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

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

The Process:

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


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



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


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



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


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

The Form:

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

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

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

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

The Characters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Plot:

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous:

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

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

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

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

The The Impotence of Proofreading

It's the last week of classes. Taylor Mali is good any time of the semester, but I need him more this week. And perhaps so do my students.

John Banville/Benjamin Black: Christine Falls

When I went Up North a few weeks ago, I checked out Benjamin Black's noir novel The Silver Swan on CD from the library, so I could listen to it while I drove.  You may recall a previous blog post where I recounted my disappointment with it, save for the voice of Timothy Dalton, who I would listen to, no matter what he was saying.  He never really did it for me as Bond, but he's got a great voice.

Anyway, yesterday I finished Banville/Black's first in that series, Christine Falls (which came out in 2006), and my faith has been restored.  I mean, it's no secret that I have a fairly sizable literary crush on Banville, hence my terrible disappointment with The Silver Swan.  But Christine Falls did everything I was hoping for and more.  The setting--1950s Dublin--was absolutely more of a character on the page.  The morality and ethics and religion were definitely stronger players (with the appearance of a Magdalene Laundry).  Quirke was definitely more of an anti-hero here and I liked him better for it.  And it goes without saying that the prose was stunning.  I've got Elegy for April checked out from the library (paper copy) and I'm pretty excited to have time to read it.

Michael Dibdin of The Guardian has this to say about Christine Falls:  "It would be absurd to suggest that Banville writing as Black is better than Banville writing as Banville, but in a different and yet fascinatingly similar way he is every bit as good, and deserves to win a new, broader readership with this fine book. Crime writers have been moaning for years that their stuff never gets considered for the big literary awards; the possibility of competition from the other direction has been less discussed. If there's any justice, Banville should be able to add the CWA Gold Dagger to his heap of trophies, but I hope this doesn't start a trend. Life is hard enough for those of us who labour away down in the potboiler room without the toffs from the penthouse suites showing up and acting like they own the place."  (Click here for the full review.)


And Kathryn Harrison from the New York Times nailed down some essential elements of why I found this book to be particularly amazing:  "Mainstream literary novels succeed or fail on the strength of characterization, but noir fiction is less concerned with building complex and believable characters than with creating a medium in which murder and mayhem can thrive. Place is essential to noir, character less so. While the voluptuous atmospheric flourishes of “Christine Falls” suggest how much fun Banville is having as Black, they also provide the book’s center of gravity, the force that holds all the other elements together. Sometimes they make an entirely adequate cast seem little more than perfunctory."  (The entire review is great, so you should check it out.  Spot on.)


Of course, as I'm working on this Crime Literature class (and having more fun putting that together--even though I don't know what I'm teaching in the fall), I'm learning all this about crime fiction that I always thought I knew but couldn't put words to it.  The difference between an analytical detective (like Sherlock Holmes) and a hard-boiled detective (Sam Spade).  Hero, anti-hero.  Block elements.  The qualities of noir.  And it makes me feel exceedingly stupid when I realize there is this whole world of Irish noir out there, like I should have expected it.  But then, every time I discover something new in the world of reading, it's actually refreshing, because I'll never run out of books to read.  Or writers to be inspired by.  The list of books I'd like to teach in this class just keeps getting longer.

I don't really have much time for "fun" reading these days, so it was nice to take a break yesterday and spend some quality time with Banville.  Well, Black. But I definitely want to spend some more time considering the wide world of Irish noir.  I'm liking that world so far.

Awesome interview with Banville, on Christine Falls:

Eng. 252: Wrapping up Star of the Sea

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

Eng. 150: Wangari Maathai

I absolutely love Fridays. Not because they're the last day before the weekend (because the way that my schedule is this semester makes it feel like my "weekend" happens on Thursday mornings), but because both of my classes turn in their Think Pieces (their reading responses). I love reading responses. I absolutely love them. It's a safe space where my students can write about their fears, frustrations, surprises, joys, and connections where they don't always bring those wonderful moments up in class.

I've been struggling in the last two weeks with this class as I've been teaching Erik Reece's Lost Mountain about mountaintop removal coal mining in Kentucky and other human-caused disasters happening, because it seems like the whole thing has been so overwhelming and so huge that my students (and me too) are getting buried under the powerlessness of the whole thing. I think I underestimated the power of this reality on myself and my students. Mostly, for them, it's because they didn't know these things were happening and so that makes them feel even more powerless. As I'm reading through their Think Pieces for this week (that they just handed in), some of them are being able to push through that shock and powerlessness and helplessness that they're feeling into a place where they can start to think about what they can do.

Thank goodness. I was getting really worried there for a while.

Of course, it helps that today we looked at Wangari Maathai's website for the Green Belt Movement. I read her memoir, Unbowed, in Tom Lynch's Global Environmental Literature class during Fall 2010 and Maathai was supposed to come to UNL in the fall, but she died of cancer in September. She was the first African woman (and first environmentalist) to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004. What the Green Belt Movement was able to accomplish is staggering.

We watched these two videos:

And I asked my students to jot down notes of things that sounded familiar to them and we put them on the board. We heard issues of gender, class (specifically poverty), the rural/urban divide, politics and power, government and power, and grassroots empowerment. Such a simple thing, to plant a tree and allow rural women the opportunity to stand on their own two feet.

We spent the rest of the class period working on the topics for their WP3, on human-caused disasters. Most of them had a decent idea of what they would do: tracking, the BP oil spill, ocean dead zones, the Keystone XL pipeline, and more. What I emphasized as we wrapped up the class is that I want them to concentrate on complicating what is going on. One of the problems we see with these human-caused disasters is that there is a huge divide between people and the environment. It's an either/or, not a both/and. So, I want them to make sure that they're talking about a disaster in a specific place--fracking in Texas is going to be a different issue than fracking in Ohio or Pennsylvania. The place matters. The people matter. Who, specifically, is affected? Race, gender, class, economic status, heritage, etc. Why should anybody care?

Their rough drafts are due next Friday, so I'm pushing them to work on the researching now, this weekend, so they can have something solid before Friday, because their last rough drafts were not good. I hope they can apply what they learned last time to this paper. I'm going to be very interested to see what happens with this project. Verrrry interested. And like I'm noticing with my 252, there's still an energy to the class that defies this race-to-the-end-of-the-semester, which is just plain awesome.

Eng. 252: Special Guest Star, Dawn Duncan!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stress Tics and Tiny Houses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 2

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Eng. 150: How Do We Measure the Value of a Place?

Today was actually the third day of our WP3, on human-caused disasters, but we didn't have class on Wednesday because we went to Don Worster's terrific lecture titled "An Unquenchable Thirst: How the Great Plains Created a Water Abundance and Then Lost It." (The video is 84 minutes long, but it's worth watching if you can make the time.) But the larger questions we're asking ourselves include "what is the value of a place? How do we measure the value of a place?"

The crux of Worster's lecture was that Americans have been living in this "culture of abundance" for so long, a culture supported by ingenuity and technology and straight-up American exceptionalism that we cannot begin to conceive of a time and culture where we cannot have everything we want. The consequences of ingenuity, he said, "required a lot of cultural change. What do you do when the natural world does not treat you the way you should be treated?" The Homestead Act assumed the benevolence of nature, which is interesting considering that the Plains were the Great American Desert, a place of no value, a place that stood between us and our destiny to possess both coasts of the continent.

"We have become a mining economy," Worster said. We mine coal, oil, gas, and water. The rate of consumption of the Ogallala Aquifer means we will mine it dry very soon--something that is complicated by rising global temperatures. All the projections, he said, indicate that the Plains and the central US will be hotter than the global mean and will be accompanied by decreased summer precipitation. This drought will last centuries, be permanent.

What was particularly interesting during his lecture was the irony I noticed between the "Bureau of Reclamation" and the role of Mother Nature in thwarting those efforts, the idea of Mother Nature as a bitch. But Worster's larger question was what happens, then, when we turn water into a commodity, rather than a resource? Our culture is shifting from a American individualism to a community, and he spoke of the "moral economy of water." He discussed solutions to the water problem, that one is a market-based approach to water distribution, to let the markets put a price on the water and then buy and sell it like any other commodity. But what's interesting about that is the people who can afford the water will not be in the agriculture industry. And, as I question, when ever has putting a price on nature ever protected it? Is money the only thing that holds our society together?

He did propose some solutions, most of which will take an incredible mental shift: a movement back to dry-land farming, reconsidering how we define wealth and affluence (and our role as a consumer society, with our transportation, the size of our houses, etc.). He spoke of "learning new ways to be rich."

In class this morning, we put that up against the interesting interview Stephen Colbert did with Mark Ruffalo on Wednesday:

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And through the humor of the interview, which is about hydro-fracking, brought up some issues that my students and I then applied to our conversations about human-caused disasters and what we're reading in Erik Reece's Lost Mountain, about radical strip mining and mountaintop removal. If you watch this interview, a few things are important: how do we place a value on places? Are they only valuable if we can get something from them? Who is affected? Who has the power to act? One of the things my students pointed out--and it's only briefly mentioned at the end of the interview--when Colbert points out that Ruffalo is the Hulk, that comment is larger than a role that Ruffalo played. It brought up a really important issue of class. Ruffalo can buy a solar system to power his house. Those who live in the houses that could blow up don't have the money to fight those tracking companies.

As we moved into talking about Lost Mountain--and we were running out of time by this point--we talked about what we thought answered "how do we measure the value of a place?" and what we put up on the board boiled down to two categories: what it can do for us and location. (I didn't know what I would get when I started this activity, but again my brilliant students surprised me.) When we talked about valuable locations and what it means that a place can give us something, the issue of "pretty" came up. We talked about how we define pretty, how somebody from the mountains may not think the Plains is pretty, etc. And then we talked about how our own place was described in its infancy, as the Great American Desert. Once it became able to give us something, then it became valuable, the Breadbasket of the World. Rhetoric matters, people.

One of my students remarked that he's trying really hard not to hate humanity as this class progresses and it's true, there is a real danger of fear and disillusionment in starting to understand what's happening in the world. Over and over my students will comment that they had no idea that any of this was happening until my class. Well, I think they're being too hard on themselves. They're eighteen. Nobody knows anything by that age. But the larger question, I asked this particular student, is not how not to hate humanity, but to question how we got to this point, because if we can do that, then the next question, "what do we do about it?" is actually a step of hope.

(And then I told them about my parents buying a new house (having just sold theirs) and me trying to convince them to think differently about what they want and need in a house, because they're Baby Boomers, growing up in a culture that told them that they deserved this, that the American Dream equaled a certain size house, and what it might mean to think outside the box in terms of housing. And then I pulled out the floor plan of my dream house, because, yes, I do carry it with me, put it under the document camera, and told them my dream house was a tiny bit over 300 square feet.)

I can't wait till Monday.

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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