 Had a typically wonderful time at the annual Walt Whitman Birthday Bash Thursday in Conroe. The main performer was Bruce Noll, who offers a “dramatic interpretation” of Leaves of Grass. He was very good—a true pleasure to hear the words recited, acted, not just read.
For my part art the Gathering of Poets, I read a segment from the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:
The American poets are to enclose old and new, for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions . . . he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country's spirit . . . . he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him. The blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland and the sea off Massachusetts and Maine and over Manhattan bay and over Champlain and Erie and over Ontario and Huron and Michigan and Superior, and over the Texan and Mexican and Floridian and Cuban seas and over the seas off California and Oregon, is not tallied by the blue breadth of the waters below more than the breadth of above and below is tallied by him. When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer and the Pacific coast stretches longer he easily stretches with them north or south. He spans between them also from east to west and reflects what is between them. On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and liveoak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and limetree and cottonwood and tuliptree and cactus and wildvine and tamarind and persimmon . . . .and tangles as tangled as any canebrake or swamp . . . . and forests coated with transparent ice and icicles hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind . . . . and sides and peaks of mountains . . . . and pasturage sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie . . . . To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events---. . . . For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista.
In my literature class this past semester, some of the students (not many; a couple or so) didn't much care for Walt.
"He's a know-it-all," one student said. "He thinks he's smarter than everyone else."
"Well, sure," I said. "He's a cosmos!"
This student also thought Thoreau was a know-it-all. Oh, well....A couple of things to investigate:
Here's someone writing about the Preface
Here's Bruce Noll’s website
 In Week Three of the class, we began the reading presentations and talked a little about outlines.
I want to discuss as many texts as possible in the class, so I came up with a reading list of 20 books. Each student will read two books off the list, and will give an oral presentation on one book, and a written report on the other. Their task is to teach the other students what these books show us about writing.
The list:
14-Sep Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
14-Sep Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
21-Sep Sarah Bird, The Mommy Club
21-Sep Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
28-Sep Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
28-Sep James Hynes, Kings of Infinite Space
12-Oct Patti Smith, Just Kids
12-Oct Mary Karr, Cherry
19-Oct Patricia McConnel, Sing Soft Sing Loud
19-Oct Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow
26-Oct John Graves, Goodbye to a River
26-Oct Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
02-Nov Susan Collins, The Hunger Games
02-Nov Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water
09-Nov Lowell Mick White, That Demon Life
09-Nov John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
16-Nov Oscar Casares, Brownsville
16-Nov Tiffani Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony
30-Nov Jim Harrison,Returning to Earth
30-Nov Percival Everett, Erasure
It’s not a perfect list. If I’d had a few days to think it over, some
different books might have made the cut. But as it is, I think it’s useful: I have a wide range of narrative types here—novels, novellas, composite novels, memoirs—horror, history, comedy, popular page-turners.
We began with Sandra Cisneros and Shirley Jackson. Erika Liesman and Austin Meek gave very fine presentations—informative, insightful, and enthusiastic.
*
Above, Erika discussing the way Sandra Cisneros uses dialogue in The House on Mango Street. Erika also used videos of Sandra talking about her writing process.... Above, Austin shows the creepy cover of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Austin gave us the plot highlights from the book, and discussed the advantages of having a protagonist who is kind of...bad.... *
This isn’t the first class I’ve taught where I have students write
extended narratives. When I was working on the creative part of my dissertation, I was writing a composite novel composed of three interlocking novellas. And since I was writing novellas, I thought I should perhaps teach novellas, and so I structured the prose part of my multi-genre into to creative writing class to accommodate long stories/novellas.
All the students got off to excellent starts, but then, after 15 or so pages, they stopped. They didn’t know what was supposed to happen next in their novella. The pages seemed to stretch out before them, endlessly, scarily. All of them recovered and completed their novellas, and some of them did truly fine, high-quality work, but there was a grim period there in the middle of the semester where the young writers were staring around glassy-eyed and stressed. It made me nervous—I’m sure it was worse for the students.
It occurred to me that a good outline might have prevented this
worrisome stall. So for my current class, I mandated that students produce an outline, and made it a graded assignment. They were due this week, and were interesting in their variety and conception. Some were very detailed, others more perfunctory—all of them, I think, will give the writers something to fall back on when they get stuck (and they will get stuck).
At the same time, I tried to emphasize that outlines are not
contracts—you don’t have to stick with them forever and ever. Indeed, as your extended narrative—your novel, novella, memoir—gets written, your conception of the project will change, and new ideas, relationships, and characters will emerge. The work-in-progress is necessarily plastic. I’m going to encourage the writers to keep their outlines plastic as well, and keep them updated as their narratives progress.
Here’s Jacquelyn Asiala’s outline, done in sticky notes…. I'm looking forward to reading everything.
Next week: more reading presentations, and the first workshops....
 Though I will leave my memories of 9-11 for another anniversary, I will say that I was from the first very concerned with what it meant—how, beyond the immediate shock and sadness, it would change our lives in the US. I figured we’d have a war in Afghanistan, and I worried that
political opportunists might use the attack to turn Americans against each other. But I would never have guessed that 10 years later the wars would still be going on, seemingly endlessly, and I grossly under-estimated the political divisions that would emerge from the attack, and I never imagined the growth of the security state.
We’ve now had the 10-year anniversary, and I wondered what my students thought of everything that’s happened. So yesterday I asked them—what are the most important events of the last 25 years? (Most of the students are about 20 years old—I chose 25 years of recent history so that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 could be included; one student called it).
I was very surprised when no student included the 2000 Election! So I included it for them….
From left to right: 2000 Election; 9-11, with arrows to the Global War on Terror, the Iraq War, and the Afghan War; Technology; Katrina; Great Recession; Obama; Government Limitations; 1989/Berlin Wall; Climate Change; Pluto losing planet status.
Looking at this, I guess I have to see the 2000 Election as the seminal event of our time—if we can engage in counterfactual historical speculation, we can assume that Gore’s reaction to 9-11 would surely have been different than Bush’s, that the Iraq War at least would not have happened, that the huge tax cuts which contributed to the Great Recession and ongoing Government Limitations would not have occurred, and perhaps the flooding of New Orleans would have been better handled. But maybe not. Who knows?
At any rate, I urged the students to pay attention to all this, everything, to the world around them—to the tumult of the ongoing crises and also to the people going about their daily lives. I told them to use their awareness in their writing, of course, but to also pay close attention because their future grandchildren will want to know what life was like during this complex and confusing time….
 When I worked at the IRS I learned to be flexible. There were many times when the Section Chief would suddenly erupt from her office and rumble across the floor and announce that production on the programs for 1040 or 1040-A or prior years or whatever was falling behind and had to be kicked up and shifted, and so we managers would scramble around reassigning work to the transcribers, setting up new quality review schedules, listening to the transcribers complain…it was a lot of work, and it changed all the time. We had to improvise. We had to be flexible.
That was a long time ago. Yet flexibility came in handy here at the beginning of this semester at Texas A&M. I was scheduled to teach four sections of composition, a class I’ve taught many times before, and I had my syllabus prepared and my books ordered and I was ready get in the classroom do some educating.
But when I got down to campus on the first day of classes, everything changed.
One of our colleagues had been hospitalized the day before, and was out for the semester, and I was suddenly assigned to teach his classes. So three of my comp sections were taken away, and I was given two sections of intro to creative writing and one section of advanced creative writing.
It was time for me to be flexible, to improvise. The two sections of intro weren’t much of a problem—it’s a class I’ve been teaching now for about six years, and I know what to do. But I’d never had an advanced class before.
During a job interview last winter, the chair of the search committee at a nice SLAC asked me how I would teach an advanced class. It was something I had given a little thought to, some vague thought, but not hardly enough vague thought. I heard the question, and had a quick flashback to my own undergraduate education in creative writing. Back in the day I had the same professor for the intro to fiction writing class, and for the advanced workshop. And you know what? It was the same class! We read the same book, we had the same assignments, we used the same damn syllabus with only the course title and the due dates changed! In retrospect, that kind of sucked.
And there I was on the phone for a job interview, holding my phone in my hand, a wave of sadness and regret washing over me. I suddenly wished I’d had better classes as an undergrad. I felt cheated. I said to the search committee, “Well, I guess an advanced class should be different than an intro class….”
It was a horrible, vague, mumbling answer-- a moment when I wasn't able to improvise!-- and of course I didn’t get the job.
But, now, on the hectic first day of a new semester, I was suddenly given a chance to do something new.
Most fiction classes at the college level, intro or advanced, concentrate on short stories, which makes a kind of sense: classes are always constrained by time, and so if you concentrate on short stories you can read a variety of works by a variety of writers, and students can produce several stories in a semester. However, this traditional approach disregards the truth that the short story is a difficult genre with a tight, restrictive structure, and that students can become frustrated by an inability to master it. Also, the traditional approach ignores the fact that literature is more than short stories.
So, faced with a new class to put together and having only about a day to do it, I decided was to do something different. I decided that we would write “extended narratives”—novellas or short memoirs, the beginnings of full-length novels or memoirs, or perhaps a series of tightly connected short stories. I set students the goal of writing 20,000 words over the course of the semester. At the end of the semester, students will revise the first 15-20 pages of their extended narrative and submit that for a grade. I’m also giving them an outlining assignment, and they’ll give presentations on the readings.
The full syllabus is here on my teaching page, along with my comp syllabus and my intro to cw syllabus and a few other documents.
Two weeks into the semester, I’m pleased with this class. I think it’s going to work out well. I’ll certainly be posting updates….
Things to look for:
Novelist/Professor Cathy Day is teaching a novel class this semester at Ball State University. You can read about it on her personal blog, The Big Thing, and on her class blog #amnoveling. She’s doing thoughtful, important work.
A wonderful book on flexibility and improvisation is Patricia Ryan Madson’s Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up. Essential reading for all teachers and writers.
 I hang on to student work for a long time—probably far longer than I need to—waiting for someone to stop by and ask for their final paper or portfolio back. A few do, most don’t, and the papers pile up until at last—after years, usually—I get tired of looking at them and off to the recycling they go….
And so yesterday I attacked a pile of pile of final portfolios from a creative writing class that closed up some four years ago. And written on the back of a folder was the following message:
Hi, Dr. White
I had a crazy weekend for my birthday! At the pool party I got drunk, beat the shit out of my man-friend, then got dropped on my head/face, and went to the ER. What a birthday huh? I also had a relative die Saturday :( I thought you would enjoy my little anecdote :)
Have a great summer!
FN
Notice that FN is not making an appeal to my sympathy. Nor is she using her “little anecdote” as an excuse—in fact, her portfolio, and all of her work in that class, was turned in on time. She is just an energetic kid enjoying her youth—though no doubt applying her energy in inappropriate and nonproductive ways.
Note to current and future students: don’t do this at home!
 I had a job interview last year that went weird quite unexpectedly.
It was a phone interview, and the email confirmation said that the search committee would call between 8:00 am and 10:00 am CST. (“AM”—that’s the morning, right?) So I got up in the morning and got my job materials all ready to reference, and I waited…and waited. No call at 8:01 am, not at 8:30 am…9:00, 9:25, 10:00…no call at all! At 11:00 I sent them a polite email: “Perhaps you lost my phone number”…Still no call. In mid-afternoon I called the school and got voice mail.
Late afternoon I went to my class at the prison, and when I got out, just before 8:00 pm, I got into my car and headed home. As I was driving through the gate, at just after 8:00 pm, my phone rang. Yeah, right.
But all that’s background, and only moderately weird. They were mixed up about the time. Very mixed up. Or crazy. I guess it happens.
So I pulled over in front of the prison and talked to the two members of the committee. They asked basic interview questions—about my dissertation, about how I teach composition, about my writing, about my work at Callaloo.
Then one of the interviewers asked, “So, tell me, how do you know when your students are learning?”
I talked about assessment, about the rubric I put together for creative writing…I don’t know, I talked about…learning things.
When I finished the other interviewer asked something or other, and I answered.
Then the earlier one asked, “I want to go back to my previous question. How do you know when your students are learning? I mean, how do you really know?”
I was parked in front of a prison in the dark. Cars were going down the street. Headlights flashing in my eyes. This is the weird part. Much of my writing is based on the idea that people are very mysterious—that you never know what’s going on with another individual, you never know what’s going on in their mind or in their heart. Never! Yet here was that question challenging that idea—I was being asked how I knew something perhaps essentially unknowable. I found that really…weird. I had a strange image of hanging around a dorm room with a bunch of stoners: “Dude, how do you REALLY know if somebody knows something? I mean, REALLY?”
I started to say something—then I stopped, and started to say something else. Then I was silent for a second. Then at last I was honest: “Uh…I guess I don’t know.”
I didn’t get the job, of course. (A sad loss for that department, since I’m a damn good English teacher).
But—after I gave it some thought over the next few days, I had an esprit de l’escalier moment, and I figured out what I should have answered.
How do I know when my students are learning?
I know when I see them change.
I know when I see them think.
I know when I see them put into practice the concepts we’ve covered over the course of the semester.
I know when ideas become action.
The Young Scholars I taught this semester at A&M reached this level over the past couple of weeks. It was remarkable to watch—and fun, and moving. They led discussions, they gave presentations, they turned in outstanding writing. They changed. They learned—we all did.
 Yesterday my students at the prison came up with an incredibly original and insightful take on Flannery O’Connor’s story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
Back on Wednesday we talked about Hemingway and read aloud a few of his various iceberg stories—“Cat in the rain,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “Indian Camp.” I then assigned the class to read “A Good Man” for Friday….
When I came into the class three students were very intently discussing the story. One said to me, “There’s some big icebergs in this story….” They’d been up all night reading the story over and over. The story disturbed them and excited them. When the other students arrived, we all discussed their theory….
Basically:
1. It’s mentioned that Grandma has lived in Tennessee and has connections there. Unsavory connections, the students think. She’s hiding something.
2. Why is Grandma so interested in the Misfit breaking out of prison? Most people would see that in the paper and shrug and go on to the next story. She doesn’t.
3. Grandma dresses so that if she dies, people will know she is a lady. This indicates that she hasn’t always been a lady. She has a checkered past. (In Tennessee).
4. The Misfit literally is her child.
5. The moment of grace is then both literal and metaphysical.
6. The Misfit, finally recognizing her, shoots her three times in the chest.
They convinced me!
One of my best teaching experiences ever….
I see that rateyourstudents.com has apparently closed up or shut down or whatever dead or dying blogs do. Sort of sad, I think. I mentioned RYS in the introduction to my dissertation, said how the anger expressed on it was at times astonishing. But at the same time it was often compelling reading.Last fall I was hanging out by our building’s vending machines, talking with a friend. She told of a problem student. I matched her. Then she said something like, We ought to feel guilty, complaining about our students!I wasn’t so sure—I'm not so sure. Problems lie at the base of all good narratives: nobody cares about all those boring happy families that are all alike, and as teachers we can’t waste our time geting riled up about the 98% of our students who do what they’re supposed to do and learn, and leave. (Though they make us very happy indeed). Instead we concern ourselves with the crazies and the prodigals, and they make us crazy and frustrated, and we slay the fatted calf or whatever to celebrate if they finally get it together and care enough to turn in a decent paper.
Update: rateyourstudents.com has reincarnatred as College Misery. Perhaps the snark—and the anger!—will live on.
Update update: After six weeks, College Misery is pretty slow off the mark. I think now one of the strengths of RYS was the fact that it was mdoerated, and the moderators had pretty high standards. College Misery is unmoderated, and people just post seemingly random complaints about whatever. Snark without wit is snottiness.
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