place. But when we think of Nebraska literature or Midwestern literature, we think Willa Cather (and all my students shuddered)--we don't think Jonis Agee, or Ted Kooser, or any of the other amazing Midwestern writers who are writing fantastic work.

And here's the moment of the day: one of my student piped up and said she thought it was because we're so focused on the past here. We learn about our history in school, but we don't learn about the present and the future. We read Willa Cather, we don't read anybody else. We know this place is complicated and valuable to us, but what we're taught has everything to do with the past. Not who we are now. This isn't to say that the past and history isn't important, because it is, as we've seen in Ryden and the museum, but we need to do some thinking about the present, the here and now.

I love my job.

We talked some about The River Wife and we ran out of time, but the point of today's discussion of the book was to think about the ways that the characters were formed and shaped by the New Madrid earthquakes. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about "who is othered in this book?" I'm having them read some scholarly articles for every class, to complicated the book, but I think that I'm going to need to give them another way to think about those articles, because they're in that "if I can't relate to it, if it doesn't do anything for me, it can't matter" and that's not true. So it's going to be a matter of giving them tools to understand complicated material and question why it was so important to read that I'm having them do it.

Yesterday in 252 was the first really good day I've had in there, mostly because I'm still getting used to the MWF-50 minute schedule. Last semester, you may recall, was a Tuesday 3-hour class. I'm still getting used to the rhythm and finding out what I can and can't do in 50-minutes. But yesterday was the first day that we've gotten into the main course of fiction and craft, beginning to talk about voice and sentencing and characters. I had them read the first chunk of Noah Lukeman's awesome book A Dash of Style--and they loved it. I figured most of them probably would--but I just love that moment of "I never thought about it that way!" It felt good. The discussion after the lecture felt good. On Friday we'll talk voice and character and Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." Not yet too deep into the Irish fiction, but that'll come. Need to find a balance of working with what they know before I push them off the deep end.

On a completely separate note, yesterday our intrepid former custodian James Cherry (he's been moved out of Andrews Hall to Seton, I hear) did his recitation of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Bailey Library yesterday morning. James was there, in 1963, to hear the speech in person--something that just makes my skin tingle--but then he gave the speech. Memorized, as he's done every year for forty years. It was beyond incredible. It's been a long time since I've been moved nearly to tears by something like this. Incredible.

Eng. 150: Morrill Hall and Disruptions

As I mentioned last semester, I'm sure that the rate of posting will go down as the semester picks up speed. But for now, enough is going on that's worth sharing that I'm going to keep at it. Today I took my Eng. 150 class to Morrill Hall, the natural history museum. The purpose of this first week in our Rhetoric as Inquiry class is, as far it is possible for me, to disrupt what they think they know without scaring them so much that they shut down out of fear. So far, it appears all is going well, on all counts.

We started out in the large mammoth and mastodon room at Morrill Hall to get our bearings before I sent them out on their own. I asked them to read Kent C. Ryden's article "Writing the Midwest: History, Literature, and Regional Identity" to orient their thinking. I asked them what Ryden had to do with us being here and one of my students very promptly answered that "we do have a history in the Midwest." The point of Ryden's article is to contrast the way that history is visible in other regions (the Northeast and the South). My student said, paraphrasing Ryden, that our history in the Midwest is not defined by an event in the way the Northeast defines itself by the Revolutionary War or the South does by the Civil War; our identity, for that matter--but that doesn't mean we don't have one.

Some moments in Ryden's article that are particularly thought-provoking:

"'Region' in this sense implies a historical veneer through which a section of the country is seen, understood, assigned meaning, and given identity according to some defining experiences located deep in the past, a crucial phase or moment at which the region was broken away, stamped for life, and set on its separate cultural course within the national collective, having achieved an identity that it is believed to maintain with greater or lesser dilution to the present day" (513).

"Lacking the historical touchstone of identity so readily available to other regions, midwesterners are required to do a different sort of imaginative work. Instead of adopting and adapting a ready-made history, they continually construct the past anew from the materials at hand...locating regional identity not in a spot but in the spot on which they stand" (513).

"Travelers in the Midwest, by contrast, notice something very different as they move through the landscape. The signs at town borders tend to bristle not with long-ago dates but with the names and accomplishments of athletic and academic champions from the local high school, a practice I have never seen in New England...a need, I suspect may seem particularly urgent in a part of the country that, unlike New England, has no obvious claim to be the locus of a national origin myth" (517, 519).

"[Many observers] are so unimpressed that they insist on seeing flatness in a landscape that is really quite rumpled, filled with swelling hills and interesting glacial leavings if not mountains. Not seeing any obvious topographical or historical significance in the landscape around them, they witness nothing at all, intuiting and projecting emptiness in a region that residents could tell them is actually richly textured; it is just that the texture is subtle, the flatness is finely calibrated and frequently interrupted, although none of these nuances is particularly obvious unless you have spent time there" (521).

"True, the region may lack a defining historical moment and an agreed-upon pantheon of cultural heroes. To expect these things, though, is to come at a definition of regional identity from the wrong direction, a direction inappropriate to midwestern circumstances" (528).

The point, I said, why we're here, is this: we're talking about this place we all home and what we know about that place that shapes who we are and how we think. We're here at Morrill Hall to either learn more about how and what history is written in this place--or to find out that maybe we don't know as much as we think we do. I asked them to be on the lookout for surprising things, weird things, things they didn't notice when they were here as kids. And I sent them to explore on their own.

While I was waiting for them, I skimmed through their first Think Pieces that they had just turned in. And I'm so proud of them that I just can't stand it. My grin just got bigger and bigger the more I read through their ideas and reactions. Most of them expressed some dismay at the confusion they felt after reading the Steinberg and Warnock articles (that we read for Wed.)--what they thought defined a natural disaster was basically destroyed--and neither I nor the authors gave a suitable definition to replace it. A great number of them admitted that these two authors forced them to be more open minded about natural disasters as Acts of God or Acts of Humans, expressing very strong religious beliefs in a God who still controls nature to teach humans a lesson. Even so, their ideas of that were complicated in ways I was very pleased to see them admit.

A few students wrote about wondering how a class on natural disasters--a subject they did not know much about--would go. Would it be boring? (This, of course, is always a chief worry of mine as a teacher, as it is for many teachers...) But already, just one week in, they're being open minded, at least, if not as excited about this as I am. And, one student mentioned that when the teacher is excited, it's a lot easier to get interested--especially at such an early hour of the morning.

When we all came back together, I asked them what they'd found and they talked about the camels, about other things that surprised them or they didn't know about. Lovely to hear what they were thinking, what they don't know about this place many of them have called home since childhood. Love it. I can't wait to talk more about Ryden's article in depth next week, as we expand our thinking.

Next week we start reading Jonis Agee's novel The River Wife--and one student, in her Think Piece, already started it and is loving it. I just love my job.

Eng. 150: What is a Natural Disaster?

This morning, the weather changed. Where it's been unseasonably warm for January in Nebraska, barely requiring a jacket, let alone mittens, this morning was chilly and windy and made me regret leaving the house with wet hair. There was Pepto-Bismol pink of the sunrise reflected on the buildings I passed on my way to campus, but strangely, it felt as if the light came from somewhere else, because it didn't feel like the sun was actually rising. Very odd way to start the day.

Today was the second time I've met with my new English 150 class and I went into class thoroughly caffeinated and energized by what we'd talk about today and hoping that my enthusiasm, my very large Stanley thermos of Earl Grey Supreme, and what we'd read would somehow translate to my students. Since we don't know each other very well, I didn't have high hopes for getting them to talk about two scholarly articles on topics they had little knowledge of. But it was a great class, so exciting that it's given me the push I needed to get out of the First Week Worry that this brand new class on a topic I hadn't taught before and now I'm just straight-up excited for the rest of the semester. My students are talkative and willing to be interested, which is more than I could have asked for at this early date.

I had them read Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?" and Mary Warnock's "What is Natural? And Should We Care?" I started off the class with a short free write, a space for them to define for themselves--and then we would construct a collective definition--of what constitutes a Natural Disaster. They offered things like death, destruction, caused by nature, unexpected, out of our control, affects a group of people (rather than an individual), affects an area, involves the elements (water, fire, land, etc.). From there, we complicated those definitions, because the point I wanted to make with Steinberg and Warnock was that defining such things is not as simple as it sounds. Death is not the only way that humans can be scarred by a disaster. In the 1997 Red River Flood, nobody died, but that didn't make it any less horrifying. Caused by nature--what does that mean? Because Steinberg starts his article with a reference to the 1889 Johnstown flood, which was partially caused by spring rains, but it was the faulty dam that failed that caused the catastrophic flood. We'll talk about Erik Reece and mountaintop removal--that's a human thing that's causing catastrophic environmental damage. So it's not just nature--people are involved. Unexpected works in some areas, but we saw Katrina coming, we saw the 1997 Red River Flood coming--that doesn't make them less a disaster.

From there, we talked about both articles and the way both authors worked through natural disasters by bringing in the human component. Culture is a very influential filter of disasters, how we think of them, how we understand them. Natural disasters as morality tales is one of our oldest forms of storytelling. Plato's telling of Atlantis was a morality tale. The biblical flood is a morality tale. But even more complicated is the way that both authors discuss "natural" and "unnatural," how disasters are either Acts of God and something completely out of our control or they are completely explainable as to how humans contributed--and both authors' arguments culminated in "it's not that simple."

Trying to understand natural disasters is our earliest form of trying to figure out the world around us. It's how we get the Greek myths, how we get Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. And once we start to understand the place we come from, we understand how it works, how the way that that the Red River floods can be explained by its geologic history and the soil composition around it. Warnock also made the point where the environment stopped being just nature and became political nature and economic nature. I said that nature wasn't just what Thoreau went to find at Walden. What keeps nature natural is a matter of politics and economics. A very interesting moment.

One of the greatest moments that came out of class today was one of my students, when we were briefly talking about the Dust Bowl: why didn't they leave? An excellent question--why didn't they leave? Those who left Oklahoma and went to California left--and what happened to them? What other things might be in play that people wouldn't leave? What would prevent them from leaving? He also said something about cloud seeding and such as being crazy and why didn't they just wait out the drought, have faith that once you hit rock bottom, things will come back up? Another truly excellent question--but how did they know that things would get better? How are things not that simple? At what point, when the drought has been going on for ten years and your children are dying from dust pneumonia do you try anything and everything in your power to make it end?

The point of class today was to complicate--and yet somehow come to a common understanding--of natural disasters, how we would be talking about them with relation to understanding a place where we come from, how they might form personal identity as well as a community identity, and more. On Friday, we're going to Morrill Hall, to the museum to specifically explore "What don't we know about this place that we should?" My purpose is to further disrupt what they think they know, because the assumptions we make about place don't help us to understand it and how it affects us.

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!

Bookmarking: Place in the Pages

Now I'm really stretching the purpose of this blog, but classes start next week and I'll be able to post on actually teaching things. But I wanted to take stock of my New Year, so far, because it's Day 5, and the reading has actually gone quite well. I'm trying to read as much as possible for my comps before the semester starts, because I don't know how much I'll be able to do--though I hope I can keep at a pretty good clip. So, to keep myself honest, here we go:

1. Dinty W. Moore's Between Panic and Desire. Freaking stupendous. I'd read parts of this, but never all the way through. I love that my comps is getting me to read all kinds of stuff I've put off till Later. I'm fairly traditional when it comes to nonfiction and form, but considering different forms is something I'm working on. My overarching question when the form isn't traditional circles around why write something this way? Mostly, my first introductions to experimental forms has come with pieces that feel like the writer is pulling a gimmick, trying to do something just for the sake of being weird, not because the piece demands such a form. With Dinty's pieces (some more than others, but that's going to happen in any book) the form was absolutely the right way to write his way through those ideas and those events. I'm looking forward to talking with him about this book at AWP, as well as my friend SFM, my resident expert in all things form.

2. Susan Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup. Hated. But I pretty much knew that going in. I'm not a fan of the New Yorker style pieces, of which this book is mostly composed. There's nothing in those style of pieces (I can't bring myself to call them essays, because they're not even close) that transcends their subjects. They're lovely in their writing--and they absolutely know their audience. However, because they're so topical with no perspective, they rely on their reader for meaning, which means if you don't know the person she's talking about, don't know New York or the place, or don't have some other sort of connection, it's going to be a waste of time. I will say that I think the New Yorker style inhibits Orlean, because those pieces that were not published in the New Yorker were near to brilliant. Those pieces allowed Orlean to make meaning out of the person, the event, the place, or whatever she was seeing. She's a brilliant writer, that's not in doubt. This just solidifies that the New Yorker wouldn't know a good essay if it bit them in the ass--what they do is good, but they should stop calling them essays. And stop clogging up Best American Essays with them. Sorry, sorry. Soapbox alert. Sorry.

3. Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. Not for my comps, but for enjoyment as well as wondering if I could possibly teach it at some point. It's been a long time since I've closed the back cover of a book with a heartfelt and reverent "holy shit," but this book was one of them. This book was so complicated, so brilliant, that I think it's definitely going to be on a teaching list one of these days. First, most importantly, the man can write a sentence. Wow. And the role of the place in the story was so much more than setting, second. Boston was not just a setting, but a place, a character, and acted as much on the human characters as they did upon it. I'm definitely teaching this one.

4. I haven't read David Quammen's Monster of God yet, but that's what's on my list for today. Bring on the charismatic mega-fauna! Stay tuned to see what I think of it.

Happy Reading!

On a Wednesday Before the New Semester

Why is it that when you have the least amount of time, when what time you have is very tightly allotted to various projects, that all the idea for other things come up. I was on the phone today with a friend and we were lamenting the stress of spring syllabi, because while we had the entire summer to plan fall classes, we only have a couple of weeks to do the spring ones. We figured that we should try--even as we wouldn't know what we were teaching in any given spring--to plan the spring classes over the summer too.

The imaginary class I'm planning in my head (only barely out of the dreaming stage, which is where I hope it'll stay for the foreseeable future, or at least till summer) has to do with literary mysteries, and teach it with a place emphasis: what role does the place play in the narrative?

I'd definitely teach William Kent Krueger again. Particularly Iron Lake, but I might revisit some of his other works. Maybe some Nevada Barr. But right now, I'm reading Dennis Lehane--Mystic River right now--and thinking that maybe this book would be a fantastic addition to my imaginary list. The book is so great that I'm only halfway through it and so blown away that sometimes I have to put it down to breathe. Core question for this book: how is he playing with the expectations of the genre and form in this novel? Such a good book.

I also found Benjamin Black's first novel, Christine Falls, at one of the thrift stores in Fargo over Christmas--Benjamin Black, of course, being the pen name of the one-and-only John Banville. This one I haven't read yet because its first couple of pages are being scanned, so I can teach my students about pacing (we'll read an excerpt from Mefisto, the first few pages of The Untouchable, and the first few pages of Christine Falls in my 252 this spring). Dear students, you will never be a writer unless you learn to love sentences. And it doesn't matter where you find them. Twilight, Harry Potter, Hemingway. It doesn't matter what you read as long as you read.

I stole the loving sentences bit from Annie Dillard. In "Write Till You Drop," she tells this story:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "Well," the writer said, "I don't know... Do you like sentences?" The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of the paint."

***

Anyway, I digress. As I'm starting to formulate this imaginary reading list, I realize it's very, very short on women. If you've got a favorite, one that uses place (urban or rural, all is good), let me know.

While I'm at it, my knowledge of canonical-type mysteries is low too. I'm a nonfiction writer, after all. Beyond Poe, I don't have much. So help there too would be great.

Happy New Year!

I'm going to stretch the definitions of place and space in this particular post, because I need to put this in writing and it only has very little to do with teaching and place. But it does fit. Sort of. There's a bit of New Year's resolution in here, but not really.

1 January 2012 marks the beginning of my eight months of comps, which, at UNL, means that I've already submitted my reading lists for approval to the graduate committee, they've been approved, and I've got the go-ahead to go ahead. Because I want to finish both my Field and Focus portfolios by the start of fall semester, my plan is to do my Field in the spring and Focus over the summer. Each list consists of 30-40 books selected around a theme of sorts. The Field is designed to be the larger of the two, in terms of scope: mine is "20-21st c. American Nonfiction" and my goal is to write my paper on the Contemporary Essay. My Field list is "Contemporary Irish Prose: 1966-present" and I want to write on contemporary environmental prose, particularly in the West of Ireland.

In addition to these 20+ page scholarly papers, our portfolios will include an annotated bibliography of our reading lists, a syllabi based on the list, a statement of teaching goals, and such. I'm pretty excited about the whole thing, because this is a subject I'm in love with, books I want to read, and I have plenty of tea in my cabinet to get me through. I'm eternally grateful that the shift from creative writing to scholarly writing isn't a hard one for me (though I think that scholarly writing is equally as creative as "creative" writing).

So, this morning, while the bright New Year's sunshine fills my south-facing bedroom (the only windows in my apartment), while Galway sleeps on the radiator, sandwiched between the warmth of the pipes and the warmth of the sun, while Maeve sleeps on the fleece on the couch, I've got a pot of Almond Biscotti/Madagascar Vanilla tea in my favorite pink pottery pot that I bought for my birthday a few years ago and it's wonderful. The lights on my small Christmas tree are bright and comforting. Cinnamon candles warming the air. Dinty Moore's Between Panic and Desire on my coffee table, with a pencil.

I'm basking in the glow of great books to come, great classes to come, new friends, old friends, new students, new ideas, new experiences, and the general wonder of a brand new year. This year is going to bring a lot of exciting things and I'm ready for the challenge.

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!

Taking a Step to the Side

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

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

Because.

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

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

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

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

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?