Barbara Walters Playing Both Ends Against the Middle

The other day I was having the obligatory discussion about creative non-fiction in my Intro to Creative Writing class. It is always a strange conversation to start, especially with people who are new the the matters of writing and literature, and most students in an introductory course like this are not well-versed in these kinds of ideas. I have to say that I don't blame them, and I completely recognize that this is what they are taking college level English classes for.

The big question that creative non-fiction asks a person to think about is regarding truth. We get at it by dealing with the difference in what one is going to have to do to produce a short story versus what one is going to have to do to produce a personal essay, or memoir piece.

The technical definition of creative non-fiction (CNF) that you'll see all around the place is that CNF uses the conventions of fiction to tell a story in which the events are presented as having happened instead of presenting the events as invented. This gets immediately sticky because of what I teach about fiction and the fact that there is no creation ex nihilo. One creates by construction of new patterns from existing materials, which we gather through experience. So, in my view, even fiction is a form of non-fiction, but the source materials are a little more processed. The word I use for that in class is "granular."

Things aren't "falser" in fiction; the truth is not as immediately identifiable.

On the flip side, I point out that the notion of a true story is fraught with problems. My buddies over in the criminal justice department make it abundantly clear that eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Our senses do not constitute a security camera that records everything. The combination of our attention, the accuracy of our senses, and the faults of our memories create a dragnet of inaccuracies that we present as "our take" on what happened, with no more claim on the truth and anyone else's take.

Which invariably brings us to Mr. James Frey and his book A Million Little Pieces and that very, very tired controversy. In order to make this part of things a bit more interesting, I brought in this YouTube video of the very important response from the erudite pundits on the View.

I was so interested in the mob mentality here, and their complete lack of understanding of even the least shred of the most basic part of this argument from a literary perspective. What struck me was Barbara Walters perspective here. She is so quick to dismiss the memoir as a concept, then she packpaddles so quickly. The entire discussion makes the memoir seem like something Al-Qaeda whipped up to undermine Western civilization. But why was Walters so bold and why did she edit herself so quickly.

Well, take a look at the title of her new book. Will wonders never cease?

Partners in the Parks

It's May, which means that it's National Parks time. My good friend and colleague, Matt Nickerson (who directs the Honors Program at SUU where I teach) and I have been putting together a program called Partners in the Parks. Each spring we take honors students out into the wild lands of Southwest Utah for what we call an Academic Adventure Program. Our focus is the National Parks system. We teach honors students about what a National Park is, how it is managed, who does the work, what it takes to maintain it.

Matt and I were recently awarded a grant from the National Parks Service to expand and document the program. In a year, we've gone from one pilot program in Bryce Canyon to six programs nationwide. Earlier this spring we collaborated with our friend Kevin Bonine, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Arizona, to take a group of Honors Program faculty from around the country on an experiential education training program along the US/Mexico border. We traveled from the saguaro country down to the Sea of Cortez.

This spring we started a series of three projects, starting with Zion National Park, followed by one in Bryce Canyon. We have one still to do on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and then one to assist with on the east coast in Acadia National Park in Maine.

The numbers were small on this first Zion program, which was good because we really needed to get going on a new approach for us: letting go. We had two new leaders to train and observe. We were used to doing these kinds of projects on our own but we knew that we just couldn't sustain this on our own, not growing the program to the size that we imagined giving coverage to the National Parks Program as a whole. That was the big challenge we hadn't imagined.

It worked okay. What was most exciting was learning to manage the administrative parts of these activities with the on-the-ground aspects. We also needed to make sure that the integrity of the program was maintained, which meant that Matt and I had to know what it was, and we had to communicate it effectively to the new leaders. The Zion project went off reasonably well. I think participants really got the main idea of the whole program: study the parks by being in the parks.

Bryce Canyon was very interesting. After two days of really scorching temperatures (upper 80s and low 90s, which is hot for that elevation), the temperature dropped something like 40 degrees). We hiked in snow flurries. At night it froze, in the day, it came up a few degrees but not much. It was a real test for everyone, including the two of us, who had to learn how to run one of these programs when nothing went as planned (and almost nothing did). This was a completely different set of challenges. We also released more control and only joined the group at the half way point, for the backcountry hiking. At the same time a project in Manhattan rolled out, completely under the direction of other leaders. Two of the three on that project had been on projects with Matt and I, but they designed and executed this one on their own. It sounds like it was thrilling.

The final project is one that Matt and I are doing alone, with no other support staff. We're heading into the really remote Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, which is along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon between St. George, Utah and the Colorado River. As remote as it is (we need to bring extra spare tires, fuel, and a satellite phone), we'll be staying in a pretty nice research facility on Mt. Trumbull. No real loss of creature comforts there. No backpacking either. I think the solitude will be rapturous.

More on that when we finish.

What is This So-Called "Syllabus" You're Talking About?

A few years ago, my wife found a bunch of silk screens on an eBay auction, and we bought them because I really like to silk screen (had a bad job once, where I learned the basics of the trade), and we thought we could do some cool stuff. The printmaking professor at my university has given me access to the lab, so I can prep the screens and expose them and do all that stuff.

I'm waiting until there is enough time for me to work on some things I've been really hankering to get into, projects that have been on my mind literally for a dozen years, or more.

Despite the fact that I have the stuff and access to even more stuff, I haven't been able to get myself in gear to work on any of those projects, except for now I think I'm close. I think I have the motivation I'm going to need to break out the screens, print a transparency, buy some Hanes Beefy-"T"s, and get busy.

My students have been driving me crazy with questions I have painstakingly answered on the syllabus in detail, sometimes excruciating detail. They'll come right up to my face and ask about a due date, or the percentage of the total grade they've just botched with their last essay. I'll tell them that it's on the syllabus, but they'll still ask. They will stare me in the face, as if to say, "I don't have a copy of that with me, and plus, I'm not going to read it anyway. Why don't you just tell me?"

So I'm going to make a half dozen of the following t-shirts, so I'll always have a clean one. It's going to become part of my teaching uniform.

Who knows. I might be able to sell a few on the internet and whittle down some of my student loans.

Art Pour L'Art | Art Pour Les Gens

I've been having a lot of conversations lately that go like this:

PERSON: How are you doing?

ME: Oh...good, but things'll be better after [weekend, conference, project, etc.].

PERSON: Yeah, I know it.

ME: It's crazy.

PERSON: Doesn't get any better, just keeps coming at you.

I'm starting to see that it really does. This seems to be one of the clichés that is so fundamentally and basically true that it transcends the status of cliché and becomes something else--a truism, maybe.

Other things in this list of transcendences include: your kids grow up faster than you are ready for them to; time accelerates; and your body just stops moving as quickly and smoothly as it used to.

As a writer who has a surfeit of creative writing education, I have been warned and counseled and browbeaten over the avoidance of cliché. It is the thing, we are told, that will destroy our writing. Cliché is the seed which becomes fully flowered florid prose, which, in turn, becomes the throw-away airplane potboilers that no one ever really acknowledges that they have read, at least not in mixed company or without a certain measure of guilt.

Yet, aren't there a few of these truisms out there that deserve a place in good writing? Isn't this how people connect to a work and want to pay $20.00+ for the book (or at least want to check it out from the library)? How does one balance the cliché with the truism? How does one give the truism a new outfit so it seems like a proper insight into the truth about the human condition without simply being a set of new threads for the emperor?

In my experience in the graduate training centers of creative writing and in the editor's chair at a couple of literary magazines, I've seen that the anxiety over cliché has created a whole lot of work that fails to engage anyone but the author. Or it connects with the other writers in the creative writing workshops who are so afraid of clichés that they would rather read bad prose that seems to be free of cliché than good prose that is, as they might say, tainted by it.

In the attempt to give cliché the slip, many writers have lost the reader well. It is now so hard for readers to find themselves in so much of this new writing that they much prefer "inferior" stories that have the porch light on and a welcome mat out.

And I suppose, who can blame them?

Certainly this is more of the old, art for art's sake argument. I used to think that position had more merit than I do now. Imagine, for example, a chef who says "I only cook food for food's sake." Even the most obscure chef, trafficking in the hautest of haute cuisine, still must acknowledge that somebody is going to have to eat the dumpling. You can't just make it and let it sit on the counter, what is the purpose in that?

It'll just go bad, and you'll have to throw it out. Thus is is with books, I think. A sad state of affairs.

Joining In

Usually I don't do the assignments I give. This week something turned inside, and I felt absolutely compelled to join in. So when handing out plotting assignments to my Intermediate Fiction Writing Workshop, I grabbed a slip for myself.

I grabbed "Day in the Life," a story shape from Jerome Stern's marvelous book, Making Shapely Fiction. The job is to use someone's quotidian existence to make a point.

Here's the plot I came up with. It's tentatively called "The Pacifier." This was really fun for me. I never get the chance to write anymore, and this just came in about thirty minutes.

Wallace Coventry got ketchup on his tie. He's in the bathroom at the shoe store, trying to wash out the spot. His boss, Ned, hassles him about being late for his shift. Wallace thinks of his gym teacher, who used to "dock him" for not wearing a jockstrap. Wallace's mother was widowed and didn't know those kinds of things were necessary. The ketchup is gone, but the spot is too apparent, so Wallace wets the whole tie and presses it between two wads of paper towels.

He goes on the floor, and a mother is attempting to fit some shoes on one child, who is screaming and kicking. The second child, still an infant, is also crying. Wallace offers to help, and the mother hands the screaming child to Wallace, who doesn't know what to do with it. He sets his Brannock tool on the floor and bounces around, trying to calm the child. The woman talks to Wallace and to her child. It is hard to tell who she is addressing, both by the content of her remarks and the direction of her attention. It is clear that her husband has left her for another woman.

After she buys the shoes and leaves, Wallace notices a binkey under one of the chairs, which is still wet. He goes to the register and gets her address off the check and decides to return the binkey. After his shift he rides his bike to a trailer park, and finds her single-wide. It is in shambles. Wallace recalls the fancy home of a girl he took to a dance in high school. She was nice, but Wallace jammed himself up, worrying that she wouldn't like him because his father was a foreman at a window manufacturing plant and his mother was a school nurse for a different school. Wallace leaves without delivering the binkey.

The next day, the mother returns. Wallace is getting dressed down for something. Ned won't stop, even though the mother is standing right there. Both children are crying again. The older one is wearing the new shoes, and is running around the store, knocking things over. Ned asks the mother to get her kids under control. The mother says they need the binkey--it's the only one he'll take, and the store is out of the right ones. Wallace says he hasn't seen the binkey, but he'll keep an eye out. When the mother and kids are gone, Ned completes his dress down and goes in the back. Wallace remembers a time when some guys at his school were talking about "finger banging" a certain girl, just as the girl appeared around the corner with the drama teacher. She is devastated, and Wallace did nothing. The pause is terrible. Wallace opens the till takes all the money and drives 50 miles to buy out all the matching binkies.

When he gets to the trailer park, the woman is sitting on the front porch with a man drinking beers. The woman notices him and says hello. Wallace takes the original binkey from his pocket and presents it to her. She thanks him. Wallace goes to a grocery store and gets a chicken and some cokes and eats them on the hood of his car. When he's done he goes to a pay phone and calls his mother and tells her he's taken a job in New Mexico and he'll be moving.

When she asks him where, he pauses. He says he has to work out the details. She tells him to be careful. He says the work will be dangerous, then he hangs up.

Narratology Bibligraphy

Thanks for coming to the panel. A copy of the bibliography in Adobe PDF format is below. Let us know what you think.

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--

Todd

I Can Eat Fifty Eggs

A while ago a buddy of mine upgraded my classroom policies to reflect a little more of the vigor he assumes I bring to my classes. He might be right.

++++++++++++

By the way, I think a few modifications, Cool Hand Luke style might be in order for some of your policies.

POLICIES

1. I only accept university-excused absences.
2. If you're unreasonably late, that's a night in the box.
3. If it's clear to me that you're not prepared, that's a night in the box.
4. If you fool around in class, that's a night in the box.
5. Each absence after the first three will take two percentage points off your final grade, and a night in the box.
6. Nine absences will equal an F in the course, and a night in the box.
7. If you have perfect attendance, I'll round up a borderline grade.
8. I won't grade late work unless we've made previous arrangements.
9. Ten or more typos in any one typed assignment will get you an F on that assignment, and a night in the box.
10. I won't read messy, disorganized, or neglectful work.

Given the current state of affairs I might have to implement these policies changes soon.

Some Great Lines from ENGL 3030

This is not a scoff and mock session. I get enough of that at lunch. These are two passages from my Intermediate Fiction class last semester. Same girl. Man...she's got a future.

He returned the door to its resting position with the lock in place, leaving the girls alone again with the unrelenting desert heat and the obscene lullaby of the Indians in the distance.

and

The sweat on the mans face multiplied under the stare of the sun.

This kind of writing threatens to make all the other garbage worth reading, but not really. Still, it's pretty nice to know someone cares about their sentences.

Dah-dah

Teaching is really a grand pursuit, but grading...grading is a real turd. It's really where the self-discipline I learned in graduate school becomes truly useful. I've found that I'll drift up to the department secretary's office and ask her if she needs any help counting how much colored paper is left in the copier room. I'll actually organize my files or dust. I'll talk to anyone about anything to keep from having to grade this work.

Why?

Because I know what grade they deserve without looking at their work. I know what kind of effort they have put out to learn, and more often than not, they can work the angles with the numbers and slip through the system. And like Sam Waterston in an episode of Law and Order, I must watch them slip through the fingers of the system, thinking that this is something we all must endure in order for things to move forward at all.

As you can tell from this post, I still have much to accomplish.

Pandering to the Student

Here's the big battle for writing teachers: what to write on student drafts.

Lately I've been concerned that the standard red pen approach is actually a kind of plagiaristic pandering, whereby we aid carnal desire to earn grades without the requisite work. In other words, they want something for nothing and we feel obliged to give it to them.

To borrow from the ubiquitous 12 step discourse, the red pen approach causes professors to function as plagiarism enablers.

The mechanics of this are simple. we identify an error, mark a correction on the essay, hand that essay back to the student, who goes back to those corrections, makes them, and resubmits the essay (as a revision or part of a portfolio). We look at this new and improved essay, and say, "Now there's some progress," and reward the student with more points.

The implicit message is that professors will subsidize student success with our own work. Consequently, I think students pick up, what is for them, an important strategy -- they can maximize their grade-to-effort ratio by not worrying about error because their professors (a) allow them to revise and (b) will show them what's wrong and, more importantly, how to fix it.

In all this what we're not teaching them how to do is fundamental. We're not teaching them how to fix their own errors.

Perhaps we think something along these lines: "How can they learn if I don't show them what's wrong?"

Human Nature | Human Nurture

Portfolios mean something entirely different for teachers and students.

Portfolios are a teacher's way of emphasizing revision, and they are a student's way of fixing a bad grade.

Portfolios are really going to mean very little for me until I can figure out how to overcome this problem. No wonder my grades are so highóI let students fix their mistakes. Is this a problem? Do other professors allow for this?

Also this: I think the knowledge that they have a "second chance" keeps students from being as deliberate and careful as they ought to be. It's like nothing matters until the last week of the semester.

And this is, of course, just human nature. But it's probably incumbent upon me as a college professor to help people overcome human nature, even if it's just a little bit.

Zenagogy

I've been experimenting with sort of not teaching my composition students how to write. For some reason, I decided that I wanted to test out the assumption that I was actually doing something.

I was scared, a little, that I might discover that they might not need me. Or worse, I was slightly nervous that my students' customer service upbringing might cause them to demand that I "teach them" something, meaning that I would talk for a while and they would take notes and then they would write a paper the way I said to write a paper and then they would get a good grade. Voila, teaching.

Well, hmmmm.

I have, over the last few years, taken some classes for fun or enrichment: pottery, breadmaking, photography, photopolymer letterpress plate making. And you know what? I didn't learn in this traditional "be told what to do and then do it" way. Instead these teachers sort of said, "Here's what you need to look out for. Here's where people go wrong. You need to just dive in and do this for a while and make mistakes and critique your own performances and experiment and play a little."

Then, you know what happened? I dove in (sometimes waded) and after a little time, I got okay.

I got okay. Not great, just okay, which causes me to realize that maybe getting okay is all that's going to happen at this point for those people who take two semesters of writing classes. How long did it take me to become a good writer?

Well, until today. And that's been a long time. But it might also take until tomorrow.

So what I've done with my own teaching is this: I've backed off. I've given assignments and deadlines. I've answered questions and made them read things they wouldn't have chosen to read on their own. I make them write and I don't let them revise things I've already graded (how is that a professional writing practice?).

Instead I make them take their time and work methodically. I don't talk about rhetoric or any of it. I just let them write. And you know what? I can't sense that they are any worse for my not teaching. In fact, I think they're a little better, which is to say, "I think it's working."

What am I supposed to do with that information?