Three days ago, I finally started reading it.

I’m not very far yet—only through the first duo of introductions and stories, but this is largely because I spend most of my time with this book flipping through it. I glance through the introductions, looking for connections and observations, but then, when I start to read—really read—I let the book fall, let the pages close. Anthologies can be explored in any order, of course, but for this first read, I want to experience it in the way the editors thought best.

I met with a fellow faculty member yesterday to discuss a freelance writing course we may end up teaching together this summer, and our discussion eventually turned to the idea of mentorship. We talked about our experiences in our MFA programs (and before, in undergrad), talked about the ways the faculty helped us over stumbling blocks, the ways they saw and encouraged our strengths. We talked about times we hadn’t been challenged enough.

Good writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, though sometimes I think new writers think it does. I poll my first-year writing classes on the first day of class, asking them what they think makes a good writer, and without fail, no one mentions writing for audience or revision or seeking out help when you need it. Most of my students balk when I have them workshop their pieces in groups, wondering out loud whether it can really help to have a peer look the piece over.

Peer-to-peer relationships are different than the ones explored in Of a Monstrous Child, but they are important just the same. To have similar moments of uncertainty, to still be learning the same lessons, to still need help with the same things. But the further I go in my writing career—and the further I read in this book—the more I realize that how I’ve thought of my various writing relationships isn’t exactly true. I have mentors and I have peer readers, but I’m coming to see that the difference between the two types is simply time and credentials. It’s the attitude I approach the person with: looking for answer or looking for conversation, though I usually end up with the latter from both parties.

Over the summer, I posted here about the doubts I was gathering to myself after getting a particularly difficult rejection. I had been overconfident in the piece I sent out, to the point where even the kind personalized rejection hit me hard. I wondered if I was really good enough to keep writing or if I was just wasting my time. I was struggling without the structure of graduate school, without regular workshops or thesis meetings, without being able to sit down, face-to-face, with fellow writers and have a discussion about any and everything writing.

The editor, Roxane Gay, saw my post and offered to help me with revisions on the piece. She sent me a detailed email of the problems in the story as well as a marked up version of the story itself. It was exactly what I needed—not just the kindness and assistance, but the faith, the gesture of someone essentially saying that, yes, I could still do this.

I spent months on the edits, not only applying them to the piece in question, but also to my other work. I began to see the own moments of trouble in my stories, and also how to fix them. I didn’t always get it right, but for the first time since leaving my MFA program, I felt my writing progressing again. Then, on Friday, the piece was accepted for publication.

The people who have taught me over the years have left me with more than improvements to my own writing. Each semester I step into the classroom with my own group of writers to teach, and I look back at the ways I have been helped, at the things that did and didn’t work for me, at the challenges I faced and the critique I received, and it helps me become a better mentor in turn.

* Though I will use the term “mentor” throughout this post, I find it somewhat problematic. It implies a hierarchy that I’m no longer sure exists. I find that I learn from all writing and from all writers, be they better or worse than me (two other very problematic terms). Reading slush, for instance, often teaches me what I should avoid in my writing, just as reading work I admire offers me techniques to try. “Mentor” seems to me more of a one-way street of knowledge, but I’ve had peers give me fantastic feedback/ideas/advice and had mentor-like figures offer knowledge I rejected.

Student who paid attention in high school English: I disagree.

ME: You’re wrong. Here’s why. [NOTE, in case my tenure committee is reading this: I say this very kindly, taking advantage of a teachable moment, making sure that the student understands that his/her participation is valued and feels both validated and enlightened.]

STUDENT: My HS English teacher said there are no wrong answers about literature as long as you can defend your ideas.

ME: Your HS English teacher was wrong. There are plenty of wrong answers about literature. What your teacher meant was that there are also plenty of defensible potentially right answers too.

[LONG PAUSE]

STUDENT: So are you saying there are wrong answers in literature and that my HS English teacher, who was my personal role model and who died last week after a heroic bout with cancer, was wrong about everything?

[LONG PAUSE]

ME: I’m sure your teacher was a remarkable person.

STUDENT: A remarkable person who was wrong about everything.

ME: Probably not about everything.

[PAUSE]

ME: Just about this thing.

[At this point, some people are crying in the back of the classroom.]

ME: Let’s move on, shall we?

Dear HS English teachers,

Please stop teaching my future students wrong (read: oversimplified) stuff. They get enough of that from TV.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Frey

the guy who will have them as college freshmen

I’ve always been uncomfortable displaying anger. I listen to all telemarketers. I’ve never hung up on anyone. I don’t send mean text messages. And I certainly struggle with face-to-face encounters, always erring to the side of politeness and self-effacement, instead choosing to turn the blame and anger inward. On the one hand, it’s nice because I’m not someone who’s drawn to angry outbursts that I regret later. On the other hand, I have a hard time sticking up for myself in situations where I have every right to be angry.

For example, two months ago, my xbox broke. Long story short (because it’s a crazy long story), Microsoft screwed up majorly handling my repair and a series of phone calls afterward, dealing with my repair and replacement xbox. The end result was that their mistake cost me money and over twenty hours of my life. I’ve called them probably two dozen times, and despite the fact that they refuse to compensate me in any way (or even give me my money back), I have yet to raise my voice at anyone; you see, I feel bad even though their the ones screwing up at every turn.

But twice this week I’ve gotten angry. The first time was in class after a student complained about the reading I had assigned, calling it “the dumbest reading I’ve ever read.” The second time was during my soccer game after I overheard a girl complaining to her friend about the way I sub players to keep playing time equal. It surprised me both times when I reacted with anger (“I get really sick of listening to everyone complain about the homework I give. I assign things for very specific reasons, so maybe you need to spend more time trying to discover what those reasons are. And twenty-four pages of reading is not an unreasonable amount.” “Do not ever criticize the way I run this team again, and now you can sit longer waiting for your turn to go back in.”)

And boy did it feel good.

I mean, adrenaline pumping, endorphin rushing good. Want to do this much more often (I hate to say “all the time”) good. Seriously how did it take me twenty-seven years to figure this out good. And, just a little bit: how can I keep this from becoming a bad thing good?

There’s a balance to find here, and probably a lesson to be learned, but all I want to think about is when I get to do it next. Oh, and about how I’m going to get Microsoft to give me my money back before I switch to Playstation.

In tenth grade, our first assignment was to write a sort of writer’s autobiography, to assess our strengths and weaknesses as writers. Like an idiot, I included a line that basically said I was awesome. My teacher wrote one word next to my claim: “Really?” That was the first time I really realized that I had a lot to learn, because it was the first time my writing knowledge had been challenged. I still react this way, and now make sure that my readers don’t sugar coat their feedback. I just want it straight; my feelings are less important.

During my sixth year of college, I took a graduate-level English class at the invitation of the professor. Our final project was to create a graduate-level project on one of our books. That was pretty much our assignment. My professor, who knew I was applying to MFA programs, encouraged me to use my creative writing skills in the paper, and I ended up writing a creative research paper where I mimicked Carole Maso’s Ava, a lyric novel that plays with truth, has an unreliable narrator, and no paragraphs. (This is probably the reason I really enjoyed writing the imitation pieces in grad school—I got to play.)

I always loved these hybrid assignments, and I’ve been brainstorming ways to introduce them in my own class. How does social media relate to communication? How is truth malleable? How can creative writing enter the research-writing classroom? How can I introduce writing assignments that get the students to respond as if to a community of peers, from a real desire to contribute to the dialogue, rather than simply because they want to pass the class?

Strangely, looking back at the first of my two examples here (or perhaps because of it), the assignment I’ve probably responded the most negatively to over the years has been that of the writer’s autobiography. It has always felt pretentious to me, because it feels so limiting, as if I’m supposed to make an inventory of what I’ve done and what I’ve learned up to this point but which leaves no room for the fact that I don’t think I know much definitively, because the day I stop learning through my writing is probably the day I stop writing altogether.

So what assignments/teaching styles did you respond to? What did you appreciate in your various writing class, and what made you go crazy? Help a new professor out.

At first I put this all on hold because it just wasn’t realistic (so said I) to move to a new city with a low-paying job and an unspeakable monthly loan payment. Plus, Michigan came with free rent, a nearby literary community that was easy to break into (hi, Ann Arbor!), and tickets to Spartan football games. A year, I said, then I’ll do something new.

And I am planning something new—it’s just not anything that was already on my list. Instead, I’ve decided to spend a year in France* teaching English. Well, technically it’s nine months, but my visa will be for a year. If my application is accepted, I’ll leave a year from this September. I’m young, I thought. If I don’t do something like this now, while my entire life is pretty much unattached, when will I do it?

Of course, I don’t know that much about teaching English to non-native speakers. I’ve done some tutoring to very advanced speakers before, but never to kids (8 to 18 years). But I figure an interest in language, in saying things, can only help. Plus, I’ll only be working 12 hours per week while there, so hypothetically I could come home with a finished book, or at least a bunch of new stories. And then I’ll get on to that list of mine.

* For anyone who is now saying, “How awesome!” a working knowledge of French is required for this program. But there are similar programs in (I think) Italy, Spain, and Austria, for Italian, Spanish, and German speakers. Also, Finland offers a program where you don’t need any language knowledge. Just English.

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?

But anyway, this song has had me (and many others) thinking. For those that don’t know, last year Rihanna was involved in a very public episode of domestic violence with her then-boyfriend Chris Brown. She was attacked, her pictures leaked to the media, and then months of scrutiny followed, during which no few voices wondered what she had done to deserve it, because clearly, she must have deserved it. Anyway, I won’t go into the many details of the months that followed, of the back and forth in the situation and their relationship; there’s Google for that. It died down eventually, but then word broke that she was doing this duet with Eminem, and it all came back to the surface.

Though many do question whether or not Rihanna should have done such a song, I see no reason to condemn her decision to use her voice in this way, to tell this story. The concern I have seen repeated in feminist circles, however, is whether or not the song actually does make a statement against domestic violence, and whether or not the song’s main audience is mature enough to get any anti-violence argument or whether they will only see domestic violence as sexy and glorified. However, this discussion leaves out one very important factor, and ultimately sets out to control the parameters of Rihanna’s art based on what others prescribe to her as her social views.

And they may very well be Rihanna’s social views. I would find it hard to believe Rihanna herself promotes domestic violence or wants teenagers to go home and start hitting their partners, but that does not mean that all of her art has to automatically take the completely opposite view or say silent on the subject. There is room for ugly in art, and there’s room to go against what we believe.

I’ve actually been having similar problems in my own writing lately (and by lately, I mean the last year). I have a character faced with a decision that, down one path, satisfies my social beliefs and would make my book fit into a specific social set of literature, and it’s really the choice I wanted my character to make from the beginning. Down the other path I write a much more conservative character would will please people I don’t want to please and quite possibly get my book scoffed at for yet another negative example of this social issue. Yet it’s what my character would do. I’ve spent months and months trying to make it not so, and the book has suffered for it. I think now that it’s time to do what’s right artistically, what’s right for the story, even if it might go against the message I might put on a billboard, even if it might make me seem less committed to my cause than I am.

So maybe there’s step three for you. Not only do I like this song and admit it publicly, but now I’m learning life lessons from it. I’ll leave you with the video, which I’ve also watched, though I’ll admit half the reason for that was because it has Dominic Monaghan in it, and I’ll watch anything with a LOST actor or actress in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelHwf8o7_U

I teach at a community college and most of my students work close to full time while trying to keep up with a full course load. Many of them also have families. This week I taught a module at my school’s First Year Introduction (FYI) seminar about how to succeed in science classes. (I teach physics.) FYI is like a booth camp for students who feel they need some preparation for student life and learn to model successful college student behavior. I told the FYI students the same I tell my regular students: the college curriculum load is taught as if you spend two hours outside of class on preparation and studying for every hour you spend in lecture. That means that for a five credit class, you spend a total of fifteen hours per week on just that subject. If you take a full load of three classes, you’re all of a sudden up to 45 hours per week of just school work—more than a full time job. To be able to have a life on top of that, you have to figure out a way to beat the system—a way to study more efficiently and be able to cram ten hours worth of outside classroom studying into eight or fewer hours.

I taught my module at 2.30 pm and at 7 pm. In the first class, most of the students were straight out of high school. As I went over the importance of preparing for class, why they’d be frustrated if they fall behind in a science class, and gave them practice exercises on how to effectively read a college textbook, they stared at me with glassy eyes, texted friends that were not in the classroom, and chatted with each other about current movies and video games. I had to dig deep into my arsenal of basic classroom management skills to be able to conduct an effective class. Five minutes before class was over, all of the students were gathering up their books, zipping up bags, and had one leg posed to sprint up from the chair and out the door. As I gathered up my handouts and erased the whiteboard, I wondered if I should ask for another year off. I had obviously forgotten how to be an effective educator.

Before the later module began, I ran errands and stopped by the grocery store to pick up something to eat for dinner. I also loaded up on cookies for the students. My plan was that if I didn’t get them excited about taking science classes, at least they would remember my session’s sugar high with fondness. If you can’t reach them through knowledge, try food.

The students that filed in through the door shortly before seven were a little bit older than my previous group. When they saw the cookies they exclaimed things like “awesome” and “I’m totally going for double-stuffed Oreos.” During my presentation, they stopped me several times to ask questions about what science classes were available on our campus, who the most popular instructors were, and why you have to take biology before zoology. They loved the textbook reading exercises and a few of them asked for my email and office number in case they needed further study tips after the quarter starts. At the end of class, most of them stayed behind to ask more questions about which science classes I thought might be right for them.

It was an awesome session. I drove home remembering how great it is to be part of students discovering something new and interesting. How privileged I feel whenever a student’s passion for the subject I teach is awakened. I also remembered the reason I went into teaching in the first place was because I want to show students how much fun science can be and that everybody is born a scientist. We start our early years in life investigating the world around us, recognizing the patterns of it, and figuring out how to function within it better—just like scientists. That evening I felt good about teaching again.  

I suspect the second batch of my FYI groups consisted of students a little more mature than the first, a little more motivated and a little more independent as learners. I probably did a better job of presenting the material since it was the second time around that day. However, I’m not taking any chances and come first day of the fall quarter, I’ll be walking in to physics class armed with a batch or two of cookies.

Hope your back to school week is a good one. I leave you with a spoof video from The Onion. It cheered me up as I prepared for lessons.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RrreVthWRY

How are you psyching yourself up for the beginning of school?

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.  (from “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”)

I for one love technology. I text and surf and Google and Facebook (I don’t, however, Twitter just yet.) and I love the connectedness I feel that these technologies make possible. That may seem counterintuitive, but just think; now I can text my friend when she’s sick to let her know what she missed at the meeting, and she’ll get the information right away. I can share pictures and events via Facebook, and I can learn just about anything I want to know in a matter of seconds on the Internet. (My boyfriend and I are always looking up information on actors and directors on IMDB while we’re watching movies, which I’m sure has greatly altered our movie watching experience, made it more meta.)

But maybe the question is more one of quality over quantity. These technologies without a doubt give us quantity in every sense of the word, but what about quality of information and the time and attention to digest it? I am reluctant to allow my students to use the Internet, especially Wikipedia, for research because they are new at discerning between trustworthy sources of information and the stuff that is embarrassingly inaccurate. But this ability to tell the difference may be one of the most important skills they practice. On the other hand, the Internet promises and encourages fast answers to what are often complicated questions, leading students to believe that if they don’t find what they’re looking for (and they’re often completely clueless about the fact that they don’t really know what they’re looking for) in a few clicks of the mouse that they have failed and should look elsewhere.

Which leads me back to the question of attention and quality. If we are only willing to look for information in the shallowest of ways and if, once we find the information, we expect it to be easily digestible, then are we having a quality communicative experience? In other words, are our brains being trained to shut down or switch gears so quickly that we have a hard time thinking through higher level cognitive issues? I don’t know, but just the other day I was reading and commenting on a student’s essay while in front of my computer, and I found myself stopping every few minutes to click on something, check my email, look up a word, whatever it was I was distracted, and I remember making a conscious decision to turn my computer off. It was the only way I could force myself to pay attention.

Find exemplars wherever you can.

Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. We talked about how each character has a vastly different personality from the others and how they are really archetypes. The ringleader, Phil, is the reckless antihero. Zach Galifianakis’ character plays the fool, the trouble maker and comic relief. Ed Helms, or Stu, is the straight man, the conscience of the group, albeit a somewhat warped one since he’s lying to his overbearing girlfriend to go on this trip. And, finally, there’s the main character, Doug, absent for most of the film, who is the catalyst for most of the events we watch. He’s missing. His friends can’t remember why and have to find him and get him back to his bride who is waiting anxiously back home.

Maybe this wasn’t “literature” so to speak, but I could totally imagine Shakespeare writing a similar plot-driven comedy that concluded, of course, with a wedding, all of the characters safe and happy in the end (besides maybe Stu’s witch of a girlfriend who didn’t deserve to be). There wasn’t a big, deep message in this movie, right? I mean, what would we take away from this? Don’t drink whatever the weird brother-in-law-to-be is serving. Try counting cards at a Vegas casino; it’s worth it. Lie to your partner as long as you can so s/he doesn’t know you’ve totally screwed up. Vacations full of debauchery are are good idea as long as you make it home in one piece. These aren’t lessons. They’re jokes.

We aren’t supposed to learn anything from this movie. We’re supposed to be entertained. This, in my opinion, is an important lesson for young writers to learn. First, young grasshoppers, you must entertain your readers. Then, once you’ve got them within your grasp, you can do other cool stuff: teach them, make them uncomfortable, inspire them, break their hearts, etc.

I encourage my students to watch movies and good television all the time. (We’ve also talked about shows like the brand new, hour-long drama, Parenthood, as well as Big Love, Weeds, and True Blood.) Maybe this is bad. Maybe I should feel guilty about it. Molly Giles, in her visit here last week, mentioned that it seems like many of the writers she sees in her MFA program at the University of Arkansas are really good at showing what’s happening in a story but are terrible at getting inside the characters’ heads, and she blames moving pictures: TV, movies, etc. Someone else in the workshop suggested that it might be our over-reliance on the “Show, don’t tell.” mantra we’ve been worshipping since the imagists, in which case, it’s William Carlos Williams’ fault.

I’m not sure who’s to blame for students’ inability to write a contemplative scene, but it may be my fault, too. I’ve seen too many stories from beginning writers that start with a paragraph or two of exposition that spells out what we’re supposed to take from the story before it’s even started. Another common story start that I want to strangle out of my students is the one where the first two or three scenes are setting up the real story: We had been best friends for ten years…. I was driving with my friends cross country…. I loved that girl more than anything…. Ughh. Often, I want to tell them to just stop writing about love or friendship or whatever it is that seems so comfortable to them that they tell it like they’re writing instructions for how to [fill in the blank]. But I’m a firm believer that no subject is unworthy of being written about. It’s not the subject that matters, it’s the way the subject is handled, and that’s where television and movies come in. If they can’t pull us in, we won’t watch and they’re doomed. Same with short stories.

Am I a bad teacher? Am I ruining my students’ ability to write “real literature”? I don’t know, but in my defense, we read lots of literary stuff too (Raymond Carver, Charles Baxter, Wells Tower…), but even when they say that they really enjoyed one of these stories, they never get as excited as they do when I say, “Hey, have you guys seen Californication?”