Negotiating the Deal AKA How I Got Through Grad School



Is there anything that you do, in your writing, that you secretly actually DIG?  Have you ever thought about this? 

I feel that we know each other well enough now, possibly against all of our own wishes, that I can just jump on in.

I remember writing Chapter Four of something or another and wanting to fly.  Not worry about sentence fraggers.  Not concern myself with offending the reader.  The price be damned.  And knowing I could not, not, not.  Here I was, faced with the coolest idea, and no way to express it.  It originally went something like:

Alice Walker writes Meridian as a maternally enslaved young black woman with no way out. 

What I wanted to write was this:

Meridian screams at the reader from dried ink on the page, begging some straggler to cut her loose, let her breathe, while simultaneously pantsing the patriarchy.

Apparently, that was not academic enough.  Fine then.  After much literary profanity and perhaps a smashed keyboard, it ended up exactly like this:

In understanding her body as the betrayer, luring her into orgasmic complacency before nailing her to the wall with a fetus, Meridian.s psyche is fragmented, as well.

And, while professorial eyebrows went up, there was a collective sigh of relief from the land.  The ivory tower was placated by the linguistic turn of a well-crafted phrase.  And I got to say that a fetus nailed her to a wall.  Whew.

We have talked about warrants, we have talked about risks and shooting matches, but I don't remember talking of negotiations.  That is the last lesson I would hope to teach you, on paper at least.  The art of the negotiation.  I hear you saying things like: but, my teachers would hate it if I said what I thought.  Usually, I hear that right after I hear: well, I don't really have a cool voice like Almond.

Are you so sure?  I call, um, bullcrappy.

Maybe not just like him, no.  But . . . there is something that you do that no one else can do.  The way you bite your finger or turn your mouth down or laugh that is pure and unique and perfect for its you-ness.

What is your writing fingerprint?  If you cannot fake one, and you cannot purchase one in the bookstore, can you find it in your own head?  And, here's the kicker, will it then be REAL?

It truly is a muscle, perhaps one you haven't used before, but we are all born with it.  (I promise, I am almost done pushing you.  Just a few more days.  :) It may not be that you were born with a missing writing muscle (as you have secretly feared) but rather, that you are simply afraid that it will not be good enough, not be strong enough, or will be severed off by some Dr. So and So. 

What if, shiver, you could excercise it within the rigid walls of academia and get away with it?

Ah.  Come on.  You only live once.

Writing Blindly

Here we are again.  I'm at a bit of a loss, so I will start with what has always worked in my writing: memory.

It's 1978, and for the very first time, I am happy.  My mother has separated from my father, getting her graduate degree at MTSU, and the movie Halloween just hit.  Twelve is awesome in 1978, people.  Poprocks, pet rocks, mood rings, and our very first junked-out slasher flick.  Sigh.  So much life left.  So much Fleetwood Mac left.  I am happy.

I suppose I still hold my mother accountable for the fall, the woman that had the audacity to finish her degree in a city that she didn't love.  And so, the day after Halloween, I began a long goodbye.  We packed and planned, refuted the idea of a Christmas tree (ornaments were airtight in Tupperware), broke up with friends and puppy loves and sent our dog, Bugger, to live with a neighbor.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started to tear up the green shag carpet in the corner of my room and leave the notes.  "This was where I learned to play the flute . . . whoever finds this should know I was happy . . . the sound the toilet makes in the middle of the night is not a ghost."  Scraps of paper to no one, shoved tightly under green fibers, probably scrapped without being opened when said carpet was scrapped for hardwood.

This is what I thought of when I read the article, "I Am Writing Blindly." I don't want to make more of it than what it was, just an adolescent shove to the universe.  Surely, those pieces of paper meant nothing more.  Except . . .

Why, over thirty years later, do I think of it?  Our author posits that narrative, and the storytelling it weaves, makes us human.  An impulse.  Finding God in the next sentence.  Why not something else, then?  Why writing?

Instead of going long, this time, I'm going to leave it here.  Call it an experiment.  Whatever.  I guess I'm writing blindly. 

The Push

I don't know about you all, but I am thoroughly exhausted.  A five week class is almost too much on the old brain, isn't it?  But we push on . . .

I suppose that's what I am asking you to do.  Push.  Through safe writing and perfect grammar for  something more, something new.  (Look, a sentence fragment.)

Some of you seemed to struggle today, and I may have lost one or two of you after grades were logged.  That saddens me.  The most valuable A I ever earned was with Jon Bolton after believing it would be that horrifying B (after all, that is what he put on my paper).  And the best B I ever earned was with someone much more dangerous and looming--and I learned more in that class than any other.  But, I suppose, that will come in time and retrospect when your "real lives" become your daily lives, or when you have to give a student you are just flat crazy about anything less than a 100.

I've mentioned before: what if this were the last class I ever taught?  What would I give to it?  What would I risk?  Which makes me wonder: what if this were the last class you ever took?  Are you sure you would just want it to slide by?

I remember one of my professors telling me to not be so invested, so close-chested, to my work as to not see its potential to be even better.  So, instead of waxing philosophical in this Monday blog, let me ask you:

Can you?
Push harder?
Write harder?
Be better?

Or do we all sincerely believe that we are "good enough?"

Where do you see yourself backing down from the battle of writing?

And if this is all just a bit too academic, let me insert something more poetic.

I had a student back in 2004, let's call her Susan.  Susan asked questions that others would have balked at, backed away from, and ignored.  Susan revised and revised and revised and bled all over her page, never missed a class, peer-reviewed with a vengeance, and read her assignments with a voracity that bordered on hunger.  I remember that she was tall, blue-eyed, and wore a lot of hats. 

On her last paper, I gave Susan an A.  She asked me how it could get better.  Stayed after class and picked my brain and talked about how words were magic and how she wished she could spend every day eating them, crafting them, and making them spin in the air.

Susan had only three weeks left to live.  The brain tumor was taking that spark out of her eyes with every breath she shared with me, yet, she went down fighting with a kind of courage that I have only seen in old men.  And she never backed down.  I went to her funeral, stood in the sweltering heat in Mississippi and listened to poetry she had written as a child--something about peanut butter. Hugged her mother and cried all the way home in an old beat-up Chevy Nova, all I could afford as an English teacher and the best car I ever had the honor of sobbing in.

And I became a better writer.  It was the least I could do.  I had time left. Time.

But wait.  I'm not asking this kind of sacrifice of you, it's not even on the syllabus.  I am asking for more push.  I see those sparks, that love for words, and I wonder--

How far are you willing to go, Advanced Comp?  How "advanced" would you like to be?  Have you, at the end of the day, given it all you had? 

And lastly, a quote:

"I'm not ever going to feel that way again. You don't get that twice." 

Investigator:
 "Most don't get it once." Mystic River

The Velveteen Writer

(Special recognition for my two girls who have put up with me, twice.  Here you go.) 

First, listen to this (a newer, hipper version):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHkmLEhFq44

I've an idea in my head, but no way to begin.  Ever go through that?  Oh, yeah.  That doesn't stop after the cap and gown day, kiddos.

Rough transition it is then.  I have another blog that I write that is not as difficult, mainly because I do not have to consistently pause and ask myself things, like "is this academic enough?" "is this inappropriate?"  "what are my intended learning outcomes?"  "will I offend that sweet kid?"

No, no.  The other blog has my cultural fingerprints all over it: my religion, my Southern-ness, my rebellious nature, my sentimentality.  Of course, it's a truer voice.  Less manipulative.  More raw.  More important?  I doubt it.  But decidedly more therapuetic to write.  (And yes, Zeke.  I am real :)

This is not to say that a blog written for a class called "Topics in Writing" isn't pertinent, or real, or fun.  Quite the contrary.  I believe that some of you will go on to get a graduate degree and will need to get much more philosophical in your writing in order to excel.  Others of you will go on to be teachers of writing and will need to ask more of your students than the smooth production of the five paragraph essay.  But . . . how can I help you, really?  If this were the last class I ever taught, what do I need to share about writing?  No pressure, right?

And so, I think I am snagged on a qualitative issue, one that I have been trying to solve by weighing out writing skills against things like paychecks, career advancements, and accolades.  So snagged, in fact, that I am prepared to ditch all of that for something, well, more "real."  

I have read thousands of books, written several published articles, and have even slogged my way through some neatly composed essays that I personally abhorred for an A.  And yet?  A piece of writing from my youth continually haunts me.  

"You become. . . That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."  The Velveteen Rabbit

Real.  What does that mean to writing?  Should we even care, for when we can craft elegantly posed thesis statements and perfectly cited essays, all in hopes of that elusive A, is that all?  Is nothing more required of us?  Of course, I want you all to hone your craft.  Become "skillful."  But, if in the journey you do not find yourself, if on the way you forget why you fancy words and books so very much, if at the end all you have is a decent job but have lost the joy of making magic with a pen, then . . . well, then your hair has not been loved decently off.

  It is Friday, and we have talked of warrants, voice, writing tools like dashes, and have peer reviewed and shown up to class on time.  But, today, this time, just once . . .

 Let's write something for the sheer joy of it.  Push ourselves to create something real.  Here's a bit from me, your very real teacher.

I was the granddaughter of a Cherokee medicine woman and only ten years old, swathed in my mother's white organza scarves and twirling in the pines.  "Dancing in the Moonlight" swelled from my am/fm radio and drove golden sparks of fireflies over my fingers as if I had called them into being, called their little bodies into a dance with summer and sweat and innocence.  It was 1976, and my feet were stained red by Alabama clay, my heart broken by divorce, and my voice was still unscarred by thirty years of smoking.  And I danced, and dreamed, and twirled under a burnished dusk sky.  Part of me is still there, orchestrating fireflies and believing that summer will never end and that daddies never leave.  Somewhere, I dance.

 I'm not going to go back over and revise this.  Because it's real.

Your turn.

Portrait of My Body and Other Horrors

 

I'm sitting here actually trying to link "Portrait of My Body" and "Why We Crave Horror Movies." Sober. I think I've got it, but it all seems a bit too strange for a blog, or for sharing, or for thinking even. I wonder if several of us were pulled in easily to "Portrait" simply because we wanted to connect to it somehow, have the scars made beautiful or the imperfections justifiable. What a jolt those of us must have had when it all went wrong halfway in and our tender author betrayed us, made it a bit uncomfortable, and stank up the room. I wondered the same thing halfway through King's piece. It was all fine and good until he started saying things like "we" and "madman," and sheesh, so close together like that?

Which brings me to another bit of a loser supposition: what if certain folks are right? What if there is no "true" us, only the performer on paper? What if we cannot escape him/her simply because we (the reader) are the intended audience for us (the writer) and, here's the kicker, we know what we cannot bear to hear? Then, riddle me this Batman, is there any point at all to this academic, masturbatory, narcissistic exercise called writing?

Come on. You didn't think I was that innocent, did you?

Let's try something here. Portrait # One:

Long fingers. Granma loved them, called them piano chasers. (And they were, years ago, chasers along porcelain sound). Here, a sliver of a scar in the shape of the glass that sliced it, either side of my middle right knuckle. Hands just beginning to crepe up a bit after years of washing dishes, cleaning houses, working dirt. They held babies and stroked hair and clasped others and enunciated sentences. Married by joints that ache when it's going to rain and sometimes just because. They were the prettiest thing I had and are now the most belligerent sign of my wisdom. The left one bears a wedding ring so heavy that it has left a permanent, soft dent. I find comfort in them, the bones and the thinning skin that are the closet thing to my writing, my history, my life. My hands.

Sookay. Now. Portrait # Two:

Cuticles long scarred by permanent teeth, ripped and bit and torn until they bled. I curl the tips under to hide the flesh when I pay in cash, cut the nails to cripple their chances of self-mutilation. Veiny and branded by a drop of velvety hot grease -- a moment of self-defense against someone I loved. Fingers so long that they will have no choice but to become claws in the next two decades, bony things that held cigarettes and formed obscene gestures and slapped a friend once in a drunken rage. I am terrified of these appendages for they just might one day turn on the rest of me in jointy glee. Premeditated. Justifiable handocide. My hands.

Saalright. Pick one. Which portrait is true? Why, both, of course. And neither. Somewhere in the middle. Whatever I choose to remember or believe or tell. I think that may be the point, after all: to tell the truth, but to tell it slant (English majors, unite). Tell it ugly, sometimes, otherwise the writer in you will call bullshit on the whole sweet thing.

And for reasons beyond my own understanding this morning, the following verse just came into my head:

Would you believe in a love at first sight? Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time. What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.

KPD

Flashback

All Things Steve Almond

Fenway Park at Night

Hello, crew.  We are now popping off these blogs every Friday.  So here goes.


As I read Almond, I am struck with the feeling of two Steves.  I sense an almost expatriate, Vonnegut resignation, but I also find him digging up nostalgic American bones.  How do I, as a reader, balance phrases like: "The peculiar sickness of the American mindset may be located in the peculiar notion that the professional athlete . . . should serve as a moral exemplar" against phrases like: "Sometimes I need to pretend.  Sometimes I need a broken-down old stadium, stinking of beer and mustard, and rain falling like flour before the sodium lights?" (For Frank: this is "Red-Sox Anti-Christ.")  Or: "Our obsession with sport is clearly a symptom of imperial doom.  We must remember: All that held Rome together at the end was spectacle" against: "the chance to surrender my will is not without its sacred pleasures--a language, however primitive, with which to seek the solace of other men."

I think about how we talked, in class, of his self-effacement, his honesty, his outright brutality against a critic followed by his admission of pain, and I wonder: is it more beautiful to admit the ugliness we make?  To lean forward to our readers without our makeup on? It seems to me that the writers I love the most make sacrifice to their own, god-like readers this way.  It seems to me that I trust them more, then, feel more "involved" in their rants, diatribes, or observations than I would otherwise--even if I have been offended.  It's more, well, human. It's the least we can ask of someone who would like a moment of our time.

I share my story, my thoughts, and my politics with my students.  It put me at personal risk.  Yet, aren't I asking the same of you?  To write yourselves into being? To put yourselves on the old proverbial line and not hammer out some craptastic five-paragraph essay? I enjoy Almond because he seems to get that I need, as his reader, to feel him present in his craft.  Anything else feels like cheating.

At the very beginning of his book, we have a quote from Vonnegut:

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been.  But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

And here we have it, don't we?  A writer looking back at American failure, broken ideals, salt marking the spot where a dream had been.  Not because he never had faith, or out of some misguided sense of smug, self-righteous finality, but out of grief.  Humanity.

Personally? I like the bar that high.

You, Me, John Wayne and the Whole Shooting Match

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8sNeozweTM

"Courage is being scared to death . . . and saddlin' up anyway." John Wayne

I'm not sure why it took me so long to come to this particular blog day. I've been toying with the idea of simply skipping it, and perhaps that's what caught my attention. Why was I avoiding this one? Because "Demagogue Days" was so political? Ranty? Leftist? I think we all know me better than that by now. So . . .

What's in my craw?

I found it over my third cup of coffee. Fear. Let's have a chat about saddlin' up, shall we?

I'm with Almond, all the way down to the last level of Dante's hell. Pissed and self-righteous with him, hurt and indignant with him, embarrassed and vindicated with him. It came as quite a jolt that Canto XXX left the two of us (yes, the two of us) in the dust, so to speak, and horribly grieved at the real fallout. When do my rants, valid or not, take me away from my intended heroism? How many times have I been right, had a warrant (and boy, did we cover that one), filed my exquisitely crafted injunctions with the proper authorities and found myself, smoking gun in hand, so far from my cause?

Just to be clear, I'll provide disparate examples of such shenanigans:

1. Professor X warns me that I am too emotional about my essay subject. Obviously, Prof X is an Anal, Archaic, Sexless Fart who is part of the great conspiracy to rip the passion out of my writing. Final essay firmly refuses to examine AASF's alternate take on said well-loved subject (damn skippy!) and lands in a slap of dust and glory on AASF's desk. Take that. Flash forward to my first B.

2. With doctorate firmly in hand, and under sudden and decidedly unwarranted attack from an uptight academe, I (and my little warrant) saddle up and ride into Town. After all, others like myself need defending. Freedom of speech and religion and all that. I think I was feeling a little less John Wayne and a bit more Clint Eastwood, circa High Plains Drifter. (Of course, I completed forgot that Clint was dead, nothing more than a vengeful ghost with a bone to pick.) The rest was all pathos-driven-Facebook-diatribing, cost be damned. My mother isn't quite over it yet.

Let's now look at the fallout, shall we?

1. I publish the B paper in a well-respected academic journal. Accolades all around, self-satisfied grunts, and AASF will still not speak to me in the halls. Word.

2. I read the end of Almond's essay and drop my gun. Shit. Tyler. I had completely forgotten about Tyler. But there he stands, hair in his eyes, that stray bullet all on me. My student. Well, damn.

You know, sometimes "my bad" doesn't quite cut it.

I guess what I'm saying/asking/posing is something a bit like this: How far can our warrants take us? Or, how far are we willing to go? Personally, I don't think we can count the cost when saddling up, mostly because I think it might be too late. I've asked a lot of you, stuff like honesty and passion, and so I hope it's not too late or too much to ask one more thing: foresight. Temperance. Just in those places where we have forgotten a little thing like ethos and we are galloping so fast toward our target that the townfolk get a bit blurry. I think Steve Almond, and I, are a bit trigger happy. Maybe it's worse to be slow on the draw? Either way, when it comes to our writing (and maybe the rest), qualitative balance couldn't hurt.

One last thing. For any of my students: I really hope the shooting match isn't over. You were the point, all along.

Using a Warrant (not the Band)

I'm sitting here thinking of 1984.  I can smell it: hairspray (Gen X was solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, I contend), Marlboro cigarettes and other things that have a grassy, smoky aroma, Jordache perfume, diesel fuel.  It is my own warrant to speak of this time, and let me tell you, I do and often.  After reading "Tesla Matters (Dude)" all I can think of is this: what are our warrants?  How do we utilize them in our writing?  Do they put folks off? Draw them in?  When, and in what kind of writing, do we use them?

I would contend nonfiction deems them critical to the power of our message.  Let me prove this: how often have you been reading along, innocently accepting the message (or maybe trepidatiously) when BAM.  There it is.  A cultural misstep.  That is NOT what Reagan said, or Clinton, or Bush--the timeline is totally off--no one would have worn those shoes then . . .

(Yep, I totally just used all of the devices we talked about today.)

A professor I had once upon a time (her name was mentioned in class this afternoon) taught me something like this once.  It went something like: never break the suspension of disbelief with your audience.  You lose them.  Badly.

You know the moment.  You read the book.  And then?  There it is, the popcorn halfway up to your mouth, your feet jauntily hooked onto the chair in front of you, and there it is.  Bastards. Sophie (The Da Vinci Code) has a brother?  What the?  That was not in the book.  You look around, expecting riotous indignation from your fellow moviegoers.  Nothing.  Yet you have psychically left the building.  Over and out.  Suspension?  Nope.  Disbelief?  Yep.  The rest is just, well, garbage. I am personally still bitter about every single Stephen-King-book-turned-movie I have ever seen.  (One of the only screenplays he has written is Maximum Overdrive.  The others were Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Stellar.)

No warrant.  You can't  come in.  That is our right as readers, though, I believe.  To refuse entry when we call qualitative bullshit.

And yes.  I have cursed more than once in this blog.  Why?  Because I am about to use a warrant, and there is no way you would buy me if I came off as a pretentious, ivy-league prof.

It was 1984 and the Cradle Will Rock tour hit hard, right on the heels of the Back in Black tour (AC/DC, folks).  I had no intention of ever working for "the man" and had even less intention of staying chemically lucid for more than, well, five or ten minutes.  The t-shirt was black and had SEX DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL emblazoned across the front, and it was about two years before most of us had even heard the word "aids."  And I was ruuunnning.  (Little Forest Gump for you there.) Smart kid, lost, angry, scared, with a serious Peter Pan complex and no vision of my thirties.  Kids like yourselves made no sense to me.  How did they study and mind and cut their hair and eat their Wheaties? No way, man.  Sunlight hurt my eyes and Walt Disney was blasphemy to my soul.  Purposefully, vehemently, I threw away my childhood when I threw up my lighter to David Lee Rothe in crimson spandex.  Part of me is still back there, waiting for the lights to come up and force me out into the street.  Strangely, all the songs and all the bands and all the beer-soaked nights add up to this one moment in my teenage wasteland:

And when some local kid gets down
They try an' drum him outta town
They say, "Ya coulda least faked it, boy"
Fake it, boy (Ooh, stranger, boy)
At an early age he hits the street
Winds up tied with who he meets
An' he's unemployed--his folks are overjoyed.

But here I am, Dr. PD, thirty years later, talking about warrants.  I suppose I could have just "faked it," but I think I learned the regret of that decades ago.

And so.  I begin sentences with and.  And do a lot of ---- stuff like that.  Proper English?  Um, no.  But it's in line with the signature on my warrant.  I wonder, do we ever know the voice in our heads without examining the paperwork . . .