Summer sweat, winter warmth

A few years ago some colleagues and I were entertaining a job candidate at dinner when the topic of spousal employment arose, as it so often does. I don't blame job candidates for wanting to know what sorts of jobs might be available in our little corner of Appalachia, but I always struggle for a good response when the candidate asks, "So what does your spouse do for a living?"

"Way too many things"would be an honest answer since there's no one-word label for a man who pastors a small church, serves as a substitute teacher, raises vegetables, and bakes more than 100 loaves of bread each week to sell at the Farmers' Market. This time I went with the whimsical: "He's a woodsman."

My colleagues laughed but they agreed that the label fits Garry like a glove. For the past month he's been donning his woodsman's gloves more often than usual to undertake an unusual endeavor involving a construction project, an auto mechanic, and a huge pile of wood.

This guy we don't even know (or didn't know until very recently) wants to build a building on a piece of hilltop property he owns, but there was a big swath of woods in the way. So he hired a company to come and cut down the trees and take away all the valuable timber, which left behind a huge pile of downed trees too twisted or hollow or otherwise unsuitable to be made into kitchen cabinets or veneers. This pile will have to be moved before construction begins later this summer.

Now the easiest thing to do would be to push that big pile of timber over the edge of the hill and leave it rot at the bottom, but the property-owner balked at wasting that much wood. On the other hand, he doesn't want to pay someone to haul it away. One day he mentioned the dilemma to his neighbor, who happens to be our auto mechanic. "I know someone who heats his house with wood," he said. "Let me see if he wants it."

He wants it.

And so began a complicated process: once or twice a week, our wonderful mechanic leaves his pickup truck and a long trailer parked near the immense pile of timber. Garry drives over there with his chainsaw and spends a few hours cutting the downed trees into moveable chunks and loading them into the truck and trailer, and then when our mechanic gets a break from work, he drives the heavy load of logs down 12 or 15 miles of winding country roads to our house, where he helps Garry toss the wood off the trailer. Garry then spends the rest of the week chopping the wood and stacking it so he'll have room for the next load.

So far they've brought over enough wood to get us through a good part of the winter at no cost to us--except for time, sweat, and lots of iced tea. (The men provide the time and sweat; I'm in charge of the iced tea.) I'm not sure what our mechanic gets out of the deal except a lot of wear and tear on his truck, trailer, and back--plus the satisfaction of knowing he's helping both us and his neighbor. But I know what my husband is getting out of the deal: a good excuse to play with his chainsaw and toss around big chunks of tree that will heat our house this winter.

They say wood warms you once when you chop it and a second time when you burn it, but right now we're enjoying the warmth that comes from cooperation and companionship under the hot summer sun. Three times the warmth from one pile of wood--that's a deal that can't be beat, and it wouldn't be possible without a working woodsman in the family.

Mystery plant

This flower popped up in my butterfly garden, with tall floral spikes rising from low bushy weedy-looking greenery. I like it, but I didn't plant it and I don't know what it is. It's crowding out an azalea bush, so this plant will eventually have to go. First, though, I'd like to know what it is--and whether it's worth saving. Help?

Friday poetry challenge: modern farming

When a colleague asked what I've been doing since classes got out, I said, "I've been spending a lot of time with the hoe."

He looked puzzled.

"H-O-E," I said. "The garden implement used for ripping weeds from the ground."

He'd heard "ho," which doesn't really fit my lifestyle. Good thing I didn't try to tell him about the time I saw my neighbor in the garden with a hoe in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Modern farming!

I wish all my Farmville-obsessed friends would spend a few minutes in my garden wielding a real hoe. Farmville farmers are far removed from Edwin Markham's "Man with the Hoe," an empty brute "bowed by the weight of centuries" and so enslaved to toil that he has become "A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, / Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox."

Farmville farmers don't struggle and sweat and suffer from blisters and bug bites, but on the other hand, I challenge them to subsist on the vegetables they produce. Given the choice between a bushel of virtual tomatoes and one red ripe tomato fresh from my garden, which would you rather byte?


The Gal with the Hoe

Oh there once was a gal with a hoe
(with an "e" at the end, don't you know)
who longed for a bite
(with an "i") of delight,
so she urged some tomatoes to grow.

While she sweated and toiled without harm, full
of dreams of produce by the armful,
her friends plowed their fields
and increased their yields
in that popular Facebook app, Farmville.

Which tomatoes will draw more attention:
the virtual kind (an invention
of mouse clicks and bytes)
or the juicy delights
that grow with the hoe's intervention?

Now it's your turn: it's gardening season, so make some rhymes grow!

Up in the air

A correspondent wants to know what's up with my hair, and the answer is: everything. Six months after my final chemotherapy treatment, my hair has grown back thick and full and curly, but it likes to stick straight up in the air. But at least it's back! One of these days I may even have to get a trim.

Sort of a little bit really annoying

Why is it that whenever I read anything I wrote more than a week ago, the glaring flaws and annoying tics glow like neon signs screaming "Solecism!" when those same passages looked perfectly fine to me when I first wrote them?

Today I've been noticing my annoying tendency to overuse qualifiers a bit, like that little phrase "a bit" that doesn't really (there's another one) seem (weasel word) to add much, if anything (redundant or just cliched?), to what you might call (so why not just say it?) the meaning of the sentence. Sort of. (See? I just can't stop myself. Perhaps.)

Strictly prosaic

At 9:30 a.m. I'm sitting on the back deck with my laptop on my lap, a tall glass of iced tea by my side, and my dog curled up at my feet. She's a wet dog a the moment, having finished our morning walk with a plunge in the creek. Our neighbors have been mowing the meadow behind our house, and during our walk Hopeful went running after the birds picking through the hay, coming back empty-handed but with little flecks of meadow stuff stuck to her coat.

I'm happy to be working outside before the sun gets too high and the neighbors start mowing again. It's great to listen to the birds in the cool morning shade, but most of all I come out here to get away from the phone. I have power out here but no phone line, so clearly I'll have to post these comments later when I get connected again. Meanwhile, I'm free from the demands of e-mail and robocalls offering me great deals on windows or insurance or mortgage refinancing. With the phone out of reach, I can focus on work.

Which will be what, exactly? This morning I'm taking Joy's advice and fiddling with a little fiction, just a treat to get the creative juices flowing. With this huge backlog of prose needing revision, I'm challenging myself to submit something for publication once each week throughout the summer. Friday will be submission day, and this week ought to be easy because I have a few short things that just need a little tweaking before they can be sent off to appropriate publications. This Friday is also the day I ought to hear whether my proposal has been accepted for a really exciting conference in the fall, and that decision will influence my scholarly research and writing for the rest of the summer. This week, thought, I'll focus on short nonfiction pieces and a little fiction. May as well start the summer with something fun.

Work in progress

My summer break starts in earnest today. For the past two weeks I've had a host of meetings and houseguests, but today the summer stretches before me as a vast plain of time interrupted by just a few scattered hillocks of commitment. How shall I proceed?

I started this morning by surveying the landscape, looking through files to find just what lies ahead. My research agenda has been pretty much on hold for the past year, but I was surprised to discover six scholarly articles that need to be revised and submitted. Six! In addition, I found four drafts of essays related to pedagogy, three cancer-related essays, and a fiction project I've been fiddling with for more than a decade.

I need to sit down and start writing, but where do I begin? With the article I've worked on most recently or the one I've worked on way too long? Start with the one closest to completion or the one that needs the most work? Focus on the articles most likely to boost my scholarly reputation or the ones that give me the greatest pleasure? I'll need to update my research on a few of these topics, but wouldn't it be better to submit something first?

I need a strategy! Everyone knows that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, but right now I can't decide where that step ought to fall. I wish someone would just give me a shove in the right direction. After that, I can take care of the rest.

Who's in the doghouse?

To my father, all dogs are male. I don't know how many times last week he called Hopeful "him," but I know that after the second day, I gave up trying to correct him. Can't teach an old dog new pronouns.

My parents' visit revealed to me how much more I know about my neighbors' dogs than about my neighbors. We went for a drive around my usual walking route and my narration went something like this: "That's where Leo DiCaprio lives. That's not his real name, but he's this cute little runt of a dog that thinks he's the king of the world, always trying to order around those nosy basset hounds. Up here is where Grizzly lives--he looks scary but he's a real sweetheart--and across the way is Goofy, which is not his real name but we call him that because he lopes like a Disney dog. Up the hill here you may see Courage, a scraggly-looking but friendly mutt, and then around the corner is the perky beagle named Scout, who likes to tag along on walks. On your left you'll see the house where Duke used to live until he decided to curl up and die under our back shed. That's his son there, Duke Junior, but he's not quite as gregarious as his dad."

I could go on. Just don't ask me the names of all the human beings who live with these animals. I know a few of them to say Hello to but I know only one of them very well. I don't see most of my neighbors much, but I encounter their dogs often enough to know how to handle their personalities, and when I refer to them, I always choose the correct pronoun.

One of these days I'll learn the trick of knowing my neighbors. Until that happens, I'll cut my dad some slack for choosing the wrong pronoun.

But what does he carry in his little black bag?

The scene is a third-grade classroom that smells of floor wax and sweaty boys. I'm the new girl with the funny name that starts with Z and exiles me to the bleak back corner of the room. I rarely speak but I write all the time, mostly sing-song verse rhyming "kittens" and "mittens." My teacher, Mrs. Davis, a firm but motherly sort with jewels on her glasses, a handkerchief stuffed up her sleeve, and white hair piled up in a bun on her head, stands beside my desk and wants to know why I'm not doing math problems, but I've finished my work and I'm writing a poem. Soon she takes me to the front of the class and makes me stand there while she reads my poem out loud to the class. My first brush with literary fame!

If Mrs. Davis ever asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I probably said "a poet" or "a writer," but I'm certain I never told anyone, "I want to be a Creative Writing Practitioner."

That's the phrase I heard this morning on a BBC radio interview with some expert in the art of letter-writing. I was driving at the time so I didn't catch his name but he was introduced as a "Creative Writing Practitioner" and he didn't deny it so it must be true.

But what is a Creative Writing Practitioner? "Practitioner" carries a therapeutic ring with medical or mental-health overtones, so perhaps a Creative Writing Practitioner is someone who uses creative writing to cure what ails you.

But no. Google "Creative Writing Practitioner" and you will find websites advertising typical Creative Writing Masters degree programs, such as one at the University of Wales: "This degree balances the study of English literature with the skills necessary to become an effective creative writing practitioner" equipped to pursue careers "from Scriptwriting, through Writing Fiction, to Poetry and Journalism." Nary a hint of any therapeutic purpose.

So how does a Creative Writing Practitioner differ from, for instance, a writer? Perhaps "Practitioner" is intended to distinguish the writer from those who call themselves writers without ever putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), and perhaps "Creative" distinguishes the writer from those who slam words into templates without ever engaging in creativity, but why would a genuine writer prefer to refer to himself as a "Creative Writing Practitioner" rather than a plain old writer?

When Mrs. Davis read my poem to the class, she gave me permission to think of myself as a potential writer, an aspiring writer, a writer in training, but it took years before I could refer to myself as a writer plain and simple. Again, a teacher led the way: I was talking to one of my college professors about wanting to be a writer and she said, "Wait a minute--you are a writer."

She was right but it took a tremendous act of faith for me to say it out loud.

I don't know what it takes to say "I am a Creative Writing Practitioner"--and at this rate, I'm unlikely to ever find out.

Nothing doing

I suppose you're wondering where I've been all week. No? Not at all? Is anyone out there? Hello!!

I could write some pretty amusing stuff about what I've been doing all week, but that would be wrong. Instead, I'll tell you what I haven't been doing all week:

Blogging.

Weeding the garden. (Which is too wet to weed anyway, but still: I haven't set foot in the garden except to pick a little rhubarb in the pouring rain Monday morning.)

Mowing, trimming, weed-whacking.

Writing.

Reading.

Cleaning.

Keeping up with office work.

Walking. (Except once, briefly.)

Thinking (much).

Now that I'm done not doing all those things, though, I need to get caught up. I'll be swamped from here to next Tuesday just getting everything back to normal. See why so many people envy my exciting life?

Insert clever headline here

How is the Internet affecting the fine art of headline-writing? David Carr considers this question in "Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline" in the New York Times (read it here). "Headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative," he claims, but "Now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice."

He gives some interesting examples of how using hot terms can bring a headline to the top of the heap in online searches, but hot terms and catchy phrases have always had the ability to capture eyeballs, whether in print or online. But the Taylor Momsen fan looking for more juicy celebrity gossip will be disappointed by Carr's article, just as Googlers looking for "Exhibitionists--totally nude!" will be disappointed by this blog post from 2006.

I always try to convince my students that a catchy title might attract reluctant readers but an inaccurate title will make readers feel cheated, which is why they can't call every essay "Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-Roll." If Carr is right, expect more and more readers to feel cheated by headlines that lure them in with juicy search terms but then fail to deliver anything juicy.

They're back!

I've been wondering whether the orioles might have forsaken us this spring, but they've finally arrived. They perch at the tops of the tall sycamores and oaks along the creek singing their distinctive mating call and moving away whenever I try to get closer, so it's hard to get a good photo. Still, it makes me happy just to know they're here.

I hear almacantars singing

I'm willing to admit that the problem is entirely mine. I am, after all, still suffering from the after-effects of grading all those piles of final exams and student papers, so my brain cells might not be quite ready to decipher heavy-duty academic writing. And besides, who wants to think deeply on the first day of summer break?

Nevertheless I plunge eagerly into the first chapter of The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form by Peter Hitchcock, and while I detect the presence of important ideas, I can't quite wrap my brain around them.

My problem starts on page 2: "I locate the long space in the extended novel of postcoloniality beside itself. A relatively narrow approach--and one that often relies on theoretically inspired close reading--it will, however, substantiate some broad materialist claims." So far so good. I could quibble about the ambiguity of that phrase "theoretically inspired," which could suggest "inspired by theory" or "inspired, at least theoretically," but otherwise I'm okay with this.

My okayness gets a little shaky with the next sentence: "If they are not a horizon of the literary and the social, or culture and society, these claims yet form an almacantar by which their current constellation may be judged."

I never would have suspected that broad materialist claims could be a horizon of anything, but I appreciate interesting metaphors so I'm willing to go along for the ride. Claims are not horizons. Fine. But what the heck is an almacantar? My first response is to feel stupid, and my second response is to assume that "cantar" has something to do with singing, and my third response is to go to dictionary.com, which informs me that an almacantar is an astronomical term referring to "any circle of the celestial sphere parallel to the horizon; when two objects are on the same almucantar, they have the same altitude."

No, I don't know why it's spelled "almacantar" in the heading and "almucantar" in the definition, but never mind that: what does it mean to say that these broad materialist claims are not a horizon but nevertheless share the same altitude on a circle parallel to the horizon? And not just any almacantar but an almacantar "by which their current constellation may be judged"?

Excuse me, but: what?

How, exactly, does one employ an almacantar in judging a constellation?

I give up and move on:

"The polemic is occasioned primarily by the event of reading inspiring fiction"--not by reading inspiring fiction, you'll note, but by "the event of reading inspiring fiction," and if you can figure out the difference between the two, please let me know. And who is doing the reading here? Or who is experiencing "the event of reading" that occasions the polemic?

"The polemic is occasioned primarily by the event of reading inspiring fiction, but also by the manner in which they speak to several key issues of cultural debate:"--and we'll get to those issues in a minute, but first: who or what are "they"? To find a plural antecedent, I have to backtrack to the previous sentence and latch onto those claims that are not horizons but form an almacantar by which constellations can be judged, and now those same claims are being asked to speak to key issues. I hope those claims are getting a little something extra in their pay packet after all that work.

But they're not done yet--not by a long shot. Take a deep breath:

"The polemic is occasioned primarily by the event of reading inspiring fiction, but also by the manner in which they speak to several key issues of cultural debate: world literature and how it may be determined; the links and breaks between the terms postcolonialism, transnationalism, and globalism; the noncoincidence between literary institutions and the literary; the meaning of form for postcolonialism; the at-once vexed relationship of the novel to nation formation in postcolonial states; postcolonialism as other than the luxury of Western or Westernized cultural elites; critical transnationalism as an interruption of the logic of information retrieval in global circuits of knowledge and power; and the event of colonialism as not historically settled."

Vexed? Unsettled? Interrupted? Sounds like my reading process here. "This is not just a list but an itinerary," continues Hitchcock. He said a mouthful.

But wait, there's more:

"This is not just a list but an itinerary, and one that cannot rest easy with the mantra that culture is the preeminent form of politics in our time and that when we feel global we participate ineluctably in wresting freedom from the crushing realm of necessity."

Wait, so when we feel global we're not actually wresting freedom? I'll make that my new uneasy mantra.

"One cannot negotiate these challenges as if yet another Western critic, by checking off a list, is freed from the privileges of power that produce that subject position. The measure of the itinerary is the polemic it fosters that will deploy the long space as the organizing trope for disputation among them."

"Them" who? "Challenges"? How do challenges dispute?

So the list is an itinerary measured by the polemic it fosters that deploys space as a trope for disputation?

Frankly, I'm simply not equipped to judge this current constellation.

Loopy but luscious

Take two things you love and put them together--chocolate and chipotle peppers, for instance.

Wonderful.

Add salt.

Amazing.

Add Pop Rocks.

Okay, now you're getting a little weird. Pop Rocks? That's kid stuff, like putting chocolate syrup on your Froot Loops. We moved beyond that years ago! Adults don't pop Pop Rocks! In fact, no connoisseur of serious chocolate would be caught dead in the presence of a package of Pop Rocks!

But hide some Pop Rocks in this amazing dark-chocolate-chipotle-and-salt concoction and that's another story. Chuau Chocolatier (find it here) creates unusual combinations of chocolate with, for instance, hot peppers, honey, or anise and coffee. The hubby found some half-price Firecracker bars and couldn't resist bringing one home, and what a bizarre experience: first, smooth dark chocolate goodness; next, a little kick from the peppers and salt; finally, popping firecrackers right in your mouth. Weird but wonderful.

And if you keep your mouth shut, no one has to know about the Pop Rocks.

Walk softly and carry a big stick (but don't do anything with it)

For three years now I've been carrying a big stick at Commencement but it's not at all clear what I'm supposed to do with it. When I asked the Chief Faculty Marshal under what circumstances I'm permitted to hit someone with the stick, she just smiled her beauty-queen smile and said, "Carry it on the left and don't let the ribbons drag on the floor."

The other three Faculty Marshals carry sticks bigger than mine and the Chief Marshal carries the biggest stick of all (because she is the Chief, if course, and indicating her status with a feathered headdress or rhinestone tiara would be unseemly). I am the newest member of the college's crack Faculty Marshal squad, so my stick is the smallest. Still, it could deliver a pretty good bonk on the noggin if required to do so. But nooooooo--hitting is strictly prohibited.

So what am I supposed to do with my stick? The answer came to me as I was trying to get the students and faculty seated neatly in their rows. We processed in as planned to the tune of "Pomp and Circumstance," and then two student marshals and I were in charge of making sure exactly 30 people moved into each row, leaving no seats empty on the ends. The problem is that the first people don't move to their seats quite quickly enough, so the last three or four see a row that looks full and try to move to the next row, so I spend a lot of time persuading processing people that yes, they actually should stay in this row instead of moving back one. This effort sometimes makes me lose count, which is not good. The faculty are even worse, because they are less inclined to trust the judgment of a colleague just because she happens to be speaking softly and carrying a big stick. With ribbons on it. That are not dragging on the floor.

Even with three of us counting, we ended up with some uneven rows: two student rows each had an empty seat on the end, and one faculty row had three empties. I hesitate to use the "herding cats" cliche, but it did occur to me while I was seating students that the stick could be used the way shepherds use crooks to count sheep: I could hold the stick out and make each graduating senior jump over it.

The problem, of course, is that many of the female students wobble in wearing entertaining footwear--heels up to here, gladiator straps, spiky patent-leather strappy sandals adorned with shocking-pink flowers--and I doubt that five-inch heels would enhance a student's ability to jump hurdles. One small slip and all those black-robed grads will be falling like dominoes, and the next thing you know we've got a lawsuit on our hands.

But if making them jump over the stick won't work, how about if I hold up the stick and make them duck under it? A little limbo action would liven up the processional, especially if the band director can be persuaded to ease a Latin beat into Elgar.

I want to suggest this to the Chief Marshal but I'm afraid she'll just unleash that indomitable smile and take away my stick. That would be the time for hitting.

On the left.

With the ribbons not dragging on the floor.

It was a very good year

At lunch with my fellow members of Faculty Council today, I noted that four (out of six) of us were hired the same year. I had already been at the college for a year as an adjunct, but I signed my tenure-track contract the same year as three other Council members, and we were among an unprecedented group of new faculty--17 in one year!--hired during the thaw after a long hiring freeze.

Several of those 17 have moved on, but enough of us remain to be a force on campus. One has served as registrar. One has served as director of the Honors Program, and several have served as department chairs. We've chaired various campus committees, and now we make up two-thirds of Faculty Council.

Either 2001 was a really good year for hiring or else we're just gluttons for punishment.

Waiting

For Godot? No:

To finish all the end-of-the-semester claptrap so I can stop driving to campus every day.

For my dog to realize that no amount of barking will bring the squirrel out of the tree.

For the cows to come home--or a home to come to the cows grazing on the hill where our neighbors are building a new house.

For the wild turkeys to come out of the woods so I can watch their frantic wobbly race across the meadow to the creek.

For a certain bit of sizzling-hot news to be announced so I can stop biding my time and biting my tongue.

To learn the fate of an article I submitted to a publication in January. (January!)

To drop a few pounds so I can get back into my cute blue skirt.

For my digestive system to get back to normal after all that cancer treatment--unless this is as close to normal as it's going to get.

For eighteen more months of clean blood tests and CT scans to pass before I can get my medi-port removed.

To pay off all my medical bills before I can even think about planning a vacation.

To find a way to visit my son this summer.

For my daughter and son-in-law to buy their house so I can help them move and paint and fix things up.

For the tomato plants to blossom, the corn to sprout, and the blueberry bushes to decide whether they're interested in producing anything interesting.

To read my course evaluations.

For Commencement.

To commence.

Heavy lifting

Last summer's move to a new office required a lot of heavy lifting, but this year I'm moving digits. We're switching to a new course management system in the fall, discarding WebCT for the more euphoniously named Moodle, and the Powers That Be keep insisting that we're aiming for a "seamless migration," which makes me wonder what sort of seamstress one might take along on a migration and what sorts of seams she might be called upon to sew, but never mind the mixed metaphors: today I'm dealing with the niggling little bit of the migration that will not be seamless. Namely, the gradebook.

Now I like keeping my gradebook online. It's so much easier than those messy old spiral-bound gradebooks with the pages half falling out, and the online version calculates grades much more accurately than I can. But the problem is that the gradebooks for past courses will not carry over into Moodle, so if I want to preserve a record of students' grades, I need to download them from WebCT.

Fortunately, for a few years I recorded grades both online and off, so I have hard copies of grades for some classes. But I still had a pile of classes for which I had no record of the grades except on WebCT. How big a pile? 21 classes. Not a lot. How difficult could it be to download 21 online gradebooks from WebCT and then save them as Excel files?

Not difficult---but tremendously annoying. WebCT is notorious for demanding multiple clicks for every action, and then, of course, I had to convert the downloaded data into an Excel file, give it an appropriate name, and save it in a sensible place. The first few files took some thought, but after that it was just mindless clicking.

How much clicking? I counted: 32 clicks per class, 21 classes, 672 clicks. Six hundred seventy-two. I kept sliding into that Zone of Mindlessness that opens up whenever a task requires endless mindless clicking, but then I would get to the point where I needed to name and save the Excel file, and suddenly I needed to retrieve my brain from the Zone, a migration it wasn't always eager to make. A few times it didn't quite make the trip all the way back and I ended up saving the file in the wrong format or in the wrong folder, and then I had to do some more clicking to fix the problem.

But the files have all migrated--not quite seamlessly, but you can't have everything. At least the heavy lifting is done. Now my clicking digits need some R&R, wrapped around a nice cold glass of iced tea.

The big finish

My creative nonfiction students presented their final projects today, multimedia essays for which the only requirement was that they combine words with other media. The results were amazing and funny and moving and wow, but I especially enjoyed what they said about process:

"It took me a while to figure out how to insert the images, but then I got the hang of it and they look much better now."

"I watched a YouTube video to learn how to edit sound files with Audacity."

"I had to learn how to use that big scanner over in the art department."

"How did you create your own game? Can you send me the link?"

Here's what I didn't hear:

"This is too hard! I can't do it!"

"How can you expect us to learn things that aren't in the textbook?"

"I spent, like, 27 hours making my essay into a podcast and then my computer crashed and the dog ate the hard drive and my house burned down and my great-aunt Edna died and I have to leave before class to get to the funeral so please can I do some extra credit instead?"

No: they did the work, and when they needed new skills, they found a way to teach themselves. And wow, what terrific results. All I had to do was give 'em a little shove in the right direction and then get out of their way. That's the way teaching ought to work.

Where's Kafka when I need him?

I'm sitting in the classroom watching my American Lit students take their final exam while I try to grade papers, but I'm not making terrific progress. First I'm distracted by a possible plagiarism case...annoying but I'll have to work on it later. Then out of the corner of my eye I notice some movement on the floor--a cockroach on its back struggles to get back on its feet. I think about squashing it but it looks pretty maimed already. It's only a matter of time before it expires.

Then a student comes up to ask me a question and I don't think about the cockroach for a few minutes and when I look back, it's gone. Where did it go? Whenever vermin is in the room, I generally prefer to know where it is, because if it's not somewhere specific, it could be anywhere. Let's not think about all the places "anywhere" could be.

So now I'm trying to grade papers and proctor an exam while in the back of my mind a cockroach is wiggling. Of all the places a cockroach could be, the back of my mind is my least favorite.

Early alert

It's 5 a.m. Do you know where your blogger is?

This blogger is wide awake in front of the computer. Why? I didn't even set an alarm last night because I don't need to be anywhere before my 11:00 meeting, but I've been awake since 3. Why why why? I tried to go back to sleep, but after an hour, I gave it up. So here I sit with nothing to say.

What woke me up at 3? No idea. Could have been the cat. She snores. For years she was not allowed in our bedroom at night because her snoring would get into my dreams, but right now we need to keep our door open or it gets too hot in there, so there's no keeping the cat out. She likes heat, especially when she's sleeping, which is, frankly, pretty much all she ever does these days. But she sleeps loudly and I sleep lightly so we really shouldn't be sharing a room.

Why didn't I just roll over and go back to sleep? No idea--or too many ideas. I just kept thinking: about all those papers I need to grade, how to organize a new class next fall, what lies behind a particular campus situation, what I'll do if the sudden cold snap devastates my herb and butterfly gardens. What can I do at 3 a.m.? My grading is at the office and it won't do me any good to go out to the garden in the cold damp darkness, and the one colleague who could possibly enlighten me about the troubling campus situation is unlikely to appreciate a phone call at 3 a.m.

I tried to stop thinking, but the brain was in overdrive. So eventually I gave it up and got up. Read my e-mail...nothing too exciting. Read some other stuff. Ate a banana. Aren't bananas full of some chemical that promotes somnolence? Maybe it was a defective banana, because I'm still awake.

Hey, I could take a pill...I still have some Ativan leftover from when I was on chemo, and it works better than bananas. On the other hand, it's after 5 now and I need to be in a meeting at 11. If I get drugged up now, there's no telling when I'll be alert again.

So I'm awake. How about you? Wide awake? I could call you and find out. Don't you love it when the phone rings at 5 a.m.? Or 5:15, as the case may be? We could have a nice chat and compare notes about what we've been doing lately: "Oh, nothing really, just not sleeping. How about you?"

Couch-potato gardening

Any idiot knows that a couch potato who plunges into a strenuous exercise program without properly stretching is setting herself up for serious pain the next day, right? So why was I so surprised last weekend when a few hours of gardening made me feel like lying down in the middle of the road?

Granted, I've been out of practice since last summer, when my daily gardening routine was interrupted by surgery and chemotherapy and radiation followed by winter. But now I'm full of energy and ready to get planting, but my planting muscles are still hibernating.

I spent a mere two hours Friday afternoon putting some annuals in my butterfly garden, working up a sweat with a lot of bending and stooping and carrying big bags of manure and buckets of water. It felt great at first, but the next morning I was stiff.

I thought a nice long walk would loosen me up a bit, and it did...until about four miles into a six-mile walk, when every muscle in my body begged me to lie right down in the middle of the road. The only way to get home was to keep on walking, which I did to a chorus of complaining muscles.

If a little butterfly garden can prostrate me, what will happen when I get down and dirty in the big vegetable plots? Clearly, I need to warm up before I take up trowel and hoe--stretches in the asparagus patch, lunges among the zucchini, and then reach for the sky to pull sunshine down on my tomatoes.

Four days later I'm still sore from last Friday, but my butterfly garden is rewarding my hard work. The new plants are still puny, but remember that wild columbine I "rescued" from the roadside two years ago? (Read it here.) This spring it's bigger than our cultivated columbines and it's blooming like crazy, producing those brilliant orange and yellow blossoms in great abundance. Now if the plants I put in last week will just put in a little effort, our front garden will soon be a haven for butterflies and hummingbirds, and I'll enjoy sitting and watching them while I rest my aching muscles.

Blooming

Trilliums are still abundant in the woods around our house, and yesterday I discovered patches of Solomon's Seal just beginning to unfurl their leaves and blossoms. Twinleaf hasn't blossomed yet but it apparently has an affinity for perfoliate bellwort, the lovely delicate yellow flowers growing nearby. Mayapple is abundant in the woods, and many of the plants have forked stalks, indicating that they'll blossom soon. And I found just a few Dutchman's Breeches still blooming.

Dynamite

The April 26 New Yorker includes a selection of Saul Bellow's letters, including a 1948 missive in which the youthful writer reflects on his timidity: "But there is a certain diffidence about me, not very obvious socially, to my own mind, that prevents me from going all out, as you call it. I assemble the dynamite but I am not yet ready to touch off the fuse."

He wrote this five years before The Adventures of Augie March and 16 years before Herzog. Once he got the fuse lit, the explosions just kept coming.

Nighty-night, MIghty Mite

My new favorite student excuse, overheard in a colleague's office: "I won't be in class tomorrow because I have to take my dog to the vet. I think he has ear mites. If you want evidence, I can bring some to show you..."

The more I think about it, the funnier it gets. Maybe that's because I spent part of the day stumbling around blindly while waiting for my glasses to get fixed, part of the day reading and responding to a big pile of freshman drafts, and part of the day noodling around at a Moodle training session before coming home and collapsing in a heap. I don't know which of these three activities was more exhausting, but I know I'm so close to the precipice that the mere mental image of a student marching into class with a handful of ear mites is enough to send me over the edge into hysteria.

Time to get some shut-eye. I expect my dreams to be invaded by moodling mites chewing through piles of student prose while I attempt to smash them with whatever comes to hand, including my glasses. If I wake up tomorrow and find my glasses broken again, I'll just pull the covers up over my head and ask the department secretary to post a note on my door: "Class cancelled due to mooding ear-mites. If you want evidence, I can bring some to show you..."

Contemplating a change

Sometimes my students leave me in the dust, especially when it comes to technology.

My Creative Nonfiction students are working on multimedia essays, and yesterday they presented their works in progress. Some are doing blogs or web sites or illustrated essays; one is doing a podcast and another plans a performance piece, but they're all finding fresh new creative ways to combine words with other media.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here looking at the same old stale template I've used since 2006, the same old photo, the same tired topics. Is it time to shift to something new?

A year ago I made a major change when I moved away from anonymity and finally signed my blog, and a friend persuaded me to try the Friday Poetry Challenge, which is fun but has a limited audience. Except for those two changes, I've been doing pretty much the same thing for four and a half years.

Is it time for a change? New template, new colors, new purpose? Or is this one of those "ain't broke/don't fix" situations? Right now I'm just thinking about options, but summer is a great time for a fresh start so I would appreciate suggestions.

Writing about writing about writing

When I received the Atlantic's 2010 fiction edition in the mail over the weekend, I immediately read the nonfiction essays first. Does that say more about me or about the current state of fiction? Okay, I did eventually read the stories, most of which are quite good even though too many of the male characters seem to have stepped straight out of Cheeverville, that mythical land where disappointed men hang out in bars and grumble about the small indignities of life while secretly fantasizing about sleeping with the babysitter. "Bone Hinge" by Katie Williams takes us way outside that familiar territory, portraying the horrible impact of a single simple decision on the life of a girl and her conjoined twin sister, two small lives opening and then slamming shut like a door on a hinge.

So the fiction was good but what really excited me were two essays. In "I Am Sorry to Inform You," Joyce Carol Oates elegantly conveys the pain and sorrow she experienced following her husband's unexpected death. A mere week after his death, she takes refuge in teaching, which has always offered hope, but she asks, "For some of us, what can hope mean? The worst has happened, the spouse has died, the story is ended. And yet--the story is not ended, clearly." For Oates, teaching and writing keep the story going after everything else seems to stop.

Richard Brausch tells another kind of story in "How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons," which suggests that there's more money to be made by writing books about how to write books than by actually writing books. Examining the vast array of books offering advice about how to write books, Brausch notes that "according to the prevailing wisdom of our time, constructing a novel or a poem or a play is no different than building a back deck on your house." The problem, of course, is that "writing that comes from those whose reading is confined to the how-to books is cramped and obvious." Too many people, says Brausch, believe they can become excellent writers by following manuals full of short-cuts: "And the industry that produces the how-to manuals plays to them, makes money from their hope of finding a way to be a writer, rather than doing the work, rather than actually spending the time to absorb what is there in the vast riches of the world's literature, and then crafting one's voice out of the myriad of voices."

The irony, of course, is that by explaining How to Write Books without The Help of Books about How to Write Books, Brausch perpetuates the very genre he rejects. On the other hand, he also points us right back toward the rest of the magazine, where serious writers can dip into vast riches and perhaps find a voice.

Listening and learning

My American Lit Survey students are ending the semester where they started: by contemplating Franz Wright's poem "Learning to Read." On the first day of class, they wrote brief analyses of this poem that none of them had ever seen before, and today we discussed it in class after spending the entire semester honing our literary analysis skills. This is the first time I've included Franz Wright in the syllabus, and I placed this poem after Friday's discussion of Theodore Roethke and this morning's discussion of James Wright. Roethke taught James Wright who fathered and taught Franz Wright, and I hoped my students would pick up on the way the later poets echo the earlier ones.

And they did! Okay, only one student noticed that the phrase "break / into blossom" (from James Wright's "A Blessing") pops up in Franz Wright's "Learning to Read" as "break / but not into blossom," but others noted some persistent imagery (growth from decay, blossoming from breakage) along with stylistic similarities. I hope they absorbed the idea that poetry is not just words on a dead page but a conversation that started centuries ago and keeps going on, whether we're listening or not.

And I hope they keep listening and learning to read poetry.

Down memory lane

One of these days I'll procure a digital voice recorder to carry on my long walks so I can keep a careful record of what I see, but until then, I'm exercising my memory while I walk. Here's what I remember from this morning's walk:

Twinleaf, trillium, dutchman's breeches, dogwood, redbud, spring beauties, bluets.

Kingfishers, mockingbirds, turkey vultures, kildeer, ducks, pine siskins, red-winged blackbirds, and a pair of mysterious buzzing birds I didn't recognize.

Freshly tilled fields, green clover, and young wheat with wind blowing across it in waves.

Cows, dogs, squirrels, the neighbor's cat.

Not terribly interesting, I'm afraid, but that's life in the slow lane.

Friday poetry challenge: spring thing

Today I ate my lunch at a table outside the library--but first I had to grab some napkins and wipe off the thick layer of yellow pollen coating the table and chairs. I sat and ate and absorbed the glorious sunshine and watched white petals drifting down like snow.

And then I started to cough.

And sneeze.

And wipe my watery eyes.

I know I'm not the only one who has a love/hate relationship with spring. Our campus is at its prettiest right now, but that beauty comes at a high cost to those of us allergic to tree pollen:

Pollen fallen
from the trees
clogs me up
and makes me sneeze.
Pray for rain
to wash the air--
come on, Spring,
pull up a chair!

Anyone who can breathe clearly right now ought to be able to do better than that. Come on--show me!

Another sign of the impending apocalypse

Breaking news: just moments ago, I received an e-mail message requesting that I participate in a reader survey for my favorite magazine. The message begins thus: "At The New Yorker, we strongly value our reader's opinions...."

I know times are tough in the magazine world, but if I am truly the only remaining reader of The New Yorker, this could be the end of the world as we know it.

The idea factory is now open for business

Further evidence that I'm no longer suffering from chemo-brain: every day I'm coming up with new ideas for workshops and other events to enrich teaching across campus.

This, of course, is part of my job as director of our Center for Teaching Excellence, but I spent my first semester in this job mostly postponing thinking about it, and when I did try to apply some brain cells to the question of what our new CTE should do, my brain cells would lie down for a nice long nap.

Now, though, the brain cells are working overtime, even when I'd like them to take a rest. I've been reading a lot of education research and talking to junior faculty members about their needs, but my latest brainstorm was prompted by a senior colleague's complaint about an assignment that simply didn't live up to expectations. Here's the idea: let's do a workshop (or a series of brown-bag lunches?) called "Can This Assignment Be Saved?" Faculty will be invited to bring in assignments that used to work really well but don't anymore or assignments that seemed like a terrific idea at the time but that fell flat in the classroom. We'll share our failures and offer each other suggestions for improvement, and maybe we'll bid a respectful farewell to assignments that have outlived their usefulness.

That's just one idea. If you don't like it, I've got plenty more.

Recumbent incumbent

A year ago, I reacted to my election as Faculty Chair by issuing a series of promises designed to assure that I would never be elected again (read it here). Sadly, my plan to establish the Grammar Police fell apart when the Subcommittee on the Status of Official Insignia disbanded after a dispute involving the vicious hurling of epithets and epaulettes, while my proposal to raise funds for a Faculty Council Fact-Finding Expedition to Paris and London got derailed when the dog ate the Eurail passes.

Nevertheless, I felt certain that I had demonstrated sufficient incompetence in office to prevent my being elected to a second term--honest, I didn't even vote for myself! But the people have spoken and now it is incumbent upon me to issue new promises for my second term, starting with the promise to banish the phrase "it is incumbent upon me" from all official communiques issuing from this office. So forthwith and hereunto I append my official objectives:

1. All committees wishing to bring motions before the full faculty must present their requests via interpretive dance.

2. A new Committee on the Status of Faculty Self-Esteem will be charged with distribution of gold stars, certificates of appreciation, shoulder-pats, and the occasional "there, there." Funding for this effort will be taken from the money saved when we officially abolish February.

3. You know those big beribboned sticks the faculty marshals carry at commencement to keep everyone in line? I'm thinking light-sabers.

4. Chocolate fountain in the faculty lounge.

That's as far as I've gotten so far but it's still pretty early in my term. I'm accepting suggestions. It is incumbent upon me to do so.

Oops.

Horseradish home

Today I watched my husband putting all his muscle into digging up horseradish roots--stabbing the ground with a potato fork, loosening the roots from one side and then another, straining to tug the long, gnarly roots from the ground without breaking them in bits--and I thought, not for the first time, "I hope those people don't still hate us."

By "those people" I refer to whoever now lives in a house we moved out of nearly 20 years ago, a spacious house in a pleasant housing development built over a swath of what was once known as the Great Black Swamp in northwest Ohio. The swamp had long ago been drained, but in rainy seasons the land remembered its origins and in any season it provided a nourishing environment for root crops. We planted a big garden in the yard, but before anyone knew what he was up to my husband planted horseradish all along one side of the house. "I thought it would look pretty," he said.

Anyone familiar with the growth habits of horseradish has already figured out the two major flaws in this plan. First, horseradish isn't exactly ornamental; at its best it looks wild and weedy. And second, the rule is that you should plant horseradish only where you'd like to see it forever, because once it gets started, there's no getting rid of it.

Horseradish thrives on neglect; you can't starve it out or drown it out, and any poison strong enough to kill it will also kill anything else nearby. Yes, you can dig up horseradish by the roots, but the roots are long and stubborn, growing deep and holding on, and if even one little sliver of root remains in the soil, the horseradish will return.

Out here in the woods we have plenty of room to grow horseradish where it blends in with the garden and won't interfere with other crops, but it's a plant not well suited for the manicured lawns of suburbia. We haven't been back to the horseradish house in years so I don't know whether anyone ever managed to remove those pesky plants or whether they've simply accepted them as an essential feature of the landscape. Maybe they curse us every spring when those long, weedy-looking leaves start poking out of the ground--or maybe, like us, they cherish the pungent bite of freshly-ground horseradish and applaud whoever had the good sense to give it a foothold in the rich soil of home.

Playing with words

My Creative Nonfiction class has been playing with words all semester, but this morning we took the word "play" more literally: the class met over Scrabble boards at Tim Horton's--with the English department footing the bill for coffee and doughnuts.

I suppose I could invent some valid pedagogical justification for Scrabble 'n' doughnuts, but my students turned in a major essay this morning and I wanted to reward them for a job well done. Besides, it's hard to accomplish much in class when many of the students have been up most of the previous night finishing a paper.

So we played Scrabble. A student with a talent for triple-word scores creamed my whole group, but I came in a respectable second. I started the game with a miserable group of letters but I managed to play the word "words" on a double-word score. Wordplay is what we're about here so we may as well make it count!

A poem is a walk is a class is a poem

This morning I took my American Lit students for a walk over to the amphitheater next to the library so we could discuss A.R. Ammons outdoors. Students had read "A Poem is a Walk," so it seemed appropriate to take a walk before discussing the connection between poetry and walking. They had also read "Garbage," so a field trip to a landfill would have been appropriate but we decided against that. "If you want a garbage-related field trip, go sniff a dumpster," I suggested. Maybe they will.

I've seen some colleagues teaching classes in the amphitheater but this was the first time I've tried it myself. The weather was perfect: hot but not too hot, just nicely warm with a cooling breeze. One year I took a class out to the large green behind the building where we sat on the ground and learned things...until the mowers arrived and started circling our space. Fortunately, there were no mowers out this morning, nor did the sprinklers suddenly come on in the middle of class. Students were attentive and engaged in the discussion, and it felt so good out there that I didn't even mind having sun in my eyes.

Today's class was a walk just as a poem is a walk, which would suggest that the class is also a poem. Is someone taking notes? You're going to be tested on this!

Not a scintilla of scintillation

Over the past few days, I have read (well, skimmed) five years' worth of minutes of Faculty Council meetings. "Scintillating" is not the word I would use to describe the experience. It was a reading (skimming) experience fraught with, well, I don't know what you'd call that odd mixture of puzzlement, concern, and sheer boredom.

I'm trying to track down whether or when a particular piece of legislation was approved by Council, and while I haven't found the answer to that question, I have learned some other things, such as the Law of Lacunae: the more you need to know something, the less likely it is to appear in the minutes. There are gaps in the minutes, such as an early April meeting in which the March minutes were approved--but the March minutes are missing from the archive. Some minutes consist of four or five short sentences to describe two-hour meetings, while others go on for page after page of excruciating detail about matters that must have seemed important at the time, but again, "scintillating" is not the word.

It's encouraging to be reminded of all the important matters Council has discussed and actions it has taken in the past five years, but it's discouraging to see certain topics coming up for agonized and lengthy discussions year after year after year without much evidence of change. We're clearly working really hard to make things happen, so why do we keep coming back to the same issues over and over? Perhaps there's no solutions, or perhaps we're not equipped to find it.

At this point I'm willing to admit that I'm not equipped to find the missing piece of legislation, so I intend to bring it up to Council again and see if we can make any headway. Let's see if we can jog loose any memory of when this matter was approved--and if not, let's go back and restart the conversation, as we have done so many times before.

Scintillating it isn't. But no one ever said faculty governance would be scintillating.

At first sight

What did I do to deserve trilliums today? Nothing, I tell you, absolutely nothing, and yet there they were in front of me, first a host of green stems with buds closed tight and then one--no, two full white blossoms, and then, like icing on the cake, one tiny little stalk of Dutchman's breeches with a line of wee white puffy blossoms like bloomers hanging on a line.

I've never seen either of them blossoming this early and I certainly didn't expect to see them today. In fact, I didn't expect to see much of anything today because for a few days my attention has been tightly focused on some mild internal turmoil caused by a petty but painful slight that has sent me harrumphing around the place in high dudgeon over something I'll no doubt forget within the week. So I was in no humor to encounter trilliums and I certainly didn't deserve them, but there they were, blossoming right in front of me as if all that stuff that's been dragging me down really didn't matter.

As, of course, it doesn't.

So I am thankful for trilliums and doubly thankful for Dutchman's breeches, my favorite wildflowers hands down and even better when they're unexpected.

A little schtick

"You'll feel a little stick," says the nurse, but it's not just a little stick--it's a little stick from a needle that will draw the blood that will tell me whether my body has thoroughly rebounded from chemotherapy and maybe whether I'll be needing more.

I can't begin to count the number of times I've been stuck with needles since last June, so this one little stick shouldn't bother me. But of course it does. I spent the morning trying not to think about that little stick and I tensed up as soon as I got to the cancer center, and then the nurse couldn't get any blood from my port so she had to stick me again in the back of the hand so it was actually two little sticks followed by two little bandaids and a not-so-little wait until I met first with the oncology nurse and then with the social worker (to once again go over that eternal question: how are we going to pay all these bills?) and then, finally, with my cheerful oncologist, who burst into the examining room to stick me with the following little joke: "Bad news! I'm afraid the scans show that you don't have a uterus!"

"I'll bet you say that to all the girls," I said, but by that time I knew that there was no bad news, that my CT scans are perfect and my blood tests produced perfectly normal numbers (except for the white cells, which remains just a little wimpy).

And normal sounds really nice to me.

Controlling the comma virus

This morning I read a student draft that mentioned a virus "which induces fever, paralysis, numbness, comma, and death," and I keep wondering where I can get my hands on some of that virus because some of my students could use a healthy dose of commas. Of course, you wouldn't want to overdo, because, as we all know, there's nothing more annoying, than a sudden, acute, unexpected onset, of random and, unnecessary, commas.

And if a virus can control commas, what about more insidious forms of punctuation? If the exclamation-point virus gets loose on a college campus, look out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And--not to put to fine a point on it--we wouldn't want to see--for instance--if it should happen to occur--which I sincerely hope it never does--an uncontrolled outbreak of--say--dashes. & what about ampersands?

In order to avoid complete chaos, a comma-inducing virus would have to be placed in the hands of people who can be trusted to enforce strict controls on availability and dosage. Yes, commas could become controlled substances! Imagine the black market in the comma virus, the dank, unruly dens of iniquity where addicts would seek a fix! There's got to be more profit in dealing illegal commas than in teaching English.

Unless, of course, the general public just decides to give up on punctuation entirely. Yeah, right. Like that'll ever happen. LOL.

Learning to talk all over again

You know how sometimes in dreams you have an urgent need to get a message across to someone but you can't find the words or your voice stops working or no one understands your language or your teeth keep falling out but you have to keep talking while hoping against hope that no one in the audience notices that teeth are dribbling all down the front of your shirt? That feeling came back to me this morning when I gave a 50-minute presentation on the meaning of a Liberal Arts education to 15 presidents and vice presidents of colleges and universities.

In China.

No wait, I wasn't in China and neither were they, but the colleges and universities they lead are in China. They're traveling around the U.S. to learn about American institutions of higher education and my purpose was to give them a brief introduction to the idea of the Liberal Arts foundation. I started with a poem ("To the Stone-Cutters" by Robinson Jeffers) and examined some of the questions the poem raises about how we leave a mark on the world, and then I went on from there to talk about how a Liberal Arts education equips us to do so.

It sounds pretty easy, but I've never spoken with an interpreter before and it was a bizarre experience. I had to slow down my normal speaking rate and pause after every sentence or two so the translator could convey my message. I like to make eye contact with an audience, so I would look at the Chinese visitors while I was speaking and then look at the translator as he was speaking and then look at the visitors to see if my ideas had made any discernible impact, but at about that time I had to move on to the next point.

It's hard to get any momentum going when you have to stop after every major thought, and then sometimes it seemed the translator would go on and on until I wondered, "Did I really say all that?" He was very helpful, especially during the question-and-answer time: he explained the background for some of the questions and provided added insight when translating my answers. At least I think that's what he was doing. Maybe he was just sharing the latest gossip about Jon & Kate.

How did it go? I don't know. I think I got some ideas across and I think the Chinese scholars appreciated them. On the other hand, I could be dreaming--but If this is a dream, why aren't my teeth falling out?

Determined to be dull

My dog and I both brought home treats from our walk this afternoon. When we were nearly home, Hopeful pounced on either a muskrat or a groundhog--I didn't really want to look too closely at the kill. She was one happy critter. The dog, not the groundhog. Or muskrat, as the case may be.

I came home with something less tangible: a little sunburn on my face. It's not much of a burn and I could have avoided it if I had kept my baseball cap on my head, but after a long, cold, gray winter, the sun felt so good that I couldn't resist charging up my solar cells.

Yesterday my students reminded me that summer is coming quickly: only four more weeks of classes (plus finals, senior week, commencement, and a teaching workshop) before we're free! This year I'm aiming for a perfectly boring summer.

I won't be attending any conferences or planning a wedding this summer, and I certainly don't intend to have any major surgery or chemotherapy (although you never know). I don't plan to travel, unless I drive a few hours north to help my daughter and son-in-law fix up the house they're trying to buy. I plan to spend my days walking, gardening, and writing, and if I can get at least six students to sign up for my summer Nature Writing class, I'll do a little teaching too.

It sounds pretty dull, but last summer pretty much exhausted my quota of life-changing events, so I think I'm due for some dullness, some time to sit back and recharge my batteries, starting with some solar energy. Here comes the sun!

Well, at least I'm not 8929th!

Of the thousands of readers who submitted NCAA tournament picks on the New York Times online site, I am currently ranked 8928th. This is a tremendous improvement over yesterday, when I was ranked around 15,000th.

Considering that I've never filled out a bracket before, 8928th is not too shabby. It's hard to believe, but apparently there are thousands of people out there even worse at picking college basketball tournament winners than I am. In making my picks, I employed the English Alma Mater Method: if one of my English department colleagues graduated from a contending institution, I picked that team to win. Marquette, Louisville, Temple, and Ohio University let me down really early, but my Purdue colleague is still in the game--and let's not forget that I earned my M.A. from the University of Kentucky.

Of course I was a UK student for two and a half years without ever attending a basketball game, nor have I actually watched any of this year's games, although we do listen to the Ohio State games on the radio, which, for me, is similar to not listening at all. Basketball on the radio sounds like what you'd get if you locked an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of basketballs, microphones, and buzzers.

No, I don't care about basketball games as games; I care about whether the final score will lift me above 8928th place. The Times has promised an iPad to whoever comes out on top. They don't say what sort of prize they've reserved for 8928th.

Not quite incorruptible

Our Information Technology guys informed me yesterday that my identity has been corrupted, which sounds like a problem for a priest rather than a techno-geek. My college-issued laptop computer no longer recognizes my authority to open documents or programs or anything else, which means I can't get into anything: lesson plans, assignment sheets, writing and research projects, pretty much my whole entire life. So I'm working in the computer lab near my office and trying not to get too far behind on all the stuff I can't work on right now.

This morning's freshman comp class was particularly challenging because not only was I unable to access the materials I needed for my original lesson plan, but also the projector in my classroom stopped working so I couldn't go to the old reliable stand-by assignment on evaluating internet sources. I had to move way beyond Plan B to Plans C, D, and F- before I figured out a meaningful way to spend 50 minutes, and even that required some scrambling for resources.

But we can rebuild! We have the technology! I don't know whether IT can make me bigger, stronger, or faster, but at some point later today I expect them to resurrect my identity without any shadow of corruption.

A never-to-be-repeated performance

Last night a colleague and I were sitting at a table at a local restaurant entertaining a candidate for a campus job when another colleague came in the door to have dinner with her son. She walked over for a chat and when we introduced the candidate, our colleague said, "I was just saying that this would be a horrible night to have a job candidate in town." She had no idea just how right she was.

Let me say first that the candidate was charming and did not utter a single complaint about the miserable dining experience. If I were a restaurant critic, I would give the candidate four stars and the restaurant none--unless it's possible to give negative stars.

We normally take job candidates to the best restaurant in town, but it's closed on Mondays, so we had reservations at another really fine restaurant, but a disastrous fire earlier in the day had closed down that entire downtown block, so our options were limited. We finally went with Plan C, and I don't want to embarrass a valued local business so I'll just refer to the restaurant as The Obese Insect.

Now I should point out that our miserable dining experience wasn't entirely the restaurant's fault. For instance, they couldn't control the weather (a torrential downpour that made it impossible to get into the restaurant without getting wet), but they could have controlled the thermostat a little better. It's hard to enjoy a meal when you're damp and shivering, especially when you try to warm up with some hot tea but the waiter replies, "I think we have some tea bags but I don't know where they are and I don't know if I can find them" and then offers instead Sierra Mist. (Because a cold soft drink is such a great substitute for hot tea.)

The service was slow (and not because of great demand, either--only two other tables were occupied) and the food was flavorless and overcooked. Note to chef: boiling vegetables until they're mushy does not improve their flavor, and then serving them on pasta and pouring some cream on top sullies the luscious label "Pasta Primavera." And why, please, were we forced to listen to "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies" over dinner during a torrential rainstorm in March?

Then the time came to pay the bill. Most local restaurants know the college drill--itemized check, no tax--but not our surly waiter, who must be a frustrated actor because he put on quite a performance: calling the manager on his cell phone right there in front of us, complaining about how unreasonable we were, and finally whining, "I'll just pay the tax out of my own pocket." It was an impressive performance but unlikely to make a job candidate want to live here.

But I doubt that he'll have a chance to repeat this performance for other campus groups. I've notified the people responsible for scheduling candidate visits and explained the whole sorry situation, so they're unlikely to send any more campus business toward that restaurant--and I won't be heartbroken if our miserable meal helps to bring down the curtain on that particular performance.

Curtains

At 7:47 this morning I'm sitting in the car waiting for the bank to open so I can deposit some checks so the bills I paid yesterday don't bounce. A curtain of rain blurs the view out my car window, softening the edges of trees, cars, buildings. The forecast calls for more rain, more grim gray skies for the next few days. I'd really like to go home and pull the covers over my head, but I have a full slate today--teaching classes, advising students, squiring a job candidate around town, attending a meeting.

Yes, that meeting--the meeting that has been disturbing my sleep for days, making me grind my teeth and wake up with a sore jaw, stiff neck, pounding headache. I keep telling myself that it's just another meeting and it will soon be over, but the meeting hangs like a curtain of grim gray gauze over my eyes, warping and coloring all I see.

Will somebody please open the curtains?

Time machine

Katie Nash is a 13-year-old girl trying to forgive herself for cruelly betraying her best friend, and the penance she adopts is cleaning her entire house--including the dreaded Venetian blinds. "Venetian blinds are what hang in hell," she tells herself, "and every day Satan says, 'My, my, I see we have some dust again.'"

Little moments of truth like this appear periodically in Elizabeth Berg's True to Form, a 10-year-old novel acting as a time machine to transport me back to early adolescence. Katie is the girl I wanted to be and perhaps thought I was when I was 13, from her writing to her tortured relationship with the Girl Scouts to her part-time job caring for an elderly woman. The novel is set in the early 1960s and it's difficult now to imagine than anyone could ever have been as young and naive and hopeful as Katie 'n' me, but throughout the book I recognized her feelings, resonated with her sense of burgeoning opportunity. Will it ever again be possible for anyone to be so young?

The ending is abrupt and the plot leans dangerously close to sappiness, but Berg creates a charming character and places her in a context that rings true in every particular. I wavered between wanting to warn Katie against the dangers of growing up and resting confident in her ability to weather the coming storms. The child in me joins her in saying "To hell with Venetian blinds" while the adult wants to remind her that if the worst thing that happens to you all summer is the need to dust the blinds, then the best thing to do is be happy and dust.

A fine whine

It's bad enough to be stuck inside feeling rotten and reading student papers when it's a stunningly gorgeous day outside, but to be stuck inside feeling rotten on a stunningly gorgeous day and then to discover that one of those papers was plagiarized straight from an internet site is just gratuitous--the academic equivalent of a plague of boils.

Home sweet home

My daughter and son-in-law are house-hunting, and I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that a child of mine is able to contemplate buying a house. After all, it was just six years ago this week that my husband and I finally bought our first house.

Unless you count the house we bought 25 years ago, which was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a house. It was a home--a mobile home to be precise, although both halves of that phrase are problematic.

It was a home--for the two of us and a host of other small woodland creatures. At various junctures we had chipmunks in the pantry and a rat in the bedroom, and once we came back from a vacation to find a recently deceased mouse under the sofa and a discarded snakeskin coiled around the top of the water heater in the pantry. I tried to assure myself that the snake might discourage the vermin population, but I didn't find this terribly comforting.

This "home" had started its life in 1948 as an 8x30 foot trailer, but it had long since ceased to be mobile. Decades before we bought it, someone had parked it in the back corner of a trailer park, with nothing separating the trailer from the train track but a shallow dip where people sometimes illegally dumped their trash. (Hence the rats.) Every train that passed by threatened to shake that trailer into the junkheap it was always trying to become. At some point in the past, someone had doubled the width of the trailer by adding a flimsy living room and bedroom, making our home "mobile" in name only.

"Indians came in here and did that," explained the ancient owner of the mobile home park, but I don't know what he meant by that and I'm not sure he did either. We did, however, learn some other important things about our little castle, including the fact that our trailer was at the end of the sewer line connecting a whole line of trailers, so if the line backed up anywhere along the way, it would eventually spill under our trailer.

But we had bought the place for a paltry $2500 (partly furnished) so what did we expect? We got our money's worth: we lived there for two years and when we moved out, we took with us all the furniture, including the deep-freeze we're still using today.

We sold our trailer (for $2000!) when I got pregnant because it was too small for the three of us and I didn't really want my infant child to share a bedroom with snakes, chipmunks, rats, and mice. We moved a few doors down to a bigger, newer, non-vermin-infested mobile home and sold our old one to another grad-school couple with two small children and a third one on the way.

After those early experiments in ownership, we waited two decades before finally finding ourselves in the position to buy a house, and now the child who got her start in our first mobile home is looking around for a home of her own. It know it won't be mobile and I hope it won't be infested with vermin, susceptible to sewage spills, or constantly threatening to dissolve into a junkheap--but even if it is, they'll figure out how to deal with those problems or any others that might come up.

Buying a mobile home was our way to survive as starving grad students, but it also provided a real-world education that has served us well over the years. Buying a house will be different kind of experience for my daughter, but one thing is certain: it's bound to provide an education.

It takes a village to raise a sledge-hammer

Just before the faculty meeting last night, one of my colleagues brought me a sledge-hammer. "You might want to use this if that little gavel doesn't work," he said, but I wondered: use it for what? Pounding on the table or pounding sense into people?

I thought I might need it first thing when I had to announce that the usual hot drinks would not be available during the meeting due to a tragic coffeemaker malfunction, but the faculty did not rise en masse and charge the chair to demand that Faculty Council immediately assuage their caffeine deficiencies. They just sat there and attended to business. That's my kind of meeting.

In the end I had to give the sledge-hammer back, which was more difficult than you might imagine. The person who provided the sledge-hammer disappeared before I had a chance to return it, and I wasn't about to carry it to his office because it would take two of me just to lift the thing--or better yet, it might require an entire committee, the Ad-Hoc Committee to Study the Status of Sledge-Hammer Retention. If I appoint the committee today, we might get a report offering an Action Plan by next fall, and then I'll have to appoint another committee to put the Action Plan into action.

Meanwhile, the sledge-hammer just sits there silently, awaiting further developments. Not a bad strategy if you ask me.

Try Troll-Be-Gone today!

I drove into town this morning carrying a load of glumness that sat like a lumpy and malignant troll clutching my shoulders. I've been carrying that troll around since I got back from my brief spring-break trip and started tackling the pile of detritus burying my life. I tried to wear out the troll with housework--taking down curtains, washing windows, cleaning carpets--but it just squeezed its sharp claws into my shoulders and held on.

I went for walks. I ate chocolate. I tried to write. The troll hung on.

It was still hanging on when I got to the office, unpacked my bag full of unfinished projects, booted up my computer, and started scrolling through my inbox. More work, more demands, more bleh...the troll settled in and started to grumble and groan.

Then I happened upon a batch of reading comments from my literature students, brief e-mailed responses to Grace Paley's "A Conversation with my Father" and Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon." I sighed, shifted the troll to a less dismal position, and started reading.

And smiling.

And laughing.

That's when the troll got uncomfortable. If there's one thing trolls simply can't stand, it's a good belly laugh.

Barthelme alone can make me laugh while Paley is more likely to make me cry, but my students' thoughtful responses made me eager to get back in the classroom. They apologized for not entirely understanding the stories (who does?), but then they asked terrific questions (Why store the balloon in West Virginia? Why can't Paley's narrator and the father talk about what's really bothering them?) and made some leaps toward analysis (Are these authors really writing about writing stories?).

As I read, the troll slunk down, loosened its grip, starting slipping down my back. Then a problem walked in the door, distracting me enough to allow the troll to dig its dirty claws right into my spine.

Then I went to class and started teaching--balloons and oxygen tanks, signs and stories--and as I walked around the room waving my arms, asking questions, easing students toward engagement with complex ideas, the troll slunk away so quietly that I didn't even notice until he was gone.

And he's still gone. I hope he stays gone for a while, but if the troll comes back lugging his sack of glumness, I know where to find the antidote.

A new crop

So I'm looking in the mirror and asking myself the eternal question: what shall I do with my hair? After all, not everyone gets a chance to start a whole new crop of hair from scratch. A colleague suggested that I try some Princess Leia honeybuns, but I'm wondering whether I ought to slather on the gel and spike my hair up into a faux-hawk.

First, though, it has to grow. Yesterday at lunch a friend noticed that my hair is returning and I said, "I just wish it would grow a little faster," and he said, "At least yours is coming back." He had a point. For some, baldness is forever.

Some are urging me to keep my hair short, but the problem is that my current 'do makes me think of chemotherapy, an experience I'd rather forget. So instead, I'm watching it grow and waiting until I can actually do something interesting with it.

Dreadlocks, anyone?

That deflated feeling

The first thing I noticed after I drove up the driveway yesterday afternoon was a distinctive hissing sound as of air rapidly leaving a tire, which indeed it turned out to be. I had spent four relaxing days gallivanting around the state without one squeak of complaint from my rusty Volvo, but then I hit a bit of exposed tree branch on my way up the driveway and destroyed a tire. Welcome home!

I felt similarly deflated later when I spent some time scrolling through the 72 e-mails that had piled up in my absence. The sun is shining, the snow is melting, the daffodils are emerging from their winter sleep--must I deal with this big annoying mess?

The answer is yes. Today I'm back in the office working my way through the pile one message at a time and punctuating my progress with steady sips from two barium sulfate smoothies. Yes: it's CAT-scan day! I'm happy to have a pile of messages to distract me from the taste and texture of these wretched smoothies, which are certain to deflate my sense of spring euphoria. I have a new (used) tire on my car and I'm reducing the inbox backlog, so after the CAT-scan I may take a walk in the woods if the rain holds off. Perhaps spring will pump the air back in my deflated spirits.

Let the sun shine

While my students and colleagues spend spring break in sunnier climes, I joined my daughter yesterday for a tromp through some wintry woods. The sun has been shining for three days straight, quite a treat considering our recent weather, and even though it's cold, I can feel the sunshine thawing winter out of my bones.

Today we met up with some old friends for lunch and tomorrow I'll head to Cleveland to visit a friend from grad school who now works as a grant-writer at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Yet another unexpected answer to the eternal question, What can you do with an English major?) I'm heading home on Tuesday so I can get a CAT-scan and get caught up on some work before classes start again next week. Meanwhile, I'm just soaking in the sun.

Bird on a wire

I'm up in the rec center rowing the erg to the rhythm of "Bird on a Wire" when I notice a couple of college students, a guy and a girl, down on the basketball court playing Horse. He's easily eight or ten inches taller but she's got a lot of spunk and an accurate layup, and it's clear that they've played this game before. They barely need to speak as they follow the rules we all understand. She takes a shot from behind the backboard: swish. He tries the same shot, but it rolls around the rim and bounces out. She shoots from the foul line: swish. He dribbles and shoots: air ball.

They shoot around a few times. I keep rowing. Jennifer Warnes sings:

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He called out to me, "Don't ask for so much."
And I saw a young woman leaning on her darkened door
She called out to me, "Why not ask for more?"

I wonder this week whether I've been asking for too much or too little. I'm asking for a chance to play the game in the broad daylight, to follow the rules as we all understand them, to take my turn and try my shots and do my best and then defer to my opponent in an orderly and reasonable manner.

The game goes on. She shoots. He shoots. She shoots. He misses. Game over. They laugh and walk away arm in arm.

After our game is over, can my colleagues and I walk away arm in arm? That's all I'm asking for. But am I asking too much--or too little?

Musing over an amusing moose

At an important meeting my colleague declared, "I think we all know there's an intangible dead moose in the room," and if it hadn't been totally inappropriate I would have laughed out loud, grateful that if we had to share a small conference room with a dead moose at least it was the intangible kind, because who wants to conduct faculty governance in a room suffused with the aroma of a tangible dead moose and how would you get a dead moose up to the third floor (elevator? stairwells?) or, for that matter, to southern Ohio (by boat? helicopter? pickup truck?) and would it be better to kill the moose first or ship it live and then shoot it just before the meeting? Tragically, our Faculty Manual offers no insight on these issues.

I'm afraid the dead moose issue distracted me from some important point of faculty governance, but one of my duties as Faculty Chair is to muse over any dead mooses that get dropped into my lap--and I much prefer the intangible kind because I never know how much to tip the helicopter pilot.

Doggerel day afternoon

Today I made my Creative Nonfiction students do it doggerel-style, but first I had to define for them the word "doggerel." None of them knew what it was. Kind of tragic, that. Apparently they didn't spend their lives so far scribbling limericks and other light verse characterized by loose or irregular measure--or if they did, they didn't know what to call it.

We've been looking at lyrical prose that employs some of the tools of poetry (rhythm, sound repetition, compression) while remaining prosaic (in the best sense of the word). How difficult would it be to translate "Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village, though" into prose? The problem with familiar verse is that even if we move whole phrases and revise words, we'll still here that rhythm pattern in our minds and look for it in the prose.

So I made them write their own poetry--or doggerel. It didn't have to be any good as long as it was done within ten minutes. Then students traded papers and each student had to translate a classmate's light verse into prose, maintaining a sense of poetry without resorting to formal scansion or rhyme.

It wasn't easy. Once the rhythm pattern of a limerick infects your mind, it's hard to make that doggerel play dead. But in the end they came up with some really interesting bits of writing as well as a new respect for the possibilities of poetic tools within prose.

Hearts and minds

It's only Monday and I've already fulfilled my weekly quota of people crying in my office. One of them was me. We were all crying about different things that I can't really discuss openly, but the thing that impresses me as I work with faculty members from all across campus is how much we really do care about our students' learning, how much we tend to take it personally when students screw up, how much is at stake when someone drops the ball. Some may see what we do as a cerebral exercise engaging only the intellect, but we're committed to engaging students' hearts and minds, and when they reject that engagement, it hits us where it hurts.