Derailed by a one-track mind

I'll be glad when my senior capstone students are done with their presentations because I'm tired of thinking about them and I'm pretty sure everyone close to me is tired of hearing about them. We are as prepared as we'll ever be and there's really nothing more I can do, but despite all my attempts to think about something else--anything!--the impending presentations keep hijacking my thoughts.

For instance: I'm driving past my neighbor's new sheep pasture, admiring the adorable little sheep and the big fluffy white dog that seems so attentive to the needs of the sheep, and suddenly I'm wishing I had a sheepdog to herd my capstone students' PowerPoints into the inbox.

Or I get to campus a few minutes later than usual and can't find a spot in my usual parking lot so I park near the President's house, and as I walk amongst the beautiful historic homes and lovely fall leaves, my thoughts immediately go to how dark that stretch of road will be at the end of the day when I'll be walking out there after my capstone students' presentations, eek!

Or I'm reading the agenda for this afternoon's Faculty Council meeting and I see a vague reference to "brief/initial discussions of miscellaneous topics," and instead of chuckling heartily I wonder when I'll once again be able to engage in discussions of miscellaneous topics instead of obsessing constantly about my capstone students' presentations.  

I envy the volleyball player who did her presentation on Monday because now she can stop thinking about her capstone presentation and instead focus on other things, like playing in the NCAA volleyball tournament for the first time in Marietta College's history, but I can't even think about buying tickets to the opening game until after I get through my capstone students'  presentations.

For the benefit of all, I probably ought to just hide out in my office until this whole ordeal is over, because there's nothing better than being done with my capstone students' presentations.

 

 

An epidemic of pre-presentation nerves

A colleague told me the other day that before his dissertation defense, he practiced his presentation at least four times every day--for WEEKS. "I could present it for you right now if you asked me to," he said and I believe him, but we had other things to do at the time, like discussing how we're preparing our capstone students for their final presentations.

This is a big deal, and I don't know who is more nervous--me or my students. Well, okay, they're probably more nervous, or we're nervous in different ways. I'm nervous about making sure the technology works, remembering to take extra batteries for the microphone and clicker, making enough copies of the rating sheets for all the faculty members present, walking up on the stage to introduce students without tripping on the steps, and dealing with whatever unexpected issues arise in the course of the presentations.

Based on the questions my students have been asking me, they're nervous about other things. What if they pass out on the stage? (Remember to breathe! Eat! Hydrate!) What if they forget all their important points? (Note cards! Manuscripts! Practice practice practice!) What if the presence of so many profs, classmates, and family members makes them so flustered they drop their note cards or throw up all over the people sitting in the front row? (We'll be there to help! We're all rooting for you!)

In fact the most difficult task for me right now is convincing my students that we are rooting for them. This presentation is the culmination of their work in the English major, so every prof in the department feels invested in their success. The students worry that we'll be sitting out there judging them, ready to tear them to pieces on the rating sheets, eager to throw them questions that will knock them down a peg, when really we want to see them shine. You'll never have a more supportive audience, I tell them, but my students seem to see us as ravening lions waiting to pounce.

My primary task, then, in this last week before their presentations is to calm them down--but not so much that they fail to prepare properly. Today I'll tell them about my colleague who practiced his dissertation defense four times every day for weeks, and then I'll pause for a moment and add, "Only four times a day. Is that enough?"

A little liminal

When people ask whether I get tired of my long drive to work and back I generally tell them No--the drive along the river provides a nice transition between home and the rest of the world. The bridge over our creek is an important part of that transition, the last piece of home before I venture forth or the last hurdle before I'm truly home, and because of this I like to pause a moment in my comings-and-goings, to open the windows and fill my ears with the sounds of running water and my eyes with the beauty around me. Sometimes I see birds or deer or a big fat groundhog but more often it's just trees and water. Today the big sycamore that leans across the creek seemed to glow in the early-morning fog, pointing toward the road that would take me to work, but I didn't want to go--I wanted to stay there all day and listen for the words under the water that Norman Maclean writes about in A River Runs through It. Nevertheless I obeyed the call of duty and drove away, carrying the sound of the creek and the glow of the sycamore with me like a benediction.

 

Stayin' alive

Last week one of my senior capstone students immersed in the demands of producing an annotated bibliography asked me, "Has anyone ever died from this process?" But in the middle of drafting week another student said, "I'm really excited about writing this paper." I've just read his draft and he has a right to be excited. It's neither complete nor perfect, but it's full of interesting insights and analysis--and well written, too.

You will survive this, I keep telling my capstone students, and so far they haven't disappointed me. The annotated bibliography was a big hurdle, but it didn't kill anyone. Now they can focus on synthesizing all those ideas into a major analytical essay and a public presentation. We looked at drafts yesterday and we'll practice presentations next week in preparation for public presentations the following week. Time seems to accelerate at this point in the semester, but after the public presentations we can all take a deep breath and exercise some thankfulness. 

At this point the students are doing all the hard work. I'm reading long drafts, yes, and offering detailed suggestions, and I've finally organized a presentation schedule that works for everyone, including the volleyball player who suddenly discovered that the team's unprecedented unbeaten season will earn an invitation to the NCAA tournament, which conflicts with the original capstone presentation schedule. 

First, though, I'll spend this weekend working my way through nine drafts, all but one comprising over 2000 words. Some will require a frustrating amount of detailed commentary and attention, but I'm already excited to see that we've reached this point in the project with something worthwhile to show for all our work. The senior capstone project may be daunting but it hasn't killed anyone yet, and I for one hope to maintain that record.

Writing "Life Writing" into existence

What's Life Writing they keep asking, and I keep telling them It's writing...about life. The course hasn't been offered for a few years so I guess it's not too surprising that our students don't have a clue what might distinguish Life Writing from other types of writing, but next semester I'll be guiding a dozen or more students through a class I've never taught before so it's about time to figure out what it might be.

I ought to know: I designed and proposed the course more than a decade ago, but then we hired a writing specialist who needed some upper-level classes to fill out his schedule so he took over the class before I ever had a chance to teach it. We were in a different place as an institution back then and I had some different interests, so the sample syllabus I had to create for the course proposal isn't proving too helpful in our current context. But in the lead-up to this bizarre election season I needed to distract my mind with a compelling project, so instead of doom-scrolling I've been finding readings and constructing writing assignments and developing a structure for the Life Writing course I'll teach next semester.

The course will begin with at the center--the individual self--and move slowly outward. Students will read short memoirs and write their own, and then they will read and write about how the self gets entangled (with activities, fields of study, or other people). Then we'll move to reading and writing the life of another person, focusing on unsung heroes or hidden figures. Then we'll bring together the perspectives of several people in an oral history project that I hope will illuminate pivotal points in the students' understanding of the wider world.

We'll read short works by some fabulous authors--Leslie Jamison! Susan Orlean! Drew Lanham!--and one book, Salman Rushdie's Knife, which illustrates the stages of writing about lives from the individual self to the entangled self to the wider world. 

And then I have to tackle the Honors element. Just under half of the students will be taking the course as part of the Honors program, which means they'll do all the work the other students do plus an activity that presents an extra challenge. I'm thinking of asking them to transform one of their pieces into a multimedia essay incorporating visuals, music, or video to enhance the words, or maybe I'll ask them to work in small groups to produce a podcast. I would love to give them a group project: setting up a storytelling booth on campus to collect oral histories of our own part of the world. What kinds of permissions would I have to get to make that happen? Would the Mass Media department share their recording equipment and expertise with my students? Looks like I've got some work to do to determine feasibility.

But hey: having a challenging project is just the ticket for maintaining sanity when the world seems to be careening toward catastrophe, so let's put words on the page and write some lives.

Step of faith

Some time ago I was sitting in a church sanctuary almost Shaker in its simplicity, with elegant lines and proportions, understated decorations, a lofty ceiling and big glass windows opening to a lush, green swath of woods; the church was hosting an art show at the time, so beautiful things were hanging on all the walls and my daughter's choir filled the space with music to exalt the soul. Sitting in that pew surrounded by my family and by so much beauty, I thought, If I could worship in this kind of environment every Sunday, I would be a happier person. 

But of course that's ridiculous. Even if I lived close enough to attend that church, it wouldn't host an art show every Sunday, nor would my daughter's choir perform there more than once a year. And besides, I never experienced their usual mode of worship, heard a sermon, or fellowshiped with the congregants. The church appealed on an aesthetic level, but when it comes to matters of the spirit, beauty isn't everything.

If I could design the ideal church, I would start with that simple but elegant design and develop a liturgy that would appeal to the whole person--heart, soul, mind, and body. But even if I included all the things I love about a worship service (great music, thought-provoking sermons, meaningful liturgy) and left out the things that leave me cold (lackluster singing, music blasting so loudly it hurts my eardrums, gaudy stained glass), I still couldn't guarantee that the church would attract the one thing that makes a church a church: the community of people who care about each other. My ideal of elegant simplicity would leave others cold--I mean, lots of people like stained glass! The thought-provoking sermon that sparks new insight in my mind might strike others as too heady or uninspiring. And the music that soothes my soul may not appeal to someone whose musical tastes start and end with Elvis.

So if the perfect church does not exist, I'll have to put up with the imperfect church--and the imperfect church will have to put up with me. But that can be a problem too. Like many pastor's wives, I tend to get buttonholed as an appendage. I am the pastor's wife: that's all anyone seems to want to know about me, and when I reveal other aspects of my being, I am met with befuddled looks or dismissive comments, like the time I told a parishioner that I teach writing and literature and he said "Why would anyone need to learn that these days?" 

So last week when I heard the poet Christian Wiman talk about his struggles with faith and art (on the podcast No Small Endeavor, which I highly recommend), it resonated deeply, especially this passage:

I do feel like faith is the most important thing in my life, but I've never found a form that is satisfying to me, or in which, to put it more bluntly, more sharply, a form in which I don't feel that my own experience is being violated.

And so that's a constant wrestle for me because I'm desperate for some community in which to believe. And at various times in my life I've had that, and I do believe in it very much. And I respect the institution of the church. I respect my students who are going into these jobs. Many of my students are becoming ministers, and there's something heroic in that at this particular cultural moment.

But for myself, I have always felt outside of the institution, and I don't consider myself a Catholic or a Protestant. I do consider myself a Christian, but I'm pretty frustrated with the ways that we try to tame God, and try to contain God in ways that make the experience palatable, gentle, socially sort of lubricating.

....

I mean, I've been to so many different churches and always something happens that, that I just disagree with so profoundly or often there's a mismatch between the urgency with which I feel in my own interior communion with, and wrestling with God, and the banality of the spaces in which this is supposedly being expressed.

And so, I'm often bored out of my skull at church, you know, and if I'm not bored, I'm often I just disagree so profoundly with what's being said. And I also feel that most churches don't allow for a space for how wild God could be, you know? I mean, Annie Dillard has that famous paragraph about saying that people should be wearing crash helmets in church, and, you know, lashing themselves to the pews.

I think this is a typical problem with an artist, because if you feel, you know, most of my sense of faith comes from my experience of art. I mean that is an intense engagement with God and with reality and then to step into somewhere where you're just sort of having coffee hour.

The notion of trying to tame God into a palatable form--I feel that deeply. The feeling that I have to put big parts of myself into a box before I enter into the sanctuary--been there, done that. The banal spaces and small-minded ideas squelching the wild unpredictability of spiritual experience--it's a problem.

Which is one reason why yesterday I attended a service at a church where I was pretty sure I wouldn't know anyone and therefore no one would know me or judge me or treat me like an appendage. I wanted to have a spiritual experience unencumbered by anyone else's expectations, and you know what? I did. It wasn't the perfect church--the ceiling was low, the altar cloths were faded, and I didn't entirely understand the liturgy--but I had an experience of the wildness of God and I left feeling refreshed and happy. Which, right now, is probably enough.

An appointment with autumn

Last week when one of the Powers That Be tried to schedule a meeting with me for this morning, I begged off by saying "I have an appointment that will keep me off campus all morning." I did not feel the need to mention that my appointment was with a great blue heron.

Of course at the time I had no idea that I'd be meeting with a heron this morning. I did have an appointment--in Athens at a car dealership to get a new rear window on my car so I can start using my rear-window defogger. I've owned that car for just over a year, but early last fall I started seeing news reports about people whose rear windows shattered as soon as they turned on the rear-window defogger, so I decided to avoid using the defogger and wait for a recall notice, which arrived in due course over the summer. First I had trouble scheduling an appointment and then I had to reschedule because of a conflict and I was determined to get that window replaced before the mornings get any frostier, regardless of the needs of the PTBs.

So I've had the car appointment on my schedule for weeks but just this week the gorgeous fall foliage inspired me to add a stop to my Athens itinerary. I left in the dark and arrived at the shallow upper end of Strouds Run Lake in the soft early-morning light, which made the world look like a watercolor painting, and right in front of the parking area stood a great blue heron.

I saw ducks, too, and a few geese and sandpipers and even a lone red-winged blackbird that should have left for a warm winter home already, and I saw the rising sun paint the sky pink and the leaves yellow, orange, and red. For a while there were no sounds beyond the ducks' quiet squawks and the wind rustling through the leaves, so I stood there and drank in the beauty without a thought for what I might be missing on campus.

I'll pay for it, of course--I'll have to scramble to get through all those annotated bibliographies and deal with whatever complications arise from my dereliction of duty, but I came home with a new rear window with functioning defogger, a host of photos, and a sense of calm that can only come from looking away, if only temporarily, from the daily grind. 

I don't know how long I watched that heron before it finally flew off into the distance. My spirit took flight with the bird, but my body sighed and drove away toward duty.