The Show Must Go On (Without Me)

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

When I was a kid, I was a performer. A singer to be exact. I was five the first time I sang in public, 11 when I had my first Peter Brady moment and 18 when I was a small part of a performance in front of more than 100,000 people. And then, singing went away, and not by choice.

I can still remember the doctor telling me, “Well, it looks like you won’t be singing anymore.”

“For how long? A month? More?” I’d had to shut it down before, go on what voice coaches call “vocal rest” while my throat calmed down. I went a week without talking once. Almost killed me.

“No, no more singing. The way your system is, you just aren’t going to be able to sing without ending up doing permanent damage.”

And that was it. No more singing or concerts or that part of me that identified me as the singer. I was lost to say the least.

Years later, I had not found a replacement for that part me, an outlet for the side of me that likes to get up in front of a room and put on a show. And then I found teaching.

Every day, I faced five tough crowds of high school freshmen and seniors, and I did the dance. I taught grammar with stories and literature with jokes. I moved in and out of the desks, singling out students and tailoring a comment just for them before moving back out to the whole room. I shot down hecklers.

The Laugh Factory, it was not. But I was in my element. And that’s still what enables me to enjoy my job. Sure, my audience is older and my jokes include more references to post modern theory, but the basis of my day is the same. I’m on a stage.

Which is what makes my hybrid class so challenging for me. After four weeks of f2f training and instruction on fiction, I turned my class of 20 writers loose for nine weeks, moving into the role of digital management while they own the class experience, shaping it to suit their needs and the needs of the book they are writing collectively.

In essence, I’ve made them the performers and I’m now sitting in the audience. And the shift has been jarring.

But my hope is that in my sitting down, my students will be forced to stand up. And if the part of my new class designed to help students see the marketability of their talents is going to work, I have to do it. 

And take up a hobby to deal with the performance withdrawals. 

more now because of how much this hurts her

The following is an unpublished piece of fiction I wrote for a project I've since shelved. Enjoy.

In many ways I am drawn to just how much trouble I have with the infinite, or maybe not the trouble I have with it but the trouble it dredges in me when I want so much for there to be nothing beyond me, beyond the way my hands are shaking, beyond the sting of the burns on my fingertips where the gas I poured on her trailer splashed on my hands and the flame from the match I lit caught more than just the trailer on fire and after I was able to put my hands out by driving them into the loose snake’s home desert sand that’s stuck in everything I own after three months out in the Anza staring up into the stars that make it impossible to feel  limits anywhere when that’s all I want; just limits that make boundaries that make recognizable spaces out of my days and decisions (because they’re all decisions, all free will, all choice even when we aren’t making them for ourselves) but the limits are crushed when I look at the stars and the closest I come to praying is to beg out loud to anything that’s out there show me where the walls of existence are because maybe just maybe there are none and maybe just maybe what I see when I look into the flames of the trailer from just outside the circle of orange they create, the trailer she let me stay in for free and probably out of some kind of guilt, what I see is just how limitless it all is in how the flames rise up toward the pinholes of starlight that choke the blackness that would have been comforting without their whiteness and what really crushes me is how much space there is between the tips of the fingers of fire I made and the edges of atmosphere tainted with starlight and I’m about to turn away and walk into the darkness of the desert with my eyes down so I won’t have to look at it all anymore when I hear her car pull up in the squeal of brakes she knows she needs to fix but can’t afford to and before the car has completely stopped moving she is out of her seat and walking toward the metal box home that is now folding in on itself, the weight of its walls and the speed of the burning pulling it in on itself like a collapsed star turned black hole and I realize that I have backed up at least a dozen steps to make sure I am covered in the darkness and then I watch as she stops a short way from it all, probably at just the point where the heat of the flames and the uselessness of their reach pushes her back and for a minute or probably more she just stands with her back to me and I paint the expression she must be wearing on her face in my mind and then she begins spinning slowly, a wailing noise coming from her mouth and when she has turned to face where she can’t see me standing peace fills me for the first time because her face is wrapped in a mask of pain that looks like no movie I’ve ever seen and no description I’ve ever read or could ever write and I feel finite in the moment.

I do not hate her. I love her, more now because of how much this hurts her.

A Note On...Writing That Surprises Us

One of the regular features of my blog is the "A Note On..." series in which I ask writers I know or hope to know to blog about lessons they've learned about writing, the creative life, or just general topics they have an interesting insight into. To kick off the series, I asked my friend and former classmate Molly Ann Magestro to describe the experience of having one writing project catch fire in the middle of working on another. 

As I sit down to write this, I am six days away from finishing the fifth draft of a novel I’ve been working on for two and a half years. It takes place in a world I created, a world populated with characters I know better than I know some members of my family. It is the writing I’ve envisioned myself doing since I was a child who thought the most important part was filling the notebooks, not whether or not the story made any sense. I like to think I know better now.

I work on this draft every day. It is more 90,000 words long. I may not love all 90,000 of them, but I love the product they are becoming more than I love some members of my family. This is the work I take with me when I go on vacation and that I still do when my job teaching writing feels overwhelming and when amazing or tragic things happen in my life off the page.

***

As I sit here writing this, I am months away from finishing the first draft of an academic book about an idea I had a little less than a year ago. *Trigger Warning* The idea is that television shows sometimes do a terrible job when they take on the daunting prospect of representing rape narratives. The book focuses on some of my favorite cop shows and courtroom dramas. It is the writing that had you asked me about it six months ago, I would have had no idea what you were talking about and made you listen to me talk about my novel instead.

I work on this project every day. Some days that means writing, but most days, at this point, it means watching episode after episode of violent television. I enjoy watching television, but there are 295 episodes of CSI alone. This is the work I am invested in because I think it is important and worthy of study.

***

Only one of these books is under contract (fingers crossed for the other some day soon, though). It’s not the book where my heart lives. I essentially stumbled into writing a book about rape on television. I noticed a pattern that made me angry and, for me, doing something about it meant presenting at a conference where I met with an editor who offered me an opportunity.

The biggest reason I considered not taking advantage of that opportunity is because I consider myself, first and foremost, a creative writer. It’s a set of skills that I have been cultivating since I was a child, something I have gladly dedicated years of my life to. When I first began thinking about a non-fiction book project, the idea of taking a break from my creative writing was almost enough to convince me to say no. But here’s the reality of my situation: ever since I was small, I have always made opportunities to write creatively because without it, my life would be less. And I may never have another opportunity to write my other book (Assault on the Small Screen: Treatments of Sexual Violence on Prime Time Television Dramas is under contract with Scarecrow Press).

So maybe I won’t consider writing a different book as taking a break. I tell my students that any kind of writing they do helps them to improve every kind of writing they do. Working on this other book, and focus on this other type of writing, might just been the opportunity I didn’t know I was waiting for to help me grow as a writer.

Molly Ann Magestro has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She teaches creative writing and composition at UW-Washington County, and she has written many books that very few people have read. For now. She infrequently blogs about writing at mollymagestro.wordpress.com.

Taking One for the Team

This is the view my students see less of every day on campus in order to
work on their fiction. I admire their dedication every time I see it. 

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

Part of my new fiction class that I’m finding fascinating is that I have required groups to copy me in on any functional emails they send each other over the course of the week. This is a necessity in the hybrid portion of class because I need ways in which to keep up with the decisions various groups make within their own work and with the other groups in class.

Sure, it’s blown up my inbox a few times. But my observing their correspondence has also elevated the discourse most groups are having with each other about the stories they are writing collaboratively while also helping students distinguish the various different roles they play over the course of the class – Writer, Editor, Communication Specialist, and Group Lead – from each other.

An added benefit has been seeing students make choices I am almost certain they would not in a traditional class.

Exhibit A: One Student Voluntarily Cancelled a Trip to Mexico.

You read that properly. One of my students, upon taking over the role of Group Lead for the first time, emailed the rest of her group to check in on their progress heading into the weekend. This is the part of the weekly schedule when the majority of the week’s writing is being drafted and also the time when face-to-face contact among group members is at its lowest level.  

In her email, she told the group, and me by proxy, that she was staying in town rather than going on the trip with her friends so she would be around should her group need to contact her and clarify anything.

I was certain this was not her only reason, and she confirmed as much when I asked her about it the next day. But she said that it was the responsibility of being the leader, and not the other work she was planning to do over the weekend, that kept her from going. She also told me that she saw telling her group she wasn’t going as a way to motivate them to take their work seriously.

I can’t ask for much more than that. Caring enough about the class to put it ahead of a fun trip and setting an example of the work ethic she wants from her group by exemplifying it in her own actions?

I’m one proud professor. 

The Beginning of the Affair

Writers You Should Be Reading: Graham Greene

Writers You Should Be Reading is a regular feature of my blog in which I hope to introduce (or reintroduce) authors that are worth picking up and spending time with. Sometimes these will be new or emerging authors and other times they will be established figures. Either way, if you have suggestions for Writers You Should Be Reading, feel free to send them my way in the comments below.

There are few books that begin as perfectly as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Here’s the first paragraph:

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who – when he has been seriously noted at all – has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet night on the Common in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft, to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet.’”

In this passage, there is a notion, an intention, and an abstraction, but all are bound in the moment.

The notion: Control is fleeting and illusory.

The intention: To instigate within the reader a reflection on how concrete we find that illusion of control.

The abstraction: That we are entering a story about story, and possibly one about the Story.

The moment: The concrete and tangible moment when Maurice Bendrix is brought back in contact with Henry Miles, the husband of the woman with whom he had the aforementioned affair.

This is masterful storytelling; the kind in which the layers of it all blend seamlessly into a single notion – that we have been ushered into this world by Bendrix knowing full well that we are being fed an arbitrary and fabricated account of these characters’ lives.

And yet, we believe. That’s great fiction. That’s why you should be reading Graham Greene if you are not already. 

An Aesthetic of Rust and Warp

When I was in grad school, I took two writing/literature classes from Lane Hall, a visual and installation artist who moved into the English Department about the time I started the program. I was keenly interested in his take on writing and, truth be told, found some of the ideas his classes fostered to be the most influential I encountered in school.

There are a number of reasons Lane's classes were so interesting, but one of the most evident was the way in which he came at writing. His appreciation of elements deep in the fabric of a text along with the visual expression of writing as a technology greatly expanded my own field of vision on the subject and moved directly into my practice.

But as a secondary benefit, I am now much more attuned to hearing the writing philosophy that artists and bankers and grocery store cashiers dispense, often without knowing it. As a result, I have discovered some beautiful thoughts in places I may not have otherwise been looking.

Character in the aging.

Such was the case when I first read Dennis Hare's artist statement. Hare, a Carmel, CA-based painter I met this year at the unveiling of a piece he donated to my father's church, describes his work in the following way:

"The beauty of things made simple, imperfect, impermanent, incomplete, and unconventional. My work is made of materials that are visibly vulnerable to the effects of weathering and human treatment. Rust, tarnish, stain, warping, shrinking, and cracking are my pallet. There is a poise and character to the natural aging process that brings life to my work. I know a piece is complete when I feel a deep spiritual connection. It is not so much what a piece says, but how it feels. I am satisfied when my work has a strength of character beckoning the viewer to get close, to touch, and to relate."

I read and reread this a dozen times, and each time I did, I was more amazed at how eloquently it captures the way I see my characters when I write.

I want their rust and stain and tarnished spots to be present, to show the cracks and the pain as the places where the loss and the grace of life mingle.

I want my readers to get close, touch, and relate to the people I'm introducing them to in my stories.

I want simple, imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete to add up to the complexity and beauty I find all around me.

The Power of Uncertainty

I’m piloting a very student-driven fiction class this semester that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

Confusion, it would seem, is the seat of creativity.

Or at least it’s the barrier that pushes us to find better solutions and tell better stories.

This makes sense, in a way. If we understand our situation, well, then there is no reason to think much about it. We slide the understood into our vast store of things we feel like we have a handle on and only pull it back out when something challenges that sense of certainty. For example, consider the last time you talked yourself through tying your shoe or getting dressed in the morning.

I may be indecisive regarding which shirt to wear, but unless my fingers have lost feeling, I rarely have to coach myself on buttoning up the one I choose.

This may seem obvious, but what was not, at least to me, was that it might increase my students’ productive work as collaborative writers of fiction if I built some necessary confusion into my new class. But that’s what research seems to indicate.

One study, done of information networks and collaborative work, indicates that while collaborative groups need access to information with as few barriers as possible, the creative process is actually improved by being slowed down and that impediment can be engineered into the system from the outset.

Put another way, choosing to make the creative process less efficient can and often does produce better solutions to problems because it keeps us from choosing the most obvious and least creative response to the situation at hand.

Seems like a pretty solid argument for the principle that invention truly is the mother of necessity.

And if the early returns are any indication, this has proven true in the case of my class. In most cases, my students have navigated the confusion well given the combination of the freedom the class gives them and the challenges it presents directly to that very freedom. I can’t wait to see how they remake the class I spent the last year making. 

Random Reflections at 14,505 Feet

This is the fifth and final installment in a five-part series on my experience hiking Mt. Whitney this summer.

As with the last time I hiked Whitney, some thoughts occurred to me. I make no claim for their necessity beyond the fact that they seemed REALLY important in my head at the time. Enjoy.

Beginning a hike at 2:50 in the morning, while necessary in this case, is lame. And awesome. You try getting above the tree line before the sun is up without feeling fairly accomplished while simultaneously ready to take a nap. 

That moment where you realize you're still wearing your headlamp and could turn it off, but it seems like too much effort.

Photo by Gus Svendsen.

Also, night hiking is way less poetic than “Nightswimming.” 

Staying in the music vein, the three songs running through my head for almost the entire hike (save above 14,000 feet where the music in my head was my pulse and the sound of my suffocation): Mumford's “Holland Road,” Queen's “Too Much Love Will Kill You,” and Switchfoot's “Restless.” 

In theory, 54-degrees is not that cold. In practice, choosing to lower oneself into moving water that temperature would seem contraindicative despite its restorative benefits.

Switchbacks are the devil. There are 97 of them in one two-mile stretch of the hike. Things I prefer to switchbacks: Switchfoot, switch hitters, children referring to sandwiches as "s'wichs," switching lanes or light bulbs, switches to the backside, switches with poor wiring that electrocute me, switchblades cutting me, the 1991 Ellen Barkin/Jimmy Smiths movie Switch, though just barely.

Children are so adorable, until they bound past you in shorts and running shoes and beat you to the summit without breathing hard. To the little nine-year-old gazelle girl from Reno this may or may not refer to - just stop it.

While I approve of the new, sleeker packaging design of the solid waste Wag Bags, I still did everything in my power not to use mine. I wish I hadn't seen so many left behind on the trail by other hikers (you know who you are).

This is their condition upon our return. Mission accomplished!

Marmots are still creepers. Serious, animal kingdom stalkers of the awkward moment.

This awkwardness may be the biggest reason why we dubbed our hiking trio thusly.

Old silver minivans are invisible. I have proof. Due to mechanical issues, I drove from Lone Pine to San Diego with no working gauges or turn signals (or air conditioning, but that was less of a safety hazard than just stupid driving through 100+ degree heat). I could have been going 100 miles an hour as easily as 55. Got nothing but a smile and a wave from the CHP officer I blew past.

And finally, it took 8.5 hours to reach the summit and another 6.5 to get back down. The highlight? This burger.

There are no words...

Photo by Gus Svendsen

“Done. That’s all I can say. Just done.”

This is the fourth installment in a five-part series on my experience hiking Mt. Whitney this summer.

The title of this post were all the words I could get out when we reached the end of the Whitney trail at 6:30 p.m., the summit receding with every step. Later, I'd be able to memorialize the finish with pictures like this:

At the time, I couldn't even form a complete thought.

Beyond the simple joy of being able to sit down after 15 hours of hiking, the end of the Whitney hike felt eerily familiar. There was a sense of let down in the exhaustion that ran with almost equal strength as the current of satisfaction I experienced. If I had to put it into words, it was almost the physical sensation of “What next?”

A side note: nothing murders the legitimate accomplishment of successfully completing the one-day summit run like walking out at the portal to the cheers for the elite competitors in the Badwater Ultramarathon crossing the finish line. If you're not familiar with the Badwater, see this and read this book. In short form, these people start running at the lowest point in America in the middle of Death Valley in the middle of the day, and more than a day later stop running 135 miles away at the foot of the highest point, the Whitney Portal.

Oh, you hiked 22 miles today? That must have been really hard!   

It took me a few days to figure out what felt so familiar, and only after the pain and fatigue had passed. Finishing Whitney felt almost exactly like typing “The End” on the two book-length manuscripts I've completed.

Sure, there is a sense of triumph. A sense of having done something substantial and kept a record to show for all the work. A sense of a goal being met.

But just as much, there is exhaustion. And pain (some of it physical). And more than anything, there is the question of whether or not the effort and achievement will amount to anything more than those two words. The end.

In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott likens reaching the end of a book to the last of the steam escaping a pressure cooker. You know you're done because there's nothing left in the tank.

Or no more trail left to follow.

Uphill, Both Ways

This is the third installment in a five-part series on my experience hiking Mt. Whitney this summer.

For the sake of reference, I live here: 

The view from my office building. Terrible, I know.

Hiking Mt. Whitney took me here: 

A pretty good view from the top too.

There is a considerable change in elevation between the two. Like 14,505 feet of change. And, having a job that requires my presence as well as a family that requires my attention, it's not like I could drive off as often as I'd have liked to prepare for this hike (read: at all).

This makes training for a climb difficult (as does my arthritic knee and general huskiness). But failing sucks worse than physical fatigue, at least to me, so I trained hard.

I hiked a tiny local mountain repeatedly. I ran hills. I rode my bike. I drank water in ridiculous quantities. I shrank my meal portions in the run-up to the climb to be ready for a day of energy bars and electrolyte tabs.

But none of this is Whitney. And I knew it. If there was anything I was afraid of, other than another bout of altitude sickness, it was not being in good enough shape to get to the top. After all, the one day round tripper is tougher than the two-day trip that kicked my ass the first time.

Worse, there was no way I could know whether or not I'd make it until I touched the top of the mountain.

In this gap - faith. Also, imagination. I believed I was ready. I had to, or it would have been pointless to start walking in the first place; pointless to make Gus and Jeremy rearrange their lives to come with me; pointless to think about it in the first place.

But I also studied the hike intently. I watched videos online of ascents. I read people's blogs and stories about their own experiences. I looked back at pictures of the first hike and read maps of the trail along with pacing guides for reaching various landmarks along the way. With all this in my head, I could imagine myself at almost every point along the way, reaching forward to see myself at the next checkpoint when the climb was at its most difficult.

I liken this to the way Thornton Wilder was able to create an accurate representation of Peru in his classic novel The Bridge at San Luis Rey. The book won the Pulitzer in 1928. Wilder wouldn't visit Lima until 1941.

When he did, I'm certain it all felt familiar. As familiar as the summit Mt. Whitney felt when I reached it.