Because seven is a cooler number than eight.

Some people would have you believe there are no new stories to tell. Christopher Booker would have you believe there are only seven plots in all of existence (though he does allow for subplots under his comedy and tragedy headings, because (I can only assume) most people with a brain could tell you that “tragedy” is not, in and of itself, a plot). I admit I’ve never read his book, and I know better than to let TV Tropes suck me in while I’m trying to get anything done, so I’ll take a stab at those seven plots and say they’re something like this: Lord of the Rings, Oedipus (marrying your mom—is that comedy or tragedy?), Cinderella, Twilight (though I’ve never read it), Star Wars, Inception, and To the Lighthouse, though I still can’t tell you what happened in Inception, and something tells me Booker hasn’t read much Woolf if he thinks her plots would fall under a heading such as “The Monster.”

In grad school, we sometimes talked about someone (and, forgive me, I forget who, because I was almost completely uninterested in simplifying plot this far) who had said there were two: someone comes to town, someone leaves town (or, perhaps I’m mis-remembering because I just looked at Cory Doctorow’s page on Wikipedia; have you tried the random article feature? It’s as much of a time sink as TV Tropes). Read more »

As an early Christmas gift to myself, I ordered a copy of Of a Monstrous Child. It’s self-described as an anthology of writing relationships, with mentors* introducing the work of their mentees and vice versa (and it features Bark’s own Sam Ligon).

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. Read more »

It’s recently come to my attention that many (?) writers have writing superstitions. According to a very quick and unscientific poll, that site found that 82% of their writers admit to having a writing superstition or ritual.

First, I think it should be mentioned that superstition and ritual are two very different things. It’s one thing to write at 6:30 every morning after having two pieces of toast (with grape jelly, of course), and something else entirely to, say, believe that your book will never sell if one of the chapters has 13 pages. In the first, I’m thinking that if said writer didn’t start writing until 7:15 one morning, all would still be right with the world (or if the grape jelly ran out and all that was left was strawberry preserves). In the second, I’m thinking that the odds are, in fact, against you even if your book has 12-page chapters, because hey, the number of people writing books far outweighs the number of those selling books.

Personally, I don’t have any writing-type quirks, either of the superstitious or ritual variety. I found that ritual kills my writing by giving me an excuse to say, “It’s 6:31, I guess that means I have to skip my writing today.” And superstition…well, I have enough other things to worry about. But I still think this merits an unofficial and highly unscientific Bark poll. Please click through and answer a quick four questions or leave your answers in the comments below. I’ll check in with the answers next week!

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Lansing-area NaNoWriMo kickoff party. I wasn’t sure I was going to go—mostly I just wanted to spend my Sunday afternoon relaxing on the couch—but this is the group I started back in 2005 and ran for two years.

Okay. I’ll be honest for a second. There’s another reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to go: I think of myself as more advanced than these other writers. I’ve got an MFA, I’m published, and I’m well networked in the literary world. I’m presenting at AWP, for heaven’s sake!

I’m a little ashamed to admit these feelings—especially since I blog regularly about making the writing world more inclusive, about not turning one’s nose up at non-literary work. These two thoughts don’t really go together. Read more »

I heard about this growing controversy while surfing various blogs over the weekend. Some people in Britain are pushing to have a Literature Prize, since they argue that the Man Booker Prize rewards sub-par works of art. Two quotes from the article:

And yet there’s a consortium of people, headed by literary agent Andrew Kidd and supported by a host of literary types, who last week announced they were putting together a prize, to be known as The Literature Prize, for “writers who aspire to something finer.”

The Literature Prize is looking to do the literary equivalent of applauding houses built with staircases that require mountaineering gear to climb them.

If you read this blog often, you probably already know which side of the debate I fall on, but I’ll say it again anyway, mostly because I feel so strongly about this issue. Readable books are good books. The sense of inflated ego that comes from getting through a difficult book does not make that book more worth than one that is accessible. And books and literature should be accessible, on the whole. Isn’t that why we create art? To be read and enjoyed?

It’s September again, which means journals all over the country are opening submissions. A few (like Hayden’s Ferry Review and PANK) stay open year-round, but they’re becoming more and more rare, and so for most writers, this is really the beginning of another submission season.

I tend to send things out in clusters, doing it rigorously for a few weeks/months then waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting to hear back, waiting to get those edits just right on that other piece, waiting until I after finish my lesson planning, etc.  This year, though, is going to be different. I swear.

One of my office mates on campus has an MFA from IWW, and, like me, has yet to have her fiction published. Together, we’ve decided to encourage/heckle/challenge/etc. each other to send out more work, to let go of our stories and send them out into the world with their  new lunch boxes in hand and their bus numbers pinned to their jackets. Or at least cover letters.

And as for me, I’m going to once again move my writing back to a place of priority in my life. I’m finally done sending out job applications, I’ve got a good feel for how my semester will go, I’m comfortable enough financially that I’m not worried about not being able to pay my bills, so it’s time once again (though I suppose one could argue that it never should have stopped being time). This submission season I’m going to finalize the edits and resubmit the three pieces I had rejected in the spring, I’m going to finish the latest drafts and begin submitting the three pieces that are almost to the point of being ready for their first foray into submission land. Maybe I’ll even write something new.

As the elder of two sisters, I lost a fair few possessions when I went away to college nine years ago. My desk, my bike, and my bedroom were all given to my sister. I’m sure I said, at some point, that I wouldn’t need these things while I was gone, maybe even that I didn’t want them. Maybe I thought these kind-of-mine possessions would be treated the same way my VHS tapes were: they were family possessions that I didn’t have full ownership over, and never mind that some had been presents over the years.

The VHS tapes, obviously, quickly became obsolete. My bike I really didn’t miss during my college or graduate school years, though there were times, but it would be fairly old now, and I’d probably be looking to replace it anyway. My room doesn’t even belong to my family anymore, since we’ve moved. But my desk. I miss my desk.

I’ve been using a folding table for the past six or so years with some cheap plastic drawers for storage. Even the desk lamp I’ve been using doesn’t work quite right, what with its buzzing and flickering.

I’ve finally decided it’s time, and so I’ve started making a list of what characteristics and features my desk must have and what features is it that I just want. Some examples: it has to have ample under-desk space for my chair and legs, it has to have a good balance of storage (I need enough space to spread papers out, but I need at least some places to put stuff). My wants are a sleek design, an easy place to put a printer, and something that’s not too difficult to move.

What do you look for in a writing/computer desk? And does anyone have any recommendations?

In my training this week we’ve been talking about using workshops in our first-year writing courses. It’s old news, I suppose, that some people find the workshop to not be all that helpful, but I’ve always liked them. Well, perhaps not always, but definitely ever since I stopped thinking that the real purpose of a workshop is to make a better piece of writing. To me, good workshops should be teaching evaluation skills and preferences. A writer whose work is not up for evaluation should be getting pretty much the same amount of useful material from the workshop as should the writer being workshopped. Because, really, it’s not about your piece so much as it is about your (or our) tendencies.

Today we sat in on a presentation for a piece of online workshop software. You submit your work online and your professor or teacher assigns your piece to some (or all) of the class. Then the evaluators look at the piece of writing and critique it. But what makes this software different from an in-person workshop is the fact that the professor can set criteria. For instance, if your class were workshopping resumes, the professor might include check boxes asking if the writer had included contact information, if the jobs were presented in an appropriate order, etc. Then, the software runs some equations and shows the professor some stats that can reflect some information about the class as a whole. So if only 63% of your class has an obvious thesis statement in your five-paragraph essay assignment (we don’t still assign those, do we?), you know you might need to review. Read more »

The first question I ever asked the readers of Bark was in reference to lying and most specifically about what it means when a Confessional Poet lies in his/her poetry. It’s been several months since that first post and I’ve made considerable progress. Now I lie all the time. I make up people and I add in emotions and I’ve become a damn magician about creating a mood. Well good, my degree has been helpful already, I can lie like a rug.  And then a few weeks ago Leyna asked “Where do your ideas come from?” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since because the simple answer for me is that my poems are still true happenings in my life as well as the lives of my family and friends. It seems my narcissistic tendencies haven’t been cured.

Nowadays, poems come up like burps for me. Sure I ate that meal hours (or years) ago but I burp and taste  it all again. This summer’s writing has been pretty slim but what has been captured  are reflections on things that happened up to  five years ago. Five years ago, I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer but I knew something else. I knew I wanted wisdom the kind that came from experience and not good experience but the tragic shit like alcohol or drug use, but I didn’t have the balls to harm myself physically. Instead I understood my own ability to bounce back from emotional damage, to be hurting and laughing at the same time, to puke and rally. Read more »

This past week, I was offered and accepted a position teaching writing at Michigan State University. So obviously I’ve spent the past four days looking at syllabi and reading the course textbook. But mostly I’ve been thinking: what did my writing teachers do to both give me knowledge and inspire passion? What projects was I assigned that I enjoyed doing?

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.