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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.

Dream School Commons started as a tiny seed of an idea about five years ago after I’d watched a documentary about TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) called TED: The Future We Will Create. To summarize, TED is a nonprofit that organizes conferences about “Ideas Worth Spreading,” as their tagline states. Each year, TED grants wishes to people who have ideas about how to change the world for the better. That wish-granting includes getting to present at one of their conferences, winning $100,000 to help kick start your idea, and getting access to thousands of influential people who might be willing to help you get your idea off the ground. One such example is Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which started as a TED Prize-winning wish.

So, after learning about TED, I wondered in my most idealistic way, if I could go to a TED conference, what would I wish for? Dream School Commons is the answer. It’s a place for people to contribute ideas, stories, and research about how to re-imagine education at all levels in America. It’s a place to read about others’ experiences in education that might inspire new ways of going about the business of educating people. Our ultimate goal, after what will probably be years of idea collection and research, is to find funding and start our first Dream School. You can read more about our mission here.

Also, I should note that the lovely Amaris Ketcham designed our logo and banner.

If you’re interested in contributing, visit our story page, read our article submission guidelines, or participate in the discussion forum. Also, I should mention that this site isn’t just for seasoned writers. We want to hear from school-aged children, those who’ve had negative experiences in school, teachers, business owners, the guy who walks down your street everyday collecting cans. Schools have touched all of our lives in one way or another. What’s your story?

Because good writing should make you want to get up and do some good.

Another website that’s turning writing into a tool for social change, Beyond the Bracelet, asks writers to tell “stories of the movement from awareness to action.”

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:

It turns out that what I’m feeling is expected. House of Leaves is considered ergodic literature, which is defined as follows by Espen J. Aarseth:

In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

Apparently, according to Mr. Aarseth, the reading I usually do requires trivial effort, while House of Leaves requires nontrivial effort. Go figure.

I have to say here and now that I think this is a load of crap. To measure the effort required to read a book by the amount the eye must move, or more specifically in relation to House of Leaves, by the number of footnotes, types of fonts, or parallel narratives is, in my humble opinion, missing the point.

Of course, this goes back to the old question of what literature should do, doesn’t it. Sigh. To make us think and feel and better understand the human condition…blah blah blah.

But what if I can’t enter the book? I like the idea of House of Leaves just as there was something about The Stones of

Two years later, I'm on page 314 of 581. Why can't I just finish the damn thing?

Summer that made me attempt it twice, getting over three hundred pages into it before I had to surrender myself to lighter reading (i.e. graduate level poetry collections).

The first sentence of The Stones of Summer is a beautiful puzzle:

When August came, thick as a dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and then they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood.

Wow, right? Yeah, but that level of detail and creeping pace continues without, if I remember correctly, the tether of a clear plot, tension, something to hold onto. The glimpses of plot often seemed inconsequential moving on to some new slightly disconnected scene, but, again from what I remember, the book does become a bit more lucid in the second half as Dawes, the main character, makes it into adulthood, so that’s something, right?

But I couldn’t finish it, not yet at least. Maybe this is a case of ‘when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ Or maybe I’m just a trivial reader. I don’t know, but I usually love reading, except on those early mornings and late nights when House of Leaves fixes its red eye on me as a sore reminder that I haven’t won yet. You will not defeat me, House of Leaves!

Anyone else have books that beat their intellectual egos?

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.

The notion I disagree with is that academia and the “real world” are the same realities with the same expectations and safety nets and check points. This is simply not true. And here’s how I know: The light I saw coming at the end of that long tunnel of education when I graduated with my MFA, the one I thought held hope and opportunity and greatness, the light I thought would save me from obscurity and meaninglessness, that light, I’m sorry to say, was a mirage.

In graduate school, I was spurred on by weekly workshops that demanded new poetry and fellow writers who demanded better and, well, quite practically, lots and lots of resources: Pam, the faculty, the conference room full of literary magazines and past students’ theses, Voice Over once a month…. In graduate school, I was working toward that light, the belief that if I worked my ass off something good would happen. I was looking for a result, a prize, a destination. These are things the real world does not offer, at least not immediately, as my gratification would have it.

For the longest time, I, too, believed that school was really just an extension of the outside world, but the real world does not require weekly thesis meetings or, quite frankly, care if you ever write another word in your life, much less publish. The “real world”–by whatever matrix it’s been created–ties strings to all of your desires and pulls…hard and fast, until you do one of two things: say mercy and give up or cut the strings.

What does cutting the strings look like? For me, it means teaching less, making my students something other than first priority, and seeking out nourishment that will satiate those desires that have been perishing over the past year. My friend and fellow poet Jess Lakritz and I applied to the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop this summer. (We’ll find out in a couple days whether or not we got in. Keep your fingers crossed!) I’m not teaching or working at all during the month of August and half of September. Instead, I’ll do yoga three days a week, write daily, polish my thesis poems a bit more, and submit. I will not think about my teaching life at all in August. This is a promise I’ve made to myself. It’s the only way I’ll stay sane.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that the life I’m living now is not the one I’d expected when I graduated a year ago. In some ways, it’s richer because it’s unexpected. More than anything, what I’ve learned since graduation is that my attitude of entitlement stemmed from the expectation that my life would continue on an upward track of achievement. I wasn’t prepared for the quiet, the stillness, the nothingness that followed. I’ve reluctantly crawled beyond the tunnel, the light has faded. Now I’m moving toward something new called self-reliance and self-discipline.

If you’re just leaving graduate school, what are your expectations for yourself out there in the big, bad world? How do you plan to keep your desires from being ripped apart (sorry for the melodrama, but gotta continue with the metaphor)?

I suppose if I could give one bit of advice it would be to be patient with yourself. If your true longing is to become a writer, you will find the time, but it may be in time, and the “real world” will make room for you if you stab the crap out of it over and over again with a sharp object.

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:

A little while back I observed that many people are put off writing because they fear committing one or more of the innumerable errors that seem to lie in wait for them at every step of the composition. But if one understands that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships and that the number of relationships involved is finite, one understands too that there is only one error to worry about, the error of being illogical, and only one rule to follow: make sure that every component of your sentence is related to the other components in a way that is clear and unambiguous (unless ambiguity is what you are aiming at). And how do you do that? Not by learning rules, but by coming to know the limited number of relationships your words, phrases, and clauses can enter into, and becoming alert to those times when the relationships are not established or are unclear: when a phrase just dangles in space, when a connective has nothing to connect to, when a prepositional phrase is in search of a verb to complement, when a pronoun cannot be paired with a noun. (20-21)

So yes, while discounting the need for rules and championing relationships, Fish does use the very language of taxonomy (prepositional phrase, verb, pronoun…) that he spends an entire chapter railing against (Chapter Two: “Why You Won’t Find the Answer in Strunk and White”). This is the main beef I have with the book, but it’s a small one, and one I’m willing to forgive since Fish does such a lovely job of otherwise turning the sentence into a palatable morsel of language. He has to use common language to discuss the sentence, after all, and naming the parts of speech for what they are isn’t really the problem Fish is arguing against.

He’s arguing against the tradition that many of us come from where rules and errors had to be memorized and practiced in primers until we could write the most perfect, albeit boring as hell, sentence our teachers had ever hoped for.

See, Stanley Fish, unlike my tenth grade English teacher, radiates an obvious love for language. He knows the power of language and promises that “If you know sentences, you know everything. Good sentences promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world.” To be able to make sense of the world! How delightful! It sounds like a lofty promise, but in 160 pages, Fish explicates beautiful and amazing sentences from a whole load of writers like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, John Milton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Agatha Christie and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name a few. I do wish he’d skimmed more sentences from our contemporaries since the styles of Milton and Dickens probably aren’t ones I’m going to try to emulate. But still, I just keep going back to the intuitive way Fish talks about writing sentences. And how I wish I’d had this kind of instruction earlier. Anyone who’s interested in writing should read this book.

So…do me a favor, will you? Tell Chris Howell that I’m going to do it. I’m going to spend a whole quarter on the sentence next time I teach developmental writing (it’s called “Fundamentals of Writing: Sentence to Paragraph” after all). I’m going to use some of Stanley Fish’s exercises to get my students to play with language. I’m going to make them explicate their own sentences the way Fish does with his. We’re going to play games with words, treating sentences like puzzles, and in the end I hope they’ll understand their own English language, and the world, a little better.

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?That’s the question Catfish is asking as well. How far do we change our selves to get what we want? And at what point does it become a farce? I’m still asking that question about this documentary even though it seems like it should be simple. What is real? What isn’t? Draw the line. But what about the notion that some lives are so overwhelmed by compromise that the mind stops being able to negotiate? What about this film is emotionally true? Does any of that count as reality? Do any of the participants actually experience love? And what about the truth? Is it better than the lie?

I suppose you may be wondering what any of this has to do with writing. Well, not a whole lot, except for the fact that nonfiction writers seem to always be negotiating their selves in order to write about their lives in ways that are both true and interesting. In order to do that, they have to, in a sense, become politicians. (I’m using the definition of “politician” that includes a person who uses “intrigue or strategy in obtaining any position of power or control.”) They have to remove the parts that aren’t as fun or smart or dangerous. They have to fill in holes. I suppose I’m curious, on a philosophical level, what makes the woman in Catfish so different from the rest of us. We all spit shine our lives the best we can when company comes, don’t we? And what about the filmmaker and his brother? What did they compromise by making Catfish?

Just go see it already. And then ask yourself who else you might be if given the right circumstances.