Eng. 151H: Scientific Miniatures

Last night, I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in one sitting, the book I'm teaching for the third Writing Project for my Fall 151H.  Amazing, as I knew it would be.  It had finally stopped raining--and this morning, as I'm in town for internet and seeing the damage that ten inches of rain wreaked on Duluth, I'm feeling grateful that we only got four inches.  I have hopes that the blue sky and sunshine today will dry out the lawn enough that I can mow it this afternoon.  Seems like every time I think the lawn has dried out enough, it rains again.  But there are worse things to be curled up at the lake with tea, fleece, and a book.


I'm still working on formulating the syllabus for my Eng. 151H (Honors Rhetoric as Argument), but things are clearing up there.  I still remember when I assigned The Greatest Invention argument when I taught at Bowling Green and one of my students wrote maybe the best paper I'd ever seen for that assignment:  she argued that the telescope was the greatest invention in all of human history, the one thing that changed our lives and our world the most.  She argued that with the optics that allowed us to see so far away, we began to understand the true size of the universe and began to question our place in it (something that the Catholic Church had worked very hard to prevent).  And when we flipped the telescope and were able to examine the tiniest things, we began to question what else we didn't know.  It was a truly great paper.  So I'm thinking in terms of miniatures, of the microscope, and that's how I came up with this idea (it would be nice if I could make some sort of Scamp or tiny house comment here, but maybe I'll have to work harder to fit it in.)


And so, as my goal during my PhD is to never teach the same class twice, I've formulated this Scientific Miniatures 151.  The purpose of the class is to consider the importance of the small things we overlook--specifically insects (Silent Spring), animals and food systems (Omnivore's Dilemma), and human cells (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  I want to talk about the various systems that these tiny things are a part of, how our understanding of them is colored by gender, politics, history, ethics, and more.  One of the things that was most interesting to me about Silent Spring was not simply the subject matter--and its importance in the scheme of things--but how much of the rhetoric of destruction came out of a post-WW2 mentality of American Exceptionalism and the beginnings of The Miracle of Modern Science.  We have the capability to do this, so why shouldn't we?  This sort of questioning I want to form the basis for the entire semester.  I'm not interested in asking students to pick a side or form binary arguments on what we're discussing--I want them to explore the complexities of the entire argument, because it's not as easy as swatting a mosquito.  Mosquitoes that I'm sure are absolutely loving the puddles left by this week's rain around the Cabin...


With Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, as we talk about the miniature world of plants and and animals, I have no interest in trying to convert my students to vegetarianism.  That's not the point.  The point is that I want them to start to understand how they function in the food systems that run our world.  We're in Nebraska, full of farms and farmers and Montsanto, but they don't know what that means.  I want them to consider the complexities of water and the Ogallala Aquifer (as my 150 class last semester went to Don Worster's lecture, which was awesome), I want them to consider the implications of Montsanto, I want them to become aware of local food.  It's excellent that during this part of the fall semester, the farmer's market down in the Haymarket will still be going on.  Excellent opportunities for interviewing people.  I may or may not add a blog component to this project.


And for the final project, as we read Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, we'll talk about the miniature world of the human cell.  This book will offer a great opportunity to talk about issues like gender, race, and class--since Henrietta's cells were taken without her knowledge, used without her or her family's permission.  Henrietta's cells, known as HeLa, have been used in nearly every significant scientific and medical advancement since 1951, yet her family cannot afford health insurance.  There is much more to this discussion than simple ethics, the complexities of what we bring to the conversation are endless, considering the contemporary state of research.

On that note, I'm going to close up the internet, go home to the Scamp, make up the bed and stock the cupboards for my (probably) only Scamping trip of the summer.  Oh, how I adore 60 square feet.

Eng. 180: On the Need For Crime Lit

In the past few days, I’ve been reading the crème of contemporary Irish fiction for my Focus portfolio (the second half of my comprehensives), which is Contemporary Irish Prose (1966-present), but I’m really concentrating on Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger work (1990-present).  I’ve read Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (I’m going to have to read it again, I think, for pleasure), Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Colm Toibin’s The Blackwater Lightship.  I’d already read John Banville’s The Sea, but I skimmed it so I could remember that the prose is stunning (it’s Banville, after all), but I like other works of his better.  This is Literature with a capital L. 

(And as I’m reading through my list alphabetically, I ended up reading three in a row that featured child narrators…so I skipped the next one on the list, Frank McCourt, because I couldn’t handle another child narrator—which is why Toibin follows Donoghue.)

But I turned in my book orders for my fall classes on Friday, my Crime Lit 180 and my Micro 151H.  (More on the 151H later.)  But the purpose of the 180, as detailed in the Aims and Scopes, is that we question what constitutes literature, why we read, and how we talk about and value that written word.  I could have chosen a reading list for that class that focused on canonical work of some sort, but for the most part, I’m not a canonical person.  It’s not my forte.  But as I started to consider what I might do for this class, months ago, I started with a maxim that’s become a staple of my classes (no matter if they’re comp, creative writing, or literature): 

I don’t care what you read, just as long as you read. 

I mean it.  I don’t care if my students are reading romance novels or Twilight or whatever the New York Times bestseller is.  You don’t have to read the latest National Book Award Winner, the latest Nobel Prize winner, the latest Pulitzer winner.  You learn as much about what makes a sentence work (or fail) in a thousand other books, a thousand other writers.  If you tell me you don’t like you read, I’ll tell you you’re not reading the right stuff.  And then I’ll hand you a book.

You can learn as much from a mass market paperback—I can learn history, I can learn politics, I can learn what it means to be human from any of a zillion “popular” books on my shelves.  But the point is not to make a distinction between Literature and other books—even though my literary fiction is separated on the shelf from my fluffy fiction—but to recognize the value (and the shortcomings) of popular fiction.  When I taught intro to fiction these last two semesters, I deliberately started my class reading short stories, but we finished up the class with a novel.  Why?  Because while my students will probably sit down to write a short story, when they want pleasure reading, they’ll probably pick up a novel.  So it was important to teach my students how to look at a novel like a writer.

Teaching literature, the flip side of that writing coin, offered a different challenge.  What kind of literature (as in a group of books) did I feel was necessary to teach, and why did I feel that way?  During my Fall 2011 fiction writing class, the novel we read was William Kent Krueger’s Iron Lake, because it was his debut novel, it had won several awards, it was brilliant, and it was a mystery set in the wilds of rural northern Minnesota.  I wanted to show my students that there are no boundaries to good writing, that you can write about anything and anywhere and it can be good—and you’ll find masters and mistresses of the brilliant sentence in all kinds of genres.  The same goes for reading.  (Ironically, in my Spring 2012, where the texts I chose were Irish, the cover copy of Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea is described as a murder mystery.  That was an accident…)

But when it came to figuring out how a class on crime literature could function, and more specifically, on place in crime literature, I needed to justify to myself what I was doing.  I would teach Poe, because that’s where we start—and nobody does atmosphere like Poe.  I hadn’t read any Sherlock Holmes myself, which seemed weird considering mysteries are where I go when I want literary entertainment.  So we’ll read some Sherlock Holmes.  He’s also getting some contemporary film and television adaptations (with Robert Downey, Jr. and what’s his name), so there’s an enduring quality there.  I’d also never read Agatha Christie, even though I did see “The Mousetrap” when I was in London with my family in 2000.  Dad had seen the play in 1975 when he was in London and so we carried on the tradition of participating in the longest continuously running play in the world.  I thought we’d read some Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, probably)—but then I thought we’d watch the movie, add to the discussion of forms of literature—but I really dislike Hammett.  Maybe if I hadn’t read Lillian Hellman’s memoir first I’d like him better, but I can’t.  So I switched to The Big Sleep—and we’ll watch that one.  I’ll photocopy a few pages of the book for my students, because Chandler is brilliant, and I kind of fell in love with him and his wit.  And we’d round out the “classic” portion of the semester with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  After the midterm paper (wherever it falls in the semester), we’ll read Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (place-based urban) and Krueger’s Iron Lake (place-based rural), then finish out the semester with Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation (nonfiction).

But here’s the point, the reason why I think all of this is important to teach a class on:  popular fiction, specifically crime fiction, plays an essential role in how we form discussions in real life.  Because crime literature—in all its various subgenres—fills a gap in our entertainment, in our lives, that we can hardly acknowledge exists.  There’s a reason that John Grisham is the force he is—and it’s not because of his luminous prose. 

Crime literature allows us to have conversations and raise issues that literary fiction does not—and I’m not drawing a distinction, that crime lit can’t be literary and vice versa.  In the books I’ve chosen, it’s easier to have a discussion about how place and class affects characters, like in Mystic River (which is a good movie, but should not be compared to the book, which is freaking brilliant and nuanced in ways the movie cannot be).  It’s easier to talk about gender with Rebecca, how the narrator (the second Mrs. de Winter) is never named, how the character who provides the engine for the book—Rebecca—is dead, for crying out loud.  We can talk about gendering with Chandler (book/movie) too, how women are represented in hard-boiled fiction.  We can talk about violence against women being used for entertainment value.  We can talk about the effect that place has on the characters.  (I'm working on articulating a clearer vision of this, so stay tuned...)

But mostly, it’s because the world is a cool place that rarely makes sense, bad things happen to good people, and sometimes it’s nice to read a book that bears absolutely no resemblance to your own life.  And it’s easier to have these kinds of conversations about books my students are more likely to pick up on their own, and teach them what they’re looking at and how to look at the book, how to talk about what they see and what they think.  That’s what any good course will do.

State of Mind: Bears at 3rd Crow Wing!

Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I opened the bedroom door to find both of my cats sitting expectantly in the hall, like they’d been waiting for me to get my lazy butt out of bed, even though it was still a decent hour of the morning.  It was strange, to see both of them there like that, but I wasn’t awake yet, so I ignored their faintly superior expressions.  When I walked into the living room, the drapes towards the lake were open, because I’d opened them at 5:00 when the beginnings of sunrise woke me, usually also a good time to feed the cats so they’ll let me sleep for a while longer.  I’ve only been at the Cabin for a few weeks, but learned that if I opened the drapes to allow them some external entertainment, I’d also get more sleep.

But there was something wrong with the view, but it took me longer than it should have to figure out what that was.  I was still not fully awake, since I’d stayed up late reading.  And then I realized what was missing, why the cats were staring at me:  the bright spot of red that was the hummingbird feeder wasn’t there.  And when my eyes focused a little, I saw that neither was the seed feeder.  My first instinct was kids! but then I realized that there were no kids around here (and secondarily, realized I’ve been living in a city for much too long to suspect vandals first).  The red hummingbird feeder was on its side on the ground, empty, its bird perches bent.  The seed feeder was just gone, except for the broken pieces of the squirrel guard. 

Bears.  It has to be bears.

As I walked down to the lake, wondering where in the world the feeder went, I tried to keep the tune of “Waltzing With Bears” out of my head or the story that my favorite essayist Paul Gruchow tells in “Visions” of watching a bear tear apart his camp or the descriptions of baby bears in John McPhee's "Under the Snow," but failed.  Had the feeder still been there, I would have suspected deer, but it’s a pretty deer-proof spot and a pretty deer-proof feeder.  I called my neighbors to the south, at the resort, and they hadn’t heard of any bear activity in the area—and as resort owners, were not excited to hear about my visitation.  I talked to my neighbor Audrey to the north and she hadn’t noticed anything, but she doesn’t have feeders.  I certainly didn’t hear a thing.  Audrey remembered my grandparents talking about being visited by bears—and I remember those stories too.  I thought about getting the other bird feeder out of the garage and taking pity on my poor confused hummingbirds buzzing around my head or my poor confused goldfinches sitting on the pole, but I don’t want to encourage a repeat performance by my new bear friend.  I don’t want him to get used to finding food here. 

Is it wrong that I’d still like to see him?

My sister Kim, after I’d told her about my visit, said she was having a hard time being anything but excited about the prospect of the bear.  My sister Kristi texted, “Don’t you just love northwoods problems?”  To which I replied, with a smile, “What problems?”  My parents were driving into my grandmother’s assisted living facility in Minneapolis when I told them, so they would have a good story to tell Gram.  Gram loved hearing about it and told my mother some of her best bear stories.  I told my mother I hoped she wrote them down.

Later in the day, Penny from the resort called to tell me that we've got a confirmed bear, and he or she's a big one.  Apparently he walked through the resort and a few of her guests saw him--and Penny said that her dogs had gone nuts the night before that and she thought they were excited by the porcupine who's been stumbling around, but now she thinks it was the bear.  Probably right.  

I still haven't found any trace of the bird feeder itself, not in Audrey's property or the resort's or ours.  I have no idea where it went or if the bear ate it, plastic and all.  Who knows?  But the hummingbird feeder seems to have survived intact, though I'm not sure about when I should put it back up.  I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the bear last night, but he didn't appear before I went to bed and the times I got up to see if he was there were, he was not.  Oh, well.  Best to be on one's guard anyway while walking to the mailbox...

Chocolat Savant

Curled up as I am in the south brown chair at 3rd Crow Wing—there are two brown chairs in the living room—in front of the picture window as the sun brightens the living room in the late afternoon hours, my view is as much of the north wall of the living room as it is the picture window towards the lake.  The first day at the Cabin, I hauled various wooden boxes from their places around the Cabin and arranged them into a bookshelf system, something I’d seen done a few times and always wanted to try.  The Cabin is full of these wooden boxes, orange crates, peach crates, Hauenstein beer crates from the brewery in New Ulm, where my mother grew up.  Some boxes go horizontal, some go vertical, and I arrange them in various patterns until the composition pleases me.  Then I start putting books on my new shelves.

I have books for the summer that need a home, the books I’ve hauled north so I can complete my comprehensives this summer, books that I’ve rescued from various thrift stores, and those I’ve ordered from Amazon since I arrived.  I’ve spent time at the local library once or twice a week, but I find myself strangely disappointed by its selection.  I think that if I returned to Hubbard County to live, I would be spending a lot of money buying books, filling up every inch of wall space with bookshelves packed with colored spines of stories.

But my parents have been in and out of 3^rd Crow Wing in the last few weeks, selling their house, moving Gram from her assisted living here to her new place in Minneapolis. They and their puppy, Daisy, have been sleeping in their camper, not the house.  The first night they were here, we watched Chocolat, and my mother and I were surprised that my father stayed awake for it.  But watching that movie and Vianne’s magical knack for picking someone’s favorite chocolate concoction, I was reminded of something:  I want to be that kind of savant for those looking for books in my shelves.  I want to be that person that someone comes to my house and says, “I need something to read,” and I can put a pensive finger to my lips, look across the spines of the books there, and pick out something that I know the person will like.  The kind of book that they never knew they couldn’t live without.

I may need more books for this.

And bookshelves.

Sometimes, already, I get to do this, but it’s harder when my family is so far away from my library.  My mother is the most willing to take my suggestions.  She doesn’t like violence, likes a satisfying ending.  She likes mysteries, but not too dark.  For her, I’ll pick Nevada Barr off my shelves, or Kathy Reichs.  She likes her Louis L’Amours—the only author that my parents can both agree on.  My father, however, is a tougher sell.  Not because I can’t read him, but because he’s stubborn.  I can tell him that he’ll love Lee Child until I run out of oxygen, but that man will find every excuse not to read them until he has no other options left to him—and then he reads them, loves them, and reads everything they ever wrote.  It’s gotten to the point where I look at him, shake my head, and scold, “Just read the damn book already!”  He tends not to remember that I’ve never steered him wrong yet.  It’s that first, hard step to get him into the pages that’s the obstacle.  I’d give my mother Tana French, but not my father.  My father likes strong, male protagonists.  I wonder if I could get him to read Nevada Barr, though, given that her protagonist is a park ranger in various national parks.  I will try.  After he reads Dennis Lehane.

My sisters are trickier.  K2 likes clever, witty fiction.  For her I’ll pull down Jennifer Crusie, though lately she’s been engulfed by Hunger Games and Game of Thrones—neither of which series I own.  For years, K2 and I traded the same copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and I suspect she still has it, hoarding it somewhere.  K2, I would give what I call “critical imagination” books—spinoffs of various classics, like Mrs. Dewinter or Rebecca’s Tale, spinoffs of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  After Christmas one year, I gave her the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth), and two Jane Austen spinoffs—the Jane Austen Book Club and another variation of Pride and Prejudice. 

K3, I once made the mistake of giving popular fiction, which I knew was wrong when I handed it to her, but I somehow did it anyway.  I don’t think she ever read it.  K3 prefers nonfiction, but political nonfiction, political memoirs, Michael Pollan, Jonathan Safran Foer, and those.  K3 is more likely to read CNN before bed rather than a book, so she is incredibly well-informed.  I did give her David Sedaris once, but that felt vaguely wrong too.  For all that she is my sister, she is my youngest sister, four years younger, and she is still as much a mystery today in our adulthood as she was when we were children.  I do want her to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, though.

I also want to be the Aunt Karen (or right now, Aunt Kinny) who has the magical bookshelves for C., my blond dynamo of a niece, to pull from.  I collected children’s books long before I ever knew she would arrive, just for the promise of nieces and nephews who would someday visit my house.  For birthdays, I give my goddaughter Emily and my nieces-by-friendship-not-blood Harper and Violet books.  Violet got The Little Blue Truck for her first birthday.  But I want my shelves to be books that offer something new and exciting anytime my nieces come to visit, books for when they’re toddlers, books for when they’re starting to read, books that I can read to them at bedtime, books they can curl up with when they’re cuddled up next to the picture window at 3^rd Crow Wing, watching a hummingbird named Harlan at the feeder. 

Right now, my crates and crates of children’s books are in the basement of K2’s house, on the lower shelves of their living room bookshelf, just waiting for C. to pull them down. Sometimes, C. double-fists her books:  sitting with her mom, or K3, or her Nana, as they’re reading to her and C. has a different book open on her lap.  

State of Mind: 3rd Crow Wing Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fall Teaching Assignments!

I left Nebraska a week ago, drove Up North, and I'm spending the summer at the Cabin, my grandparents' house (though nobody lives there permanently right now), and what's a better environment for a place writer and teacher to plan new classes, read and write for comps, and just generally decompress from two intense PhD years?  Not much.  Wake up to loons, spend days on the couch in your pajama pants with a pot of tea at your elbow, watching the leaves in the breeze off the lake, watching the lake itself until the leaves fill in the view.  Already I feel about fifty pounds lighter.  Stress is heavy.  And what's weird is that there isn't internet at the Cabin (always been a proper noun in our family) and I'm not missing it.  A trip once or twice a week into town for groceries and stuff, that'll be enough to check my internet.

Right now, I'm at the library for my internet, and my email inbox has delivered my fall teaching assignment!  I'm scheduled to teach Eng. 180, "Introduction to Literature," and Eng. 151H, an Honors section of "Rhetoric as Argument."  Except for having no blessed idea what I'm going to do for that 151, I'm pretty darned excited about the 180.  I've been messing with my "Scene of the Crime" syllabus as I've been enjoying the couch--and I read Erik Larson's Devil in the White City in two days, then read Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation in one day.  I was going to put Larson on the syllabus, but I think Vowell's going to be a much more interesting choice.  For one, she's freaking hilarious.

I'm starting pages for these classes, so if you're curious about how they're evolving, check them out!

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.