Hot under the collard

I was reading a student essay that referred to "blue collard workers" and I suddenly recalled the fabulous collard greens served alongside equally fabulous smoked brisket in North Carolina last week, but sadly, my student wasn't writing about greens but about collars. Spelling errors aren't as nutritious as collards and brisket, but they're my bread and butter.

Ah, academe! With your annoying notices about late-afternoon Zoom meetings, your advisees reluctant to heed good advice, your bottomless pit of bad excuses! Yesterday afternoon I overheard a tutor trying to explain the function of the semicolon to another student and I thought there's no place like home! Sure, it's fun to be whisked away on a colorful adventure that tastes like brisket, but there's nothing more comforting than the gentle drone of professors' voices emanating from rooms full of sleepy students.

As of this moment I am finally caught up on the grading that piled up while I was away, so now I can look toward the future--classes to prep, essays to edit, meetings to schedule, and on it goes. I've been back two days and already I'm wondering when I can get away again. Last year at this time I was contemplating a semester with no breaks, no opportunities for travel, no enticing prospect outside my home and office and piles of work; this year we get a brief break two weeks from now and a longer one at Thanksgiving. Covid transmission is dropping in the area and campus case numbers remain very low, so things are starting to feel more normal.

Last year all I wanted was a return to normal, but now that I've tasted the brisket and seen the sights, I'm bored by normality and I want to get away. Unfortunately, the only way to break away is to work really hard to earn that break, so off I go once again to stamp out ignorance, one blue collard at a time.   

A full and colorful life (but now I need a nap)

In just five days we managed to drive seven hours (twice!), stuff eight people into an AirBnb, eat way too much junk food, attend my nephew's wedding, watch my adorable granddaughter dance with Daddy and Grampa, eat a slice of the world's best wedding cake (apple spice!), sing Happy Birthday to my dad, hang out with both of my brothers for the first time in years, watch the grandkids splash in a pool that set their teeth chattering, and even teach an online class--and then come home to a new concrete front-porch slab! I'm having a full life over here, so full that I don't have time to write about it, and now I need to try to catch up on all my course work so you'll have to make do with photos.

 

With my brothers.

I guess we clean up well.

Cousins!

Great-Grampa had lots of help with his birthday gifts.

Taking Grampa out for a spin.

Dancing with Daddy

A feat of cheese engineering.

Some handsome dudes.

Beautiful wedding venue.

Mapping the imaginary

I showed my Honors Lit students a map of North Carolina this morning, but it was a singularly uninspiring map: here is Raleigh; here is Cold Mountain; here is a long stretch of state in between the two. The map comes alive only as we read Cold Mountain, following the footsteps of Inman as he walks across the state on his long homeward odyssey; students will follow Inman's internal map layered over William Bartram's descriptions of the state and the smaller maps other characters provide. "Island can only exist / if we have loved in them," wrote Derek Walcott, and I hope my students will love Cold Mountain enough to develop a vivid internal map, although it's just as likely that they won't.

My Postcolonial Lit students, on the other hand, showed me maps they'd made illustrating contexts of various works we've read so far this semester. Some of the maps are rudimentary, and I grade them on the quality of the information presented rather than on artistic merit, but a few stood above and beyond the rest. How, for instance, do you draw a map of a book of poems Chris Abani wrote about his time confined in a Nigerian prison? A talented student drew the outline of Nigeria, marked the places where Abani was born and imprisoned, and filled in the rest with important words from the poems. In the center is a small barred window filled with a work of art by Viktor Ekpuk, and together the art, map, and words evoke the freedom of creativity within captivity. Lovely.

Another student mapped Paule Marshall's short story "To Da-Duh, In Memoriam," in which a small girl travels to Barbados to visit her grandmother, who cannot believe the child's stories about life in New York City. The student juxtaposed maps of Barbados and New York, with the island map showing what the grandma loves the most--her house, her garden, the tall hill nearby. From the New York map, though, the Empire State Building throws its long shadow across the sea to hover over the island, a visual reminder of the way progressive urban values overshadow and ultimately overwhelm Da-Duh's agrarian island life.

When we shared these maps in class last Friday, students commented on how vastly the maps differed, even though some were mapping the same literary work. I reminded them that every map is an interpretation, pointing us toward the map-maker's values as well as the real world; these maps, though, are especially subjective because they focus on works of the imagination. A good map leads us to a destination, which is difficult enough when that destination is a point on the globe but infinitely more difficult when the destination exists outside the realm of gps. Who can map a poet's mind? Who can map the outline of abstract concepts? 

And how do we map the places that exist only because we have loved in them?

The Inland Island and the illusion of escape

I went for a walk to help me think last evening but found my ruminations interrupted by mosquitoes. Pesky critters--how am I supposed to think deep thoughts when I'm being dive-bombed by blood-thirsty vermin?

On the other hand, blood-thirsty vermin of a different sort play a part in the book that inspired my deep thoughts, The Inland Island by Josephine Johnson. The book had been recommended as something I might want to assign in the place-based class I'm teaching next semester, and while every description of the book makes it sound ideal, I found it deeply frustrating.

The Inland Island, published in 1969, recounts a year in the life of a plot of ground outside Cincinnati, Ohio, and given my longtime interest in nature writing and the Midwest region, it's surprising that I'd never read the book before. It earns high praise for its lyrical descriptions of nature, but Johnson occasionally interrupts those pastoral passages with sharp criticism of events taking place outside of her rural refuge: the Vietnam War.

The contrast is jarring--peaceful description of spring wildflowers followed by sudden images of children burning--and it reminds me of nothing so much as a poem by James Wright, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" (click here), which transports us to a lyrical pastoral moment until the final line: "I have wasted my life." An interesting insight, but it's so unearned and abrupt that it feels like someone has flipped the hammock and dumped us unceremoniously on the ground.

As I was walking and swatting mosquitoes last night, I thought of other works that combine lyrical descriptions of nature with deep thoughts about philosophy, theology, or the human condition. Take Walden, for instance, or if you want something more recent take Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Amy Irvine's Desert Cabal: the descriptive and ruminative passages are so intimately intertwined that you can't separate the strands; pull on one thread and it's all knotted up with everything else.

The Inland Island is different, and that difference is apparent in the title: the author's rural refuge is so separated from the outside world that the occasional dispatches from that world feel intrusive, disconnected, unearned. She could have found more effective ways to link the two worlds, but maybe the separation is the point: we need to retreat to a pastoral refuge to escape the horrors of everyday life. But when those horrors keep intruding despite our attempts to escape, it's hard to know where to turn.

I'm thinking of assigning one or two chapters of the book in my class next semester but I'm not sure what my students will make of those sudden irruptions of violence. Et in Arcadia ego, I'll tell them, and they'll look at me as if I'm nuts, which maybe I am. I don't particularly like the book, but sometimes we need to be reminded that even the loveliest setting might include mosquitoes.

Someone wake me when the fun starts

It's hard enough trying to teach classes when I'm wide awake--teaching in my sleep is darned near impossible. Nevertheless I keep trying to do it, tossing and turning in bed at night while my mind races to resolve all the issues arising over the next couple of weeks.

It's a tough part of the semester anyway, with all four classes turning in drafts or papers this week, one class preparing for an exam, all of this week's drafts being revised for resubmission next week, and the usual daily class preps. But then everything got way more complicated when my nephew scheduled his wedding for next Thursday and my family decided that it would be nice to celebrate my Dad's 88th birthday next Friday since we'll all be together anyway, and now I have a long drive to North Carolina and a whole lot of fun activities interrupting my already busy week.

So this week I need to respond to a pile of papers and prep next week's classes, including online activities for the two days I'll miss, but then I also need to prep classes for the Monday after I return from North Carolina since I won't want to do all that class prep on the road regardless of who's driving. It feels like three weeks of work being compressed into a few days--days already busy with papers demanding responses--and all that compressed work keeps contorting in my brain all night long.

This morning I took steps, trying to do all the things that can possibly be done before the papers start flooding in. I set up online activities for two classes. I wrote a study guide, wrote most of an exam, got all my ducks in a row for classes for the rest of this week. And now I need to start responding to student drafts, because I've scheduled one-on-one conferences with my first-year writing students for the next four days. 

And what about outside of class? I need to buy a dress for the wedding (but all the local stores I usually rely on have closed!), find wedding and birthday gifts, catch up on some mowing--and oh yeah, the guy who's replacing our front porch slab is slated to demolish the old one next Monday and pour the new one on Tuesday. If I do any sleep-walking that night, I'd better not wander out to the front porch.

All this fuss is leading up to what ought to be a delightful series of events, the whole family together for the first time in years, but I won't get to enjoy the fun until I move all the obstacles out of the way first--and if I can't find a way to do it while I'm awake, my subconscious is happy to take over at night.

Good thing I don't need to be mentally alert to read student drafts. (As if!)

Overheard in the hallway

Prof 1: Yeah, my students are a little needy, but I'm just trying to listen and be even nicer than usual.

Prof 2: I'm tired of nice. I just don't have the energy for nice.

Prof 1: But you've got tenure--you don't have to be nice! 

If only it were true....

My dream semester

I confess that my mind wandered during our department meeting yesterday as we were trying to assemble a schedule of English course offerings for the next two years, a task just as scintillating you might imagine. While the discussion hovered over issues outside my bailiwick, I asked myself a question: What courses would I teach if I could put together my dream schedule?

Course scheduling is like a jigsaw puzzle in which everyone holds tightly to certain beloved pieces while others lie neglected in a heap, and the complete picture won't come together without compromise and cooperation. We need enough composition classes, enough intro-level literature classes, enough upper-level classes, enough writing courses, enough service courses to make everyone at least partially happy. No one gets to be entirely happy all the time, but we're all willing to trade in a little happiness for the good of the order: I'll move my class to a different time so it doesn't compete for English majors with yours, and you'll move that upper-level class to spring semester so it doesn't compete with mine, and we're both moderately content.

But what would I teach if I didn't have to think about anyone else's needs, if I only had to please myself? What would my dream schedule look like?

It would start small: Only three classes instead of four. The four/four load becomes more exhausting every year, leaving little energy for writing, research, service commitments, or out-of-class activities like field trips. My dream semester will include only three classes, which means I'll have to sacrifice first-year composition. I don't mind teaching composition every semester and I think I'm pretty good at it after all these years, but if offered the opportunity to drop one course without repercussions, I would drop composition without a moment's regret.

Instead I would teach the upper-level writing course I haven't been able to offer for years: Nature Writing. Imagine spending a semester reading and writing about nature with advanced writing students! If I could bump a colleague's writing course to make room for Nature Writing without risking any hard feelings, I'd do it--but again, we're just dreaming here. 

So dream on: How about a Representative American Writers course focusing on Natasha Trethewey and Amit Majmudar? My upper-level courses generally focus on fiction, but spending a semester with these two very interesting contemporary poets would be a nice change. Both poets plunge deeply into the American experience for people of color, and both engage in formal experimentation to produce poems ranging from playful to somber. I would gladly spend a semester in such good company, if enough students would sign up for an upper-level poetry course.

And for my third course, I would love to reproduce my favorite teaching experience ever: the California Lit class that included a spring break trip to California. I wouldn't have to go to California; I could teach Florida Lit or Chicago Lit or literature focusing on some other area where I'd love to take students. Since we're dreaming, let's locate this dream semester at a time when Covid no longer makes travel so unpleasant, and let's imagine that I can find sufficient grant funding to make the trip affordable. It's hard to believe, but in 2011 my California Lit students each had to pay only $850 to cover their share of the cost of six days in San Francisco and Monterey, which covered airfare, lodging, admission to attractions, and some meals. The rest of the cost was covered by grants, and it's a good thing my dream semester includes only three classes, because a trip like that takes a lot of time to plan and finance.

So there's my dream schedule: Nature Writing, Trethewey/Majmudar, and a Concepts of Place class including a trip to somewhere interesting. What would have to change to make such a schedule possible? 

Well, I would. I would have to stop caring about what my colleagues want and what my department needs, and I would have to think only about what makes me happy. So maybe I'll save up this schedule until I'm ready to retire and then go out with a bang. By then the four/four load may have reduced me to nothing more than a composition-teaching robot, but a girl can dream, can't she?

At one with wonders

If you want to see wonders, stand still in the middle of a summer meadow and wait for a flash of movement and then follow the movement with your eye wherever it goes, turning as the bright flash of butterfly or bee flits hither and yon until it finally alights on a sunflower or ironweed blossom or tall scraggly weed, and if it never lights but keeps flying you'll still see wonders--the play of light and shadow on a milkweed pod or the deep purple berries hanging like strings of jewels from pokeweed stalks--and the fluttering of butterfly wings and buzzing of bees make you merge with the meadow to become an extension of the sunshine itself.

 

Photos from the Luke Chute Pollinator Habitat yesterday afternoon.