On being "a soul in transit"

A shot from last night's concert off of Switchfoot's Facebook
page. Pictured are Jon and Tim Foreman, pro surfer and guy
I grew up around, Rob Machado, and my old friend Drew Shirley.
Check out the band at 

https://www.facebook.com/switchfoot 

Last night, I got the chance to see my favorite songwriter, Jon Foreman, play a show with my favorite band Switchfoot. It was amazing.

Jon (I'll call him Jon, because we shook hands at the post-concert meet and greet, so we're friends now) is a great writer, and not merely of the poetry that makes his songs speak. In many ways, he is a thoughtful observer of the way time slips past us when we're waiting for meaning to find us. And in that, he lives in tension.

When he visited the Writer's Symposium by the Sea here at Point Loma in 2008, Jon described writing as the process of returning over and over to an irritant, a thought that even after several attempts to articulate it demands more attention. In essence, it's not repetition but living that drives us back to the topics we can't put down.

And so it is with doubt and belief in his work.

The "opening act" for last night's concert as a screening of the group's new surf and concert documentary, Fading West. I'll be writing more about it later, but there was a comment Jon made in it that matters here.

"I know what I believe, but I have my questions and my doubts. For me, that is the journey. I'm looking for the melody....I'm a soul in transit."

If I think about it, this is where writers live. The world is neither complete certainty or doubt, but the conviction that the space between the two is what matters most. And in that is meaning.

There's a notion in storytelling and poetry that is not linear. Writers don't have a plan so much as an intention. They make maps rather than follow them. Somewhere along the way, they make meaning - for themselves. And then, if the story they're telling makes it beyond the walls of their preferred writing device, others make their own meanings of the story. Those meanings are neither their nor the writer's, but a fault line between the two.

And that's what makes story necessary.

Back in 2008, Jon Foreman visited Point Loma as part of the 2008 Writers Symposium by the Sea. Watch the entire video here.

This is the second of a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeanette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

If You Build the House, You Should Get the Keys

As technology dependent as my new class is, some groups
still return to the classics - in this case, a chalk board - when
planning their next week's story lines and concerns. I love it.

If I’m honest with myself, I think my hybrid fiction class is built, at least in part, on a small amount of petulance on my part. It never fails that I have a few students each semester, generally those unhappy with their grades, who tell me they wish they had more control over the coursework and experience.

It usually sounds a bit like this:

“You know Dr. Clark, I think I struggle because I don’t get to choose anything about what we do.”

Snarky comments about overreaching word choice and hubris aside, I think my response is this class. You want some control (which, if they were paying attention, these students would realize they’ve had all along), well let me make you very, very aware that you’re in control.

Hence the 9-week, self-directed small group writing process in which my students, in collaboration with the other groups in the class, are writing a novel-in-stories that I will publish electronically after the semester ends. With their names on it.

As I expected, this was at once and exciting and sobering, “you-got-what-you-asked-for” moments. But it has also led to inventive solutions on the part of my students who feel the need to jailbreak even a system designed to give them almost all of the creative control. And I love what I’m seeing as they work outside the systems and platforms I provided or required.

Some groups have created their own SMS repeater groups so all their texts automatically go to every group member. Others have created their own Google circles for the class, enabling the use of Hang Outs for meetings if they want to work remotely or if a group member is unavailable in person. They’ve even tried gaming the story constraints I put on their work (if I have to kill one more zombie storyline…).

In total, I left some gaps in the process to see what they’d do, and it has paid off in a number of ways, some of which I’ll likely build into the next iteration of the class. I can’t wait to see how the next group looks to break the system productively.

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.

A Writer’s Prayer

Photo by Heather Clark

Maybe we can’t plot the moment when we were changed irrevocably; when we ricocheted off of greatness along a new course that would become our trajectory; when we saw, for a moment, what we wanted to reach for before we died.

Or maybe, if we look closely enough, we can.

I read a lot growing up. I don’t know a writer who didn’t. And, given my context, I read a broad swath of material. Hemingway when I was eight. Stephen King when I was nine. Catton and Hughes when I was ten. Austen when I was eleven. Didion when I was twelve. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare by the time I was fourteen. Alice Walker almost got me kicked out of high school when I was a freshman.  

Somehow, though, I missed Walt Whitman until I was a senior. Or, more precisely, until I was almost done being a senior.

Uncle Walt was like one of those bands you knew that you needed to “know” but you didn’t know how to “know” so you just pretended you knew what people who actually “knew” them talked to you.

Random Dude in High School: “You like Bad Brains, right? I mean, those guys were like pioneers.” 

Me: “Totally. I mean, I’m kinda partial to Black Flag because, like, Henry Rollins is a poet or something, but…”

Random Dude: “Totally.”

So it was with Whitman, until that sappy moment when, at the end of the senior slide show at the end of prom, when the Walt truck hit me. Let me set the unlikely stage. Kids in tuxes and formal gowns. On a paddle boat. Almost to the after party. Video slide show with Whitney Houston as a soundtrack. And then – cue the synth orchestra – the words of “Oh Me! Oh Life!” roll up the screen.

And there I was, through the swirl and clatter of gossip and teenage nostalgia and plates being cleared, transfixed by a poem I should have already known.

Oh Me! Oh Life!
Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                       

                                                        Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Source: Leaves of Grass (1892)

This. This was my moment. I always loved to read. But this, this simple profundity, this small moment of stable clarity in a world that felt like it just wouldn’t stop shifting under my feet. This was it.

I’m fairly certain this is the beginning of my journey as a writer, not that I knew it at the time. There were other influential points on the plot line, but this was my genesis moment. My garden and my fall and my intention to journey toward making sense of it all for someone else.

Twenty years later, I’m still working. Still grinding. Still trying to be even a cut-rate Walt. But I’m still certain of these things:

I am here.

The actors are still on the stage.

And my verse may still yet get read.

What was your moment? Who authored it? Let me know.

I Need a Role Model

No, seriously. Help me.

Recently, I’ve asked publicly, nay begged, for people to punch me in the throat if they hear me utter the following words aloud:

“So, I have this great idea for a class…”

Consider it a cry for help.

This hybrid fiction class is awesome. It’s pretty much all a creative writer working in academia could ask for – the freedom and encouragement to chase down a new way of helping students grow. In many ways, it’s like writing the story of the exact type of class I really want to teach and then enacting the story with real-life actors.

But the class is also extremely overwhelming, in that I had almost no models to work from when creating it and no body of reflections from others because there isn’t anything for them to reflect on in this vein. At least, not in creative writing circles.

My friend Trent created a somewhat similar course, but his aims and mine are vastly different in terms of student takeaway, which means the architectures of our courses diverge quite a bit. And outside of some standalone activities I’ve read about, I just haven’t run across this type of class.

This is not a subtle brag. It’s the reason for the bags under my eyes. Every class session, traditional or virtual, carries its own learning curve. Every flaw in the system, no matter how hard I worked to eliminate them, requires almost immediate attention.

And if this class is novel for me, the guy who spent more than a year researching and constructing it, then just imagine the combined apprehension and nervous energy of 20 students who thought they’d signed up for a traditional lecture and workshop fiction class.

It is no tired business metaphor to say that while I am not building the plane while it’s in the air, but I’m definitely still bolting down the seats.

I just hope that all the work I've done makes the next redesign I'm planning - I'm looking at you Literary Nonfiction - a little bit less insane.

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.

The Sentences of Saul (Sorta)

Dave Eggers makes interesting comments. He needs eight uninterrupted hours or he can't write. He knows how much it costs to ship a cannonball through the mail. He would classify his readings earlier in his career as performance art.

In terms of writing advice, I was taken with an off-handed comment he made at the 2012 symposium. He said that he has been greatly influenced by Saul Bellow's sentences, but you wouldn't think that by looking at his writing.

Counterintuitive a little, no?

When an artist says they have been influenced by another artist, we expect to see signs of it. If a painter says Banksy influences her, there should be more than just a general street-flavor to her work. If a guitarist claims Eddie Van Halen as a model and he doesn't drop in a heavy dose of tapping, we (well, at least I) question that. If a politician invokes Reagan or JFK, they'd better be doing more than biting nostalgia.

So, when an author lists another author as an influence and then seemingly distances themselves from their style, it's worth considering. How can someone be an influence and yet not "show up" in the work of someone who they are influencing?

And yet, this is probably the best piece of writing advice from the evening with Eggers. Let your influences be just that and not patterns you try to manipulate your work into replicating. Take a cue from the annual Bad Hemingway contest. Don't try to be your favorite author. Try to be what you admire in them.

In Eggers' case, he acknowledges Bellow's brilliance at the individual sentence level and aspires to pay that kind of attention to crafting his own. In the age of memes, we may be losing sight of the simple beauty that comes when we take in the art we consider great, strain it through our senses, intellect, and soul, and then produce our response to it rather than our sincerest attempt at repetition.

This is the first of a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeanette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

Friday Fiction

That's me, writing in the middle of the day on a family
camping trip this summer. I'm not sure it
was Friday, but on vacation, I feel like every day
is Friday, so I'm calling it one.
Also, the sippy cup is not mine, I swear...

I am fairly convinced that all writing work done on a Friday that is not under a specific deadline should be considered a double victory. The end of the week, with all its closing ceremonies and its proximity to the weekend, is a composing quagmire littered with the best of writing intentions. So, regardless of your word count, you should celebrate what you did get down today. 

So, whether you wrote 5 words or 500, I salute you. Job well done. 

Murder Was the Case They Gave Them

One of the reasons I love teaching the collaborative fiction class I'm piloting this term are the wonderfully creative and awkward emails it's creating. In that vein:

Hey group.
Just so you know.  Colton has informed me (Group 3) that they want us to kill off their character in the hit and run.  The only problem is that their character is male.  What do you think?  Can we accommodate them?  Interesting eh? dk 

I love the way students are looking at each other's work in ways that are not merely theoretical, but in the very practical and functional context of creating of their own story and the larger novel it will be a part of. Getting students to understand that they are part of a larger narrative and must care about the other stories they come in contact with is really the aim of any writing course, or literature class for that matter.

However, this hybrid collaboration is really proving to be a very effective environment for producing that kind of insight. Even better, the desire to find it comes not from me or an assignment, but from the students themselves. 

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.