…sometimes they’re hard to tell and yet all the more necessary. 

Like a fairy that leaves other-worldly gifts in unlikely places, someone has been spreading magic in the form of art made from books in Edinburgh, Scotland. If you haven’t seen this, it’s worth a look. Sometimes people can be so cool.

The first of ten sculptures left anonymously in a library or other literary center.

What I did over my summer vacation

You know how, as writers, we often feel ineffectual and separate from all those other people in the world? Okay, maybe I’m just speaking for myself, or for poets. Alright, for myself.

Regardless, the question of the usefulness of writing is one that I’ve been asked more than once in more than one venue. I remember just a few months ago one of my well-meaning developmental writing students came into my office, presumably to cheer me up or something, when he said something like, “Jaime, I have to be honest with you. You’ve seemed really tired this quarter, and I just don’t know if teaching writing is worth wearing yourself out over. I mean, seriously, I’m not going to use this stuff outside of school, and I don’t think most other people do either.” Sigh. He was right, I was tired, but not of teaching writing or even of hearing students tell me things like that. He was, after all, telling me the truth as he experiences it.

Besides, there was some wisdom in his statement. A lot of students really don’t use the academic skills we teach them: MLA format, essay organization, how to locate a scholarly article on a library database…. But, whether they know it or not, they do use the less tangible, more cognitive skills we teach them: to look deeply at a text, to analyze an argument, to question authority.

These are the reasons I enjoy teaching college composition, but I often struggle with the applicability of it. When, as my student asked implicitly, will they ever use the academic skills I’m charged with teaching them? When will essays ever become relevant to anyone outside of academia?

I know of at least two places (I’m sure there are more.) where essays are not only relevant, they are promoting social change. The first is my own, newly started nonprofit organization, Dream School Commons. The second is Eastern Washington University alumnus Ross Carper’s website, Beyond the Bracelet.

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After a month, I'm only on page fifty. Sigh.

I’ve been hearing about this book since I was in grad school at Colorado State in 2003. Little whispers of awe seeped into my psyche until, while at Powell’s about a month ago, I bought it without really knowing anything substantial about it. Of course, I read the book’s inside flap, and from that I decided it would be a challenge, but a fun one. Without going into too much detail, one of the main narratives of the book (yes, there are multiple narratives using multiple fonts and footnotes) is the story of a family that moves into a house that they discover is bigger inside than it is on the outside. This, apparently, set into motion disturbing events. I can’t tell you that for sure though because I haven’t gotten past page fifty.

I wake up every morning to this book sitting like a tidy, rectangular black hole on my night stand and feel accosted by it. I won’t read you today, I think. You can’t make me. But occasionally, it does make me or I give in or something, and the book opens to some embarrassing double-digit page to taunt me with its impermeability. And after a page, or two if I’m feeling ambitious, I expel the breath I’ve been holding and once again give up.

What’s wrong with me? Or to see it another way, what’s wrong with this book?

Just today, I looked House of Leaves up on Wikipedia to see what I could learn:

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I was looking for a happy ending...or maybe just an ending.

I’ve had this blog post germinating in my brain for a while, and the end of spring quarter seems like an opportune time to share it. It also seems a little cruel to all you lovely MFA students who just graduated because what I’m about to say is the opposite of hopeful: Life outside of graduate school, what some call the “real world,” can be a floundering, heart-wrenching experience. Let me explain.

I used to be under the impression that graduate school, or academia in general, wasn’t much different from the rest of the world. Maybe I saw it as a microcosm, a more manageable chunk of real life, that still required the daily monotony of  mundane tasks and bureaucracy that exists in most environments. Just days ago, I realized I don’t believe this anymore.

I overheard one of my colleagues telling a student that school and real life are pretty much the same thing and that the student shouldn’t feel like he isn’t participating in real life just because he’s in school. I perked up at this because I realized that I was, maybe for the first time, internally disagreeing with this notion. Sure, the student shouldn’t feel any sense of guilt or remorse for burying himself in books rather than sloughing all that off for something more “real.” That’s not the part I disagree with.

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All lovers of language should read this book.

Sometime last year Chris Howell remarked in passing that undergraduates should have to spend an entire course learning how to write a sentence. At the time I was teaching some of the very undergrads he was talking about, and even though I agreed that they needed a deeper understanding of language and the funny little ideas sloshing around in their brains, I was hesitant to go off the deep end of the grammar pool. That is until I read Stanley Fish’s new book, How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One.

First, a disclaimer: I, unlike some of my friends and many of my students, was immersed in grammar instruction both in high school and for an entire year of college linguistics. I remember diagramming sentences in tenth grade English. I know how to use commas and a lot of the parts of speech, although I still get confused by simple verb tenses like present participle. (Isn’t that like “I am eating strawberries”? See, I get confused.) And these moments of confusion about the “taxonomy,” as Fish calls it, of language worry me. Does this mean I’m not a real writer because I can’t remember what an appositive is or the difference between that and a prepositional phrase? But I feel like I’m pretty good at understanding the relationships between words and phrases and how they can be put together to make an interesting unit of thought.

And that’s the basic philosophy behind Fish’s book:

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Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers

and

The Decline of the English Department: How it happened and what could be done to reverse it

Sometimes this reality feels like drowning

The 50-something-year-old electrician comes in half an hour late every day. Sits in the front row. Turns in every assignment. Late. Four kids, he says. Ex-wife doesn’t help him, he says. Unemployed, he says. Like the widow in the back row who comes early everyday, takes notes in graceful, dancing cursive, asks questions the others are afraid to ask. Her job was outsourced, she says. She’s been diagnosed with an incurable disease, she says. Because of the doctor’s appointments, she’ll have to be late just this once like the boy, no more than twenty-three, who left one Friday and returned a week later with a scar crawling out of his shirt collar. Open heart surgery, he says. Please excuse my absences, he begs. Then there’s the Romanian boys who misunderstand all of my instructions and the middle-aged man in my night class born with broken ears who misses all the s’s. And the boy who came every night but never turned in a thing. Last week he was gone. And so was the girl in foster care and the boy who lost his apartment. Last week the girl with the baby almost left her husband. He’s doing drugs, she says. I have to quit school, she says. But she doesn’t. She’s come back, wants to tough it out until the end of the quarter. And I want to teach them to trust themselves, to love language enough to puzzle it out. But everyday I’m mostly just astounded that their heads are still above water, that they haven’t drowned yet. Most of them continue to show up. And they’re still determined to learn, even after sleepless nights with sick children or abusive partners or situations they hide from me with smiles. Even after years of being told that they’re stupid, that their writing is weak and their ideas no good, they show up. I haven’t written in months. I’m reading a book a month, if I’m lucky. My literary life is drowning. But every morning a hundred lives float around mine like buoys and pull me up. Someday I’ll write about this.

One of my favorite books

I was headed into hour eleven of a fourteen hour day last week when I decided that what my developmental writing class needed was a little poetry. After all, I fed them Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” the week before, and they ate it up like Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. In other words, they loved it. I read the story aloud, and when I got to the last sentence– “They unlocked the door, and even more slowly, let Margot out.” –I heard a student in the back of the room whisper, This is gonna be awesome. So there I was a week later in my closet of an office reeling from that little bit of encouragement and searching for a poem that would provoke them to similar states of excitement. That’s when I remembered the final section of Adrienne Rich’s poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World”  in the book by the same title. In a rush, I looked it up online and read it for the umpteenth time, and then the craziest thing happened. I started weeping, like really crying my eyes out like a dumb ol’ baby. I was tired, yes, and stressed out, yes that too, but it was something else, too. That poem was the most beautiful thing I’d experienced in weeks. I was looking for direction, and there it was telling me who I was and how I felt. And by the time I got to the last sentence– “I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else / left to read / there where you have landed, stripped as you are.” –I had the eeriest feeling that Adrienne Rich had been residing in my brain all these years. Yes, this is why I read and write poetry, because there is nothing else left that will bring me back to life after all the countless external forces have sucked me dry. Thank you, Ms. Rich. I’ll be sharing this poem with my students in a couple weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What poem, story, or novel revives you this way?

Sometimes the boundaries are too blurry to see.

First, let me make a disclaimer: I can’t really talk about this movie. If I did, I mean, if I really, really talked about it, I’d give away the punchline. Catfish is worth seeing mainly for what happens in the last forty minutes or so, and I don’t want to ruin it for you.

So I’ll start with this: What do last week’s episode of The Office, politician Richard Blumenthal, and the new documentary Catfish all have in common? They all raise the question of what it means to be a real person. What do I mean by “real”? Well, that’s sort of the problem. Maybe it’s tricky to define.

Let’s start with The Office. Last week, Pam decided that she wanted a new position and a raise, but she knew that no one was going to just up and give it to her. So what did she do? She acted like she had been promoted to office manager, and, low and behold, after a little lying here and there, people started to believe that she really was the office manager. Like magic, she willed it to be, and it was. That’s pretty tricky. Pam was just doing what successful people do, right? She was projecting her desired future self out into the world and hoping that something good would bounce back.

Blumenthal’s situation isn’t so tricky in my opinion. In case you haven’t been watching the news, Richard Blumenthal is the Democrat running to replace Sen. Chris Dodd in Connecticut. He’s also the guy who’s been in trouble more than once for saying he fought in the Vietnam war when he was really only in the Marine Corp Reserves. But something drove Blumenthal to tell people that he went to Vietnam. Something made that a more appealing story than the truth. Maybe he was thinking about the persona of a soldier, what that’s supposed to mean to people, and how he knew that his version of being a soldier, the true version, wasn’t compelling enough. People wouldn’t get that warm, patriotic feeling about a man who avoided the draft, even if it was a draft into an unjust war. Right? I disagree. My father was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, serving nineteen months in prison for it, and I’m incredibly proud of that fact. So why does this politician feel the need to create a new self in order to get what he wants? Read more »