June 2009 Archives
Why We Write Simply
Just a super-short, super-quick post to say that I loved Sergio Troncoso's recent blog entry, "Why I Write Simply," and think you should read it, too.
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Categories:
Letter from a Young Writer
First of all, Happy Anniversary, Stonewall! Hurray! Now to overturn DOMA, and we'll be making some progress around here.As the insane person I apparently am, I decided some time ago to squeeze in a road trip to meet relatives before I head to Boston to teach in the Pine Manor residency. These are relatives I've never seen before: my biological paternal grandmother, aunts, cousins, y más--relatives of my biological father, Len (The Truth Book, p. 1, for those in the know). They're having a Fourth-of-July family reunion, and they generously invited me to come reune with them.
As those of you who've made the trek to meet unknown relatives or an unknown homeland can appreciate, it's an intense, overwhelming sort of thing to experience. (I'm still absorbing the shockwaves from meeting my biological maternal relatives, and that happened over a decade ago!) Anyway, it should be interesting. I'm packing now.
Recently, Heather Sellers was kind enough to share with us her thoughts about writing by hand, and several of you responded. Chris Westerman asked the great question about whether neurological research had been done to see if different parts of the brain are activated by the two different composition processes, and I'm looking into that. To my happy surprise, I also received an email from one of Heather's former students, who wanted to share his own views about the process.
Of course, let me add the caveat that we all know plenty of people who draft beautifully on their laptops--and more power to them. I just wanted to offer this perspective, in case you want to try it out.
Paul Morin graduated from Hope College in May 2009 and will enter Central Michigan University's M.A. English program this fall. He is currently working on a collection of short stories, Michigan Winter. Here's what he has to say:
I am a writing student of Heather Sellers. She mentioned that you were doing
a piece on writing by hand and that I should email you and share why I write
all of my work by hand. The simplest answer is: because it works. When I
write by hand, I am able to go through the scene more slowly and actually
experience what is going on with my characters. When I write on the computer I tend to go too quickly and leave out important parts of the story: the little details that make a story real. The 'Delete' key is the other main
hindrance for me and my writing. The ability to delete my work effortlessly
makes me feel like I have to correct any mistakes then and there or I will
look like an idiot. That takes me out of the image in my head and also
allows me to delete some of the gold from the story. If, on a snap
judgment, I delete something that I think isn't working, then I may never
have the chance to revisit that detail and discover why my subconscious
thought it was important to include. (Case in point. I have deleted and
re-written three sentences in this email already.)
Another big advantage of writing by hand is revision. When I revise, I copy
over a previous work by hand and add or take away depending on what I see.
When I do this by hand, I am able to see more and spend more time
fleshing out the details. When I write on the computer it is way too easy to
just start typing and end up copying everything over word for word.
Something about the pen allows me to make substantial revisions to the point
where a whole other story emerges from the old one. I have never been able
to do anything more than superficial changes on the computer. It is also too
easy for me to be lazy with a computer. For example, I can use the thesaurus
option in Microsoft Word and change all of my verbs, adjectives, etc. and
feel like I have done actual work. When I write by hand, that option isn't
there, and I am forced to go back into the story and re-see everything which
often brings forward things I never would have seen with something like my
Thesaurus method.
I have also noticed a marked change in the work from writers in various
writing groups when they have switched over to hand writing. The work is
fuller, has more energy and is more enjoyable to read. The whole group could
tell when people had switched. We would be reading a story and say,
"Something's different. You changed your style."
Writing by hand allows me to feel more. It makes my work better sooner,
requires less revision, and adds more depth. And in the end, it is faster
than trying to write a quality piece on the computer. To quote Heather, "The
slowest way is the fastest way."
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Categories:
A Bunch of Dynamos
These two recently published profiles of very popular commercial authors intrigued me: "Real Romance" in The New Yorker about Nora Roberts, and "Pulp Princess" in Elle about Miasha. I haven't yet read books by these writers, but their professional stories were interesting--especially in terms of their writing work ethic, determination to succeed, and strenuous, successful efforts to market and promote their work. Their sales are kind of staggering to read about.
Have I mentioned that teaching in the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference was great? The workshop participants were serious, focused, hardworking, and sweet, and they produced like crazy and supported each other. A teacher's dream.
Now I'm back at my desk, revising scholarly articles for submission, planning my fall graduate course in women's transatlantic modernism, and still plugging happily away on my novel.
Here in Lincoln, where the actual temperature of 97 degrees feels, or so weather.com tells me, like 109, and the UV index is 9, it seems like a wise day to be indoors anyway. In our apartment with all of the blinds drawn, I feel like one of the mole-people. Stay cool! Stay hydrated! Slather on the sunscreen, folks.
The graduate course is really exciting for me: Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, Margery Latimer, and Virginia Woolf all jostling around in one highly contested little period--and I had to cut so many! (Stevie Smith, I miss you. Djuna Barnes. Dorothy Richardson. Oh, my shame. And this is just prose--we're not even doing poetry.)
My goal is for every graduate student (18 are registered) to get a solid, submittable (is that a word?) journal article out of the experience. We'll see.
Have I mentioned that teaching in the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference was great? The workshop participants were serious, focused, hardworking, and sweet, and they produced like crazy and supported each other. A teacher's dream.
Now I'm back at my desk, revising scholarly articles for submission, planning my fall graduate course in women's transatlantic modernism, and still plugging happily away on my novel.
Here in Lincoln, where the actual temperature of 97 degrees feels, or so weather.com tells me, like 109, and the UV index is 9, it seems like a wise day to be indoors anyway. In our apartment with all of the blinds drawn, I feel like one of the mole-people. Stay cool! Stay hydrated! Slather on the sunscreen, folks.
The graduate course is really exciting for me: Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, Margery Latimer, and Virginia Woolf all jostling around in one highly contested little period--and I had to cut so many! (Stevie Smith, I miss you. Djuna Barnes. Dorothy Richardson. Oh, my shame. And this is just prose--we're not even doing poetry.)
My goal is for every graduate student (18 are registered) to get a solid, submittable (is that a word?) journal article out of the experience. We'll see.
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The Book I've Been Waiting For
Last week, I received and devoured Sue William Silverman's new Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir (U of Georgia, 2009). And gentle readers, I have to tell you: This is the teaching text I have been waiting for.It's terrific. It's smart, practical, honest, and candid, and it's clearly the product of Silverman's long experience as both writer and editor. (She has two riveting memoirs in print, and she's the associate editor of Fourth Genre, one of the top two journals that publish creative nonfiction exclusively, and my personal favorite.)
Until now, as a teacher of undergraduate and graduate memoir workshops, I have liked and used Vivian Gornick's shrewd and literate The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative with students, but honestly, it makes only a few really important take-away points, and most of them can be found on pages 3-26 and in the last chapter. Most of the rest of the book addresses (at length) texts that my students haven't read, which can be alienating/confusing for them, and I'm not able to devote our whole semester to reading Gornick's references. The Situation and The Story is a good jumping-off point, but then I've had to cobble together numerous other resources to make the pedagogical points I've wanted to make.
Fearless Confessions addresses everything: craft (from plot to sentence-level issues), ethics, the vexed issue of truth and memory, and even marketing. Silverman also addresses the psychological challenges of memoir writing, the fear that such a project can evoke, and the reasons to have courage. "Most memoirists I know are scared to write their stories," she acknowledges, "but the point, I think, is to write anyway--in our own way, in our own time." Throughout, Silverman's voice is warm and open, a voice of guidance, instruction, and encouragement from a been-there perspective.
Politically, as a gender critic, I was pleased to encounter her assessment of the highly gendered reception of memoirs in our culture, an issue that has troubled me since I read all those hostile, slanted reviews of Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss--so brilliant, so maligned--way back when. Silverman tackles the issue head-on:
. . .[W]hy are members of the media and society, broadly speaking, more likely to honor stories written by hostages, prisoners of war, or soldiers who have fought in foreign, faraway places? Aren't stories about domestic civil wars, stories of abused women and children, domestic POWs and homebound hostages--just as acute? Yet when we write about our wars closer to home, or even in the home, we are frequently, and pejoratively, labeled "confessional" writers. Whiny.She talks back clearly and convincingly. A whole section late in the book, "What the Media Doesn't Understand about Confessional Stories," develops the point, and Silverman's book title reclaims the term confessions from its pejorative past. For women and men whose writing focuses on domestic issues, I guess it helps to know the critical terrain in advance, so you can be prepared.
Useful appendices offer seven complete essays--three written just for this book--from contemporary writers such as Michelle Otero and Karen Salyer McElmurray, as well as a bibliography of "Contemporary Creative Nonfiction" that I love. Because it has so many works on it that I already admire and teach, like Alice Sebold's Lucky and Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate, as well as classics of the genre like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, it feels particularly trustworthy, and I look forward to exploring the works I don't know.
And I'm really excited that another appendix offers Silverman's essay "The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction," which I liked so much that I assigned to my graduate CNF students when it first appeared in The Writer's Chronicle last year. It provides useful descriptions of immersion writing, the lyric essay, and other CNF forms. Hurray! Now we have it in book form.
I look forward to using Fearless Confessions with students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, because it builds on, reinforces, and amplifies all the things I already try to teach when I teach memoir writing, the things I learned from good teachers and trial-and-error: sticking close to the body and the senses, showing-not-telling when portraying people and events, figuring out how to blend your voice then with your perspective now, which verb tense to choose, differentiating between therapy and memoir-writing, and so on.
This past weekend, I taught a mini-marathon blitzkrieg of a two-day intensive workshop, "Kick-Start Your Memoir," for the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference to a group of fourteen wonderful, serious participants, and I felt very confident, during our last hour together, recommending Fearless Confessions to them. With its guidance, reflections, and several very fruitful-looking writing exercises, it's a book that can keep them going strong on the route they've chosen.
Silverman reminds us why we all keep showing up:
Memoir writing, gathering words onto pieces of paper, helps me shape my life to a manageable size. By discovering plot, arc, theme, and metaphor, I offer my life an organization, a frame, which would be otherwise unseen, unknown. Memoir creates a narrative, a life story.Yes. Lovely, and just so.
Writing my life is a gift I give to myself. To write is to be constantly reborn. On one page I understand this about myself. On the next page, I understand that.
One of the tricky issues Silverman discusses in the book is writing about family. This Wednesday, if you'll be in Lincoln, you'd be very welcome to join Hilda Raz, Glenna Luschei, Aaron Raz Link, Kelly Grey Carlisle and me at NuVibe Juice & Java on 14th Street at 1:30 for the panel discussion "Speaking from Memory: Writing about Family." Come out, sip a smoothie, and share your views.
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The Value of Writing by Hand: Q&A with Heather Sellers
In response to a recent post on this blog, MFA student Faye Rapoport DesPres asked,
The rhythms of my sentences seem stronger and better when I write longhand, and so does the precision of my word choice. Since my hand is slower on the page than both hands are on the keyboard, my brain has time to try out alternative versions of a line before putting down the one my inner ear likes best and settles on.
I know that people say that writing by hand is too slow--that their pen can't keep up with their thoughts the way that typing can--and this is true for me, too, but I find it to be a good thing, since I can try out and discard weaker possibilities before they even make it to the page. Also, the extra step of typing up the handwritten work builds in an additional opportunity to let the words cool for a while and revise. Lastly, I'm a geek for slow food and organic, handmade stuff; I just generally prefer the intimacy and the sensuous, embodied feeling of writing by hand.
This is just my gut response to Faye's good question; I haven't done any research about it.
But writer Heather Sellers has given this issue a lot of thought for a long time now. A wildly productive, lovely, funny writer in multiple genres, she's the author of the award-winning short story collection Georgia Under Water, two collections and a chapbook of poetry, an illuminating college-level creative writing textbook that I just love (esp. the section about leaps), and two wonderful books about the writing process, Page after Page and Chapter after Chapter. Face First, her memoir about face blindness, is forthcoming from Riverhead, and she's a dedicated and beloved professor of creative writing at Hope College in Michigan. I got to hear her read her hilarious, blistering, sad, knockout essay, "Sails with Good People," in the forthcoming collection An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots, and she blew the room away. Check out Heather's blog about the writing process, Word after Word. She was kind enough to share her thoughts with us about writing by hand.
Me: Can you talk about your own reasons for writing by hand?
Heather: When I write by hand, I have to revise less. The work is more true, more fresh, more strange, more pure. Whenever I write by hand, the work comes out better. Thoughts are so so so useless, I think, when it comes to writing. The brain comes up with all these ideas, these notions and suggestions. They're TERRIBLE. It's the stuff that comes from under the brain, some place where the heart meets the soul in the land of the unconscious--the same place DREAMS come from--that's the place we want to get to when we make art. And, the hand, writing by hand, it lulls me into that place. My pen can't keep up with my thoughts. Perfect! I have a chance to really really write. Not vent. Not pour out words. But when the hand takes over, and the body and the brain are working together—this is always my best work.
Me: Do you see a difference in your students' work when they write by hand?
Heather: I do. It's amazing. They see it too. I can tell, when they bring their final manuscripts (typed up) to workshop who is writing by hand and who isn't. It's like looking at scarves made by machine, and scarves knit by hand by a dear dear friend. Two different beasts.
There's proof. It is wild. I have my advanced students submit a story in advance of the spring workshop, in December. On the first day of class, in January, this past year, I laid the stories out in three piles. One pile was Great Stories. They were so, so, so good. On the next pile, stories that just had a long way to go. They felt pat,
familiar, kind of "phoned in." Earnest writers, trying hard, but they didn't have that....ineffable spark. That thing. In the the third pile I put stories that didn't fit in either category. They were... a mixed bag. Some great parts. Some flat parts. I turned to each of the authors of the stories in pile one. "How do you compose," I said. I really wanted to know. This wasn't set up. Each author said, in turn, "By hand. I write by hand." Each author. I didn't single out the authors of the more beginning-ish stories. I just asked in general, "Do you write on the computer?" They all nodded. OR not. Which I took as a "yes." No shame. No blame. Just learning here. Okay, I said. "What about you three? These stories. I can't tell. Are you hand writers or computer writers?" Each of those students said the same thing. Some of the story was written by hand. Some was on the computer. After class, I sat with two of these writers, and I pointed out the passages I felt were hand, and the ones I suspected were computer. I'm not bragging here, I'm really not. But I got it 100% accurate. I really did. Now, I know these students, and I adore them, so maybe this is too unscientific to be of use or interest. But we were all pretty blown away that day.
I have not yet had a student who writes by hand say, "Yeah, I am really going to try the computer and see how that goes." Once they start (or return) to hand, they never, ever go back.
I remind them of all the great books that were written by hand. For example, all the works of Jane Austen. All the works of Shakespeare. All Sappho. All of the Bible. All done ... by hand.
Me: Are there kinds of writing that you deliberately choose not to do by hand? If so, why?
Heather: Letters to ex-boyfriends. Letters to my lawyer. Anything where I need my critical faculties in hyperdrive. Creative writing is the opposite--it requires that part of the brain to be off, or idling in the distance. Interesting--I'm just thinking of this now--I almost always write my class plans by hand, at breakfast, on printer paper...the work is always more alive, more mutable, more "real" when it's coming from the fingers.
Me: What would you say to an aspiring writer who's worried about the amount of time that writing by hand will take?
Heather: It will be faster if you do it by hand. Remember your mother saying how you should "do it right the first time"? You get better results and have to revise less. It is true. But if you have time to draft and draft and draft, by all means! Use the computer!
Robert Olen Butler is really good at explaining this in his book with Janet Burroway, From Where you Dream. And Lynda Barry, who teaches this method, explains it in One Hundred Demons.
I love this topic and have been happy all day having a chance to think about it. Thank you for letting me weigh in.
You've mentioned in a few blog entries that you write by hand before typing. I'd be very interested in your thoughts on that in a future blog entry...is there an advantage to writing your first drafts long hand, and do you think there is value in that process for any writer? Or is it a personal thing?It's a wonderful question. Thank you, Faye! Alas, I have only the most instinctual response, and here it is.
The rhythms of my sentences seem stronger and better when I write longhand, and so does the precision of my word choice. Since my hand is slower on the page than both hands are on the keyboard, my brain has time to try out alternative versions of a line before putting down the one my inner ear likes best and settles on.
I know that people say that writing by hand is too slow--that their pen can't keep up with their thoughts the way that typing can--and this is true for me, too, but I find it to be a good thing, since I can try out and discard weaker possibilities before they even make it to the page. Also, the extra step of typing up the handwritten work builds in an additional opportunity to let the words cool for a while and revise. Lastly, I'm a geek for slow food and organic, handmade stuff; I just generally prefer the intimacy and the sensuous, embodied feeling of writing by hand.
This is just my gut response to Faye's good question; I haven't done any research about it.
But writer Heather Sellers has given this issue a lot of thought for a long time now. A wildly productive, lovely, funny writer in multiple genres, she's the author of the award-winning short story collection Georgia Under Water, two collections and a chapbook of poetry, an illuminating college-level creative writing textbook that I just love (esp. the section about leaps), and two wonderful books about the writing process, Page after Page and Chapter after Chapter. Face First, her memoir about face blindness, is forthcoming from Riverhead, and she's a dedicated and beloved professor of creative writing at Hope College in Michigan. I got to hear her read her hilarious, blistering, sad, knockout essay, "Sails with Good People," in the forthcoming collection An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots, and she blew the room away. Check out Heather's blog about the writing process, Word after Word. She was kind enough to share her thoughts with us about writing by hand.Me: Can you talk about your own reasons for writing by hand?
Heather: When I write by hand, I have to revise less. The work is more true, more fresh, more strange, more pure. Whenever I write by hand, the work comes out better. Thoughts are so so so useless, I think, when it comes to writing. The brain comes up with all these ideas, these notions and suggestions. They're TERRIBLE. It's the stuff that comes from under the brain, some place where the heart meets the soul in the land of the unconscious--the same place DREAMS come from--that's the place we want to get to when we make art. And, the hand, writing by hand, it lulls me into that place. My pen can't keep up with my thoughts. Perfect! I have a chance to really really write. Not vent. Not pour out words. But when the hand takes over, and the body and the brain are working together—this is always my best work.
Me: Do you see a difference in your students' work when they write by hand?
Heather: I do. It's amazing. They see it too. I can tell, when they bring their final manuscripts (typed up) to workshop who is writing by hand and who isn't. It's like looking at scarves made by machine, and scarves knit by hand by a dear dear friend. Two different beasts.
There's proof. It is wild. I have my advanced students submit a story in advance of the spring workshop, in December. On the first day of class, in January, this past year, I laid the stories out in three piles. One pile was Great Stories. They were so, so, so good. On the next pile, stories that just had a long way to go. They felt pat,
familiar, kind of "phoned in." Earnest writers, trying hard, but they didn't have that....ineffable spark. That thing. In the the third pile I put stories that didn't fit in either category. They were... a mixed bag. Some great parts. Some flat parts. I turned to each of the authors of the stories in pile one. "How do you compose," I said. I really wanted to know. This wasn't set up. Each author said, in turn, "By hand. I write by hand." Each author. I didn't single out the authors of the more beginning-ish stories. I just asked in general, "Do you write on the computer?" They all nodded. OR not. Which I took as a "yes." No shame. No blame. Just learning here. Okay, I said. "What about you three? These stories. I can't tell. Are you hand writers or computer writers?" Each of those students said the same thing. Some of the story was written by hand. Some was on the computer. After class, I sat with two of these writers, and I pointed out the passages I felt were hand, and the ones I suspected were computer. I'm not bragging here, I'm really not. But I got it 100% accurate. I really did. Now, I know these students, and I adore them, so maybe this is too unscientific to be of use or interest. But we were all pretty blown away that day.I have not yet had a student who writes by hand say, "Yeah, I am really going to try the computer and see how that goes." Once they start (or return) to hand, they never, ever go back.
I remind them of all the great books that were written by hand. For example, all the works of Jane Austen. All the works of Shakespeare. All Sappho. All of the Bible. All done ... by hand.
Me: Are there kinds of writing that you deliberately choose not to do by hand? If so, why?
Heather: Letters to ex-boyfriends. Letters to my lawyer. Anything where I need my critical faculties in hyperdrive. Creative writing is the opposite--it requires that part of the brain to be off, or idling in the distance. Interesting--I'm just thinking of this now--I almost always write my class plans by hand, at breakfast, on printer paper...the work is always more alive, more mutable, more "real" when it's coming from the fingers.
Me: What would you say to an aspiring writer who's worried about the amount of time that writing by hand will take?
Heather: It will be faster if you do it by hand. Remember your mother saying how you should "do it right the first time"? You get better results and have to revise less. It is true. But if you have time to draft and draft and draft, by all means! Use the computer!
Robert Olen Butler is really good at explaining this in his book with Janet Burroway, From Where you Dream. And Lynda Barry, who teaches this method, explains it in One Hundred Demons.
I love this topic and have been happy all day having a chance to think about it. Thank you for letting me weigh in.
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Lightning Round
Because I owe some feedback to one of my graduate students, I'm just going to post a lightning round here. First of all, many thanks to all my students over the years, who've helped me learn--the hard way!--what works and what doesn't. Your feedback is helping me put the finishing touches on the workshop I'll be teaching this weekend at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference. But can creative writing be taught at all? Should it be? Louis Menand goes there.
Here's why I keep loving the work of Tayari Jones. When it comes to the humanity of her characters, she never settles for less. (Writers and aspiring writers, definitely read this.) Plus, her latest blog entry says that, after a hectic and tumultuous time, she has finished a draft of her latest novel, THE SILVER GIRL. Hurray! The excerpts I've seen have been beautiful and moving. We'll be looking forward....
Mystery novelist (and fellow West Virginian) Craig Johnson's first novel came out in 2005, and Viking's now publishing his fifth. (Is that humanly possible?) Having just handed off my global revision of THE DESIRE PROJECTS to a reader today, I love what he has to say on the issue of work ethic:
I kind of think of it as the blue-collar school of literature. . . . Never have I met a ditch digger who said, 'I'm just not feeling the ditch today, the ditch muse is not with me, I have to put my shovel down now.'But alas, it looks like he may have been using that shovel just a shade too often, stretching his bio to include a stint with the N.Y.P.D. Oops. Writers beware: Viking/Penguin may not fact-check you, but the New York Times will, even if they're just doing a puff piece on your cool house. (And do me a favor: when they do, try not to respond "petulantly," okay?)
This new exhibit of art by U.S. Islamic women looks fascinating; I especially love the idea of the Persian nesting dolls, above. Me encanta. Our visible image can look so different from who we are inside.
Lastly, for those of you worn out by explaining minority standpoints--re: gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, ability, religion, class, and/or you name it--to clueless members of groups on which you serve, take heart. When you're exhausted and/or fed up, know that you don't always have to argue your position to make a positive difference. You change the dynamic and the awareness just by being in the room. It may not achieve perfect results, but it's something. So take a breath, relax, and just show up.
And many thanks to those of you who wrote in privately to say how much you appreciated my recent post on Sonia Sotomayor. I'm helped by knowing it was useful. Sometimes I think political commentary isn't really the appropriate purview for a literary blog (so many people do it better than I can!), so it's good to know I'm saying something you value. ¡Gracias!
Let me get a little woo-woo on y'all for a second and just say that, according to the Ayurvedic calendar, the seasonal juncture ended yesterday. We're now officially in summer, the season of lightness, play, sweetness, and living out what the deep, introspective shake-up of spring helped us see. If you've been experiencing personal turbulence--and paying attention--now's the time for fruition. I hope you enjoy it!
Till soon!
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Categories:
Language, Thinking, Sex, and Justice
The yammering about whether Sonia Sotomayor will judge "differently" because of her ethnicity and gender grinds on. (The line that's riling folks, which you've probably read or heard a dozen times now, comes from a speech she gave 8 years ago: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Critics object that the rule of law, not personal experience, is what should guide a judge's decision in any given case.)
This interesting addition to the discussion, "Debate on Whether Female Justices Decide Differently Arises Anew," appeared in yesterday's New York Times.
The piece focuses on a Supreme Court case regarding a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched by school authorities for OTC painkillers. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found the search objectionable; her colleagues (all 8 of whom are male, remember) weren't troubled.
Leaving aside the specific issue of strip-searching a kid for ibuprofen, I want to look at the assumptions embedded in the way this story is being described in language, as in this line: "But the idea that women may inherently view the law differently on occasion is something that troubles even several female judges who believe it may be so" (emphasis definitely mine).
So what I want to do is back up for a moment and unpack this. The word differently implies--necessitates--the existence of a norm to differ from. Such a norm indeed exists, and it is the norm of "law." But this "law," which has been written and revised over hundreds of years, is a construction made by individuals and groups of people, working together, imperfectly, over time. This construction has been authored (almost entirely exclusively, until the late 20th century) by only one identity group: white males (and you might nuance that to say mostly "economically privileged white males," though some worked their way up, etc.).
Thus, this form of writing, this body of codes, necessarily bears the marks of that group's experiences, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world. It cannot avoid doing so.
But today, these particularities are neutralized in the common imagination and in the media because, hey, it's "law." It's been authenticated by the highest political authorities available. (But again, these authenticating authorities have been white males.)
Only if you believe that the norm--the law--is magically right, which suggests a lack of historical awareness (Plessy v. Ferguson, anyone?), or if, hmm, you benefit from the way the norm is constructed, will the idea of things being done "differently" keep you up at night.
If history had been different--if women, say, had authored the statutes that governed what is legal and illegal--then reporters might be commenting on how gender-biased were these responses of two male judges, whose perspectives stem directly from the personal experience of being socialized as boys:
But again, no reporters are pointing that out.
Women know (and may have lived) the statistics: approximately 1 in 8 of us are raped as adults (by men; let's name it), and approximately 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 of us are sexually molested in childhood (primarily by men--by a vast margin). Most of us have been monitoring our dress, physical behaviors, and spatial freedom since childhood in order to mitigate the possibilities of such assaults. We carry our keys (and maybe pepper spray) in our hands and check the backseat of our locked cars when we walk out of the grocery store at night. Again, in the interests of naming the unspoken, this is due to the prevalence of attacks by men.
This is our daily, lived experience. These are the micropractices that shape our consciousnesses.
We also know intimately the various confusions of menarche, adolescence, and the attentions--welcome and otherwise--that our maturing bodies bring. We are thus far more likely to question the needfulness of an adolescent girl's being "made to stretch out her bra and underpants" so that school officials can inspect what's within. (For ibuprofen, remember. We're not talking heroin or explosives here.) Our experience inflects our understanding of what such a strip-search would feel like. We can empathize with the girl in a way that male judges' personal experience apparently prevents them from doing.
Sexual inequality before the law isn't ancient history. In graduate school in Texas in the mid-1990s, when I was sexually harassed by a man masturbating on the street, I was able to obtain his vehicle's license plate number, which I gave to the police. Because I had filed a report, my name and address were available to anyone (including the harasser) for a nominal paperwork fee. His name and address, however--though the police knew them, based on his license--were not made available to me. That was the law. The police drove by his place of business to give him a warning; they didn't want to go to his house, because he was married, they said, and they didn't want to stir up trouble with his wife. A warning, to my knowledge, is all he ever got.
He knew I had complained, and he could learn, if he desired, exactly where to find me. There was nothing I could do to prevent that, no way of protecting my name and address.
Who wrote those laws? Who enforced them? Who benefits?
So yes, women view the law (when it speaks to gendered concerns) "differently"--differently from men, for whose advantage the laws have long been written. Likewise, men also view the law differently--differently from women. Alas, women haven't historically held sufficient power to make their views of the world into "law," so the norm from which male views differ is a muted or even silenced view.
I think we can safely extrapolate from this to issues of race & ethnicity and economic class, to which Sotomayor can speak from experience, as well as sexual orientation and religion. Only when all people's standpoints are represented in the halls of power will justice be real. Only then can we afford to let it be blind. In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes open, and so should the media.
Will Sonia Sotomayor judge differently? Probably, when it's relevant. And it's a difference we need.
This interesting addition to the discussion, "Debate on Whether Female Justices Decide Differently Arises Anew," appeared in yesterday's New York Times.
The piece focuses on a Supreme Court case regarding a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched by school authorities for OTC painkillers. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found the search objectionable; her colleagues (all 8 of whom are male, remember) weren't troubled.
Leaving aside the specific issue of strip-searching a kid for ibuprofen, I want to look at the assumptions embedded in the way this story is being described in language, as in this line: "But the idea that women may inherently view the law differently on occasion is something that troubles even several female judges who believe it may be so" (emphasis definitely mine).
So what I want to do is back up for a moment and unpack this. The word differently implies--necessitates--the existence of a norm to differ from. Such a norm indeed exists, and it is the norm of "law." But this "law," which has been written and revised over hundreds of years, is a construction made by individuals and groups of people, working together, imperfectly, over time. This construction has been authored (almost entirely exclusively, until the late 20th century) by only one identity group: white males (and you might nuance that to say mostly "economically privileged white males," though some worked their way up, etc.).
Thus, this form of writing, this body of codes, necessarily bears the marks of that group's experiences, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world. It cannot avoid doing so.
But today, these particularities are neutralized in the common imagination and in the media because, hey, it's "law." It's been authenticated by the highest political authorities available. (But again, these authenticating authorities have been white males.)
Only if you believe that the norm--the law--is magically right, which suggests a lack of historical awareness (Plessy v. Ferguson, anyone?), or if, hmm, you benefit from the way the norm is constructed, will the idea of things being done "differently" keep you up at night.
If history had been different--if women, say, had authored the statutes that governed what is legal and illegal--then reporters might be commenting on how gender-biased were these responses of two male judges, whose perspectives stem directly from the personal experience of being socialized as boys:
Justice Steven G. Breyer was one of several on the court who suggested during oral argument that he was untroubled by the search. Justice Breyer said that when he was that age, boys stripped down to their underwear in the locker room and “people did stick things in my underwear,” a comment that produced hearty laughter from Justice Thomas.But the influence of personal experience of masculine socialization--and how it might make a male judge deem some things unimportant--goes unremarked by reporters. Even the metaphors chosen by male judges, as in the "comments by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas . . . that judges should be like neutral baseball umpires," are inflected by gendered experience. (Don't Title IX me. Thomas [b. 1948] and Roberts [b. 1955] were out of school before that little gem, which passed in '72, took effect.)
But again, no reporters are pointing that out.
Women know (and may have lived) the statistics: approximately 1 in 8 of us are raped as adults (by men; let's name it), and approximately 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 of us are sexually molested in childhood (primarily by men--by a vast margin). Most of us have been monitoring our dress, physical behaviors, and spatial freedom since childhood in order to mitigate the possibilities of such assaults. We carry our keys (and maybe pepper spray) in our hands and check the backseat of our locked cars when we walk out of the grocery store at night. Again, in the interests of naming the unspoken, this is due to the prevalence of attacks by men.
This is our daily, lived experience. These are the micropractices that shape our consciousnesses.
We also know intimately the various confusions of menarche, adolescence, and the attentions--welcome and otherwise--that our maturing bodies bring. We are thus far more likely to question the needfulness of an adolescent girl's being "made to stretch out her bra and underpants" so that school officials can inspect what's within. (For ibuprofen, remember. We're not talking heroin or explosives here.) Our experience inflects our understanding of what such a strip-search would feel like. We can empathize with the girl in a way that male judges' personal experience apparently prevents them from doing.
Sexual inequality before the law isn't ancient history. In graduate school in Texas in the mid-1990s, when I was sexually harassed by a man masturbating on the street, I was able to obtain his vehicle's license plate number, which I gave to the police. Because I had filed a report, my name and address were available to anyone (including the harasser) for a nominal paperwork fee. His name and address, however--though the police knew them, based on his license--were not made available to me. That was the law. The police drove by his place of business to give him a warning; they didn't want to go to his house, because he was married, they said, and they didn't want to stir up trouble with his wife. A warning, to my knowledge, is all he ever got.
He knew I had complained, and he could learn, if he desired, exactly where to find me. There was nothing I could do to prevent that, no way of protecting my name and address.
Who wrote those laws? Who enforced them? Who benefits?
So yes, women view the law (when it speaks to gendered concerns) "differently"--differently from men, for whose advantage the laws have long been written. Likewise, men also view the law differently--differently from women. Alas, women haven't historically held sufficient power to make their views of the world into "law," so the norm from which male views differ is a muted or even silenced view.
I think we can safely extrapolate from this to issues of race & ethnicity and economic class, to which Sotomayor can speak from experience, as well as sexual orientation and religion. Only when all people's standpoints are represented in the halls of power will justice be real. Only then can we afford to let it be blind. In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes open, and so should the media.
Will Sonia Sotomayor judge differently? Probably, when it's relevant. And it's a difference we need.
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Three Cheers for Empathy
I'm so psyched about Justice Sonia Sotomayor, her fantastic record, and her excellent chances of being confirmed. As Jeffrey Toobin observed on last night's Daily Show, there have been 110 justices on the Supreme Court during the U.S.'s history, and 106 of them have been white men. It's about time. Sorry about the squeals she's provoking from the right, but folks rarely relinquish unearned privilege gracefully. Why the right is trying to scare people off the word empathy, though--and why Dems are capitulating--is beyond me. I wonder what George Lakoff would say. Progressives currently have power and the will of the people behind them. It's our turn to shape the discourse, and leaders should take the wheel in that regard.
Ain't I a princess? Disney's drawing fire for The Princess and The Frog, an animated film due out this December that features Disney's first black princess, Tiana. Oprah consulted, and parents are happy, but critics voice concern that the prince is not black enough (or not black at all) and that the princess spends a good chunk of the movie as a frog herself (in a divergence from the original).
I was wondering why, instead of reshaping a classic European tale (the film retells the Grimms' fairy tale but sets it in 1920s New Orleans), Disney didn't just look to either African or African American narratives. If I wanted to create a tale that highlighted a black princess/heroine, I'd start by looking at some culturally indigenous stories. Just a thought.
If you get a chance to see Examined Life, a documentary of public intellectuals gabbing and moving, go. It's more accessible than you might think, given the status of some of the subjects as high-powered theorists, and it's often humorous (intentionally or otherwise). My favorites were Avital Ronnell, who talks about anxiety and ethics (pointing out the way that Bush was notoriously un-anxious about the death penalty in Texas and various crimes against humanity since), and applied ethicist Peter Singer, who questions our moral responsibilities to one another vis-à-vis the issue of conspicuous consumption in front of Fifth Avenue's windows full of designer goods. (Singer's remarks actually helped me think through a chapter I'm revising, so that was an unexpected plus.)
Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the filmmaker's sister show up in the film, too, as does Judith Butler, who is much sexier than I'd guessed from her prose. (Of course, a doorstop is sexier than I'd guess from Judith Butler's prose.) Sharp hair, Judith.
Thinking about the Other is all over the documentary, so empathy, though not called that by the philosophers, was a theme. How do we design and implement a just society when people have such different capacities and values? How do we imagine our way across vast differences into another person's perspective?
Many thanks to Sonam, Amalia, Julia, and Jon for going with me and talking about it afterward, and to Sonam for dreaming up the outing in the first place.
Today's Grey's first day on the job at a bookstore in Austin, where he's spending the summer, so my mom-heart is all wondering about how it's going for him. Good luck, Grey!
With the end of classes, I'm getting just a ton of revision done. A character completely surprised me last night; I love it when that happens.
I'm so grateful to be a teacher and thus to have summers off. For three months a year, I get to live and work like a real artist, to dwell in the imagined, constructed worlds of creative projects. It's such a gift.
I think it's a gift back to our students, too, though. If we didn't have this concentrated, different sense of focus on our work, we wouldn't be able to do our work as well, and then we wouldn't have sufficient experiential knowledge when we teach. In fact, I wish university administrators really comprehended artists' processes better and would structure more "studio" time (time for jello-mind, time to write for hours on end) into the school year, so we could stay juiced up all year long, instead of sticking us onto committee after committee. I have a few scholarly friends who genuinely like committee and administrative work, and more power to 'em. I wish they could do it all. I'd like to just teach and write, teach and write, and then, for the summers, just write.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Ain't I a princess? Disney's drawing fire for The Princess and The Frog, an animated film due out this December that features Disney's first black princess, Tiana. Oprah consulted, and parents are happy, but critics voice concern that the prince is not black enough (or not black at all) and that the princess spends a good chunk of the movie as a frog herself (in a divergence from the original).
I was wondering why, instead of reshaping a classic European tale (the film retells the Grimms' fairy tale but sets it in 1920s New Orleans), Disney didn't just look to either African or African American narratives. If I wanted to create a tale that highlighted a black princess/heroine, I'd start by looking at some culturally indigenous stories. Just a thought.
If you get a chance to see Examined Life, a documentary of public intellectuals gabbing and moving, go. It's more accessible than you might think, given the status of some of the subjects as high-powered theorists, and it's often humorous (intentionally or otherwise). My favorites were Avital Ronnell, who talks about anxiety and ethics (pointing out the way that Bush was notoriously un-anxious about the death penalty in Texas and various crimes against humanity since), and applied ethicist Peter Singer, who questions our moral responsibilities to one another vis-à-vis the issue of conspicuous consumption in front of Fifth Avenue's windows full of designer goods. (Singer's remarks actually helped me think through a chapter I'm revising, so that was an unexpected plus.)
Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the filmmaker's sister show up in the film, too, as does Judith Butler, who is much sexier than I'd guessed from her prose. (Of course, a doorstop is sexier than I'd guess from Judith Butler's prose.) Sharp hair, Judith.
Thinking about the Other is all over the documentary, so empathy, though not called that by the philosophers, was a theme. How do we design and implement a just society when people have such different capacities and values? How do we imagine our way across vast differences into another person's perspective?
Many thanks to Sonam, Amalia, Julia, and Jon for going with me and talking about it afterward, and to Sonam for dreaming up the outing in the first place.
Today's Grey's first day on the job at a bookstore in Austin, where he's spending the summer, so my mom-heart is all wondering about how it's going for him. Good luck, Grey!
With the end of classes, I'm getting just a ton of revision done. A character completely surprised me last night; I love it when that happens.
I'm so grateful to be a teacher and thus to have summers off. For three months a year, I get to live and work like a real artist, to dwell in the imagined, constructed worlds of creative projects. It's such a gift.
I think it's a gift back to our students, too, though. If we didn't have this concentrated, different sense of focus on our work, we wouldn't be able to do our work as well, and then we wouldn't have sufficient experiential knowledge when we teach. In fact, I wish university administrators really comprehended artists' processes better and would structure more "studio" time (time for jello-mind, time to write for hours on end) into the school year, so we could stay juiced up all year long, instead of sticking us onto committee after committee. I have a few scholarly friends who genuinely like committee and administrative work, and more power to 'em. I wish they could do it all. I'd like to just teach and write, teach and write, and then, for the summers, just write.
Hey, a girl can dream.
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