This post originally appeared on February 22, 2013. Yesterday I wrote a course description for next semester. It was due only a week ago, so I’m feeling pretty good about getting it done. I’m thinking about the course today, which I’ve titled “1968” and which will be on that historic year in arts and letters, in part because I haven’t chosen the texts yet (use comments section to suggest texts! There’s too much to choose from!). I have some idea of other texts I want to include, but kicking around ideas for possible fiction has gotten me thinking about the criteria I’m using for choosing course material. I’ve been looking for fiction that has characters that feel real, through whom my students can feel what it was like to be alive in 1968. I’ve been looking for fiction that paints a realistic picture, that captures 1968 in amber. And I’ve been looking for fiction that has something meaningful to say about 1968. What I’m realizing is that these preferences express a set of assumptions about fiction that I often work against in my students. Further, they’re a set of assumptions nobody made me reflect on when I was an undergraduate (not successfully, anyway).  Over the years I’ve done a lot of this reflection myself, with the help of critics who have  convinced me of  some pretty basic truths about fiction, and I’ve internalized them over the years. In retrospect though, I wish somebody had told me these basic truths early in my undergraduate career. Thing I Wish Somebody Had Told Me #1: Characters Aren’t People. If you read writers talking about writing, you will come across someone saying that she listens to her characters and lets them determine what they do in her stories. I know what writers mean when they say this, and it may feel this way to them, but it’s not quite true: writers try to create characters who act in a way that is consistent with whatever personality they have tried to give them: they try not to have them do things that seem “out of character” (the fact that people often act “out of character” is a subject for another day). Likewise, if you listen to your students (and I hope you do), you will hear them talking about characters as if they were real people. Often they use a word that has become a bête noir of mine and say that characters are “relatable.” They will talk about whether or not they like characters, they will psychoanalyze them, they will confuse them with their authors. Why is this important? Because the constant battle is to get students to look at form—to get them to understand how literature is constructed through a series of authorial choices, choices that have calculated effects on readers. That’s why it’s important not to ask students, Why does Character X do this? but rather, Why does Author X choose to have Character X do this? While students aren’t wrong to have feelings about characters, they need to be able to recognize and think about how and why authors make their characters act the way they do.  Students need to remember that characters are made of words. Thing I Wish Somebody Had Told Me #2: Realism Is a Trick. Related to Thing #1, this basic fact is something that everybody knows deep down, but its ramifications are often not realized.  While undergraduates don’t necessarily need to watch you diagram structuralist insights about signification on the board to get this (though I think it’s a great idea), they might benefit from you talking early on about what Barthes called the referential illusion—the false idea that works of literature can actually represent the world faithfully. What writers do—and if you press the point, no student will persist in maintaining that the black squiggles on the page “are” the world—is paint a picture of an idea of the world, with varying degrees of verisimilitude, detailed description, and, in Barthes’ great insight from “The Reality Effect,” the inclusion of insignificant details, which makes the picture seem more real. (A bit of instruction on the history of realism as an ideal in the Western novel—on the way in which it wasn’t the centrally important thing in the prehistory or early life of the novel and only became the default mode in the late nineteenth century—can help too.) Reading novels and stories with the unexamined assumption that they are representations of the real can keep students from appreciating the artistry writers practice—the way they do things with words that create reading experiences that have effects on readers, that make them feel things and see things. Reading for realism can also make it harder for students to consider the factors that influence a writer’s picture of the world—things such as political beliefs, historical moment, any of the things that make us perceive the world as we do. Thing I Wish Somebody Had Told Me #3: Stories Don’t Mean Anything. If I’ve said any one thing in a classroom more than “No, tell me what you think” (or possibly “Please don’t use the word ‘relatable’ in your papers because it causes me physical pain”), it may be “Good fiction doesn’t have a moral.” It’s one of those things that is generally true but will admit exceptions, at least for some people; while Milan Kundera has said that there was nothing George Orwell wrote in his novels that he couldn’t have just as easily said in a pamphlet, most readers will admit that there are a few powerful works whose main aim is to drive home only a single message. Still, the larger point is that part of fiction’s power lies in its ambiguity; it can show us things about the world we may not have seen before, it can push us to consider ideas we’ve not thought much about before, but it doesn’t generally have what less sophisticated forms—fairy tales, parables—have: a moral. It’s also true that even if writers want to drive home a single point about something, even if they are skilled at their craft, things will get away from them. Whether they are trying to keep two ideas in dialogue without picking a winner, as Bakhtin said is what makes great novels great, or are trying to display a Single Great Truth about the world, language and culture—meaning—is too complicated, too rich, to play along. This is the great frustration of so many students—what do you mean there’s no right answer?—and of many teachers who want to confine a novel to its “theme.” So I’m going to continue planning this course, and maybe I’ll talk some more here someday soon about the process of text selection—about how I want to be wary of looking for texts with characters like people that capture 1968 in amber and have something to say about what happened then; about how to pick texts that challenge these assumptions about fiction; maybe even about how certain kinds of courses and critical approaches lead to the privileging of these assumptions. For now, I’ll just try to remember to pass on these three Things to undergraduates, who sometimes just Need to Be Told. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on February 15, 2013. Most of my LitBits blog posts have been focused on exercises or discussions aimed at motivating or inspiring the beginning writer. I’ve written craft exercises designed to help students mine their memories and interrogate their own lives. I’ve talked about helping student writers get over “writer’s block” and figure out just what they might write about. What I haven’t focused on, so much, is the intermediate or advanced nonfiction writer—the student who already has ideas and knows the basics of the genre, and who is ready to move on from “just getting started.” In future blog posts, I hope to share some revision exercises, which I think are frequently overlooked when we talk about teaching creative writing (although I’d like to point out that some of the contributors to the recently-released text, Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction offer  some really cool exercises designed to help the writer who has already started to refine her writing—and many of these ideas can apply to nonfiction of any length, not just the short-short stuff).  First, though, I have to come up with some of these exercises. Today, though, I thought I’d tell you about a class I’m teaching for the first time this semester.  I call it “The Contemporary Essay”—although I had wanted to call it “The 21 st Century Essay” at first, until I realized that a few of the pieces I wanted to teach were first published in the late 90s.  In my head, I still call it “The 21 st Century Essay,” historical publication facts be damned. I began to think of this class several years ago, as it became apparent to me that, over the past few decades, we’ve slowly begun to build a canon of great essays, memoirs, and works of literary journalism. I’d become quite comfortable teaching the works of Joan Didion, George Orwell, James Baldwin, E.B. White, Annie Dillard, Phillip Lopate, Maya Angelou, Tobias Wolff, et al.  Comfortable to the point of complacency, I feared. Sure, I could occasionally sneak an essay by the likes of Eula Biss or Ander Monson onto the syllabus, to give my students a sense of where nonfiction seems to be headed, but I felt like I couldn’t really focus on where this genre was going until the students got an idea of where it has been. This year, though, I’m fortunate enough to be teaching at St. Lawrence University, which has about half a dozen faculty members in the English Department with really strong backgrounds in nonfiction forms, and who teach these forms to undergraduate students in workshops that always seem to be filled to maximum capacity. I figured, “If I’m ever going to be working with students strong enough in the history of this genre to teach this class, that time is now.” So, with the enthusiastic blessing of my chair, I began to design the course. I cheated a little bit—we spent the second week of class (the class meets for three hours every Wednesday evening) discussing some of that canonical stuff I said I wasn’t going to teach—Orwell, White, Didion, and Lopate’s introduction  to The Art of the Personal Essay. I decided, in the end, that I wasn’t comfortable starting with the present until we’d talked a little bit about the past. But beginning with the third class—last night’s class, to be precise—we’re focusing on the current scene entirely. So, how did it go? We wound up discussing work by Cheryl Strayed, Bob Cowser Jr., Pam Houston, Jill Talbot, and Eula Biss. The Strayed piece—“The Love of My Life”—seemed to be a particular favorite, as she writes about grief and sex in just brutally honest ways (if you’re offended by brutally honest depictions of unpleasant sex written by talented writers—and I know some people who are—don’t click on that link; otherwise, read it. It’s amazing). We also spent a long time discussing Talbot’s observations about the construction of self in the age of social media: “Everyone now,” Talbot writes, “not just writers, creates a written, published persona on a daily (hourly) basis.  Artifice abounds.”  We even wound up relating these ideas to Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s idea of self-fashioning during the early modern period. How did it go? It was awesome. I imagine we’ve all had those moments in the classroom where the discussion went so well, where all participants seemed so engaged, that the time flew by and you felt like the discussion should really go on over beers or coffee. It was 10 p.m., and I had to be up to teach at 8:30 the other day, and I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t drink with students, but… well, it was that kind of night.  It was the kind of class that makes one glad to do this for a living. Will we be able to keep up this type of intense engagement?  It’s hard to say, of course—I can’t predict the future. All I can tell you is what’s on the syllabus—Steven Church.  Jenny Boully.  Ira Sukrungruang.  Ryan Van Meter.  Kristen Iversen.  Akhim Yuseff Cabey.  E.J. Levy.  John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. And lots of other thought-provoking practitioners of this form. I can’t say for sure that this class is going to be a roaring success based on how well things went last night, of course, but my feeling is that our students want to know more about the contemporary nonfiction scene. I walked into class worried that I might have trouble filling three hours; I walked out regretting that we didn’t have five hours to devote to discussing these authors and their work. So, as I usually am in pretty much all things, I find myself cautiously optimistic. I’ll keep you updated with how things go with this class, and what I learn along the way.  In the meantime, I’ll try to think of some revision exercises. If you have some, please leave a comment.  For that matter, if you can think of an essay or writer I ought to include on the reading list for a contemporary/ 21 st century essay class, let me know in a comment. ... View more

[[This blog post originally appeared on February 1, 2013.]] Dramatic writers aim to capture the way that people speak:  Therefore, grammatical correctness is not necessarily important in the text of a play or script.  What is unacceptable in academic prose is often quite desirable in drama. Unfortunately, students sometimes take drama’s emphasis on performance and the spoken word as a license for sloppy writing.  Dramatic writing, though often non-grammatical, must never be haphazard. Frequently, I encounter in beginning playwrights a lack of attention to punctuation.  Perhaps they believe that, because punctuation is for the eye, it is unnecessary to writing that addresses itself to the ear.  However, such a belief ignores punctuation’s significance as a means of suggesting vocal techniques of expression—specifically, the pause—which are readily understood to the listener but hard to convey to the reader.  Because punctuation captures the rhythms of spoken speech, it’s essential that playwrights employ punctuation to its fullest potential. While everyone is familiar with basic punctuation marks—such as the period, comma, exclamation point, etc.—there are others that beginning playwrights tend to neglect.  Here are some of my favorites.  (Similar lists can be found in textbooks such as Buzz McLaughlin’s The Playwright’s Process.) The ellipsis (. . .) indicates a trailing off, whether within or at the end of a speech.  It suggests confusion or a wandering of the mind, rather than an abrupt change of thought. The dash (—) indicates an interruption, whether within or at the end of a speech.  Characters interrupt themselves as their thoughts change in quick succession or as they make hasty additions to their statements.  Dashes are used, also, when characters are interrupted by other characters. The semicolon (;) links related thoughts. The colon (:) links related thoughts more closely than the semi-colon.  The colon is used for assertions that hinge on one another, suggesting a stronger—perhaps causal—relationship. The question mark followed by the uncapitalized question—e.g., “What do you think I am? a dog?”  This form suggests a subsidiary question that continues the first, rather than a wholly new question asked in succession.  This punctuation device can greatly affect an actor’s inflection. Consider working with punctuation in class.  For instance, you might have students come up with sample lines of dialogue in which they use these conventions.  Such exercises can help encourage greater precision in writing. To commit speeches to paper, dramatic writers should take advantage of all devices at their disposal—including italics, all caps, and the formatting of text as verse.  After all, playwrights have the difficult task of converting a complex medium (the spoken word) to another medium (the written word) and of doing so in such a way as to suggest delivery to actors. How do you teach punctuation in the scriptwriting classroom?  How do you discuss micro-concerns like the line, as opposed to larger concerns like plotting or character building? ... View more

This blog was originally posted on January 23, 2013. The question took me by surprise.  We were about halfway through the semester, and I’d finally figured out the rhythm and patterns of my 10:10- 11:40 Techniques of Fiction class.  I’d come in just before class started to a roomful of students talking and joking with each other.  I’d try to say something pithy to get us started, then remind everyone what we had read for the day—typically, two student stories to workshop and one story by the likes of Faulkner or Cather or Baldwin.  I’d say, “Let’s start with the workshop—who’s dying to go first?”  The student authors would exchange glances, both shrug slightly, and then one would finally speak: “I’ll go.”  This was business-as-usual. But on this day, I walked into the room and, before I could make any type of witty remark, a student said, “Can I ask a question?” “Sure,” I replied, settling into my seat. “What do you do when you have writer’s block?” As I said, I wasn’t expecting this question.  This is an intro-level class.  Writer’s block, it seems to me, is something people develop when they’re further along in their writing careers, surely.  And what’s more, I wasn’t even sure writer’s block really existed—too often, I think writers use “writer’s block” as an excuse to do something—anything—other than writing. So I led with that observation.  “I don’t really believe in writer’s block,” I said, noticing that the entire class had stopped their side conversations and were listening to me.  “I’ve found that when I have ‘writer’s block,’ it’s usually because there’s an article I want to read in The New Yorker, orRaging Bull is on TV, or there’s beer in the fridge, or I want to hang out with my wife.  In my experience, writers claim to be ‘blocked’ when they feel like being lazy.” An honest answer, but an unsatisfactory one.  I could tell by my student’s expression that this wasn’t helpful.  Judging by the expressions on the faces of some of her classmates, I wasn’t helping them either. “I assume you’re asking because you feel like you’re blocked?” I asked. “I just don’t know how to get started on my next story,” she replied.  I noticed some other students nodding, heard a few “Yeahs” too. I was actually relieved to hear this.  A sophomore’s anxiety about getting started, intimidation by the blank screen, is a different problem than “writer’s block,” it seems to me—or at least writer’s block as I understand the term.  The idea of writer’s block sort of affirms the belief that writing is all about inspiration, being touched by the muse.  That’s the sort of belief that I want to disabuse my students of—I don’t want them thinking that there’s something mystical about writing, that it’s something they either can do or can’t, depending on the whims of some supernatural force that may or may not anoint them.  I want them to understand that writing is hard work, and sitting around waiting for the story to present itself to you so that you can transcribe it is about the best way to not be a writer that I can think of. Having trouble getting started, though, is a different matter, I think.  Particularly when we’re talking about student writers.  I rarely have trouble getting started these days, but I remember a time—not too very long ago—that I struggled to come up with something to write about.  These days, I have the opposite problem—I’ve got a ton of ideas, and not enough time to write about them. How did I get to this point?  I wondered to myself.  What did I do that made it easier to get started, to face down the blank screen and create art? I talked about sitting down at the computer, without distraction, and just pushing ahead.  Forcing yourself to get started and trusting that you’ll discover what the piece is about as you go along—even if that means eventually going back and seriously revising (or even completely trashing) those first few sentences (or paragraphs) after you’ve figured out what you’re doing.  I told them about a former classmate of mine, who always started with what he thought was the most interesting moment or idea in his story or essay, even if it belonged at the end of the piece, and who then would go back and write the beginning if he needed to.  I talked about my experience in screenwriting classes, which taught me the value of working from an outline sometimes—sometimes, it’s easier to begin a journey when you have a map in front of you. Most importantly, I think the key to finding inspiration, I told my students, is in paying attention to the world we live in.  I don’t just mean go to the mall and people watch—although sometimes that works.  I mean taking the time to notice the stuff you frequently overlook in your day-to-day life.  Look at the trees that line the sidewalk you travel every day to get from your dorm to the dining hall.  Listen to the sounds that surround you—birds calling to each other from across the quad, laughter coming from someone’s open window, the faint sound of “All Along the Watchtower” coming from one of the fraternity houses down the street. I like to regard much of my life as research for a hypothetical essay or story—that way, everything I do can be considered “productive” in some way, even if it’s just drinking a glass of wine with my wife in our porch swing—who’s to say I’m not going to write about this experience?  When you regard your actions and interactions as potential material, I told my students, it’s downright impossible to find yourself “blocked.” This seemed to make sense to them, but I feel like this is something that I want to revisit with them as we get closer to the end of the semester.  I’d be interesting in hearing from readers of this blog: How you deal with the issue, either with your students or in your own writing? ... View more

[[This blog was originally posted on January 30, 2013]] The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. –T S Eliot Recently, I planned out my courses for spring. I wrote new syllabi for poetry and fiction workshops and revised my existing syllabi, too. And, this year I decided to include a new section.  After explaining to my students the Grades and Attendance and Formatting Your Work parts of my syllabus, I added a section called Creating Sacred Space. This is new territory for me, and will be for most of my students, I think, and I’m curious to know what you think. What I have noticed in the past couple of years is this. Students rarely take phone calls during class. Most of the time, they silence their phones, though a few times each semester (usually during an in class writing period, or when a student is reading an incredibly moving, incredibly personal poem aloud—aka The Worst Time), a phone will hum and buzz and there will be a frenzied patting down of a backpack or self, a litany of apologies, or, worst, weird silent ignoring while the buzzing or belling persists.  Once in a great while a student will take a call in class:  “I have to take this! It’s my mom!” Ugh. But last year, I noticed something truly deleterious, in my opinion, to the workshop itself. When we take our break halfway through the three hour workshop, many students get out their phones and text. Some of them text during the entire break. Often, I’ll see the little thumbs, the downward gaze, when we are in class, not on the break. Texting in class is okay, students believe, in a way that taking an actual phone call is not.  But, I think it’s very much NOT okay. So, this semester, I’m creating a new policy: Sacred Space. We bring very personal work to class, and of course there has to be a boundary of reverence around our discussion. On Day One, we formally vow not to discuss the work of this class with outsiders, and not to share any drafts with others. I’m not worried that students’ text communications with those outside the workshop during the workshop is violating trust. Rather, I believe that texting during class, even during the break, is hurting our ability to be present with each other. I believe texting even on the break is hurting students’ ability to learn how to be connected with the depth of their inner lives, and the range of their imaginations. You might disagree.  But if you can’t disconnect from other people for three hours stretches, how are you going to write a poem or a short story? When we are around a table, with work-in-progress spread out before us, there’s a lot that’s called for in terms of awareness, paying attention, thoughtfulness, and intuition. These skills are very similar to the ones we need when creating art.   For example, when we start break in class, I can look at Emily and see she is having a rough day. I can see how nervous she is—her story is up next. The break is not really a break from class; it’s a break from work, from concentration.  It’s a chance to stretch, to run to the restroom, to grab a snack. But we are still a class.  We’re still a group endeavoring to make meaning, give insightful feedback, hold and carry and nurture and tend to art and each other. If our attention is divided, if we are participating in conversations about dinner, about whatever, Mom found her car keys!—with folks who aren’t in our class, I feel we are not just missing out on opportunities to see each other with the full richness that is required for something as intimate and demanding as workshop, I think we are hurting our art. I think we’re damaging our process. To make art, we have to be able to enter a complicated dance between knowing and not knowing, between what’s clear and what’s chaotic.  We have to be able to space out—slightly.   We have to capture those notions that come from the right brain.  A creative writing workshop is a complex system of interactions—we have to be off-line, here and deeply here.  We have to be paying attention to surprise, to nuance, to everything. I am nervous about my new policy. I worry students will see it as draconian. Un-American. But you know what? Going to college means learning new ways to be in the world, honing one’s ability to work with others, and deepening one’s relationship with one’s inner self.  The ability to create sacred space—well, I think it might help my students create more productive, more rewarding writing practices.  And, I think it might be one tiny way to heal the world. ... View more

I may be the last person in the country to have heard about Anand Giridharadas’s The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, but I spotted the striking cover when I was walking through an airport a week or so ago and immediately went over to check it out. The first part of the title caught my attention because for years I had intense discussions with students in my writing classes about how to define an “American.” We’d read what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say by way of defining the people he met when he visited the country in 1831—along with several later attempts at definitions and then eventually our own try at this task. Along the way we were learning about the characteristics of good definitions, but the conversations over this particular definition were always beyond lively, often continuing far after the class discussion closed. Of course, the second part of the title is also arresting, so I grabbed the book from the shelf and took it with me onto the plane. The opening is as riveting a piece of writing as I’ve read in quite a while, and it’s based on a true story. It begins ten days after 9/11, when Mark Stroman, a tough guy covered with tattoos, enters a Dallas mini-mart, marches up to the counter, and asks the brown-skinned man behind, “Where are you from?” Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a well-educated immigrant from Bangladesh who has come to the U.S. in pursuit of his own American dream, sees that the man holds a gun and expects a robbery. But the question startles him and before he can find an answer, Stroman shoots him in the face. As he lies in a pool of his own blood, he thinks that if Allah spares his life, he will dedicate what he has left of it to serving others. The rest of the book explores the road that brought each man to this particular spot on this particular day, moving back and forth between the two and bringing both into remarkable focus. Bhuiyan doesn’t die, though he loses an eye and has many surgeries. Stroman is caught, tried, and convicted of this and two other assaults, including a death, and sent to death row. So far, a remarkable pairing of stories. But Giridharadas goes far beyond any simple linking of good and evil. With grace and great insight, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with both men and their families, he paints a more and more complex picture of what motivated and continues to motivate each man. Eventually, Bhuiyan not only forgives Stroman but mounts a campaign to save him from the death penalty; Stroman for his part undergoes a transformation that leaves him remorseful—and connected to Bhuiyan in several ways. I won’t say more because I really hope that teachers everywhere read this book. What I think you will find is a subtly nuanced as well as gripping tale that raises questions about just what a “true American” is and that refuses to provide any simple answers. I can imagine using this book as a key text in a course that invites students to do research on a whole range of issues related to “murder and mercy” and the American psyche. I’m so glad for that chance find in an airport bookshop and for an extremely rewarding summer read. Check it out to see if you agree. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

[[This blog was originally posted on January 15, 2013]] I’m sitting on the train from New York City to Boston, writing my talk for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association which I don’t have to give for a couple of days yet so please don’t judge, and I’m watching the trees and snow fly away from me, backward. I sat down facing the wrong way, but it seems the appropriate orientation for a year-end post. The past year of teaching, looking back, was a lesson in the value of being unprepared. I say this with some trepidation, for the obvious reasons—as academics, former good students all growed up, we are conditioned to do all our homework and the extra credit—but due to circumstances both beyond and entirely under my control, the last two semesters were My Year of Winging It. In the spring I took a course over from an instructor a few weeks into the semester, inserting myself into a preexisting syllabus and telling the story of American Literature since 1865 that it was designed to tell. So my winging it here was not completely improvised; like the actors hurrying to learn their lines just offstage and receiving prompts from the wings, I had a script, I just didn’t write it. This past semester I taught a new course on the rock novel (which I’ve already written about here). In the past, I’d occasionally included a novel in a course that I hadn’t read prior to putting it on a syllabus. Once or twice I’d not read it until the semester had already started. This time out, for reasons practical and pedagogical, I hadn’t read most of the books on the syllabus prior to putting together the syllabus, and chose not to read them until teaching them—that is, I taught  the novels blind, reading only the pages assigned to the students and reading them the night before. Was this a little terrifying? In some cases, it was. Day to day, I couldn’t depend on the big picture, knowing where things were leading and what themes would emerge as major; I was unable to rely on having the whole novel under my belt in choosing where to direct discussion. The downsides to this are obvious. The upsides were not, always, so I got to discover them as I went, and foremost among them was this very process of discovery. Threads of ideas and form emerged for me as I read, at the same time as the class made their own discoveries. A central tactic of my pedagogy has always been (as I suspect it is for many teachers) the creation of an atmosphere for discussion in which discoveries can happen collaboratively, rather than the leading by the nose I too often fall back into (which I occasionally realize I’m doing mid-discussion and end the string of leading questions with “What number am I thinking of?”). Teaching unread novels did this work for me. The “we” in the question “So what did we learn last night?” was genuine. Reading without knowing the plot—or without knowing the end—was quite instructive for me as, well, an instructor, and helped me see that this is what students are always doing. This seems an obvious point, and maybe it is, but I tend to forget from class to class that I usually have the benefit of hindsight when I teach fiction. Not knowing how things would turn out made me more cognizant of the construction of plot, of the narrative devices employed, and more aware of the existential fact that a plot can turn any way it wants to. We have the sense after we’ve read a narrative that it could only have gone the way it went (this is the moment of retrospection Peter Brooks describes), but as we read a story for the first time, we can only guess. Another effect of reading without knowing where the plot is going is that it encourages something I value but don’t always practice as much as I’d like, which is close reading. Focusing only on the pages at hand makes it easier to focus on the pages at hand—that is, to pay sustained, slow attention to the words in front of us. As Jane Gallop has discussed so eloquently (here and elsewhere), the historicization of literary studies has tended to lead to a focus on the thematic to the exclusion of the kind of close attention to form that is one of literary studies’ chief joys and benefits. Whether we are arguing for the value of the English major or just the occasional English class from the instrumental side (employers value the skills associated with textual interpretation) or the humanist (citizenship of the world values the attention to ambiguity, irony, beauty, etc., that exposure to the literary affords), we can agree on the value of close reading. One last effect of effect of Winging It in this way was, in one case, the assigning of a novel that wasn’t very good, one to which I’d been pointed by someone whose literary judgment is unimpeachable (though maybe should receive censure for this one offense). While I won’t be teaching this novel again, there was something positive to doing it. Practicing full disclosure, I had told the class at the beginning of the semester that I hadn’t read most of the books, so as we read this one and discovered that many of us didn’t love it, we were able to talk about our own tastes and what they consisted of and even about taste as a thing in itself and, without bringing in Bourdieu and taste as a social phenomenon, were able to get pretty far into what it means to like or not like artworks. I’m not much for resolutions, and even if I were, a resolution to work harder to prepare less assiduously wouldn’t be one I would make. I am still one for working up pages of notes about career, context, theme, form, and divergent interpretations. I am hoping, looking back at the year flying away behind me, that I can find ways to remind myself of the value of not knowing the end of the story. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Michelle Stevier-Johanson, who teaches Basic Writing and coordinates the Writing Center and other tutoring at Dickinson State University in Dickinson, North Dakota.  She has taught developmental writing and first-year composition, writing about the environment, and women's studies courses since receiving her master's degree in composition and literacy studies from Indiana University in 1996.  Her scholarly interests include writing as empowerment, civic literacy, and activism; writing course/writing tutor partnerships; and rhetorics of resistance. Last fall, one of my Basic Writing students – I’ll call him Brandon – wrote about his experience with the Bakken oil boom.  Brandon supports North Dakota’s oil industry, but he’s dismayed by what he sees as an injustice inherent in mineral rights. In his third essay, Brandon was able to research and clarify his thoughts and concerns about this injustice. This third essay, what I call the “explanation of opinion” paper, arises out of a pedagogical struggle of my own. In previous courses, I found that no amount of discussion of reader-oriented prose was enough to make sure that students used our final paper, a Toulmin-based argument, as an opportunity to persuade rather than preach. The “explanation of opinion” paper is designed to put a brake on the tendency to articulate our beliefs before we consider the beliefs and experiences of others. In Essay 3, students state their opinion as their thesis, but the task of the essay is to discuss how they came to this belief. How did family and friends’ beliefs influence them? What specific life experiences shaped this opinion? For Brandon, Essay 3 offered a significant opportunity to learn more about the injustices he perceived in his community. Although Brandon knows farmers and ranchers who own the mineral rights to their land, Brandon’s family had to buy their land without these rights in place. In his essay, Brandon addressed the complex consequences of this difference:  His family’s livelihood is tied to their farmland, and yet that livelihood can be undermined at any moment by a mineral rights owner who wants access to “drill, baby, drill.” As a result, while the oil industry booms all around, landowners like Brandon’s family don’t experience the same economic growth. Instead, their rights are thrown into question. As I worked with Brandon, I found myself struck not just by his eloquent depiction of his family’s situation, but by the way in which this story provides a metaphor for Basic Writing itself. Like many Basic Writing teachers, I spend a lot of time thinking about place, politics, and ownership. These things are central to Basic Writing whether we want them to be or not. Whenever I try to argue with the politics of administrators, colleagues, and others who characterize the work of Basic Writing as remedial and perceive our students to be outsiders to the academy, I realize the enormity of our marginalization and separation – our students’ and our own. Worst of all, at least in my opinion, there is that seemingly inexorable belief that enables the perception of outsider status:  the idea that the “basic” in Basic Writing refers to grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, and formatting, not to the real writing students will do in first-year composition and elsewhere in their undergraduate careers and lives. My students and I are repeatedly turned into mere observers of changes to the land we thought was our own. In just the last six years of my career, the “place” called Basic Writing has been radically altered without much input from me and without any input from the students whose lives are profoundly affected. For example, there’s the course credit we lost a few years ago when my university system decided that Basic Writing is “pre-college” material. There’s the course name change that took us out of the English Department and linked us to “academic success” rather than the discipline of writing. As he worked on his essay about compromised land rights, Brandon kept coming back to a simple question: “Why can’t people understand that this is about rights and fairness?” It’s a question that plagues me with Basic Writing as well. How do we help outsiders to our field understand that, in the American academy, Basic Writers are not tenants without rights but landowners? Why must the power of certain stakeholders come at the expense of the power of others? Indeed, any unthinking chant of “drill, baby, drill” is as irresponsible an approach to Basic Writing as it is to this nation’s energy problems. Marked by the always-already compromised turf of Basic Writing, my students are not simple observers of fences, gates, and rights-of-access issues:  they are, and they can remain, the fenced and the gated. Furthermore, unlike issues of land ownership in the Bakken – the agricultural and industrial prairie that once belonged to Native peoples – Basic Writing students’ access has no ugly consequences. No environmental damage can occur from Basic Writers’ full participation in American higher education.  Just like Brandon, these students have vital stories to tell and talents that need to be supported, even prized.  As a space for some of the academy’s best direct action, Basic Writing must be liberated from compromised status and assume its rightful place:  a guardian of students’ rights and a central location for academic and civic empowerment.   Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I’ve been spending some time with the 14-year-old grandson of a good friend, who is visiting. He came out to California fired up about learning to play golf and intent on keeping up with baseball (he’s a Cubs fan but checks other box scores daily). He’s also been glad to help out with gardening and other chores. What he has NOT been excited about is READING. Listening to him complain took me back to an encounter with my nephew, then in middle school. It was summer time and he had a big reading assignment: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He was reading it, but very reluctantly, and with a certain amount of disdain. I remember his saying, voice dripping sarcasm: “I don’t know why people say this is a great novel. The girl that wrote it is sure wordy.” I did wonder about that choice of text, certainly not one I would have thought would have great appeal for middle schoolers! Well, at least my friend’s grandson isn’t assigned to read Frankenstein. Instead, his obligatory summer reading is of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I looked up the book and found out that it’s YA novel set in a society where everyone gets extreme cosmetic surgery at 16 to become “pretty.” You can imagine the complications and tensions (and triumphs?) this premise leads to, and I read a few pages, enough to see I could easily read more. But not my young friend. He declared it endlessly boring and not what he wanted to be doing during his summer holidays. So—is it the fact that it is required reading that makes this task so objectionable? In this case, that seems to definitely be part of the problem. I have seen the same kind of resistance in Stanford students, who are assigned three books to read before they arrive on campus for their frosh year. When I had an opportunity to choose the three books, I selected Lynda Barry’s 100 Demons!, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. But I and the other faculty members who have chosen these books have a good ace in the hole: the authors of the books come to campus during orientation for interviews and Q & A with the frosh. The year I chose the books, some of the first year students confessed that they hadn’t read the books during the summer. But the session with the authors was so riveting that they all rushed back to their dorms to read them after the fact. So. If we want kids to be reading books during the summer, it would seem like a good idea to provide some hooks. One might be to let them choose the books they want to read. That’s worked well with my grandniece Audrey, now 11 and reading away this summer at five books of her choice. Another might be to engage the students with the authors in some way, most likely online. Still another might be to assign a graphic novel or narrative, or a book along with a movie version. There are probably lots of other good reading programs out there, along with hooks to get students engaged in reading. If you know one, please write! Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community  to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Cincinnati is on my mind as I write this post. In the spring of 2007, I tutored elementary school students in Cincinnati’s Mount Auburn neighborhood, the same neighborhood where, after a traffic stop, Sam Dubose was shot in the head at point blank range and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer on Sunday July 19, 2015. The first day of tutoring, I was greeted in Mount Auburn by a laminated sign that announced this neighborhood school as a “failing school,” using the terminology from the No Child Left Behind Act. The sign was displayed prominently at the entrance to the school. The school was nearly 100% Black, and I was the nice white lady who had come to tutor the children for Ohio’s state exams in reading and writing. Later that spring, I entered the school only to discover that the students were working on benchmark practice exams. I was taken to the cafeteria to help supervise children who had arrived late to school and, according to the rules, were not allowed to take the practice exams. A casual observer of that cafeteria scene might have described the students as rowdy and resistant. Yet that picture remains incomplete. The children were not sitting in their usual classrooms and they were not following their usual schedules. When I spoke with the children one-on-one, they shared their anger, their fears, and their passions. In other words, the children and I shared with each other our common humanity. On that spring day in Mount Auburn, I learned what happens when we begin with stereotypes and work through the resulting cognitive dissonance. I also learned the importance of approaching our practice by “[developing] flexible strategies,” and moving forward with an open heart. In preparing for the new term later this month, the children of Mount Auburn remind me of the positive potentials of transformation—not only for our students, but also for our classrooms and ourselves. Below, you’ll find three lists to help prepare for the fall semester’s first new writing project. As detailed in my last post, the first project focuses on “forming and transforming stereotypes” and is based on a TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The first list is a set of criteria that presents several course goals that students will undertake for the Writing Project 1. The course goals are taken from the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing. The second list focuses on course actions toward completing the assignment, using Bloom’s Taxonomy. The third list offers foundational assumptions behind course goals and actions. Lists 1. Course Goals Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and re-thinking to revise their work 2. Course Actions Applying basic disciplinary knowledge in a similar but unfamiliar context Evaluating a theory for the validity of its implications for college students and their instructors Creating a new interpretation 3. Foundational Assumptions The course is not remedial, and all students can learn to build on strengths. If writing leads to thought and action, then all students have basic disciplinary knowledge that can be applied to writing in the college classroom. All students in our courses have thought about matriculating to college and taken action to enroll in the course. The steps that led to those thoughts and actions hold the potential for success. To confront stereotypes and to deal with cognitive dissonance, students and instructors alike need to develop flexibility, re-think our work, and create new interpretations. We can practice these skills through steps in the writing process, and in completing the writing process to create a new essay that has never before existed. This practice is not necessarily easy, and the results may not become visible until long after the process has ended. As we practice editing and proofreading in a classroom community, we learn to read more closely and to pay more careful attention to the world around us. Every person who attempts this process will carry different strengths and discover different struggles. The struggles can become short-term goals for continued practice. This process is equally true for students and instructors. ... View more

I still remember my first experience with “professional development.” The year was 1966 or 67 and I was a new high school teacher, working with 10 th and 11 th grade students. A couple of years out of undergraduate school, I was thrilled to have a “real job” at last. So there I was, with a string of 30+ classes and tattered hand-me-down Warriner’s books, supposedly teaching “world literature” and “American literature.” I was a reasonably good reader and writer myself (stress on “reasonably”), and I’d been lucky enough to get an NDEA Fellowship to take summer courses on dramatic literature that offered some “development,” but I had very little understanding of how to teach others. In short, if anyone ever needed professional development, I was that person. So I was looking forward to an afternoon program on one of our teacher days—but not for long. Once there, our principal announced that we were going to take up “behavioral objectives” and would learn how to do so that day. There followed an incredibly tedious lecture by an “educational expert” about what in fact turned out to be an incredibly tedious and unrewarding task. For every class, every day, we were to write behavioral objectives (immediately referred to as BOs) describing each expected outcome in learning—in behavioral terms. These were to guide all of our classroom activities. I was too green at the time to understand why this process seemed so counterproductive and completely beside the point to me, and I didn’t yet have the knowledge to know why one might resist a behaviorist approach to learning. So I learned to crank these things out in no time at all—and then set them aside to make my real plans for each day. From that day on, I took a fairly dim view of “professional development.” But times have changed, and sometimes for the better (though not always). I’ve long been associated with the Bread Loaf School of English, which I regard as the best professional development program for teachers in the country. For six and a half weeks for five summers, teachers at Bread Loaf take a series of heavy-duty content courses that focus on helping young people read, write, listen, and speak with growing sophistication and depth. We live together, study together, eat and party together, and spend our time doing pretty much nothing but reading, writing, and talking about learning and teaching. I’ve seen this program change teachers’ lives and ripple out to affect tens of thousands of young people. Of course, not everyone has access to such in-depth professional development; while Bread Loaf has quite a bit of financial aid, it’s still an expense—and it demands being on campus for all those weeks during the summer. Fortunately, teachers have other good opportunities. I think of all the Writing Projects around the country, for example, and of how successful many have been.  Most recently, I have had a chance to meet and talk with teachers who are part of Stanford’s Center to Support Excellence in Teaching’s Hollyhock Fellowship Program: So almost fifty years ( ! ) after I started teaching, I am encouraged to see such programs—and I’d like to hear about others you know of. But in my ideal teacher world, these programs would be ongoing—not just for two weeks during two summers. Rather than being regulated to the nth degree and boxed in with testing, testing, testing, teachers today deserve not only gratitude and a living wage: they deserve opportunities for ongoing and truly professional development. ... View more

Since I attended the West Virginia University 2015 Summer Seminar: Access/ibility in Digital Publishing, I have been thinking about what I do to make resources accessible in the classes that I teach. Like most teachers, I include a policy that tells students to visit our campus center for Services for Students with Disabilities for verification of their needs and resources to help them in the class. I’m not doing the best job with that statement, however. Tara Wood and Shannon Madden’s “Suggested Practices for Syllabus Accessibility Statements” on the Kairos PraxisWiki explains how much more can be done to provide students equal access. Go read it. Beyond the syllabus, there is the content of the course itself. I post either PDF or web-based versions (or both) of all the course documents so that students can magnify the text, if they need support for a visual impairment. I think the pages will all work with screen reader software, but I have to admit that I haven’t tested them. I add ALT attributes to all the images that I use on the course website as well, to ensure students who cannot see the images still understand what they are. I use Lynda.com videos, which have high-quality transcripts. That’s about it, and it feels very much like a piecemeal, minimalistic approach. There is more that I could and should do. As I have been developing resources for a more visual syllabus, for instance, I worry about the potential for the visual presentation to fail, whether because of a student’s visual impairment or because of her lack of familiarity with the layout and organizational structures I am using. Even students who will say that they need no special accommodations can have difficulty navigating text that does not conform to traditional paragraphing conventions and syllabus layout structures. So in the coming weeks, I plan to keep bringing up the issue of accessibility as it relates to the course materials that I create and to the classroom activities that students complete. Students need to learn to create accessible texts, too. My first task will be improving accessibility to the information I present on the first day of the course. Time to revise that tired boilerplate I have been using for my equal access policy! How do you address accessibility in the classroom? Please share any strategies or resources that you have found particularly effective. Just leave me a comment below, or drop by my page on Facebook or Google+. [Photo: Handicap Sign by sterlic, on Flickr] ... View more

Grab a cold beverage or a frozen treat. Press play to begin or pause to resume. Hear and watch our lineup of authors present innovative ways to teach writing. ... View more

As I grade multimodal projects, I’m always frustrated when I find errors that demonstrate that a concept didn’t stick with students. I ultimately spend about half my grading time wondering if the errors I find are my fault. Even though everything is explained repeatedly in assignments, course blog posts, and in the classroom, I fail to communicate some ideas to every student.   As an example, consider the multimodal course that I teach, Writing and Digital Media. Most of the students in course are English majors or minors. They enjoy writing and are usually fairly good at it, as the screenshot on the right from one student's final project shows. When I begin talking about multimodal composing however, they can struggle to follow the concepts, even though they are well explained in the textbook that we use, Writer/Designer, and we go over them repeatedly in class.   As I am planning the course for the fall term, I am thinking of directly addressing these ten issues that I hear students ask questions about most often:   Multimodal does not mean digital technology. Multimodal texts engage multiple modes of communication. You don’t need digital technology to do that. An illuminated medieval manuscript is just as much a multimodal text as a YouTube video is. It doesn’t mean multimedia either. A multimodal text may use multimedia (multiple media, like photos, animation, words, sounds), but it doesn’t have to. Everything in the composition classroom is multimodal composing. It’s impossible to write a text that engages only one mode. Take a traditional essay, printed out and stapled in the upper left corner. That text includes the linguistic, spatial, and visual modes of communication at a minimum. People have been learning about multimodal composition for centuries. Since everything in the writing classroom is multimodal composing, it’s not surprising that teachers have always taught about more than one mode of communication. When you learn how to use layout and design to make the words stand out on a page, for example, you’re learning multimodal composing techniques. What’s important isn’t how, but when and why. How to use multiple modes of communication when you compose is the easy part. What’s important is learning when to engage the different modes of communication and why they bring meaning to the text. Using every mode doesn’t necessarily make a text better. Use all five modes if they help you communicate your message, but don’t add modes just because you can. Make sure that they add to the meaning of the text. Communicating with the visual mode isn’t limited to using photos. Sure photos can be part of it, but you’re also using the visual mode when you add bold text or change the size and color of a font. The gestural mode includes both body language and movement. The word gestural does make you think of gesture, but gestural mode isn’t limited to things that people can do, like smile or wave their arms about. Any kind of movement that communicates with a reader uses the gestural mode. It’s easy to compose a multimodal text. It’s actually impossible not to create a multimodal text. When we add words to a word processing document, for example, we may not think about the multimodal communication we are using. We add visual elements when we choose specific fonts, when we add emphasis by changing a font to bold or increasing its size, and when we indent the words to signal the start of a paragraph or a blocked quotation. It can be challenging, however, to compose a rhetorically effective multimodal text. It is easy to compose a text that uses multiple modes of communication, but it takes work to make sure that the different modes contribute the intended meaning to the text. As you compose multimodal texts, think constantly about your intentions and make sure that the different elements that you add to the text help you say what you intend to.   I am thinking of sharing the list itself, creating an accompanying infographic, or maybe making some memes and posters. If I can convince students of those ten concepts during the first weeks of class, I think they will have an easier time as they work on their projects. I hope so anyway.   What are the ten things that you most wish students knew about the topics you teach? How do you communicate those issues to the class? Share a strategy with me by commenting below or connect with me on Facebook and share your experience. ... View more

Now that my grandnieces Audrey (11) and Lila (7) are out of school for the summer, they are engaged in all manner of activities: Camp (the sleepover kind!), hip hop and tap, volleyball, and, of course, reading. Their school has a voluntary summer reading program, and for the last few years, Audrey has been one of the top readers, gaining mysterious points for every book read. This year, Lila will be joining her, and she’s reading up a storm too. As near as I can tell, their public school offers suggestions, but pretty much lets them read whatever they want. They both love the Dork Diaries books, and Audrey is deeply into The Babysitter volumes while Lila any books about animals. Such programs are going on all over the country in elementary schools. But there are also dozens (if not hundreds) of beyond-school programs to get kids reading. It seems like everyone—from public libraries, to Barnes & Noble and Half Price Books, to Chuck E. Cheese, Pizza Hut, and Pottery Barn—is offering some kind of activity (online or in-person) for kids who want to read—or who can be cajoled to read. My little girlies are at camp right now but have promised to send me their summer reading lists when they get home. In the meantime, I’m wondering how much writing they are going to be doing along with their reading—and I wonder too if writing is involved in the programs listed above. I hope a lot. I have found some programs that focus on writing as well as reading, such as Scholastic, on whose site teachers offer writing activities, including the use of Kidblog, daily writing prompts, and writing journals. The Summer Reading at New York Public Libraries offers “Reading and Writing Fun,” where kids are invited to become storytellers, reporters, and more; and Start with a Book balances the focus on reading with writing activities like Create a Poetree, Review It, Explain It, and Write to Your Favorite Author. Perhaps schools across the country are inviting and encouraging young students to write as well as to read over the summer. If so, I’m very glad, since we all know that writing muscles atrophy just like any others if they’re not used. If Audrey and Lila don’t seem to be writing a lot, I plan to cook up some fun writing activities and games for them. So if you have any to recommend, or any information about outstanding summer reading AND writing programs, please let me know. ... View more