Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

4 x 4 Writing Inspirations

In response to Joanna Young's invitation at Confident Writing:

lessons to be (re)learned

• One afternoon during freshman English class (high school variety) my teacher passed out a bagful of oranges. He told us we needed to learn to see things. We fingered the pebbled texture of the skin, examined the wrinkling around the stem end, pulled away the layers of peel and sticky white membrane, split apart a segment and poked with a pen tip at the packets of juice lined up orderly as rows of corn.
• I can still see the blackboard from Writing Workshop (sophomore year now): my teacher's spidery handwriting Show don't tell and below Specific details. The way I remember it, that just about summed up her advice. She left us alone to write most of that year, every once in a while calling someone to the round conference table and slipping an issue of the New Yorker from her pile, saying, "Here, read this," like a prescription tailored especially for that person.
• In the one-semester Form and Theory of Poetry class required of us fiction writers in graduate school, the teacher made us actually write poetry: heroic couplets, open couplets, blank verse, ballads, sonnets, terza rima, even ottava rima. I bought myself a rhyming dictionary and locked myself in my study for hours on end, discovering the generative power of form (as this assignment reminds me yet again).
• I did not particularly enjoy the fiction workshops in graduate school (a testosterone-laden atmosphere where writing a short story was often compared to playing a football game), but from the poet-friends who lounged around our livingroom after end-of-the-month potluck dinners and later crowded onto the picnic tables in the neighborhood bar's beer garden I learned the value of reader-pressure, the sense that there is a sympathetic audience waiting to read what I have written. (And for me this is one of the many appeals of blogging.)

body

• Walking around the block, I first notice the things I can’t see when I drive by, trying to pick the details that best convey the tone of each household: the silk flags changed for every holiday, the rake lines in gravel driveway, gazing globes nestled among hollyhocks and delphinium. I remember walking these routes when my oldest daughter was a baby, picking fistfuls of roadside wildflowers (blue toadflax, mullein, chicory, bittersweet nightshade), how later at home, when I was looking through the guidebooks, trying to name something made me look at it more closely. As I walk further, my attention strays. I follow my mind as it jumps from memory to memory, lists of things to do, then taking dictation as finally constructed sentences stream across my cranium like a tickertape of CNN news.
• Working at relatively mindless, repetitive tasks helps my mind to wander. Greek cooking seems especially good for this, rolling koulouraki or stuffed grape leaves for Easter dinner, but I’ve done other things as well: working in the dish room at college, scraping catsup-soaked remains into the garbage disposal, peeling dozens and dozens of hardboiled eggs all day, or outside pulling weeds in the garden, down on hands and knees, scratching soil loose with cultivator, then ripping weeds out by their root hairs.
• Once the beginning of an idea comes to mind, doodling helps to nourish and develop it. It’s important the paper be not too elegant (I’ve made the mistake many times over of buying too beautiful a journal, one that’s impossible to actually write in). Yellow narrow-lined legal pads are a good choice, or even better the backs of envelopes.  With the finest of black felt-tipped pens I scroll treble clefs and cubes and five-pointed stars until some words come.
• Avoiding the fast-approaching deadline of something I do not want to do (constructing a syllabus, say, or doing the income taxes) is another surefire way to get me working on a writing project.

mind

• I remember the family stories my mother told me: about my great-grandfather who immigrated from Sweden, a carpenter and poet and state legislator, who in the days before WWII brought home an entire German band for my great-grandmother to feed; my great-aunt, married in late middle-age to a man who fondled my mother's teenaged breasts and eventually committed suicide; my flapper-grandmother, who got pregnant, then married, at eighteen and divorced by twenty-two, who worked in an office to buy the fashionable clothes and costume jewelry her second husband said they couldn't afford, who delighted her grandchildren with her handmade angel and tomte Christmas ornaments, her spun-sugar Easter eggs filled with woodland scenes, her off-key voice husky from vodka singing Swedish songs that lilted something about hey hop min lilla socker top.
• I connect remembered bits from my past, like trying to find the repeating section in the complex geometric pattern of my grandmother's red-green-white kitchen floor. My great-aunt had a sterling silver brooch inset with a blue butterfly wing; when I was ten years old, in Charleston, West Virginia, I paid fifty cents for a butterfly pin shaped from tiny turquoise-colored fake pebbles, its eyes (do butterflies have eyes?) two pieces of even tinier red glass. I look for analogues, metaphors, leaps of associative thinking that circle back to the starting point. Though I think of myself as a skeptic, these serendipities comfort me with their demands for preservation.
• I try to imagine how my great-grandfather's best friend (the German hunchback, the rest of the family called him) came to paint what we now call the Naked Lady Picture, a ripe pink nude fresh from her bath, the initials on the towel hanging at her side monogrammed with the tangled initials of my great-grandmother's name. I try to imagine that scene in Washington, DC when my not-yet mother refused to stay in the bed of her married lover, determined instead to go to her library school seminar and thereby effectively ending the affair with the man who may have been the love of her life. I try to imagine if she would have been happier in a different life.
• And, as always, I read. Lately, thinking about the deepening mystery of her life, I have been reading mother-memoirs: Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, Mary Gordon's Circling My Mother, Meredith Hall's Without a Map.
  

spirit (or the deadly sins approach to fueling creativity)

• Envy stirred the other day as I ripped open the Amazon box to pull out the short story collection I'd pre-ordered four months ago, the third book of a woman from my high school class. I'll be checking weekly the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, waiting to see the reviews that will no doubt be glowing (I read one of the stories in a literary magazine; it was wonderful). In addition to this classmate, two of my roommates from graduate school have, by my count, published between them a whopping ten novels.
• The Faculty Without Offices come out of the woodwork for the beginning-of-the-semester meetings, announcing out of strange mouths their familiar-sounding names. Adjunct English, they explain to the full-time faculty at my community college who smile vaguely in their direction.  I refuse the title. In my latest experiment I’m trying to let anger fuel my writing, anger at the system and colleagues who face the same under-prepared students semester after semester but, when a new full-time position opens in the department, debate whether they’d prefer a Specialist in Emerging Literatures or a Renaissance Scholar.
• I tell myself that my greed  is under control, not for boatloads of money (just enough for books and dental work and, maybe, some new kitchen cabinets) but rather for a secure job that gives me time and energy to write.
• The fear is not of death, exactly, but rather oblivion, the old "Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain" syndrome. In her daily obituary reading, my mother, at 78, marvels at how long people are living these days; at 51, I see the teenagers killed in car accidents and the 4o-year-olds whose families request donations to Hospice in lieu of flowers. Two days ago my mother missed guessing the year of her marriage by a decade; yesterday she asked if the neighbor who'd been the best woman-friend of her adulthood was still alive (she isn't). It's time to write.

Writing teacher writing

In the past few months, as I've been trying to figure out how to carve out more time for my own writing,  relevant articles and passages have been dropping from the sky. First someone slipped into my mailbox a NISOD Innovation Abstracts sheet, Stephen A. Catrello's "Practicing What You Teach". He recounts, when he was an adjunct, bringing in samples from his technical editing "real job," both to show his students real-world writing and to let them see him as a fellow writer. Later, when he landed his full-time gig, he wrote the narrative essay assignment along with his students, emphasizing the value of their seeing his process and his struggles (and successes presumably).

I often have thought about doing assignments along with my students, but hadn't  found the time until this semester (although I do generally talk about how I'd approach the assignment and toss out some of my conceptual-art-essays).

Warning: digression ahead. Which makes me think about the essay-of-the-mind (to echo Wallace Stevens' "On Modern Poetry"). I'm not sure whether it's an occupational hazard or my natural habits of procrastination (probably both), but I find myself with a sizable collection of ghost-essays, germs of ideas floating around in my head or at most scribbled onto some back-of-an-envelope to-write list , but not yet fleshed out into actual words. It's a dangerous practice, I'm afraid, for several reasons.

• It's too easy for the concepts in my mind to seem clever, insightful, poignant so that it's with stomach-churning disappointment that I see them lying there lifeless when finally captured on paper. Hypothesis: the longer the ghost-essays wander around my head before venturing out to test the air the more painful the disillusionment. Learning to tolerate this pain is (one) key to overcoming writers' block, which is a serious problem for so many of my students. The idea, of course, is to convince them that Revision will come riding to the rescue on that cliched White Horse.
• The other important thing, for me to remember and for students to understand, is that in the process of putting down these ideas on paper brings up more ideas. As the mathematicians say, this is a nontrivial statement.

Looking back, or ahead: opening day assignment

The 13th week of class is the time to harangue now-familiar students to get cracking on those research-paper rough drafts, most definitely not the time for recapping the semester's beginning assignment. And yet, as always, I find myself about this time looking ahead (my own procrastination strategy), looking forward to the fresh start that January will bring with its rosters of strangers' names.

Classmate snapshot (original version). Pick a representative moment in yr life, a tiny slice no more than a minute or two that captures some aspect of yr life or personality that you'd like to share. Maybe you were driving through Dunkin Donuts this morning for yr daily French vanilla iced coffee, singing along to whoever-it-is on yr car stereo, as you drove up to the window momentarily embarrassed at the mound of crumpled McDonald's bags on the floor of yr car. Maybe you were sitting on yr new overstuffed couch at 2 am,  watching Casablanca for the thirty-eighth time, with a tub of pistachio ice cream on yr lap. Maybe you were standing at the kitchen stove trying to cook, with yr two-year-old clinging to yr knees and yr preschoolers tearing lettuce at the kitchen table. (Contrary to my own obsessions, food need not be involved.) Maybe you were at work. What were you doing? Who else was there? What do yr surroundings look like? Or maybe you're involved in one of yr many hobbies. Imagine this moment as a snapshot (or a very short clip of film).

Now pair up with another student. Introduce yourselves. Each of you must interview the other, asking about his/her snapshot moment. If the snapshot is not clear in yr mind, ask questions to sharpen the picture. Take notes. Remember the tools of the fiction writer: setting, character, action, dialogue (a line or two can "snap" a character into life). For homework, write one paragraph that gives the reader this snapshot of yr classmate in words. (If you get home and find that yr paragraph is thin and skimpy, make something up.)

Goals.

• to get students talking to each other
• to get an initial portrait gallery of the class (for semesters when I'm using a CMS or blogs, I ask students to post these paragraphs--so useful for orientation to technology involved as well)
• to obtain initial writing sample for informal assessment of writing "levels"
• to talk about specific details (evaluating which details are "best," i.e., most revealing) , showing not telling, revision, and all that beginning-of-semester jazz (to be reprised throughout)

Not again to the lake?!! (or, Selecting essays for FYC)

In trying to decide which essays to use in my comp classes this semester, paging through the stacks of texts sent out by publishers, I was struck by an amazing coincidence: Why is it that, of all the narrative essays in the English-speaking world, George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" and E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake" show up over and over and over again? (Judy Brady's "I Need a Wife" seems to me somewhat over-represented as well as the proto-definition essay...) I pulled out White's essay for a closer look. Now, I know I'm supposed to revere him as a stylist (and I am fond of Charlotte's Web and Elements of Style), but that particular essay, for me, reeks of musty Reader's Digest condensed books and damp mass market mysteries, conjures the feel of scratchy blankets and two too-many days without a hot shower. So, rather than actually buckling down and committing to a half-dozen essays or so I'd use in my classes, I instead started one of my meta-musings about the process. I've written before about why to use reading of external texts in FYC; now I've been thinking more specifically about how I do (or should) choose the particular pieces I assign my students.

As I started in, thinking about why and why not for particular essays, I paired in my mind White's "Once More to the Lake" with another essay I'd assigned for a few semesters, then discarded, Michael Pollan's essay "Why Mow? The Case against Lawns."  Why Pollan, and this essay in particular? Well, I own all four of his books (though I haven't had time to read The Omnivore's Dilemma yet); I admire his style; I'm interested in his subjects. Grass seemed to me initially a universal topic, and I'm partial to essays that invite the reader to take a new look at something he may have taken for granted. Though I've pushed a lawn mower  only a few yards in my life (my parents expected me, as a girl, to do well in math and science, but lawn mowing and garbage disposing were not among my childhood chores), the subject evoked memories: running and scuffing my bare feet through newly cut grass as my father finished up his twilight mowing; the college bio-sci librarian in town who planted his lawn over to wildflowers, forcing his neighbors to examine the prejudices of their own lawn-aesthetic (nice in theory but not next to my shorn grass); my husband's childhood neighborhood, where grass measuring over 2.7 inches tall resulted in grumbling over the hedges and, in short order, the imposition of  fines for civic irresponsibility. Beyond the personal resonances, I had things to say about the essay from a writing teacher perspective (notice his tactic with the lead, his seamless integration of sources, how the structure of his argument is built from blocks of description and narration and comparison/contrast). The thing that got me though, looking out at the faces of my actual students, many of them lower income, first generation American, first generation college students, was wondering how many of them had lawns or the experience of mowing lawns. I'm not sure how relevant that is or should be in choosing to discuss the essay (surely unfamiliarity alone is not sufficient grounds for excluding an essay from consideration), but the consciousness of class that the essay raised was uncomfortable for me. I'm still not quite sure what to do with those feelings, but for now I haven't been using that essay.

A word is worth 1000 pictures??

In response to John Walter's response on Machina Memorialis, I've been exploring a little more my own ambivalences about the use of images in FYC. (It's relevant, I suppose, that although several of the blogs I regularly read beautifully use photographs--bgblogging and writing as jo(e) come to mind--this blog of mine is resolutely image-free.) I'll stick, first, fairly close to his points, trying on some contrary positions just for fun, then wander further afield...

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I'm interested in John's point that images were historically tied to words in meaning-making and that "composition sans image is deeply roots in and tied to print culture [...] and this move to banish the image from serious texts in fairly new." I'm interested as well in the neat sort of turn by which digital media have brought the image back into play (I hope I'm not mis-stating his point...)  But I don't quite understand how images played such a role pre-Gutenberg, when virtually all of the poetry-drama-fiction- philosophy-history -whatever texts I've read and that we ask high school and college students to read are indeed exclusively word-based. Were images stripped away from these texts at some point in the modern typesetting process? These early texts were distributed and preserved via recitation (aural memory) and manuscript. Were the images in illustrated manuscripts produced by the authors of the texts or the  manuscript-copiers, or doesn't that matter?  What do we know about the actual composition of these early works? To be flippant, is there evidence that Plato sketched out a floorplan to think his way through to Allegory of the Cave? (To anticipate my next point, I'm taking "image" here in the above to mean graphic image, that is, picture, since I don't see how aural/manuscript/print/digital culture issue affects either mental or verbal images.)

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I'm bothered by the commingling of mental, verbal, and graphic images. They seem qualitatively different to me in the processes of thinking and writing and reading. I am reminded of a post I wrote a few years ago on Words and thoughts, and I'll repeat the quote  from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct:

In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine thoughts....People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture...But it is wrong, all wrong....People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise, or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, we have to use--what else, words!

That is, it seems to me that thought can take place pre-verbally, in the form of mental images, or even more amorphously, something like sensations, hints, intimations. My sense of my own thoughts is not I am producing and listening to a constantly streaming inner monologue, but that "things" flicker past without my having the chance or wanting to take the time to verbalize them. But to capture these images (for my own examination or to communicate them to others) I have to attach words to them (or make them manifest in some other medium, oil paint, say).  This is a necessary (I think) part of the critical thinking process and largely what we mean by the process of composition, to grab hold of these mental images and embody them in words.

Verbal images, associated with the poetic, seem to me something like what I'd call concrete details (words that refer to and create sensory images) and figurative language. The split that John identifies between poetic and rational discourses is tragic, in my view, resulting in the depersonalized, hyper-abstract, jargon-ridden forms of academic discourse that make my skin crawl. There are people I guess who aspire to write this way, but I'm not one of them (hence no Ph.D for me) and I don't take it as my mission in FYC to create such writers. I concede that for certain technical writing aimed at a specialized audience the poetic may be appropriately "purged" from the rational; for my money, though, in general terms, for a general audience  "good writing" requires these verbal images, not merely as stylistic flourishes but for clarity's sake as well.

So we have mental images integral really to the process of thought and verbal images a requirement for effective writing. For me, graphic images are a different sort of creature. Helpful in some contexts (maps of troop movements in Civil War battles--that is, for showing spatial relationships; bar graphs, pie charts, and other mathematico-statistical representations--that is, for summarizing data and depicting quantitative and qualitative relationships; photographs of people, places, things--that is, for presenting a version of apparently unmediated reality and thus short-cutting the need for physical description) but--here's the important thing--these graphic images are basically optional conveniences. Maybe. (I'm talking here about the use of graphic images within a text; as an aid to invention they seem potentially more useful. A side note: I am not a fan of the graphic novel, though perhaps I should give them more of a chance...)

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The essay according to Heilker and Hohn

I have been gestating a post (for not quite nine months) based on two things I read at the beginning of the year: Paul Heilker's essay "Twenty Years In: An Essay in Two Parts" in the December 2006 issue of CCC and an essay  by Donovan Hohn in the January 2007 issue of Harper's titled "Moby-Duck." I was especially happy to see Heilker's name in the CCC TOC. Though I've never met or communicated with him, I felt a personal connection of a sort: he had (unbeknownst to him) stood as an ally in my disastrous (in the mealy-mouthed Ivory-Tower sort of sense of the word) attempt to overthrow thesis-driven writing. Or at least to open up a dialogue, to question its bullying domination of FYC in my department, to argue for a more inclusive, baggier sort of definition of what we were looking for in the freshman "essay."

It was about four years ago, and I was still relatively new to the dept. I had been doing freelance editing at home for nearly fifteen years and was thrilled to be back in the middle of (what was to me a rather horrifying term but a welcome idea) the "academic discourse community." After a meeting in which one faculty member seemed to claim that the thesis was the sine qua non of FYC, I'd sketched out a tentative position paper, just a couple of pages long, arguing, in essence, that writing could be exploratory as well as argumentative. (The disastrous part involves that faculty member's response: my memo described as an "unsubstantiated diatribe" and my behavior as "totally lacking in professionalism and collegiality.") In my note I quoted from Heilker's book The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form:

The incredibly tight discursive structure of the thesis/support form makes the additional ideological claim that the complexities of the world's problems and issues are not problematic at all--not a complex web of interconnections that need to be addressed from multiple perspectives in a collaborative dialogue--but really rather neat, "slottable," and solvable in a very short space using a single point of view and formulaic thinking, a procedure which will leave one with no bothersome loose ends. (6)

Words and pictures

I've been thinking the past few months about the place of images in composition classes. Like the shift from black-and-white to color television in my childhood, our textbooks have turned technicolor as the dawning recognition of the importance of visual rhetoric sweeps the comp/rhet field like those waves of colored cards across a football stadium. I understand its attraction, the carnival-like appeal of all those quirky advertisements to analyze. And learning to look, of course, is a vital skill for the writer. But is making visual rhetoric the cornerstone of comp classes a service to our students, helping them make judgments in a culture saturated with images, or is it a surrender to a public discourse in which people take positions on stem cell research via youtube clips and on political candidates via 30-second Swift boat ads?

The appeal of rhetoric

I confess to mixed feelings about  teaching  the apparatus of rhetorical appeals in FYC. Passing through two graduate creative writing programs, I never learned that framework and considered that I could write quite adequately, thank you very much, without it.  When I finished graduate school, I was happy finally to discard the rigid mask of academic tone (in the graduate lit classes I took) and began writing essays that traced out ideas, circled around analogies, sought out reverberations and associations. By the time I started teaching again some fifteen years later, though,  the comp/rhet influence had infiltrated FYC and I was obliged/expected to teach rhetorical appeals as the foundation of a program devoted to classical argument. When I began to teach the appeals, I had my doubts whether that layer of nomenclature was useful for FYC students, or was it too difficult an abstraction, complicating beyond their needs (what's a complete sentence? how can I connect general statements to supporting details? how can I hold my sentences together into coherent paragraphs?) 

Rethinking themes

At last month's final I asked my students (4 classes of FYC) for feedback on the theme-based class they'd just sat through: did they find a course theme confining or liberating (though liberating wasn't really the best word--I meant something more like generative). The theme of technology had seemed to me wide open with possibility. I tried to convince them that technology cuts across so many aspects of society, from politics to medicine, communication to the environment, education to commerce. Surely, I thought, they could look at technology's impact in several arenas they were already interested in, sports, say, or music (or maybe they could get curious about something unfamiliar!) But as the semester progressed, the air seemed to suck out of the room in the face of student resistance and, in some cases, downright hostility to my carefully considered theme. So at my minimal-stakes final I wanted to probe a bit to try to see how widespread was the dissatisfaction (on the theory that perhaps the most unhappy were the most vocal) and to try to classify the reasons behind it.

I tallied responses as positive, fence-sitting, or negative (admittedly not a perfectly designed way to collect data, on signed final exams) and found a roughly even split between the three camps. My next step was to try to categorize the critical comments, which not only raised a lot of questions for me about the advantages/disadvantages of this sort of course design but also made me consider what I (maybe?) should have explained to students about why I'd chosen that design (and the more general question of how transparent to make this whole process).

Waffling on technology

My students this semester are again using technology to read and write about technology and its impacts on commerce and the creative arts, communication and warfare, education and the environment. Pretty wide swath of subject matter, designed to appeal to all comers and delivered via the mode these Gen Ex, Why, Zee-ers—whatever they’re being called these days--eat, sleep, and breathe. Only it’s not working out so well. My community college students have problems setting file formats and attaching files to emails, remembering the passwords needed to get into their blogs, adjusting browser settings. Their printers don’t work. They don’t know how to save files to portable storage devices. A few don’t know how to find the word processor on their desktop and open a blank file. One fresh-from-high-school student snorts that I should be a science teacher. Another older student says that when she was in high school only the girls who wanted to be secretaries learned how to type, she thought this was an English course, they told her she wouldn’t need to know anything about computers, why does she have to learn how to use a computer when she would so much rather sink into a good book.

I have felt on the defensive, sputtering my justifications, my tone veering dangerously close to the inappropriate:

• A typed manuscript is a standard expectation even in middle school these days and has been for decades, to save the teacher’s tired eyes and to eliminate the prejudgments that attach to handwriting (you wouldn’t want me to be judging an essay based on those bubble letters of yours, that careless scrawl, those curves careful as a second-grade teacher that scream cliché).
• Let me tell you all about White-Out, those glops that take forever to dry, and the miseries of retyping that last page three times because it’s 3 a.m. and you keep leaving out some vital part of your conclusion. Or suppose you decide that Martin doesn’t really suit yr debonair protagonist; how wonderful to be able to do a global search-and-replace!
• One word: spell-check.
• Won’t it be convenient to be able to access  the course syllabus come week six or seven, when you’re starting to calculate just how many classes you can afford to miss or the grade you’ll get if you really nail those last two essays?
• And don’t forget the emails you can send me explaining yr absence from class and yr avowed intent to turn in that late essay by tomorrow night.
• By using (instead of a textbook) articles available electronically, either online or through the library’s e-reserve system, I’m saving you at least $64.99 plus tax. You’re welcome.
• Finally, wait till you get to the research paper. You wouldn’t believe what we used to have to do (my version of the walk five miles to school in the snow): a special trip to the library to go through shelves full of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature; guess from the titles which articles seemed relevant to our Quest, in periodicals the library was likely to have; trot upstairs with knotted stomach, hoping the hoped-for bound periodicals were on the shelf (the New York Times we accessed on microfilm, our heads under the hood of the microfilm reader, wincing with each squeal of tape unnaturally loud in the dim room);  take notes on the spot, careful to write down all the information we’d need for our bibliographies. Wait till you see what information you can get now, from the comfort of yr home-(computer), full-text articles to yr heart’s content for printing and annotating.

That said, I have my own doubts, my own concerns about where computing intersects composing.