Some of the most legendary elements of theater history are the tales of full-scale riots that erupted at performances. At a certain period of time in Paris, it seemed that a riot at a premiere was commonplace– Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and Maeterlink’s Pelleas and Melisande are just a few of the avant-garde classics that I can think of that resulted in chaos. Before that, in New York, the 1849 Astor Place Riot killed something like 25 people.

And though in theory I understand that theater filled the role that movies, TV, widely broadcast sports games, etc. fill for us today–namely, I suppose, a mix of entertainment, community, and catharsis–it has always nevertheless been difficult for me to picture these riots as the result of what was happening on stage. It is difficult for me to imagine ordinary people walking in off the street and caring, in some engaged, personal, and critical manner, about the artistic expression of a playwright and a handful of performers and technicians. In spite of all I know about the content of these plays and the status quo at the time they were performed, in spite of everything I know about what these artists were trying to break at the time, I can’t quite make the jump in my mind from a houseful of stiff, quietly scandalized theater-goers to a houseful of enraged, destroying, trampling theater-goers (never mind the tomatoes). In fact I have difficulty not picturing them all yawning and discreetly checking their phones before drifting to sleep upright in their red velvet seats. Read more »

This site has a plethora of lessons, exercises, and activities for K-12 reading and writing teachers.

After reading Laura’s last post about what she learned from teaching third graders, I thought I’d do a shameless plug for one of my favorite websites, ReadWriteThing.org.

(Disclaimer: I write for this site, so I may be a little biased, but I don’t think so. It really is one of the best professional sites for language arts teachers. One reason I’m sure of this is because of the process I go through as a writer of lessons and activities for the site. Everything is peer-reviewed, so once I write a lesson and turn it in, it goes to a professional teacher/writer in the field for review. Then it comes back to me with notes for revision–unless I’m having a really good day and they think my work is brilliant–at which time I make revisions and corrections before turning it in for final approval. It’s quite a process, but it’s worth it because the material on the site ends up being top quality.)

Anyhow, I was also thinking about all the writers in MFA programs out there doing service in schools like we do at Eastern with Writers in the Community. They should definitely know about this site. It’s super easy to navigate, and you can search for anything from handouts and activities to complete units that will last weeks. It’s something all reading and writing teachers should know about, even those at the college level because many of the high school level lessons can easily be adapted for college students. So if any of you are teachers or thinking of going into teaching after you graduate, I highly recommend this site.

I’m back from vacation. Please hold your applause until the end of the blog entry.

Some things I learned on my 5,893-mile, 14-day road trip through British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and Alaska:

In Dawson City, Yukon, they take their Robert Service very seriously. Their are daily recitations/performances of his work, and the Robert Service House in Dawson City has folks dressed in period garb who will recite his work and give you little mini-info-tours as you walk past. (They’re a little scary.) If you don’t know “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by the time you leave town, you must’ve had earplugs in. Shooting of Dan McGrew
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So I’ve been writing a lot the last few weeks, dodging the portentous summer slump of which the recent EWU graduates warned me. I’ve velcroed waterproof cleats to my feet, tied a lifejacket around my waist, and spent a beautiful afternoon in Lake Wawasee, kicking through the bellies of bulbous sturgeons, steeping the water red with their stupid entrails; I’ve accidentally shown my friends a gay porn, after pulling down my sweatpants to show them how many pubes I’ve sprouted; I’ve forced my younger sister to chew stick after stick of blue wintergreen gum and stick the wads to a color-by-numbers American flag thumbtacked to my bedroom door for an art project of which my dad, Warren, disapproves. The only problem is, none of it’s real – it’s fiction.

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Poems that Open the Summer of Your Mind

The best reading experiences seem to happen in summer. You’re finally free from the overbearing school year. You get to pick up the books whose petticoats you’ve been peeking up. Yesterday I turned in my grades for the science fiction class I was teaching and felt my first afternoon of summer. I picked up The Dragonfly, the poems of Amelia Rosselli translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace, published by Chelsea Editions.  

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of this beautiful book from Deborah who was one of my literature professors at the University of Washington in 1995 and who has remained a generous mentor to me ever since. And though Deborah is worlds beyond me intellectually—and, therefore, so are her interests and her work—I found The Dragonfly to be accessible. If I read it in winter or even this fall, maybe I’ll dig further into the philosophical layers and poetics, but now, in a summer state of mind, it purely entertained and infused me with the delirious logic that I love to soak in when reading poetry.  

Roselli uses repetition to dizzying effect. Do you remember how delicious it is to roll down a grassy hill? Roselli’s hills are covered in wildflowers, cottonwood puffs, feathers, leaves, grasses, strings, and as you roll you collect, becoming nestly and wild. She does this best in the title poem, “The Dragonfly,” which was originally published in Yale Italian Poetry. Here’s an example of what I mean:  

I don’t know if I rhyme from bliss or beleaguered
pain. I don’t know if I rhyme for enchantment or for reason
and don’t know if you know that I rhyme exclusively
for you. Too much sun has the sea drunk in its
placid prison, where the embroidery of the
sea refuses to lay a hand on sunken vessels.
Dawn shades to gray in the distance… (95)                               

The world of “I don’t know” rolls from intense feeling to intimacy to untamed natural imagery that is stuck in the confines of needlepoint and perspective. Here’s some more rolling and wild gathering: Read more »

Great Literature Retitled to Boost Web Site Traffic

The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The
American Dream
1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like

(Lacher also wrote this Short Imagined Monologue, titled “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.)

With apologies to Lacher:

Lose pounds now — 17 Foolproof Strategies to Avoid Getting Money for Food

Dramatic Proof That a Sturdy, Religious Marriage is Superior to One Full of Passion and Intensity and Rash Acts in Train Stations

Whales die! Whalers die! Lone Survivor Spills Story

Anyone else?

Lori Nix creates her own places to photograph

I was reading a friend’s novel manuscript, and something didn’t feel quite right about it. Sure, there were characters, and these characters interacted and said things to each other, and as it moved along, the plot lines got more complicated, connection and disconnection alternated and there was some tension—so why was I feeling the need to complain and critique? I knew the state where the novel was set, though I knew it only theory—somewhere in the pages, I had been told the location, but I hadn’t been shown the location. The novel felt like a giant short story, moved quickly for a long arc; it never settled down and gave me a description of the world I was supposed to inhabit.

In the end, I felt obligated to give advice to my friend: it’s a novel; you can take a few pages here and there and tell me if these are prefab homes where the toilets keep breaking even though they are new or if the character lives on the other side of the railroad tracks and blueberry bushes have started to creep in and reclaim the area. You aren’t going to lose your reader if you relax into some scenic description, I said. My friend nodded, took the manuscript home, revised for a few weeks, and then handed me the updated material. Two or three lines of setting had been added, even though a new scene took the main character to New York City.

I wanted to smell the Big Apple, to know if the sidewalks were sticky, if the city was more populated than the suburbs where the character lived, if the character got jostled in the crowded streets, if a random elbow jarred the character in the subway. And I wondered what was wrong with me.
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The Mona Lisa

So I went to the Louvre this morning and saw the Mona Lisa (or, as the French call it, La Joconde). I wasn’t particularly interested in going out of my way to find it, but my sister wanted to, and so we battled the massive crowds so that eventually, we could view the small painting from about ten feet away (you aren’t allowed any closer). I stood, trying for a look of reverence, while my sister snapped a picture (no flash), and then we fought our way back out of the room (apparently there’s no better place to stop and have a long conversation with someone). We continued through the hall of Italien painteurs, looking at the paintings, but not stopping to stare. We had discussed earlier how we are each more impressed by the sculptures and ancient artifacts (like the mummified cat) than we are by paintings, and so maybe this is why, but neither of us can understand what makes the Mona Lisa so special. I assume that many people there saw it for the same reason we did—because if you’re in Paris, and you’re in the Louvre, you are sort of supposed to see it—but why? We even saw a large-ish group of people clustered around a similar looking painting (we think they were confused), so even with our relatively high level of painting ignorance, we were by no means the worst off—but how special can something be if you mistake it for another painting? Read more »

The other night I was having a discussion with a friend about what movie to rent for our movie night.  I suggested we watch the new Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland.   He looked at me like I was nuts.  I know that not everyone is into the weirdness Tim Burton weaves into the stories he retells so I was prepared to leave it at that.  But then my friend said something I wasn’t prepared for, he asked if it bothered me that Tim Burton was bastardizing our childhood.  And then he went out on a rant about what a horrible thing Johnny Depp and Tim Burton had done to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ending with “proof” that Gene Wilder thought the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was just a money making scheme. Read more »

I spent a lot of time teaching creative writing to third graders this year, and though our time together has ended, I can’t stop thinking about certain tidbits that they taught me while I was trying to teach them.  For example:

Silence is golden–especially in a room full of 8- and 9-year-olds.

Bodily functions are always funny.

A story is composed of a character, a problem, and (in third grade, at least) a solution.

Lines and plots from TV, books, and movies only improve with repetition and rewriting and repetition and rewriting.

The tooth fairy is very important.

Limericks don’t have to be dirty.  They can be about talking guitars from Mars.

Every story is better with illustrations.

Sometimes the best pieces of writing are produced through Mad Libs.

The best part about writing is sharing it.