Sunshine! 01/08/2012
 
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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.
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During a break a student came up and asked for help with his novel. He was stuck. Of course. I’ve been expecting people to get stuck in their extended narratives. It’s a long semester, and I’m asking the students to do a lot of work. Everyone’s bound to get stuck at some point.

“But what can I do to get unstuck?” he asked.

“Weed!” a girl said.

“No,” I said. “Don’t tease. Be serious….”

“Jack Daniels!” she said.

“That won’t work, either,” the stuck student said. “I can’t have booze in the dorm….”

I was thinking—a laborious task for me, sometimes.

“Well,” I said, “there are several things you can try….”

And I told him a few things. Tricks, maybe.

Like having a door open and a new character come through it. What conflict will result from the new character?

Like skipping ahead in the outline to another scene, bypassing the resistance of the current stuck scene.

I’ve used both of those in my own writing. They can work. There’s no telling if they’ll work for my stuck student or not. I kept thinking. Came up with nothing immediately useful.

Then, on the way home, in a moment of academic esprit d’escalier, I thought of Robert Pirsig. He spends a lot of time discussing stuckness in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Chris brings out the paper again. "Now help me," he says.

"Okay," I say. I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So separate them out. Just make a list of all the things you want to say in any old order. Then later we’ll figure out the right order.

"Like what things?" he asks.

"Well, what do you want to tell her?"

"About the trip."

"What things about the trip?"

He thinks for a while. "About the mountain we climbed."

"Okay, write that down," I say.

He does. Then I see him write down another item, then another, while I finish my cigarette and coffee. He goes through three sheets of paper, listing things he wants to say.

"Save those," I tell him, "and we’ll work on them later."

"I’ll never get all this into one letter," he says.

He sees me laugh and frowns. I say, "Just pick out the best things." Then we head outside and onto the motorcycle again.

So, basically, we’re back to the outline again—or, perhaps a new and updated outline. A list of places you might want to go—but not an itinerary, a list of places you have to be at a certain time—rather, a list of possibilities. A “list of all the things you want to say in any old order.”

And part of that, of course, could be having a new character walk in through an open door, or skipping ahead in the old outline.

Pirisg writes:

The first [problem] is stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies the physical stuckness of whatever it is you’re working on. The same thing Chris was suffering from. A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is "Remove side cover plate" in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There’s no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.

If you’re experienced you’d probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you’re inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you’ve had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.

Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.

This isn’t a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. In traditional maintenance this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you have avoided even thinking about it before you come to it.

The book’s no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don’t need any scientific experiments to find out what’s wrong. It’s obvious what’s wrong. What you need is an hypothesis for how you’re going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn’t provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they’re around.

This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

It’s normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you’re inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It’s just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

What you’re up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination... "unstuckness," in other words...are completely outside its domain.

So: Don’t force yourself through the stuckness. Don’t think yourself through it, either. Instead, feel your way through it.

Feel. Okay. But—how…? And what?

Easier said than done, right?

ZMM had an incredible impact on me when I first read it as a morose 16 year-old, and then again when I was in graduate school and teaching composition for the first time (it’s often overlooked that the whole middle part of the book deals with teaching comp). I think Pirsig might have useful things to say about stuckness/unstuckness for our creative writing class, and perhaps we’ll explore that a bit next week and see what happens....

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Things to look for:

Someone put all (apparently) of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance online, here.
But you know what? It's always better to read the actual book! Buy it here....

And here is a website devoted to Pirsig and his work....
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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....
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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.

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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....
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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....
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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….
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I'm looking forward to reading everything.

Next week: more reading presentations, and the first workshops....

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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….
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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….

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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.

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I was as at the prison and we were writing about lying— about liars and lies told —when an instructor came by the classroom and said that the education building was being shut down, and the inmates needed to return to the units. So I gave everyone a homework assignment and the students left and I began packing up, when one of the students stuck her head back in the classroom and said, “It’s raining! You’ve got to see this!”

We’ve been in a hard, hard drought this year, and then, as of today, 23 straight days of over 100 degrees. It’s been rough.

I went out into the hallway and the instructor said, “Well, it’s trying to rain. Been a long time!”

One of the rules of the institution is that in times of thunder and lightning, inmates are restricted to the units, and so my students went all excited back to the barracks. I closed up my briefcase and went outside—and was half-blinded by dust. We’ve been so dry there’s not much but dirt and dust in this area, and the storm winds were picking up the dirt and blowing it around. I signed out at the security station and went to my car.  A few drops of mud came from the sky. There were sudden blasts of cool air—cool!—from downdrafts, followed by the buffets of hot air. I could smell rain.

I drove back through the neighborhood—the sky was sort of open to the north, and stormy in the east and south.  In this photo, looking north, you can see a field of dead grass. Texas right now is a sad, khaki-colored state….
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Then it really started to rain!  Amazing. I made a video of my drive home….
(Remember, I was a professional driver for six years—don’t try this at home!)

I stopped by the grocery store to get some supplies, and people were lined up under the awning gazing heavenward with looks of wonder on their faces.

Readers in damp climates, don’t take for granted the miracle of water from the sky.

And—why not?—some rock and roll….

Just hope I don't have to wait a long time to play this again.....
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On the last day of the 2010 AWP Bookfair, the powers allow non-AWP civilians to enter the arena to buy books and hobnob with writers, and I was sitting at the Slough Press table and a lady and a boy of maybe 10 or 11 came by and looked over my books. He was really taken with That Demon Life—which put me in an uncomfortable position.

I want everyone to read my books—everyone, including kids. But—but—when I tell people That Demon Life is a comic novel about lust and laziness, with lots of drinking and screwing and miscellaneous bad behavior—well, I’m serious. It really is. And is that appropriate for a kid?

My parents let me read pretty much anything. I moved pretty much from Dr. Seuss to adult novels.  An example: I loved James Bond, so for Christmas in the 4th grade I got a boxed set of the complete works of Ian Fleming! That was so cool….

But I’m not a parent. (Thankfully!)  I had never had to concern myself with thoughts of familial censorship or appropriateness until that day in Denver.

In the end I steered the kid over to Long Time Ago Good, and his mom bought it for him. I guess that’s good, right?

I’ve been thinking about these things since I read Steve Himmer’s essay, Making Room for Readers. Himmer was in a somewhat different situation than I was in, but at least my kid had a good mother who wanted him to read almost anything. It was me and not the controlling adult who thought my book might be inappropriate….

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Happy endings are fine—who doesn’t want everything to turn out fine, both for us and for the people with whom we have an emotional investment? But happy endings have to be earned in fiction—characters have to go through a process of narrative, really need to get roughed up, gain a knowledge of the world through hardship, before they can be rewarded with a happy ending. For a reader, anything else is unsatisfying.

…For several months—since the beginning of the tax season, back in January—Garza had felt that he was drifting.  He had come to hate working in Data Conversion, and he wanted out.  He was only a temporary manager, and at the end of the season in June he would go back to his permanent job as the Section clerk-typist.  Clerk-typist!  What a job title!  Four years of college at the big university, a degree in history, all for a lousy job as an IRS clerk-typist.  Even some of the other managers, his friends, would look at him at times and say, “What the hell are you doing here?”  Garza didn't know.  His friends from college were out of law school now, or out of grad school, or out working for corporations and making good money, and Garza was stuck doing quality review on tax returns and writing up his employees for returning late from breaks.  And he had turned thirty.  That made a difference, too.

In “Five Things,” Garza begins a difficult process of trying to understand what he wants in life. Is the ending happy? I think so. He's earned something close to happiness.... 


"Five Things" is the closing story in Long Time Ago Good. Next week I'll do a recap of the soundtracks, plus a bonus or two....
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Here's a nice little review of Long Time Ago Good appearing in The Hays Free Press....

I know one should not judge a book by its cover, but truthfully, many people do, and I am no different. On a recent trip to the Buda Library, I was browsing through their newly acquired books and a title grabbed my attention, “Long Time Ago Good: Sunset Dreams from Austin and Beyond” by Lowell Mick White. The picture on the front cover depicts a blurry, angry dog barking at an armadillo. I opened the book and discovered it was a collection of short stories. Based on what I saw on the cover, I had a feeling these stories might have some edge to them. I was right.

Read the full review: "Check it Out, Neighbor."



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