21st Century Creative Writing Manifesto: Nina Fillari

As part of a split advanced creative writing workshop and graduate seminar I taught this spring on A.I. and creative writing, I posed my students a challenge in the form of a question: What would a manifesto of creative writing look like in the 21st century?

The class itself centered around some foundational explorations. What does it mean to make art in the age of machines attempting to do the same? Is art inherently a human pursuit and domain? How is the digital exploration of creativity recasting the work of art as it has been perceived? And what might we learn as artists if we engage the strengths and limitations of machine art?  

From these angles, we dug into a number of conversations surround the intersection of art, human consciousness, and machine learning/expression. These manifestos, then, are my students’ expression of what art and artists should do in our context. We referred to older examples of the form (Dadaist, Surrealist, Feminist, Fluxus, and Oulipian among others). But I left the final form up to them, knowing that I would be making them public via my blog. The following series are the of what they came up with. I encourage you to sit with their ideas over the next couple weeks.

 First up is an interactive take from Nina Fillari that invites artists and the reader to try on a number of different paths in their thinking. Seemed like the right one of the ten to begin with given each takes a different approach to calling artists to action.

Striking Out

Photo by MChe Lee on Unsplash

For more than a year, the teachers in my wife’s school district have been locked in unmoving negotiations with their administration. Tomorrow, it appears likely they’ll go on strike simply to maintain their level of health care benefits and receive a raise that still leaves them behind the curve of inflation.

The experience, from where I sit, has been a bit like watching a massive ship steam inexorably toward the dock while its captain blames landfall for the impending collision.

It’s going to be messy. It will impact hundreds of teachers’ families and thousands of students’ lives at a time when that’s the last thing they need. And it will present the community a crucial question: how much do we really care about teachers?

But the worst part for me is what’s it’s doing to my wife. She’s a teacher’s teacher. The best I know. A safe space on campus for students. A source of counsel administrators seek out regularly. The kind of teacher students actively stay in contact with years after they graduate.

I’m worried that this will sour her on the job she’s done so well for decades. That students will lose her because of the selfishness of a small group of people gaslighting her and her peers by implying they are the self-interested ones. That the damage this is doing might become irreparable.

I can hear the question here: If this is so simple, why hasn’t the district simply found a way to meet teacher’s needs? I have some thoughts.

In opening of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, education historian Diane Ravitch discusses how she went from being part of the federal move to impose No Child Left Behind on American students to repudiating that same body of policy as harmful.

What is most relevant to the situation in my wife’s district is how Ravitch ended up supporting NCLB in the first place. Working as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, she describes being pulled into what she describes as “thinking like a state.” In short form, this view of education from 30,000 feet turned educators and students into numbers and those numbers became ledger items to be addressed in the most broadly efficient ways.

But efficiency and humanity are rarely congruent aims when people are simply numbers, especially when learning is the goal. Further, thinking like this encourages decision-makers to ignore the real, human impact of their choices in favor of serving the bottom line. It also creates the need to contort the message around those choices as being focused on “student success.”

This is a recipe for the kind of impasse happening in Covina. The district administration and school board have intentionally chosen to treat teachers and students as simply budget items. And, as they have proven with many other budgetary decisions, they have made poor financial decisions they are now looking to blame on others.

Frankly, the disrespect this has caused is both breathtaking and, sadly, a banal form of reality replaying in communities around the country.

The superintendent and her cabinet have made specific spending errors over the past few years that, handled differently, would have rendered this fight unnecessary and then passed the bill for those choices on to teachers and green-lit misrepresentations about the costs of the core issues they are being asking to address.

There’s a reason well over 90% of the teachers in the district voted no-confidence in the superintendent’s leadership. Taking the long view, she should never have had the interim label removed from her title, let alone been given a contract extension in the middle of stalled negotiations by a board who literally refused to look teachers, students, and community members in the eye as they begged them for more than a year to come to an agreement that honors the work of teachers.

Honestly, this strike is a referendum on her failure as a leader, but she’s pulling people aside to say she believes teachers will fold quickly because they have bills to pay while she uses district funds to foot the heavy costs being charged by legal representation and crisis communication consultation the district only needs because of its leadership’s intractable desire to get everything about this situation wrong.

• Collect teachers’ keys at the end of school every day weeks before a strike was officially called? Check.

• Add locks to school gates those keys wouldn’t work in anyway, just to make a statement? Check.

• Imply they’ll charge teachers with theft if they don’t turn in their computers before they go in strike? Check.

• Threaten to cancel sports for students and then walk that threat back? Check.

• Offer THREE TIMES the typical amount of daily sub pay to induce scabs to cross the picket line while claiming there’s no money to address the issues teachers have raised? Check.

• Pen press releases about how much the district truly “respects” teachers while ignoring the independent review of their proposed contract that concluded teachers deserve more than they’d even asked for? Check.

• Blowing off parent inquiries in support of teachers? Check.

• Promising to meet student needs like special education accommodations and instruction appropriate to their long-term professionally despite the fact they functionally can’t be without permanent faculty in the classroom? Check.

It’s abundantly clear the district administration is much more concerned with getting their way than with serving their students.

Otherwise, they’d be breaking their backs to avoid another serious educational disruption for students already reeling from the impact of the pandemic-driven shut down.

Otherwise, they’d be determined to honor the work of the teachers who carried the heaviest burden of that shut down.

Otherwise, they’d have the moral fortitude to own their mistakes, humble themselves, and return to the table with a fair offer for a group that is already underpaid and simply asking not to have their benefits cut to cover expenses they didn’t incur.  

My wife is a phenomenal teacher. Being that requires sacrifices every single day, sacrifices that carry no pay, garner little attention outside of the people she makes them for, and sometimes cost her dearly because she cares so much.

Her absence and that of her colleagues will be felt. I just hope it will be effective, because I’m not convinced the people in control of the district purse strings care.

I am convinced that regardless of the outcome, the entire administrative cabinet in Covina Valley should step down or lose their jobs, if for no other reason than they made this mess whether or not they want to cop to that.

Their lack of empathy and creativity has done harm to the teachers they supposedly respect and represent, and that should cost them.  

Rebuilt for the long run

Photo by Jeremy Lapak on Unsplash

When I was young, I was a sprinter. A quarter mile if I had to, a half or quarter lap if the choice was mine.

Today, my marriage crosses the line at a quarter century and I have discovered that being married this long has turned me into a distance runner. So, seeing as how round numbers—maybe oval ones in the case of this metaphor?—get more thoughtful responses, here are a handful of reflections on the occasion.

The first thing that changes is the sprinter’s heart. Physically, I’m convinced biology built me to run shorter distances. My resting heartrate hovers in the high 80s, which is not optimal for long distances. My ADD doesn’t help on that score either. Beyond having a bit of an aptitude for speed, short races just fit my system.

Check my job history and this has generally been true of my professional commitments as well. Save my current vocation and position, they all seem to come with an expiration date shorter than my performance would demand.

Conversely, good marriages, it turns out, are built outside of what is easiest and most within our nature. In my case, it meant tuning my heart to running longer distances than feel comfortable if that’s what my wife needs.  

Let me be clear: this isn’t one of those “being married is the hardest but best choices I’ve ever made!” moments. Feel free to set aside any pumpkin spice-flavored lifestyle blogger personal admission expectations that may lurk in your psyche for this post (and any others of mine you read).

The hard work of a good marriage is remembering you’re running with someone else and their preferred pace gets as much priority as yours does. In fact, the way they run has lessons to teach should you be humble enough to expect this to be the truth and open enough to let your partner change you for the better.

This has definitely been the case in our marriage where I needed help learning to slow down in order to weather life’s tougher moments. Not everything can be conquered by speed and the will to push oneself faster.

Put another way, finish lines are an illusion. We only have the race until we don’t have it anymore.

Another change the sprinter must make in marriage connects to this. Mistakes in short races are small and require small fixes. There’s no time for anything more than that because the race is over so quickly.

Distance runners are playing chess. They’re strategizing responses to the physical demands of the race, the challenge of their competitors, how they feel on any given day, and also where they are in their season balanced against the needs of the moment.  

Neither is right or wrong, just vastly different worldviews when it comes to judging oneself in time and space next to everyone else in the race with you. Both are needed in navigating this thing called living.

You may think I’m making my partner a competitor in this case. You would not necessarily be wrong. Or correct for that matter.

Heather is my teammate and I am hers. We are invested in helping each other be the best person we are capable of becoming. But we are also ourselves, and we have to run this race individually. So, we benefit from learning what the other can show us and also the comfort of having each other in the same heat of the race.

Our partnership doesn’t require we lose ourselves. Rather, we gain each other, and that means I’m as happy for her when she wins as she is for me when I do.

This was…not the case when I was a sprinter (except for it was when my teammates were doing the winning instead of me). I hated losing and always wanted to run faster when I did. It’s just that my identity was not bound up solely in the winning, which was a good thing given how many REALLY fast people I ran against.

A note on that: in sprinting it’s near impossible to compare oneself to your competitors while racing. They’re either in front of you and you need to catch them, or they’re behind you and all you want is to keep them there. Comparison only comes after the fact and in preparation for the next race.

Long distance provides the opposite experience from what I’ve seen. I trained for a marathon with a group of students when I was an undergrad and every time we ran all I could think about was how much easier it seemed to be for them. How much they laughed and TALKED TO EACH OTHER while we ran and I wheezed. How they had plans after our long runs more active than laying on the floor in the fetal position.

It took time, but I learned that comparing myself wasn’t a bad thing if I didn’t let the more toxic elements of comparison culture act as the prism for my thinking. Instead, I drew on Amy’s more efficient arm swing and Dave’s lower, less-draining stride to change my own form and make the running just a little easier.

Emphasis on the “little” in that last sentence because it never gets easy. It just gets familiar and familiar is the foundation for learning what we are capable of after we have taken the leap to try something the first time.   

A third lesson this sprinter needed aligns with that marathon training. Just a couple weeks before the actual race, I was on a long run at about two in the morning when I stepped off a curb and sprained my ankle. The pain of this was compounded by the fact that I was four miles from my apartment and my roommates didn’t pick up the phone when I called from a phone booth I found.

So, I limped home that night, couldn’t get right in the days before the race, and didn’t get to run it. Four months of training wiped out by a pothole I didn’t see coming and could easily have avoided if I had.

At the time, I chalked it up to my rough history with races I cared deeply about (see also: my last competitive sprint and the torn hamstring that ended it). Then I got married and realized this was a sprinter’s mentality.

Like fixing mistakes in a competitive race, the speed of the short run means any injury basically ends your chances at winning. But the distance runner learns every race requires running through pain.

Another quick note: this does not mean that one ignores the injuries they experience and just keeps running. It means that pain should be expected along with joy (can’t have one without the other, actually) and training the mind and the heart for this pain is just as important as training the body for the run that causes it.

In the best marriages—the ones I hope ours fits next to on the scale—the motivation to do this training is and must be our partner as much as it is ourselves. Otherwise, in our work to avoid our own pain we’ll more than likely create pain for them.

Even when you do you training on your own, as circumstances often demand, you must share what you learned from it with your partner. And they need to return the favor. Otherwise, you’re not a team, just two people hoping chance and fortune will keep them running in the same direction at the same pace. Ask a therapist how that approach generally works out.

One last lesson distance has delivered to bring this loose set of thoughts to a close. It occurs to me, now, that running sprints is what I needed in order to understand I’d need to give up sprinting, even as I miss sprinting deeply.

There is nothing like the feeling of running as fast as you can toward a fixed point. The world slows down and speeds up all at once. The decisions have all been made, so it’s safe to simply feel rather than think about the meaning of that feeling.

When I discovered I could run fast as a kid, I imagined this my superpower. Sprinting was the only place I could slow the racing thoughts in my head, the doubts and fears and inadequacies.

Meditation in 22-second intervals.

But that isn’t real life. Just like sprints give way to races asking for patience and persistence, all things new in life become the results of our care and concern, given or withheld based on the work we put into running the race to honor our commitments to them.

Twenty-five years on, this relationship is still my most important race and the motivation to run that race well all at once. If I’d remained a sprinter, I’m not sure I’d be able to say that. Fortunately, I’m rebuilt for the long run.

One Year Since

Unlike planes, memories rarely fly in formation.

A year ago.

Just hours after I’d held his hand. Told him I loved him. That I’d see him in the morning. To breathe easier and rest up.

Then the call. The tears before she said it. The ending I’d hoped wouldn’t be written that day.

“He’s gone.” A year ago.

I still feel the razor wire in my throat. The dull throb in my ears. The sting of the carpet burns after falling to my knees. 

“The doctor said we’d talk about more treatment tomorrow.” A year ago.

Then came the responsibilities. To the kids. Mom. The family. Arrangements for what needed to happen after he left had all been made with a level of care I don’t think I’m capable of.

“It’s still all so hard.” A year ago.

At the graveside, Pastor Dale said this would be a year of grieving firsts. The first anniversary with just a picture. First Christmas without his laughter. First moments alone in his workshop.

“I don’t want to sit in Grandpa’s chair.” A year ago.

 It took me 338 days to visit his marker at the cemetery. It wasn’t the sadness that kept me from going. Or fear. Or busyness.

“I wasn’t sure where it was and then it was right there and caught me off guard.” A year ago.

Today’s the first, round marker of the time that’s passed since Dad died in contrast with the usual jagged reminders like memories rising unbidden; like the need for advice that makes me forget for a minute; like the echoes of him that reverberate in the most everyday of moments.

A year ago.

A Father’s Day Lament

I loved hanging out with Dad. A football game, lunch with the family, or wandering the aisles of Home Depot while he found a new tool he’d justified buying by starting a new project, whatever we did was a chance to laugh and talk about whatever was on our minds. My first Father’s Day without him has me missing the ease of it all. The love of it all. The normalcy of that love and ease.

Feeling vulnerable but here we go…I’ve been dreading Father’s Day for months. Ten of them to be exact.

It’s my first without Dad and I’m not sure how to sit with this on a day devoted to thinking about him. About Mom and my siblings without him. About myself in comparison to him. About my own kids thinking about him and, maybe, what Father’s Day will be like without me someday. 

As a writer and teacher, the inventions of my imagination are generally where I find myself and what I need to help the people around me. Right now, they simply return me to the ache of missing Dad, a sensation as constant today as it was in the days just after he passed.

Ironically, it’s all the good memories I carry that surface this ache. Grief has wound itself around those moments like a vine twisted around tree branches, the sturdiness of our past giving sadness more permanence than it might otherwise have on its own.   

“I’ve found myself writing about Dad so much this year. If I tell the stories, even just to myself, he’s here for however long it takes me to get them down.”

Of late, I have been leaning into the meditative practice of visualizing emotions as weather. Acknowledge their presence. Their reality. But also, their transiency, that they will soon be replaced by different conditions. It’s been a helpful perspective added to my prayers.

But the weeks leading up to Father’s Day have been thunderstorms punctuated by sunny days that exist solely to be swallowed by the next dark cloud bank. The next change in barometric pressure. The next showers. Some are light, some heavy, but all dampening.

The guilt that falls with the rain doesn’t help. I can hear the comments. “He had a good, long life.” “You should just be happy you had a dad who cared and was there for you.” “You know we’re not supposed to ‘grieve as the others,’ right?”

And yet, he’s not here and I miss him. I guess I’m just really tired of living in a culture that has an entire industry designed to separate us from the process of death and hurry along our grieving because it makes others uncomfortable.

“Grief, it seems, leaves no emotions simple or singular.”

I guess, maybe, this is just me reminding myself that lament is necessary for healing and there’s no statute of limitations on grieving. I guess, maybe, what I need to grieve isn’t limited to just Dad’s passing, but that’s what’s right in front of me as Father’s Day approaches.

That’s why I’ve found myself writing about Dad so much this year. If I tell the stories, even just to myself, he’s here for however long it takes me to get them down.

Ironically, almost all of those stories so far have ended sad, even the goofiest ones. Dad was funny and kind and remembering it in specific ways makes me wistful when it used to simply make me smile. Grief, it seems, leaves no emotions simple or singular.

But I keep writing, hoping maybe these gray endings will give way to the gold of the simple joy spending time with him so often brought. They tell you to look for the sunlight at the edge of the darkest clouds, and I think that’s what I’m doing. It just so happens that the edge of one cloud feels like the face of another these days.

I believe that will change, but I’m still waiting for that faith to become sight. While I do, I write and I wonder how the grief of the people closest to Dad compares to mine. How my brother feels, a new grandfather himself, regularly holding new life in his hands. How my sister feels, knowing both that she’s more reserved with her words and feelings than me, and that she loved Dad so fiercely. How Mom feels, quietly navigating all of this in ways and waters I can’t even imagine.   

I wonder how we will make sense of this Sunday, each of us somewhere different on the path of grief and remembrance.

“Maybe there’s simple hope in the fact that I will continue looking. It’s all I’ve got at the moment and I think I’ll call that good enough.”

All this wondering and I have no answers, just more clouds on the horizon. I know this piece should offer some uplift. Or, maybe, I know that’s what some people reading it would like to find. I’d like to offer some, but that too seems just outside my ability to articulate.

Maybe there’s simple hope in the fact that I will continue looking. It’s all I’ve got at the moment and I think I’ll call that good enough.

Recently, a friend asked if I’ve been to visit Dad’s grave marker since it was installed at the National Cemetery.  I haven’t. Haven’t been able to make myself go. Won’t this weekend either.

As I write this, I can hear him grunt and say, “So? I’m not there anyway.” He was always so much more present than I’m capable of being.

So, I’m taking that as my cue. Instead of his grave, I’ll be at the beach with Heather and the kids, a place that always brings my family back to me and me back to myself. The forecast calls for nothing but sunshine and I’m banking hard on any clouds simply giving contrast to the light.  

Again.

Photo by Hoach Le Dinh on Unsplash

Sometimes, it’s the sameness that makes it all feel unbearable. When news of the school shooting in Uvalde broke, my first thought was, again?

There is a particular heartbreak in that “again.” A cycle of grief turned groove in our collective psyche. The murder of children on a mass scale and it feels…familiar.

When I was a young reporter, I was assigned the education beat. This was before Columbine. Two names reverberate in my head. Kip Kinkel and Andrew Golden. Two school shooters when the names of perpetrators got more attention than adding another specific school name to a list so long it now also includes cities.

To be clear, it’s not that their identities deserved more attention. It’s just that school shootings were still such outliers we thought understanding the shooters would help prevent future incidents.

We should have spent more energy on reckoning with the culture that makes them. Arms them. Crafts excuses and deploys evasions in advance for enabling them. The same excuses we already hear about the latest violent iteration of our self-loathing.

But we didn’t, immediately making metaphors of Columbine because we weren’t willing to deal with its realities.

When I left journalism, I taught high school for six years in the early 2000s. This meant my school was newly surrounded with Columbine-inspired wrought iron fencing, had “enhanced security protocols,” and a fulltime campus resource officer.

About halfway through my time there, the school went into a full lockdown. A female student said she’d been pulled into a bathroom by a man with a gun. That man would never be apprehended.

What would happen is students and teachers spent the next four hours locked in our rooms, using the “all clear” code word in hourly calls with the office, and trying to catch any news we could in the era of living life before the immediacy of social media.

It was terrifying and tedious. News helicopters circled overhead. Parents gathered by the hundreds at the main gate, trying to find their children. And then, hours later, it was over. Students went home. We showed up the next day and soldiered on.

The only gun I saw during the lockdown was carried by an off-duty police officer in tennis shorts and a polo. He’d come straight from working out and was part of a team clearing the campus building by building.

I saw his gun through my tiny rectangle of a window before I saw him. Then his face. Then his clothes. Nothing about him save a tactical vest said “cop.” My first thought was that the shooter had arrived and it might be my time.

Then he gave me a thumbs up and moved on. My students, who I’d pushed to the back of the room and away from the window, never even saw him. A small mercy. But I can still picture him to this day.

When I left for a graduate degree and a career in higher education, I saw the shift happen in full. My students came to college increasingly fearful. School was a site of potential mass violence. Lockdowns and active shooter drills had rendered them homes to present danger.

I saw it in the short stories and essays they wrote in my classes. I saw it in the safety tips they shared with each other unbidden. I saw it in the gallows humor they buffered the fear with.

At the same time, my own children grew up and went to school. Sandy Hook happened and people lamented. “Never again” was met with idiotic calls for more “good men with guns” and fresh donations to the NRA and politicians who crave power over progress.

Kids learned to deadbolt doors. Use desks as body armor. Carry ballistic-grade backpacks. Throw books at a shooter in a last-ditch effort to survive. Public calls to arm teachers became stupidly common.

There is a particular sense of helplessness in knowing the very training that is ingraining life-long fear in now a second generation of students is also necessary because we are too afraid to make the cultural changes we know we need to.  

There is a particular dread in dropping off our kids or spouses (my wife is a high school English teacher) at a campus that is both generally safe and exactly where senseless violence could occur and all in the same moment.

Talking about the Uvalde shootings, my 15-year-old son said, “It’s crazy. We live in California, so we really need the earthquake and fire drills. But the shooter drills are the thing we’re supposed to care more about.”

Neither he nor my 19-year-old daughter have ever known a world where this is not the norm. My 11-year-old son once said he just chooses not to think about it because it’s too scary. In all of that I feel our collective failure.

Convention says I should end these scattered reflections with a call to action. An elucidation of our moral imperative and shared humanity. An attempt to draw some kind of unified meaning from it all.

But I can’t. We know what we need to do. We lack the will to do it. And so, we sentence ourselves to the horrific sameness we so commonly feel, re-setting the clock as we wait for the next Uvalde.

It does not have to be this way, except it does because we choose to make it so. Our thoughts and prayers and pass me more bullets form of civic religion constructs the tracks of this violent reality and propels a continuous train of grief along them.

I hope we change, but I fear we won’t. We’ve had the entirety of my adult life to do so and it hasn’t happened.

As the old wisdom says, the proof of what we love can be seen in how that love affects others. Our passive acceptance of this kind of violence, then, is pretty damning evidence.

Publication Day: Imaginative Teaching Through Creative Writing

Here it is! You can find it here online.

You ever hear the story about the book that started as some loose thoughts penned on a coffee shop or bar napkin because someone said, “Yeah, we should do this…”? Somewhat of a common origin tale in writing circles. A metaphor of sorts as well.

And, as publication day has arrived for my co-editors and me, it actually happened. Today, Imaginative Teaching Through Creative Writing is available. In the fall of 2018, the book was literally a conversation at a BBQ joint in North Carolina and a couple of napkins full of maybes. 

The primary topic of that discussion—other than whether or not the brisket was the best thing on the menu—was the following question: Why isn’t there a book that connects solid, accessible creative writing theory with the best practices already happening in standards-driven secondary language arts classrooms?

Before grad school and teaching at the college level, Chris, Amy, and I all taught at the secondary level. And, in some ways, we’ve remained connected to those experiences even as we’ve pursued our creative and post-secondary work. 

So, we sketched those napkin notes, reconvened a little later for a fire-side continuation of the conversation, and then left the conference we were at with a rough plan. Then we wrote a call for chapter proposals, reached out to some folks in Creative Writing studies circles who had useful pieces of the theory puzzle they could bring to the book, and started the long process of pulling a proposal together (twice, actually). 

And now, it’s here, and it is fantastic. Part collection of excellent, tested models for teaching creative writing in ways that better explore educational standards than many currently preferred approaches. Part foundational theory that aims to broaden the perception of creative writing as a pedagogical tool and offer a variety of ways to establish its necessity in secondary cultures that privilege functional-literacy. And all written by people committed to establishing a truth we all hold as unappreciated: creative writing should be central to the language arts classroom experience, not merely an add-on or “break” from more serious subjects.      

Imaginative Teaching came together more seamlessly than we had any right expecting. Much of that is due to the work of my co-editors who were an absolute joy to work with, even as we shoehorned the majority of the work into pandemic schedules turned upside down and morning Zoom meetings half editorial in nature and half group therapy. This process was by no means easy, but I appreciate the way we shared the burdens and also the process. 

I’m also happy to be working with Bloomsbury Academic again, particularly with our commissioning editor Lucy Brown. This is my third collection with them, and I have felt supported and thoroughly understood each time. Also, working with the chapters of this book has felt particularly fulfilling (including getting to publish an essay from one of my former students as well as one from the most talented educator I know personally). 

If I’m being honest, Imaginative Teaching completes a thought I had almost 20 years ago when I came up with a lesson one Sunday night I called Novel in a Week and then, on that following Monday, taught my ninth-grade students (more on that in the book and in a blog post to come). I wondered then—as I do now—why so many English classes teach creative writing as an object rather than an action. Something to read and respond to rather than write and release. 

Fortunately, others have wondered the same thing and doing something about it. It’s truly my hope that this book will encourage more teachers to engage the work of creative writing with their students and support their efforts along the way.   

Threats, idle…

Image Photo by Kev Seto on Unsplash

Story time…

So, I’m in my office set to work another disjointed night because pandemic time is meaningless. The university is mostly empty. Probably fewer than 50 people scattered around both campuses. 

Ironically, one of those people is the guy in the office next to mine. The rest of the building sits vacant. Just finding my grading groove, I hear him head out for the night and barely acknowledge it until the siren starts moaning. I cycle through my list. Too low for a police car. Too slow for a fire truck. Too insistent for an ambulance. For a moment, I’m back in the Midwest iand preparing for a tornado. 

Then the voice starts. I can’t quite make out the words, so I open my door and find my neighbor leaning against the railing outside, trying to figure it out too. 

“…This is not a test. There is an emergency situation on campus. Again, this is not a test…”

The rest is a blur. Evacuate immediately. Don’t use electronic devices. Get at least 400 feet from buildings. Leave if you can. 

I pack my bag immediately and bounce, walking to the lot with my neighbor. We exchange stay safes and hop in our cars, neither of us sure of the reason for doing so. 

On my way home, I start checking the socials. Nothing at first. A half hour later an email alert arrives…bomb threat. I update Twitter, already home because I live just a couple miles away. Then I hug my kids, knowing equally that nothing will likely come of the threat and that it still has to be taken seriously because, well, this is America. 

As I sit on the couch—mourning the lost night of work and thinking of my few students sheltering in place because they have to live in campus housing—a story from my own college days floats back on an associative cloud.

A note here: I teach at my alma mater, so this connection will seem fairly obvious. At the same time—and contrary to what my students will tell you—I don’t spend my days thinking about the things I was doing in the spring of 1996, even the weirdest ones.

And yet…

It’s 2:30 on a Thursday morning. I’m skateboarding across campus on a cool Southern California night after a long night of laying out the news section of the student newspaper. Cutting through the center of the university, I’m just about to the main lot and can see my apartment beyond it when I notice the Campus Safety cruiser parked against the curb. A woman—in some ways obviously not a student—sits near the car’s front bumper. 

As I reach them, two things become apparent: she’s drunk—like the old-timey drunk we used to call blotto—and the two student officers talking to her aren’t sure how to handle the situation. At the same time, a squad car from the local PD pulls up on the other side of her and she gets agitated immediately.

“Wait. Wait!” She says the word loud, like a shield, and looks from Campus Safety to the cop getting out of the car and then catches sight of me from the corner of her eye. Turning back to the campus officers she point at me.

“Hold on, that’s my brother-in-law. I’m here to see him. Tell them. Tell them I’m here to see you.”

One of the officers, Dave, looks at me and shrugs, as if to say, Well??? We know each other. Since freshman year. He let me into one of the buildings on campus to propose to my future wife that January. I shake my head. 

“Naw, I don’t know her.” 

The woman stands abruptly and shouts, “Stop lying! Why are you lying?”

She’s cuffed and in the back seat a few moments later and I feel bad for her. She’s so blasted she likely doesn’t really know where she is. Might even believe I’m family. But I’m exhausted and figure she’ll sleep it off in a cell. Probably get cut loose in the morning (I have reasons for thinking the system will do her that courtesy).

A few nights later, I get a call from one of the younger staff members on the paper staff. There’s been a bomb threat and a dorm on campus is being evacuated. Ever the sensitive one, I bypass the Are you alright? and tell him to grab a pad and cover it. 

The call turns out bogus. No bomb or credible threat in LEO-speak. Just a bunch of college students standing around in their pajamas in the middle of the night until it’s just a minor anecdote in their college memories, if that. 

I track the story with the police and find out a bit more a few days later. The call came from a pay phone outside a local dive called The Wheel about two miles from campus. If you’re from SoCal, you know the type of place. Red brick exterior, wagon wheel-shaped neon sign, an aesthetic we’d call Colonizercore in current parlance.

A woman made the call. Said people at the school treated her bad. The bomb was because of that. 

This info is given to me off the record. I ask if they think it’s connected to my “sister-in-law.” They say they’ll look into it, but they likely won’t find the person. Probably a crank call. Low-priority. And that’s just how it turned out. I honestly don’t know if they ever caught anyone or if that woman had anything to do with the call.

And that’s it. Life moves on and I can’t say I feel unsafe as it does. I certainly don’t think much about it all beyond a few fleeting plans for going to The Wheel to ask around. 

But I was busy and the paper was just one of three jobs I was working outside my course load. Within a couple weeks, it’s back-burnered so far it slips into the murk of my subconscious and only resurfaces when the PA siren jolts me into remembrance.

And yet…

Something’s different this time, even as the outcome is basically the same. After evacuating all nine of our campuses and searching the two I work on, the all-clear is given. No bombs found (plural because the threat is specific enough to say there are multiple devices but vague enough to make their supposed locations uncertain). 

Then an email at 10:33 pm—just under six hours since the evacuation order—with the sentence “Business may resume as normal.”

 Somehow, I don’t feel the same sense of moving on from this, mostly because I don’t have much of a theory for why this happened. There’s almost no one here. Student athletes in some sports. The few professors who don’t have the bandwidth at home to run their classes online. The skeleton staff keeping the place running. 

So why a specific bomb threat? I have speculations I won’t get into, not because they’re wild conspiracies, but because they’re baseless, even more tenuous than thinking the woman on the curb that night cared enough to call in a threat.

I hope we do find out, if for no other reason than to head off people spinning out false narratives and finding more fear in the spinning.

On books: The System by Ryan Gattis

I'm a sucker for companion stories. Narratives that exist in parallel with each other, linked but not necessarily directly. Influenced by each other, but distinctly and wholly their own.

Such is the case with The System, Ryan Gattis' latest that is part procedural, part multi-voiced exploration of L.A.'s criminal justice system in the early 90s that inverts its norms via criminals investigating the crimes of law enforcement, and part coming of age story told from inside jails and courts that so often fail to see the humanity in the people they hold.

Buy this book. No, seriously, here’s the link.

On its own, this tightly-paced story encompasses the competing mechanisms of South Los Angeles' highly organized street gangs and the various arms of the criminal justice system, from probation to prosecution to incarceration. Holding it all together is a single crime: the attempted murder of a drug dealer named Scrappy by two rival gang members.

When an eyewitness accuses Omar "Wizard" Tavira of shooting Scrappy and Jacob "Dreamer" Safulu of being his accomplice, the two are swept into a legal culture cracking down hard on gang violence in the wake of the King Uprisings a year earlier. And with Wizard's prior convictions—as well as the gun turning up in Dreamer's dresser—the case seems to be open and shut.

Except one detail: one of the two is innocent and there is more to the story than just a mistaken accusation. The balance of the novel is the search to put together what happened in time to help exonerate the innocent man before he becomes just another wrongful conviction statistic hardened beyond repair during his sentence.

Several characters’s stories are woven together over the course of the novel, drawing on the internecine competition between prosecutors and public defenders, the power that absolute loyalty to the gang holds over its members, and the ways in which various actors in law enforcement can abuse their power, either intentionally or by merely allowing the gears of the system to churn unchecked.

In the balance, this complicated portrait reveals every character clearly and holds all of them accountable for their role in the events of the story. Included in this character list is the System itself, a dispassionate arbiter of fate that empowers some it should not while seeking to crush the lives of others regardless of their guilt or innocence. And yet, in a moving way, Gattis leaves hope that even in this seemingly unwinnable contest, there is still the possibility a person can escape changed and looking to alter their role in the game. Whether or not they decide to change, however, is never telegraphed.

Those familiar with Gattis' work may hear echoes of his excellent 2015 novel All Involved in these details. This is more than coincidental as The System is stitched with connections to the earlier novel ranging from the influence of characters like Payasa and Big Fate to shared setting to a sense of how the violence of the lawless days of the Uprising shifted alliances in such a way that created the violence at the center of the new book.

These connections are effortless and additive, acting as grace notes to the composition here rather than central portions of the score. More than easter eggs but less than intrusions, the connections build out the universe of the two novels in interesting and, ultimately, necessary ways.

For deeper cuts from Gattis' work, though, the resonance of some physical descriptions in The System carried me back to the author's two-novella set The Big Drop. This was particularly evident in the descriptions of one character's drug withdrawls that echoed the physical episodes of collapse a brain injury caused the books' main character, Johnny Ban, to suffer.

Further, Jeovanni "Little" Matta's journey from hesitant gang affiliate to junior shot caller as he investigates how Dreamer and Wizard ended up suspects parallels in some interesting ways Johnny's path from reluctant tool of Japanese crime lords to a world-wise investigator whose choices change the nature of the story's climactic moments.

In total, The System is as gritty a novel as it must be to take seriously the deep darkness these competing worlds produced without losing the human heart at the center of it all. And that's more than enough reason to spend some time in the universe Gattis has delivered here.

A farewell note…

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

I woke this morning to the news that the recently-retired president of my university died. If I were just an employee at this school, it would have been sad. But this is my alma mater, and I knew Jon Wallace as a student, then as a journalist covering the school, and finally as a professor here.

Jon was the final stop in the process that brought me to APU’s English department , though we never had the face-to-face interview I was supposed to. I'm still disappointed that meeting didn't happen. I genuinely liked the man and wanted to see his expression when he realized I was *that* Mike.

We never really talked in the years since I returned. The couple brief moments we shared were not extremely personal, something I didn't take personally. When I left the school as a student, APU was a small place. When I returned, it was a regional universtity bigger than I could have imagined as a 18-year-old freshman bouncing around campus.

Jon, too, had grown to feel responsible for it all. I didn't expect him to remember the time we shared in the mid-90s, even as he did for so many people over the years. Jon truly impacted thousands of lives during his 40+ years at APU and could bring to memory so many of them (as the countless tributes I've seen on social media attest). I was just one of those thousands.

A note before I finish up here: this post is about the kind of influence I learned to hope I'd have from the one Jon had on my life. One I never took the opportunity to tell him about, much to my sadness even as I know he received so many similar sentiments while he was alive.

But I can draw a direct line between my becoming a professor and something Jon did for me without even knowing he’d done it. As an undergrad, I worked on the student newspaper and he had become the heir apparent to replace the president at the time whenever he decided to retire.

In the course of reporting a story, I learned that he had worked as a custodian at APU early in his life-long career here. This was just one part of the lore. He'd been a student, an athlete, a residence life staff member among other things.

But a custodian. This spoke to me. I'd been a janitor as a teenager. Did landscaping and construction work. Hell, I made most of the money I needed to buy food and pay the bills in college in the cafeteria's dish room. Finding out the guy who would be president had done the same kind of work opened a window I didn't know was closed in me.

To be clear, I have never wanted to be a university president. But the idea that I could be taken seriously on a college campus despite my background...or maybe because of it...that shifted things in me. Made space for a weird hope, one that would take a decade and a half to become a reality.

I'm not sure I would have entertained the concept of being a professor without Jon's example, something he was not even aware had helped me. And that has become one of my goals as an educator, to try to help cultivate hope in the students I work with. Hope they maybe didn't know they deserved to have.

So thank you, Jon, and rest well. I'll try to keep paying it forward.