Typing with my eyes shut

I wrote 1000 words with my eyes shut this morning because (1) I was having trouble keeping them open and (2) I didn't want to abandon the one colleague who showed up for Writing Wednesday. She had just been telling me how writing in the presence of other people helps keep her on task and focused, and normally I would agree but seriously, I had almost no sleep last night and it was very hard to think or speak or put any kind of prose down on the page, so I decided to stop fighting and just close my eyes and type. It wasn't pretty:

I think of my eight-grade typing teaching, mr who? Who would walk around the room slowly calling out letters—a,s, d, f, j, k, l, sem—and we had tofollow along on those big bulky manual typewriters that took the force of ajackhammer to press down the keys throgouthly. I never again used a manual typewriter afer that class but it ws a good way to learn and strengthen findgers at the same time. 

See? Barely readable. Reminds me of what Truman Capote (I think?) supposedly said about Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "That's not writing--that's typing."

With my eyes shut I can type really quickly but can't reliably back up and revise, and I don't even bother trying to find the number keys so I tend to spell out numbers. It's an effective way to disempower that annoying internal editor, but at some point I have to open my eyes and re-engage the internal editor to try to beat the words into some semblance of sense. 

Why didn't I get any sleep last night? Long story involving my son's ongoing battle with chemotherapy side effects, a story involving more vomit than you'd really care to read about plus rampant feelings of helplessness, but the result is that he's back in the hospital to get some fluids and tests and heavy-duty nausea medications so he can get back on his feet before the next round of chemotherapy (Friday!). He's too sick to drive himself so my husband and I had to tag-team the commute, but fortunately he's in the local hospital instead of two hours away. I dropped by to see him today around noon. He ate a little bag of chips and about three bites out of a sandwich, which is more than I've seen him eat all week. 

So yeah, a little too much on my mind to be able to sleep, but I had to go to campus this morning because the only IT guy who's not on vacation this week had agreed to meet me in my office at 8 to convince my college laptop that I am indeed authorized to access college resources like the printer network and Teams, so I had to get up and get to town just a few hours after I'd finally drifted off to sleep. This is the second time this summer that my college laptop has decided that I'm no longer an employee. Next time it happens, I'll just agree and walk out the door.

Mr. IT got my laptop functioning again (six months until retirement...please let it survive that long!) so I had no good excuse to avoid Writing Wednesday, where I let gravity grab hold of my eyelids and wrote 1000 words about writing, and typing, and that annoyingly arrogant grad-school student who lost an entire term paper he'd been writing in a departmental computer lab after an explosion at a tobacco warehouse nearby caused a power outage, back in the era of big floppy disks and tiny clunky monitors and (maybe this is the most bizarre part) tobacco warehouses located within a few blocks of an R1 university. I wouldn't want to be the person staring at a blank keyboard where a paper used to be, but then again, he ended up with a great story. Imagine asking a professor for an extension because spontaneous combustion at a tobacco warehouse destroyed your paper.

He was typing with his eyes wide open, which is what I'm doing right now, which is why most of the words are spelled correctly and make some modicum of sense. I'm glad I stuck it out at Writing Wednesday and got some words down on paper (er, screen), words that I might find some use for at some point in the future. First, though, I need a nap.

The view from a waiting room at the local hospital. Not inspiring but what did you expect?

 

Correspondence concerning "The Correspondent"

Dear old friend,

I've been wanted to send you Virginia Evans' novel The Correspondent but right now I can't seem to organize my life enough to put it in the mail, and on second thought it's the kind of book I look forward to reading again so maybe you should find your own copy. Sending you the book would be the kind of gesture that, over time, builds a friendship like ours, but you're the kind of friend who will understand that sometimes it really is the thought that counts.

How are things with you? Kind of difficult here, with frequent disruptions due to my son's health problems, although I hesitate to call them disruptions because it sounds so negative, as if I resent him for getting cancer. I would gladly take the cancer away from him if I could but since I can't, I'll drive him to Columbus for extra tests, cook the foods he likes best, clean up his vomit, and closely monitor my phone throughout an important meeting with the visiting accreditation team because my husband took our son to the emergency room while I was still barely awake this morning and I need to know what's going on. (Electrolytes are low. Maybe something more. Who can say? Nothing I can do for him at the ER so I'll keep busy here as much as possible considering multiple distractions.)

One of the things I really like about The Correspondent is how our main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, deals with the distractions that interrupt a life she considers alternately mundane and miraculous. A retired attorney and judicial clerk, she devotes her life to writing letters (some by hand, some by email) four mornings each week, an ongoing "correspondence that is her manner of living." She writes letters to friends and family members; to famous people like Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Larry McMurtry; and to strangers, some of them hostile, whom she somehow manages to transform into friends over time.

But that makes the book sound too saccharine. She's a feisty old lady, revealing fragments of herself to a variety of correspondents and requiring readers to assemble the puzzle of her complex character. Her voice is, by turns, angry, prickly, condescending, sarcastic, self-righteous, cranky, curmudgeonly, conciliatory, tender, and loving, and in the end she's a character with whom I'd gladly spend more time--hence my desire to re-read the book. 

You might enjoy this book because Sybil shares our love of reading. Nearly every letter refers to some book she's reading, and her letters to famous authors reveal how reading helps her understand herself and her world. In a letter to Ann Patchett, for instance, Sybil explains why she appreciates a particular character in State of Wonder: "I saw some reflection of myself in her. The agonizing ethical questions for which the reader puts her on trial. That amazement one feels at this stage of life--a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here?"

And I see some reflection of myself in Sybil's seeing some reflection of herself in Patchett's book, making the book a Russian nesting doll of character analysis. 

Like Patchett, Evans invites readers to put her main character on trial. Sybil has always welcomed the clarity law provides; at one point she explains why she pursued a career in law at a time when the field did not always welcome women: "The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order...well, of course it's appealing. There's nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white."

But the letters reveal that nothing is quite as black and white as it appears. Feisty Sybil first resists admitting culpability for both minor blunders and major disasters, but over time the blinders come off her eyes--even as she is literally losing her eyesight. She tells various versions of the truth to different correspondents but reveals the whole truth over time only to a correspondent she calls Colt, whose identity is revealed late in the book in a tender but harrowing revelation of personal pain.

Moving toward the end of an eventful but misunderstood life, Sybil seeks connection and significance. "I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction," she admits, adding that it is

a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

She returns to this image late in the book, after her correspondence has brought together disparate people from all over the globe, people who would not have known each other except for their connection with Sybil, who has transformed these isolated nodes into a rich and thriving community, including one character to whom she reveals her shame over a long-ago tragedy, a character she tells, "it's taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that."

And that's another reason I wanted to send you this book: you have been on this road with me, have welcomed me into a comfortable space with a warm fire and a table laid, and I'd like to thank you for that before it's too late.

That's ultimately why the correspondence exists: to share the bumps in the road with someone willing to walk alongside. For Sybil, the letters she has sent out and those she receives 

are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn't there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one's life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it's a very small thing, to someone?

And that, I guess, is why I write to you and why I'd like to send you this book, to scatter puzzle pieces or chain links or dandelion seeds across the miles in hopes that some meaning will survive beyond our separate selves. If I can't send you the book right now--well, you're just the kind of correspondent who will understand.

(Some) visiting writers rock!

In 2009, Anthony Doerr was a cheap date: he came to campus, met with a creative writing class, had lunch with English majors, and read from his work in a public reading, all for the pathetic honorarium our department was able to scrape together. We invited him on the strength of his short stories and Four Seasons In Rome and we paid him just enough to tempt him to fly cross-country. This was before the novels and the Pulitzer and the movie deal, so there's no way our meager budget could lure him here today--but if we did, I have no doubt he would spend quality time with students. He was great with students. Alumni still rave about the writing advice he so generously shared.

We've been lucky over the years with many of our visiting writers, pleased with their willingness to share their expertise with students. Sarah Vowell was fabulous. Dan Chaon was great. Joni Tevis was a gem. And the first visiting writer whose visit I arranged--the poet David Citino--read students' work with care and offered focused encouragement. A year later when I learned he'd died, I was so moved by the memory of his patient attention that I cried in front of my class.

But some visiting writers have not been so accommodating. I guess I understand, a little bit: if some big-name writer takes time out of a busy writing schedule to travel out to darkest Appalachia, flying in and out of annoying little airports and staying in a chain motel next to the interstate, they might want to get out of here as quickly as possible, arriving on campus in time to read but avoiding the classes or lunches or opportunities to meet with students. They're tired. They're busy. They're big stars in the literary firmament, and we are nobody.

But do they have to rub it in? I remember one pretty well known writer--whose name I won't mention--whose imperious attitude left a bad taste in my mouth. She openly expressed contempt for our students' work, and while I'm not surprised that a student's writing might not meet the high standard expected by a successful writer of literary fiction, I don't see the need for contempt. But this same author also treated the chair of the English department like the hired help, so maybe contempt was just her usual way of being in the world.

A visiting writer who hates students probably ought to stay away from students entirely--read the work, be inspiring, go away. Fine. But I keep thinking back to that visit by Anthony Doerr, when no one knew that he would someday become THE Anthony Doerr: he convinced our students that their writing mattered, and the students responded by writing more and mattering more.

Next time I'll leave the red pencil at home

I appreciate the student who raised his hand in class and said, "Planetarium--I can never remember whether that's about plants or planets." Sure, we all got a good laugh out of it, but I wish more people were willing to speak up and admit when they're confused instead of nodding knowingly about things they know nothing about. 

I also appreciate the student who, when asked why a character in Tara Westover's Educated had said some particularly outrageous thing, raised his hand and said, "Because he's crazy." Yes! As I wanted to tell the rest of the class--especially the ones avoiding eye contact--"If you don't realize the dude is nuts, you're not paying attention."

Yesterday at a big meeting I was tempted to get out my red pencil--the imaginary one I always carry, long enough to reach up to a theater marquee to remove unnecessary apostrophes--and correct some errors on slides presented by people I probably shouldn't be correcting in public. First I wanted to correct the spelling of a colleague's name, because why bother congratulating a person if you can't be bothered to spell the person's name correctly? But that's the former journalist in me speaking, the person who breaks out in hives at the recollection of a particularly egregious spelling error.

But then if I'd had my imaginary red pencil with me, I would have wanted to correct some other things, like enrollment numbers and rambling responses and administrative decisions I find ridiculous. These things may not have been errors, but I simply can't accept a world in which such statements can stand unchallenged.

Finally, I was delighted to share with my upper-level writing students this passage from a book I've been slogging my way through:

Nowadays, of course, given all man has learned of their senses, it is easy to see why they should have felt so liberated, so connected to their wild selves, when it appeared: like any crepuscular creatures that possess night vision (whether naturally or through a device), the augmented but still ethereal light of that Moon makes all the usual night sights--whether rustling trees and bushes or prey and predators--show up brilliantly. 

My students were apologizing for their first drafts, worried because they weren't quite perfect. I pointed out that the definition of a draft is a piece of writing with something wrong with it, and then I pointed out that the sentence above was written by a professional author and published by a reputable press that presumably employs competent editors, and yet not one of us could make sense of it. (Does it help if you know they refers to cats and when it appeared refers to the full moon? Not much.) If a sentence can pass through so many brilliant minds without becoming comprehensible, then why should we expect all our sentences to hit their marks on the first try?

So here's my tepid cheer for the presence of error in the world. Let's speak up and admit that we don't know everything! We're all still learning (I hope), so let's admit our confusion out loud and help each other toward understanding.

Write write write--but why?

This is it--the first Writing Wednesday of summer break. I'm sitting in a library classroom tapping on my laptop alongside two faculty colleagues, three of us in all--a small start perhaps attributable to some problems in communication. I faithfully followed new campus procedures for getting the word out but somewhere there's a glitch in the system. Three people! Better than none, I suppose.

I have spent two hours writing, although perhaps "writing" isn't entirely the right word. I have revised my Agnes essay to include info about that historic hurricane and sharpen up some phrasing; now I need to decide whether I want to call my brother and ask what he remembers about our family's encounter with the worst natural disaster in Pennsylvania's history. And then I need to figure out where to submit the essay. Literary magazines are closing and possibilities are shrinking, so I'll need to do some serious research.

And then I opened the folder containing the larger project I started during last summer's Writing Wednesdays. I'm happy with the first chapter and I'd love to submit it somewhere as a stand-alone essay, but again, where? It's too personal and not theoretical enough for an academic journal but too steeped in literature for a casual outlet. Where are the hybrid publications where an intelligent person can combine close reading with practical classroom experiences? (Asking for a friend....)

I haven't looked at the rest of the project since last August and so I was surprised, both by how ambitious it is and by how fragmented. I see some lovely sentences and paragraphs but an awful lot of gaps and brackets. I'm reminded of the seven-page single-space notes-for-a-memoir document we discovered among my father's papers after his death: whenever he seemed to be getting close to a really interesting part of his life, he would write ETC. Now it's too late to ask what all those etceteras were eliding.  

And that's the conundrum about this writing project: as I near the end of my teaching career, I feel the need to pass on a whole bunch of etcetera lest it perish with my passing, but it's hard to write when I don't know have the first clue who might serve as audience. Writing these essays is either an opportunity to pass on some important insights or a massive, thankless waste of time.

For right now, though, it's therapy. Putting down words, imposing some order on the chaos, feels like an accomplishment. And that's why I look forward every week to Writing Wednesdays, even if, in some sad dark corridor of my mind, I fear that every word I write takes me closer to The End.

Some practice in probing for the story

How to give advanced writing students practice at conducting interviews? In my Life Writing class, we've worked on asking good questions and following up to clarify details, and we've spent some time practicing interview skills on each other and then writing up mini-profiles that integrate quotations in interesting ways. But my students know each other too well already--they need to practice interviewing strangers.

So I invited a retired colleague to visit my class. (Let's call her Dr. M.) I told my students very little in advance aside from her name and the fact that she's led an interesting life, and we devoted part of Monday's class to writing questions designed to probe for information that the interview subject might not volunteer all at once.

When Dr. M visited class on Wednesday, each student was required to ask at least two questions; for the first round I drew students' names randomly, and we got started off on the right foot when the first student asked our guest how to spell her name--which she did, slowly and clearly. Dr. M walked around the room engaging students individually and told some great stories about her 42 years as a professor, but she followed my instructions to the letter: if a student asked a vague question, she gave a vague answer. If Dr. M mentioned or even hinted at an interesting story, it was up to the students to follow up and tease out the details. Sometimes they did, but they let some great opportunities slip right by.

And then they had 20 minutes to write a mini-profile, one or two paragraphs based on what they'd learned. Considering the time constraints, some of these profiles were quite good--setting the scene, describing the subject's bright smile and abundant energy, selecting and incorporating quotes that revealed her voice and personality. One student started her mini-profile by stating that Dr. M "may carry the name of her mother and her mother before her, but she has made a legacy of her own." Nice work on such a short deadline!

But about half of my Life Writing students chose to use no quotations at all. Dr. M spoke slowly and clearly (as one would expect from a longtime professor of Communication) and my students were scribbling notes or typing on their keyboards throughout the interview, but somehow many of them had trouble turning their notes into quotes or accurate information. I saw Dr. M's name spelled five different ways and her hometown spelled incorrectly or connected to the wrong state. And then there was the gaffe about her favorite childhood book. I doubt that today's students are at all familiar with The Bobbsey Twins, but how could a student have misinterpreted that as The Bootie Twins?

Today we'll take a look at some of the great examples and I'll try to get some insight on their reluctance to use quotations. I've seen something similar in my American Lit Survey class--in-class essays for which students had full access to their textbooks, but about half of them didn't use any quotations at all. How do you analyze literature without attending to words? And how do you interview a bubbly, dynamic person for thirty minutes without capturing a single phrase worth quoting?

They can learn from this, I'm certain--and so is Dr. M. "You give me hope," she told my students, and those students able to recognize a great quote made certain to write that down.  

The tragedy of TL;DR

I swear I'm going to SCREAM the next time a student tells me she didn't like a reading assignment because it's too long. If the server put an extra scoop of ice cream on your sundae, would you complain about getting too much of a good thing? If a visit to a national park overloaded your senses, would you gripe about being intoxicated by too much beauty? Why, then, complain if a really lively, informative, thought-provoking article provides more good stuff than you can squeeze into a life crowded with so much doomscrolling and video gaming?

It's not even a difficult text--"Stone Skipping is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It," an excellent piece from Outside magazine by Sean Williams (click here for a fun read, and don't neglect the jaw-dropping videos of stones flying across vast lengths of water in apparent defiance of the laws of physics). Several students in my Life Writing class told me this article was their favorite assigned reading so far this semester, but those who didn't like it said it was just too long to read.

I pointed out that the author and editors could have chosen to cut any number of passages, such as the bit about the history of stone-skipping and its various monikers in other parts of the world. ("Czechs throw froggies, while Swedes say they're tossing sandwiches.") They could have cut details about Kurt Steiner's hermetic cabin, mental health struggles, and failed marriage, or they could have deleted the lovely passage about the search for the Platonic ideal of skipping stones. In fact, why didn't the editors demand that the author transform the whole amazing article into a simple series of bullet points? So much easier to read!

 

But so much emptier. Like many other aspects of life, stone-skipping is inherently futile--I mean, in the end all you've achieved is tossing a bunch of stones into a lake. How, then, can the subject of the article, Kurt Steiner, claim that stone-skipping is "a means for the redemption of mankind"?

 

Well you'll have to read the article to find out, and when you do, you'll note that the first five paragraphs provide a master class in introducing readers to a complex subject. The author starts from the outside and draws us deeper into the topic until we're well and truly hooked. 

 

First paragraph: Description of physical surroundings and Kurt Steiner's appearance, including the word "Rasputinesque," which we had to look up in class.

 

Second paragraph: Description of the man at work, relying on such vivid comparisons that it's worth quoting in full: 

Steiner stared across the creek and raised his right arm into an L, clasping a coaster-size sliver of shale the way a guitarist might hold a plectrum during a showstopping solo. But rather than fold his torso horizontally, as you might expect somebody skipping a rock to do, he stretched his five-foot-nine-inch body vertically, and then squeezed down like an accordion and planted his left leg to crack his throwing arm, placing the rock under so much gyroscopic force that it sputtered loudly as it left his hand, like a playing card in a bicycle wheel.

Third paragraph: The stone acting as the subject of one sparkly verb after another.

 

Fourth paragraph: Steiner's reaction to the toss, a passage that begins unveiling the subject's personality.

 

Fifth paragraph: Statement of purpose. "Kurt Steiner is the world's greatest stone skipper" plus a clear indication of why stone-skipping matters. I don't know about you, but if the Rasputinesque dude with the accordion body insists that stone-skipping will save the world, I want to know how.

True, it takes a while to get to the answer, and it's not so much an answer as a series of questions about how damaged people find meaning despite--or perhaps because of--the inherent futility of their actions. The article ends at a moment of indecision and uncertainty, but also a point of possibility, when just about anything could happen but there's only one certainty: any time is the right time to throw.

 

And any time is the right time to read a sparkling article about stone-skipping, as long as we don't reject it as TL;DR.

Maybe we can make a metaphor

This week for the first time I'll be introducing students to Nicole Piasecki's remarkable essay "Maybe We Can Make a Circle," constructed as a letter to a beloved high school English teacher but with a twist I don't want to spoil. (Go read it first--it's worth it.)

I love so much about this essay--the way Piasecki evokes the conventions of the gratitude-for-an-influential-teacher letter while blasting them to pieces, the way she arouses strong emotions without swamping readers in gloom, the way she metes out essential information little by little and then all at once. But most of all I admire the gaps, the things she doesn't say or can't say, the questions she can't answer or maybe no one can answer. The heart of the essay beats in those gaps, in the unspeakable, incomprehensible, ineffable absence around which the essay circles.

I have not suffered the kinds of losses Nicole Piasecki describes, but I feel the anguish involved in tip-toeing around gaps. So much I can't write about right now, so many feelings I'm tamping down into a wad in the pit of my stomach, where they sit there and fester and wait to kick me awake in the middle of the night. 

And of course the worst part is that I can't even write about what I can't write about. I want to stay employed for another three semesters and I want to remain on speaking terms with friends and family and I want to continue to encourage students and colleagues to fight the good fight, but opening the door to the dungeon might loose the ravening beasts and endanger everything I care about. 

Over the decades my mother developed the habit of silence, biting her tongue and nodding in agreement until she lost the ability to speak for herself. She lived out the dictum don't rock the boat until the boat became stranded in a becalmed sea with no hope of ever reaching land.

(Why am I always transforming pain into metaphors? It's impossible to say just what I mean! And yes, I'm teaching Prufrock today, a poem more relevant with each passing year.)

One thing I'm certain of: it's impossible to eat the peach while biting my tongue. And yet here I am, dancing delicately around the gaps and wondering why I'm so darned hungry. 

Students inspire me--but what happens when they stop?

My student put her blue book in the pile on the desk with a big smile. "I love this prompt," she said, and my first thought was I need to write about why this prompt is so great, but then I got distracted by an uncomfortable question: What will I write about after I retire, when I no longer have students to feed me clever lines and cool ideas?

Maybe I'll try to resurrect the past, wallowing in nostalgia for bygone years, or maybe I'll provide up-to-the-minute breaking news about the state of my kitchen, how many socks need darning, or how high the grass has grown (with updates at 11!).

Or maybe I won't write at all. It could happen. Retirement might transform me into a barely sentient lump on the sofa, perusing a never-ending supply of British murder mysteries and heartwarming episodes of All Creatures Great and Small. I'll go around the house humming peppy TV theme songs while wondering why I ever spent so much time playing with words and ideas. Maybe I'll slowly lose the ability to put words together in meaningful ways, or maybe one day I'll just decide that I've written enough.

Or maybe not. When my teaching days are over, maybe I'll find inspiration elsewhere instead of relying on my students to inspire me. But who will step up and slide me some great writing prompts?

Writers, writing

Today I tried to convince my Life Writing students that they are writers. 

Some of them don't have to be convinced--they already know they're writers--but others just need an upper-level class to fulfill a graduation requirement and assume that a course characterized as Creative Writing will be a breeze. They know they'll need to write, but that doesn't mean they think of themselves as writers.

I remember the moment years ago when I told a professor I wanted to be a writer and she said, "You are a writer." Powerful words! I'd like my students to feel that power, and one way to achieve it is to make them say it out loud. I asked them to respond to the roll call by completing the statement I write because....

They write because it unleashes creativity, gives them a sense of accomplishment, provides control over chaotic circumstances. One student said he writes because he has to do it to get a degree, and another said, "It makes me happy." Good reasons both.

We spent some time talking about what it means to have a Writing Practice, the disciplines that can unleash ideas, and the need to give the mind some time to wander. I urged them to set aside time for boredom in their lives, to regularly unplug from media and other inputs and just let the mind be. I don't know how many will take my advice but I felt compelled to tell them.

And then we worked on some invention techniques to help them choose a topic for a short memoir project. We put events on a timeline and then chose one event to explore in more detail, constructing a cause-and-effect chain to multiply the entry points into writing about the experience. Then we did some free writing starting from one of those entry points--and then we did a second round of free-writing starting with the gaps in the chain: What's missing? What were you afraid to write down? What does no one else but you know about this experience? 

I don't know what they wrote about but they wrote and wrote and wrote, which, after all, was the point. For 50 minutes in my classroom today, my students were writers. Let's hope they can carry that experience with them through the rest of their lives--or at least until the end of the semester.

Limbering up the writing muscles

Stiff is how I feel today, in mind and body. The other day I did a bit of house-cleaning that taxed my abilities, and by house-cleaning I mean cleaning the accumulated dirt, algae, and glunk off the siding on three sides of my house. (I can't reach the fourth side without a ladder, and I'm enough of a klutz to know that carrying a long-handled sponge mop and bucket up a ladder will only end in disaster.)

I don't remember when I last cleaned the siding, but it's been long enough to allow my light-gray house to appear to be growing a green beard on the shady spots. I don't want to use the power-washer because the siding was installed by a previous owner who did every home-improvement task in the cheapest and sloppiest possible way, so there are many spaces where a pressure-washer could force lots of water under the siding, which is not optimal. In the past I've used a bucket of cleanser and rags, but this time I repurposed an old sponge mop so I could reach higher with less strain on my shoulders and arms. 

I know no one really wants to do such an annoying task much less read about it, but if my entire upper body hurts today, maybe you'll understand why. Also, I found a nest of hornets. Also, I broke the mop. BUT: it's now possible to sit on the back deck without wondering when the fuzzy green beard on the siding is going to develop sentience and take over the planet.

I'd love to be sitting out there right now thinking deep thoughts and writing them down, but the stiffness that suffuses my body seems to have also crippled my mind. I've been writing steadily for nearly three hours at Writing Wednesday but I don't see a single sentence that makes me light up with pride or want to share it with a reader. 

I'm still at the getting-it-down stage of this writing project, writing as quickly as possible without concern for details, and I see lots of sentences studded with little parenthetical notes like add example or get quote or what year? It's still not clear to me exactly what shape this thing (essay? analysis? pile of dangling insights?) will take, but I've settled on a controlling metaphor that gives me hope that it will all cohere in the end. Yellowjackets are involved. In fact, one of my parenthetical notes asks are yellowjackets cooperative? Guess I need to look some stuff up before my next writing session.

Despite my stiffness, I'm pleased to see that I've produced close to 9,000 words, which is kind of a lot for a piece that doesn't really fit into any preconceived categories. Progress is being made, one chunk of verbiage at a time, and if that progress looks a little sloppy and unpolished, it coordinates nicely with the whole rest of my life right now. 

I think I'll have one more week in the getting-it-down stage before I turn toward the cleaning-it-up stage, at which point I'll need answers to all those parenthetical questions. I won't need ladders or mops or buckets, just a supple mind and some swiftly-moving fingers. I wake up every morning with fingers so stiff I can barely grab my glasses, but a long bout of typing limbers them up nicely. I only hope it's limbering up my brain cells at the same time. 

Restructuring a life's sentence

I had trouble this morning introducing my American Lit Survey students to some poems that can be counted on to choke me up--Yusef Komunyakaa's "Slam, Dunk, and Hook," with its young men seeking moments of freedom and beauty on a neighborhood basketball court while Trouble stands on the sidelines "slapping a blackjack / Against an open palm"; and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," featuring the poet's fruitless attempt to convince herself that the "art of losing isn't hard to master"; and Denise Levertov's "Making Peace," which argues that writing peace into the world is a responsibility we all share:

a line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

 

In class we focus on analyzing elements of form and meaning, but in the end I want poems like these to spark reflection and action. I want to ask students so many questions: Where do you cultivate beauty? How will you cope with loss? What sentence is your life making? What word is each act bringing into the world--and how do are you linking your words with others'?

 

I have reached the point in my life when I'm not satisfied by academic discussions of literature. Sure, I get excited about examining interesting metaphors and stylistic choices, but I also want to make it personal--or at least point out to students how they can take literature personally. My next essay is coming out in Pedagogy soon, and far from an academic exercise in name-checking all the trendy scholars and theories, it's an impassioned plea for the importance of continuing to teach what some call "divisive concepts."

 

Writing that essay gave me great joy, a quality often missing from academic writing. In an article in Inside Higher Ed today, Deborah J. Cohen and Barbara J. Risman ask how faculty members can "Cultivate joy in their writing." They argue that the pressure to publish or perish "discourages joy in writing--beyond focusing on a utilitarian means to an end, it creates fear, loathing and pressure. We're told that if we do it enough, our careers will survive."

Well, I've done it enough, but it's not clear that my academic writing has accomplished much more than to keep me employed. I'm happy when I see that others have cited my articles, but if I'm part of what we call the scholarly conversation, it's an infuriatingly slow-paced and unrewarding mode of communication.

 

Cohen and Risman ask us to discard the utilitarian approach and pursue writing as an art that we practice for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional:

 

The painter makes art to thrive, to share the meaning they find in the world with others. So, too, if a writer recognizes their work as their art, they sit down to do it to share their gifts with other people and society in general. And the process of writing itself becomes a way to thrive, to contribute to the world.

And that's what I want to do with my writing about literature--and also my teaching. As I near retirement, I've been toying with the idea of teaching a class I'm calling Lit4Life, focusing on literature that can help us create a meaningful life. But why not write about it too? 

 

All this to introduce my summer writing project: a series of reflections on literary works that challenge us to live meaningful lives. I'm calling it Life Lines at the moment, but that will change. Who is my audience? What readership shall I appeal to? Where do I imagine publishing? Not even thinking about those questions right now. I want to immerse myself in writing for the joy of it and postpone academic questions until I see the words on the page.

 

I'm tired of squeezing myself into the constricting mold of academic writing; instead, I want to take a risk, to follow Denise Levertov's plea, to restructure the sentence my life is making just to see if I can recover some joy, make some peace, and find a place to thrive in the long summer pause.

And that's why teaching poetry choked me up this morning: because the questions I wanted to aim at my students' hearts circled back and hit mine instead.

Sarah Vowell among the crazies

During her campus visit yesterday, Sarah Vowell explained that she had once intended to be an Art History professor but her experience as a teaching assistant killed that dream: "Have you spent much time with young people lately? What kind of crazy person does that?"

Color me crazy, but I really enjoyed introducing some of my young people to Sarah Vowell's work earlier this week and to the author herself yesterday. What surprised me was how few of my students were interested in taking advantage of the opportunity, despite the lure of extra-credit points. Only about one-quarter of my comedy students showed up for either the small-group session with the author or the public reading. I have English majors who want to pursue writing careers but somehow can't take the time to seek insight from an actual writer. What kind of crazy person does that?

One of the things Ms. Vowell emphasized during the small-group session with students was the importance of revision, both in writing and in life. "I hate writing, but I love re-writing," she said. Describing her practice of writing multiple drafts, constantly whittling down sentences and tossing out sections that distract from the purpose, she said, "Most of what I do is wasted work." And yet the finished writing is stronger for her willingness to toss worthy passages into the recycle bin.

And she made it clear also that her life is stronger and richer for her willingness to abandon dreams and adapt to unexpected opportunities. By the time she understood that she would not be pursuing a career as an Art History professor, she'd held a variety of other jobs for newspapers and radio stations and knew that she could make a living as a writer. Goals are fine, she told our students, but knowing when to toss out the plan and try something different can lead to surprising rewards.

I hope my students were listening--those who bothered to attend. Because if we crazy profs decide to devote our lives to educating young people, we have to hold on to the hope that it's not mostly wasted work.

When AI answers the wrong questions

Writing instruction is irrelevant, they said, or something very close to that. Artificial Intelligence is able to excel at so many writing tasks that in the long term, they said, we won't need to waste time teaching students how to write effectively because they won't need those skills in the so-called Real World. 

Imagine a world, they said, in which you never again have to explain to a student how to use an apostrophe--because the AI can take care of that. Students who rely on AI will turn in papers without annoying spelling errors, without misplaced or missing commas, and without subject/verb agreement flaws.

And without humanity, I wanted to interject, but there's no point in yelling at the radio. Without creativity, without playfulness, without depth of ideas, without so many things that make writing worth reading.

To my mind, the AI cheerleaders seem intent on providing answers to the wrong questions. If the question is "What's the most efficient way to get students to produce error-free essays," then AI is a pretty good answer. But what about other kinds of questions?

Go ahead and ask ChatGPT about the purpose of suffering. It is capable of instantly producing an error-free, well organized essay outlining various philosophies of suffering, with a caveat at the end:  

It's important to note that these explanations are not exhaustive, and different individuals and cultures may hold unique beliefs about the origin and purpose of suffering. While understanding the reasons behind suffering can offer insight, addressing and alleviating suffering remain important goals for individuals and societies.

All true! And if I ever need a brief summary of different approaches to understanding suffering, I'll know where to look. But what I don't see in this passage is any evidence of original thought: given all these approaches, which do you find most relevant to your life or to a particular text we're discussing? If, as Richard E. Miller insists, writing is "a technology for thinking," then I want writers to do some thinking in their writing, not just parrot back what others have thought.

But apparently I'm missing the point. According to the experts on the radio, I need to think about writing tasks from the perspective of students, who may suffer extreme anxiety at the thought of putting words to paper. AI will help them overcome that anxiety by enabling them to produce error-free prose fulfilling the requirements of the assignment.

Again, all true! If the main purpose of education is to ease students' anxieties about writing, then AI is a pretty good tool. I don't want to minimize the impact of writing anxiety--heck, I still get tense and jittery when I have a deadline and I've been writing professionally for over 50 years. But in my experience, we don't overcome writing anxiety by avoiding writing but by writing. Just as a performer can learn to transform stage fright into energy that connects with the audience, the anxious writer can learn to transform anxiety into energy on the page.

But this transformation takes time, and it takes effort, and it takes writing--a lot of it. The AI cheerleaders seem delighted that these new tech tools will allow students (and others) to write less when what they really need is to write--and think!--more. 

But I can't tell the radio experts all that, and even if I could, why would they listen to me? After all, I"m a dinosaur facing certain extinction in a world in which writing and thinking will no longer matter.  

Just a brief midweek happy dance

I had the strangest feeling while driving home yesterday afternoon, an overwhelming lightness as of my whole being trying to smile. Could this be--happiness? For no good reason? In the middle of a ridiculously busy week?

Let me count the reasons I ought to be unhappy right now: student intransigence, campus shenanigans, financial stagnation, personal frustration over the zillion ways it's impossible to live in two counties at once. And yet I feel happier than I have in months, maybe years. 

It's true that yesterday a colleague shared with me something a student told her about my class that made me feel like Super Professor, but a solitary student comment shouldn't be enough to offset the gloom that has characterized the past year and a half of pandemic teaching. Last year at this time we were all dutifully putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day and the week and the semester, spending so much time wrangling technology for Zoom classes that we had no time to hope for happiness. This week I'll need to turn on Zoom to accommodate one student in quarantine, but the relative absence of Zoom from my daily life has lifted a curtain and let in some light.

And this semester I've also spent more time interacting with colleagues face-to-face, most meaningfully as chair of a task force charged with producing a bit of verbiage for the College's strategic plan. Sounds deadly, right? But here's the thing: this group worked really well together crafting a statement that bears none of the hallmarks of committee-produced prose. It's succinct, elegant, profound, and perhaps even inspiring. I was delighted to lead a mixed group of colleagues through the process and especially pleased to see the rookies step up to make significant contributions, suggesting hope for future campus leadership.

And I've also finally found an avenue for my own future research and writing. No one has been doing much professional development during the pandemic--I mean, who has time to write conference papers or journal articles? I've been shepherding the comedy volume through the editing process and I finally submitted the Natasha Trethewey essay to a journal, but for a long time I haven't been able to visualize any future research or writing beyond these projects. I've been wondering whether I might be reaching the end of the road as a productive scholar, but then this week I started sensing a pathway opening in a new direction, an area adjacent to my previous work but different enough to arouse my curiosity. I'm not ready to go public yet but it's exciting to see that what looks like a dead end might instead be a sharp turn into really interesting territory. 

It came to me in the middle of a long walk up the Big Horrible Hill, a hill I haven't been able to climb in months. I could blame the weather, my ridiculous schedule, or my aging joints, but the result is that I've fallen so far off my usual exercise routine that I couldn't make it all the way up the hill the first time I tried this fall. But I've been working at it--one foot in front of another, a little farther each time--and this morning I made it clear to the top and back home again without too much trouble. I'll be living on Aleve today, but there's no doubt that getting out for a challenging walk through woods suffused with autumn gold nourishes my body, mind, and soul. 

And so I feel happy--still!--despite joint pain and piles of grading and more committee work. I'm going to hold on to this feeling as long as I can because if nothing else, pandemic teaching has taught me how ephemeral happiness can be, how easy it can be to lose hope. I know it's not over and there are more challenges ahead, but just for today, let's raise a glass to happiness.

Friday poetry challenge: Don't ask the mask!

A friend wonders whether this bizarre life we're leading is squelching my creativity and yes I said yes it is yes!

The mask makes it more difficult to be understood, to the point that sometimes I calculate whether it's even worth the effort to open my mouth, and I know my students are feeling the same way. But the mask is a visible sign of this invisible cloud we've all been living under. Sure, lots of people have responded to the pandemic by letting their creative juices flow in all kinds of interesting ways, but over time the cloud has turned dark and heavy and surrounded me like a damp wool cloak, suppressing my ability to think or speak or write creatively.

I know I'm not the only one feeling this way. I have to force myself to write anything more complicated than an email, and even then I struggle to put together words that reach beyond the perfunctory. My mind feels blank, my language leaden--even my dreams are colorless and blah. Where is the creativity of yesteryear? And will it return to full flourishing after life gets back to normal, whatever normal means these days?

Maybe what I need to do to keep the creative ideas flowing is to give them a regular outlet. That's why I'm trying to revive the Friday Poetry Challenge: if I force myself once a week to engage in a little creative word-play, maybe the exercise will open a conduit to keep the creativity moving through the pipes. It's worth a try. Setting a specific goal helps motivate me to act, and if there's one thing my sluggish, lazy, couch-potato brain needs right now, it's exercise.

So this is me, exercising my creativity within some narrow constraints. Feel free to join the fun!

Don't ask the mask!
It maims the game
of words. I've heard
the same from fam-
ous folk. Don't poke
the beast! It ceased
to care; it stares
or sleeps. Don't speak
of dreams--it seems
they're dull, a null,
a nought. I ought
to pull and mull
some words I've heard,
stretch sounds around
in play. I may
abound in sound
again. 'Til then,
don't ask! The mask
prevails. I fail
the task. (Don't ask.)

No "I" in team, but there is a Me

Pick a problem--any problem, from your roommate's dirty laundry to world hunger--and put together your dream team of experts to work on solving the problem.

This is the challenge I gave my composition students during this morning's class. They've been reading articles about groups of experts trying to tackle some of life's persistent problems--protecting endangered whales, balancing the need for development with the need for conservation, and preventing paper jams--and they'd also viewed the film The Martian, where a whole host of people with different types of expertise have to work together to get Matt Damon home from Mars. The final exam will ask them to write an essay related to problem-solving, so I thought we would spend a little time talking about how to put together a problem-solving team.

But I gave them very strict rules: Choose a problem and then put together a team consisting of one character from The Martian, two experts from our recent readings, and two Marietta College employees, and be prepared to defend your choices.

All my groups chose complex problems--hunger, littering, protecting endangered species--and they made some fairly predictable choices of experts from the film and their readings, but their choices of campus experts were especially interesting. The group tackling the problem of how to feed starving people thought they ought to have a cafeteria employee on the team because they know something about the logistics of feeding people, and another group mixed biologists with engineers to make sure to prioritize design thinking. 

And one group chose to put me on their team of experts. Why me? I'm not a scientist and I don't know anything about how to solve these big complex problems, but here's what they said: "We need someone to persuade people to care about the problem. That's your job." 

Well sure, let me just clear my committee schedule and I'll get right on it....

They made me proud, these students, because they finally realize that the big complex problems that face our society require the efforts of all kinds of people, from biologists to economists to cafeteria workers and even students, and an important part of the work is simply telling the story so that people will care. If they've learned nothing else this semester, I'm glad they learned that communication is an essential part of solving any complex problem.

Now I can't wait to see how they put this principle to work on their final projects. I'm still on their team, even when I'm wielding the gradebook.

Grasping at straws in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

I've just been reading very different texts about and by oceans: an article about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and a novel by Ocean Vuong. The Garbage Patch article will help me revise a scholarly article for publication, dealing with the way identity and narrative can be assembled from random flotsam circulating in unseen currents, while Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous tackles a similar issue in fictional form. The novel is getting a lot of attention and raving reviews, but my response was mixed: I loved individual sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, along with the description of the parent/child relationship and the narrator's first experience of the world of work; however, I found the  totality underwhelming. It's possible, though, to enjoy individual waves without embracing the entire Ocean.

This, I think, is how my summer is going: waves of delightful moments interspersed with long periods of dullness. I might moan about mowing, but at least the task provides a shape to my days and offers measurable signs of progress. A week like this one, though, when the sun never comes out long enough to dry the grass and make it mowable, leaves me treading water in confusing currents. I do a little of this and a little of that, read an article, write some notes, catch up on e-mails, clean the bathroom, maybe read another article, circling and circling in the widening gyre surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a disordered existence with no immediate goal and no unobstructed route toward more distant goals.

Today I'm hanging desperately to the buoy of my Writing Wednesday group, which, unusually, is made up this week entirely of people within my own discipline. We're all working on something, all keeping our heads above water by keeping our fingers on the keyboard, and all offering occasional encouragement in the midst of the morass of academic publishing. Sometimes I need to finish something small just to gain a sense of progress before I'm swamped by the next wave of deadlines and distractions, and if all I can do is write a three-paragraph blog post, then at least that's something. But when this is done I'll be back to work on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, trying to grasp handfuls of passing flotsam and make some sense of the floating detritus.

In place of the original post

So you've just finished writing a pithy little blog post beautifully capturing in words the afterglow of a morning spent struggling to put words together into a coherent argument in the presence of your Writing Wednesday colleagues who sit around a table in a library conference room for a few morning hours and write write write on their summer projects, and you're pleased with the way you've recreated the soothing hum of fingers clickety-clicking on keyboards and brain cells wrangling with intransigent concepts, and you're eager to share the serendipity inspired by a colleague who forwarded a Call for Papers just at the moment when you were casting about for an audience worthy of that neat little insight that's been boomeranging around the back of your mind for at least a month but now the unexpected gift of a CFP has provided a clear target and sense of purpose and a shape for your summer writing time, and you really want to share how good it feels to have ideas flowing from the brain to the fingers onto the screen so you write it all down and prepare to post but then at the last minute you're distracted by a question from a friend and you click on delete instead and in a flash it's all gone--what do you do?

Maybe it's time to put down the laptop and rev up the lawnmower.

 

Just feeding my addiction

When I served (briefly) as interim director of our campus Writing Center, I would sometimes arrive first thing in the morning and find that someone working in Center the night before had left a porn site open on one of the computers. Annoying--and very different from the guilty pleasures I indulged in during my own undergraduate service as a writing tutor. True confession time: If I found myself alone in the Writing Center, lacking a client or blessed with some unsupervised free time, I would secretly indulge my addiction to reading style guides.

Yes: I might have started with a taste of Strunk and White, but I soon moved on to the hard stuff--Fowler and Bernstein and the AP Stylebook and even (gasp!) the massive Chicago Manual of Style. I loved exploring lists of easily confused words, examples of dangling participles, and techniques for repairing faulty parallelism. 

The taste has never left me; as evidence I offer my four-foot shelf crammed full of style guides, grammar grumblings, and weird word books: The Transitive Vampire. Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. So many more, and I love 'em all.

The newest addition to my collection is Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, a longtime copy editor and now a vice president and copy chief at Random House. But don't let that Utterly Correct subtitle fool you: Dreyer explains grammatical principles clearly, but he understand the language thoroughly enough to know when the rules need to be broken. He rejects those pettifogging rules that are "largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless," explaining that his goal is to provide writers with a rational basis for the choices they make:

Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or--and this is the part that hurts--unfairly, by People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their origin but, observed, ain't hurting nobody.

See how he flouts your third-grade teacher's rule against "ain't" in a sentence about flouting rules? Dreyer's playfulness enlivens discussions about normally stodgy topics such as, for instance, ending a sentence with a preposition, which "isn't such a hot idea, mostly because a sentence should, when it can, aim for a powerful finale and not simply dribble off like an old man's unhappy micturition."

He covers the usual suspects--punctuation, numbers, dangling modifiers, frequently confused words--with brevity and verve and memorable images, like this one: "Think of colons as little trumpet blasts, attention-getting and ear-catching. Also loud. So don't use so many of them that you give your reader a headache."

Or this:

As a serial abuser of parentheses, I warn you against their overuse, particularly in the conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness. One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience. One rather needs a beauty mark and a peruke to get away with that sort of thing.

Also refreshing is Dreyer's appreciation of aesthetics, his attention to both how a sentence sounds and how it looks on the page. "I suppose it's an obvious point," he writes, "but if a style choice follows the rules but results in something that looks awful or makes no sense on the page, rethink it."

And then there are the footnotes, snarky little tidbits in small print well worth the squint, like this comment on a certain unnamed magazine's house style: "If you're going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space." 

(Hmm: Maybe I should shelve Dreyer's book next to Mary Norris's Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, in which the former New Yorker copy editor explains that magazine's devotion to the diaeresis, which doesn't look right no matter how I spell it. Let Norris and Dreyer duke it out between themselves while I'm not looking.)


Sometimes my students complain about having to consult a style guide or wonder why they should care about semicolons or numerals or parallel structure, but they'll never know the joy of consulting competing style guides to track nuances of usage through multiple examples and footnotes. Style guides are my guilty pleasure, toolbox and toybox wrapped up together, and Dreyer's English will make a charming addition to my bookshelf. If I'm an addict, I'm also a pusher: go ahead, give it a taste. You won't be sorry.