 This is how absent-minded I can be sometimes: I will buy a book, and enjoy it—love it, even!—and then lose it, or think I’ve lost it. And so I buy another copy.
And then I find the first copy hiding somewhere.
Of course.
This most recently happened with Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease, a book I’ve mentioned before—it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read on writing.
And so, yesterday I was happy to find the older copy, the long-lost friend, and I leafed through it, looking at Flaherty’s words and my various marginal notations, and I came across a puzzling one:
The photo is sadly blurry. There is a wavy line around a paragraph, and above it a little sort-of circle with lines emerging
from it—a dandelion seed, maybe, or a bacteria. It took me a while, but then I realized, no—it’s the sun! For
next to it I wrote: “Sunshine!”
Here’s the passage I was commenting on:
I strain my nerves for the faintest sense of the feeling I should write, the feeling that my feet are starting to lift off the ground. Although I sit down to write every day at five in the morning, on the days when my muse has left me, I can no longer pretend to sit down because I am in control of the situation. I am not writing but doing penance for all the days when the muse spoke and I failed to listen (87).
Sunshine! Right?
I do like this passage. I’m not a muse-man, but sometimes writing does indeed feel like penance. I love this book.
 At this point in the semester, we’re getting into the heart of the class—writing and workshopping.
At my university the creative writing classes are large—25 in the intro class, and 19 in the advanced class. This makes using the traditional workshop a bit difficult. Because of their numbers, students simply don’t get as much feedback as they would if they were in a smaller class—their work gets discussed twice a semester, if they’re lucky, and usually only once. And, in the classes I’ve observed, only a handful of students actually seem to do the reading and then participate in discussion.
Since I began teaching creative writing some five years ago, I’ve tried to work around the class size problem by having students work in small groups. It’s been pretty successful, I think. Students get into groups of three and each reads her or his work aloud to the others, who then comment.
Still, I’ve changed the workshops around a little this semester. The classrooms have projectors in them, so each week I take the work-in-progress of two students and put it up on the screen. The student reads their work aloud, and then talks about their intentions for the work, or problems they’ve been having, or anything else they want to talk about. Then the class comments, and then I say a few words. We do this on Monday in my intro classes, and on Wednesday in the advanced class (it’s a three-hour class).
Then in the next class session, students break up into their workshop groups and go over their work. I also then call up students for individual conferences. If my scheduling goes right, all the students will have their work discussed by the whole class at least once, and will meet with me individually at least once (of course, they can meet with me as often as they want during office hours or before or after class), and will discuss their work in groups about ten times.
So far—it’s working.
Below, Catherine Wright's novella-in-progress, "Deviant," up for discussion on the classroom projector....
 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.
 Years ago I was driving across Tennessee and came down toward Chattanooga just at dusk, and it looked so pretty looming up out of the impounded waters of the Tennessee River. I was moved—and I thought of moving there. I told a girl I knew then about my dream of Chattanooga, but she was unimpressed.
“You probably won’t be any more happy there than you are here,” she said. “Or unhappy.”
Which might have been true. Heck, was probably true. I never found out, though, for I never ran away to Chattanooga. But still—the main impulse is right, I think. Sometimes you just have to pack up and go. Hit the road and leave everyone and everything behind….
Janet put on a jacket and gathered up her purse and a battered Rand McNally road atlas. Seven times in the last eight weeks she had dropped Jay off at Steve's, then set out on long drives out of town, driving eight or ten or twelve hours, thinking, thinking, stopping late for a motel room—twice sleeping in the front seat of her car—then turning back in the early morning and heading home. Each drive—to Dalhart, Clovis, Carlsbad, El Paso, Big Bend, Wichita, Little Rock—she saw as a dry run, practice for when she really left town for good.
The opening scene with Janet and her son is taken from one of my earliest memories, a morning when I was sitting at the table with my mom when we were startled by a sonic boom….
“It's when a plane goes faster than the speed of sound,” Janet said. “You know what that is?”
Jay shook his head.
“Okay, let's say that airplane came busting through the wall just now”—Janet pointed with her cigarette at the wall just behind Jay—“and I yelled 'Get down, Jay!' But no matter how fast I yelled at you, the plane would still run you over, 'cause it would be going faster than my words.”
Jay twisted around in his chair and looked at the wall, as if judging the likelihood of a jet bursting through it at any moment. Then he turned back to his cereal and began eating, every now and then looking up at his mother. He didn't say anything.
Janet thinks, “…at the speed of sound, you could get a long way away, maybe before anyone even noticed you were gone.”
Several people have pointed out, correctly, that Janet’s decision to flee—to bolt and leave her kid behind—would be a selfish one. But sometimes we write about selfish people, and sometimes we are selfish people. Life is like that.
There are jets--RF4Cs, in fact--in this story, and so I'll run this video again....
 The tragic and untimely death of Amy Winehouse provoked many responses among my social network pals and on the various blogs I read—and most of the responses were sober and thoughtful and sad, though some were vicious, and some just clueless. It’s the clueless ones that here attract my attention.
“It was not a matter of if but of when” was a comment I saw in half a dozen places on Facebook. And reading these comments I thought, What? Huh?
Oh, clueless friends of Facebook friends, go look in the goddamn mirror. You see a person there? The one that looks somewhat like you? For that clueless person, too, death is not a matter of if but of when! Your reflection and you and me and all of us are sadly mortal, and death could come tap us on the shoulder at any moment.
The question that then faces us all is pretty basic: what should we do in the meantime? How should we spend these few precious remaining hours?
When she looked back on her life, Bonnie Chamberlain could see that she had always lived in a tortured world. Not just tortured through the normal heartbreaks of dying parents and stupid boyfriends and husbands—though, of course, like anyone else she had experienced those minor personal tortures—but tortured by time itself, vast, scary time, a span where mountains rose and eroded, oceans flooded and withdrew, where earthquakes and volcanoes went off, and strange creatures walked and flapped and swam.
She felt the pain of the world most of her life; when she was nine years old, some 45 million years after the last seas finally receded and the land that would become Texas emerged wet and steaming from the gunk, Bonnie found a fossil shark’s tooth in the bed of a dry creek on her grandparent’s farm. Long as her finger, black and gray and still sharp and scary-looking ages after being shed, the tooth was suddenly precious to her, a link to a hidden world—holding it in her hand, even as a child, she could almost feel the power, the mystery, the danger, the delight, the very life of the long-dead shark. Later she remembered looking up into the hills above the creek and being thrilled and scared to know that this had once been the floor of the ocean—and before that, a mountain range—and before that, and that, and that—something had always been there. She could feel the world spinning back, endlessly.
In the story “Reliction,” Bonnie’s response to mortality is to find solace in the physical world. Some people create art. There are other possible responses. Some are more dangerous than others.
 One of the best writing students I’ve ever had was an athlete, a young woman basketball player who was heading off for a career as a high school coach. I told her a quick path to publication might be to write about basketball—there always seems to be a demand for sports stories.
“Basketball stories are all the same,” she said. “Buzzer-beating shot wins the game.”
I said—Well, then, don’t write that story! Write about what it’s like to be a basketball player—the endless practices, the rivalries and relationships between the players, the intricate tangle of conflicts and desires that exists in the locker room and on the court….
I’m thinking back on this because I just finished reading George Dohrman’s Play Their Hearts Out, one of the best books I’ve ever read on sports—certainly the most disturbing. Dohrman spent eight years following a team of young basketball players, and the stories of these young men are heart-breaking and tragic and occasionally—incredibly, rising up through the corruption—inspiring. Always we have lives revealed through action.
Dohrman’s book just misses the mark of greatness, I think, because it lacks a strong narrative voice—it’s more a work of journalism (very high quality journalism) than a work of art. I often found myself wondering where the narrator was in certain scenes, and wondering too how complicit Dohrman was in the corruption he describes. (As an observer, does a reporter have a responsibility to step in and help out a kid in trouble? Or at least just address his or her complicity?)
Still, it’s totally worth reading… And it points to maybe the biggest task a young writer—any writer—faces: recognizing the incredible richness of the material that exists in this world—all the stories that surround all of us….
Buy Play Their Hearts Out….
George Dorhman’s website….
 In my teaching I start from the position that everyone has a story to tell—you, me, everyone. I work with the objective of getting students to discover the existence their voice and to acknowledge the validity of their personal history, to get them to reflect on their lives and see their experience as a source of creativity. Sometimes that's the hardest part of a class, getting students to buy into the idea that they are really are people with imagination and creativity.
But sometimes the students are already there—that’s certainly true of JH, one of my students at the prison where I teach. Here’s her literacy narrative, written a few weeks ago in class as a quick draft:
Before I was sentenced to 43 months in this federal prison camp, I spent 10 months researching prison life and finding out what, if any, opportunities I’d have available. I knew that I wanted to make the very best out of this terrible situation. For years, I’ve spent many hours alone writing about my life and my experiences and the thoughts and feelings I had as results. I’ve covered page after page trying to break down my perception of life and love and dreams and fears and all of the not-so-interesting points in between. I knew in my heart that somehow, once I got to where I was going, to do whatever amount of time I had to do, I would find an inspiration or a motivation of some shape or form that would spark up my writing again.
You see, when I put my life into words, it seems a bit more interesting, to me at least. These memories I’ve made and the impressions I’ve left…The stories I’ve heard and the trials I’ve overcome—all of what makes my life mine…I like the way words fall together on paper and make it all seem worthwhile—more so than if it all just sat in the back of my mind or heavy on my heart.
The day I was informed of the creative writing classes that were being offered from Texas A&M here at FPC Bryan, a bell rang in my head letting me know that this class was for me! I signed up for the very first creative writing class and waited patiently for the other inmates to do the same so we could get it started. When the class finally began, there were 12 or 15 of us participating. All of us different from one another. Different ages, shapes, and sizes. Different colors, different personalities. Each of us had out own stories to tell. True or not, they were all entertaining. We laughed, we cried, we even had what we claimed as “Angry Fridays.” But best of all, what we all had in common and got the chance to express was that we were creative and we had words to share.
Now I’m in Dr. White’s second class, non-fiction life stories. The only difference in this one is that all of our writing is based on facts—the true blue history of you! Not always easy. However the passion is of another level. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to get out of the housing unit I’m assigned to and spend 2 hours a night expressing myself. I love to write, and I love Dr. White’s class.
The National Endowment for the Arts has changed lives by making these classes possible, and is deserving of everyone’s support.
 When, a way long time ago, I put together my dissertation reading list, I focused on the main area of writing that interested me: the relationship between the writer and his or her region. My list was in three parts: Theories of Place, where the relationship was explicitly discussed; Regional Literatures, where the relationship was performed; and 20th Century American Memoir and Travel Narrative, where the relationship is usually performed or discussed. Few of the books are about “Creative Writing” per se, at least as it is often taught and theorized, yet all of them combine to give a picture of what I think is important in writing.
Then, a few weeks ago, a couple of grad students asked me for recommendations on writings about creative writing. My dissertation list wasn't quite what they were looking for. So I had to give it some thought....For me, creative writing breaks down into four rather broad areas:
Where It Comes From: How place influences writing and the writer.
What It Means: a more traditional critical look at writing and the production of writing.
What Produces It: looking at the “creative” part of creative writing.
How It’s Done: Looking at craft, usually from the point of view of the writer
So, here are a few books toward a creative writing reading list:
Where It Comes From
Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
Taun, Yu-Fi. Space and Place
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space
Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
Clay, Grady. Real Places
What It Means
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel
Weing, Siegfried. The German Novella: Two Centuries of Criticism
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
Lucaks, Georg. The Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel
Wood, James. How Fiction Works
What Produces It
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Madsen, Patricia Ryan. Improv Wisdom
Richardson, Robert. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process
Flaherty, Alice. The Midnight Disease
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought
Andreasen, Nancy. The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius
How it’s Done
Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction
Addonizio, Kim. Ordinary Genius
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners
Shelnut, Eve. The Writing Room
Hills, Rust. Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular
Of course, this is just a list. Many, many other fine, interesting books could be on it. You could really read forever--and maybe you should.
___
Photo: "The End of the Road: 1964," from the Shorpy Photo Archives. http://www.shorpy.com/node/1003?size=_original
 This desk has been the starting point for two and a half dissertations and two books:
§ In 1964, my father bought the filing cabinets to store materials for his dissertation.
§ In 1974, my mother placed a board across the cabinets, transforming it into a desk, and wrote her dissertation at it.
§ In 2009-2010, I wrote my dissertation at it.
§ In the early part of this decade I rewrote and revised That Demon Life sitting at this desk.
§ In the middle part of the decade, I wrote Long Time Ago Good here.
There will be more books coming from this desk, though I doubt there will be any more dissertations….
Links to a few things of interest….
Study shows that writing helps keep the brain healthy...Brain plasticity is a hot topic right now—no doubt a result of Nicholas Carr’s popular but disappointing book, The Shallows. So maybe I won’t get Alzheimer’s. One less thing to worry about.
Only Children Not So Lonely….I could have told the researchers this! The only children=lonely children concept is spread by people who grew up with siblings and cannot conceive of the pleasures of childhood solitude. Now we need to get busy and demolish the concept that only children=spoiled and selfish children.
James Dickey’s Deliverance turns 40….I’ve always liked this novel a lot—the movie, too. Though as a West Virginian I have several times been on the end (yes) of rude “hillbilly sodomite” comments—the ignorant commenters not realizing that the book is set in Georgia! Still, it’s a fine novel. Does anyone teach it?
Best Practices for Teaching with Twitter. I’m using social networking in my classes this fall—Twitter and Facebook both. I’m not certain how it will turn out, but it should prove interesting….
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