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New Semester's Eve

2008-08-25T23:05:07Z

I'm so excited, like I always get right before classes begin. So please forgive me, everyone else, but this post is dedicated to my fellow teaching geeks out there.

In my Chicana/Chicano Lit class, a new course for me, I'll be teaching these great books:

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya, a classic

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, which I've been teaching now for over ten years--it never wears out!

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa, which blew me away in graduate school (though I remember that it freaked out a few of my fellow grad students)--the title page of that early edition still bears my sweetly awed, breathless, scrawled note: "the most amazing book I've ever read"

the anthology Latino Boom, edited by these great guys, John Christie and Jose Gonzalez, who also have a very helpful website on Latino lit

and the brand-new, still damp from the presses memoir by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Mexican Enough: My Life between the Borderlines.

By sheer happy accident, I ran across an advance copy of Mexican Enough at the Pine Manor residency this summer, and I got hooked by just the first five pages. It's a lark, a romp--but with serious brains. Then--again, by sheer happy accident--I was lucky enough to meet Stephanie herself, very briefly, at Macondo, and I'll tell you what: even on only a first impression, she's a way fun girl. That carries over into her narration, so I thought her book would be a livelier intro to some of the cultural and historical material we need to cover than me lecturing at the front of the classroom. We'll see if the ENGL 245D students agree!

I'm in love with the books for my graduate course in creative nonfiction, too, especially Telling True Stories (a brilliant craft guide, co-edited by Wendy Call, one of the terrific participants in our workshop at Macondo), Food & Booze, the collection from the journal Tin House, and a beautiful collection of essays, Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places, by Naomi Shihab Nye, who (hurray!) will be our writer-in-residence here at UNL next spring. But I won't rave about them now, because I've got to finish thinking through my opening-day spiel.

I'm reading Barry Lopez's Resistance, and I love the first story and the deep seriousness that it opens up. Read it, read it.

But--call me cranky--the rest of the collection just doesn't sustain. At least so far. Maybe it'll pick back up, but it's becoming just a shade monotonous, predictable, and the voices of all the fictional narrators are so similar that it's hard to distinguish them. The first story's wonderful, seriously, but I'd rather just have imagined the rest.

I'm also reading the Bhagavad Gita again. Like Arjuna, I'm feeling reluctant to charge into battle (another start-of-the-semester feeling), so I'm trying to listen up and see if Krishna will make any sense this time.

On a totally unrelated note, I saw Bill Maher on Larry King last night. My Dad used to love Bill Maher--he watched him religiously, if I can use that word in regard to anything Maheresque. We don't get HBO, so I don't watch Bill Maher's show, but I must say, his interview with Larry King was refreshing. You don't hear people speak so frankly in the public sphere very often. Whether or not you agree with Maher's perspectives, his honesty and directness are bracing.

I think he's the kind of guy that the best of the U.S. founding fathers--the best of them, mind you--would have liked hanging out with. Little perceptible b.s., little perceptible spin. There's a kind of unassailable vulnerability that comes when you just tell the truth about who you are and what you believe. He has some of that, and it's refreshing because that's not a quality that makes it to prime-time very often.

Lastly, how is it that, according to a recent poll, McCain and Obama are tied? Huh? Hello? What did I miss? Nation, what's happening?

A Cool New Piece & Big Hugs to Helena

2008-08-20T14:50:39Z

When my husband brought the Sunday New York Times home this weekend, I was so excited to see a piece from one of my favorite teachers and mentors in its pages.

"Beach Blanket Baja," by Helena María Viramontes, begins by delineating her family's class and ethnic position:

IN our East Los Angeles working-class neighborhoods of the ’50s and ’60s, no one thought of summer vacations or sleep-away camps as a possibility. . . . My parents grew up in one of the largest and oldest Mexican-American communities in the nation. Immigrant belief prevailed, despite the fact that both Mom and Dad were born in the United States. We were poor, but it was a poverty that we were unaware of since everyone around us was the same.

Into this mix comes the "delirium" of a childhood vacation:

. . . [I]n 1964, when I was 10, my father announced that we were all to spend a weekend in Ensenada, Mexico, with José and his family.

My mother was, at first, skeptical: It would be no easy feat to transport a total of 16 people, the majority of them children, but Tío José had worked out a plan. He would drive his Pontiac, accompanied by his wife, Tía Lola, and his children. My father would drive Joe Junior’s clunky Chevy, and my oldest brother, Gil, would be in charge of driving our father’s white Ford pickup.

Gas and food? Everything was much cheaper across the border. Lodging? Camping under the stars!

Funny, frank, and unflinching about the economic woes she sees south of the border, the piece finally becomes a story about the nerve-wracking difficulties, the "anxieties" of "monstrous proportions," even for documented U.S. citizens, of crossing the literal border from Mexico back to the United States--an important thing to make vivid for readers across the country now that, as the Pew Research Center reports, "Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported," according to a nationwide survey of Latinos, and "Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos."

Thanks, Helena, for bringing it all to life.

¡El Sabado Gigante!

2008-08-17T01:42:53Z

My husband and I spent a big, hot chunk of today out canvassing door to door, getting voters to apply to vote early by mail. It was so cool.

The whole going-door-to-door thing--not to mention the fact that we got assigned to a gigantic trailer park--was sort of a flashback fest, but once I got over my jittery old self, it was really fun.

The best parts were when I got to talk to really elderly voters. They were like, "Yes, this is great! It's hard for me to get out." In November, the weather in Nebraska can be daunting. It was good to imagine them warm and comfortable at their kitchen tables, filling in their ballots.

Nebraska is one of the few states (two, I think?) that don't go all red or all blue in the presidential race, so individual voters have a little bit more of an impact. We have three congressional districts. Ours here in Lincoln (and stretching north and south) is the first, Omaha's region is the second, and western Nebraska is the third.

Right now, folks are guessing that the second CD (Omaha) will line up for Obama in November, and the third CD (west) will go for McCain. But the first CD (ours) is anyone's guess. It's kind of up for grabs and could go either way--or that's what some say, at least--and it was cool to be out there helping people make their voices heard.

In other news, I'm working to get my syllabi ready for the new semester at UNL, which starts on the 25th. I'm excited to be teaching two new courses this fall: Chicana/Chicana Literature (I've only taught big-umbrella Latina/Latino lit courses before), and a graduate course in creative nonfiction. I'm very psyched about both, but the planning is eating me alive!

Your Rumi du jour

2008-08-13T00:50:51Z

Quatrain 82, from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Long time, no blog!

2008-08-08T22:14:10Z

Hello, hello, hello! I'm happy to be back from an incredible, marvelous workshop at Macondo, and I thought my first blog would be a big report about it. But I've been hearing from some writers lately who need encouragement.

When I was writing the first draft of The Truth Book, I stayed for three weeks at the beautiful women's writing colony Norcroft up in Minnesota (now sadly defunct--sigh). I had the Julia Alvarez room. Framed on the wall was a poster, Alvarez's "Ten of My Writing Commandments." I've always been a sucker for wise aphorisms, and the sayings that inspired Alvarez also buoyed me through the difficult evenings when I came back alone from my little shed overlooking Lake Superior to the solitude of my room.

Here are the first five:

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities.
In the expert's mind there are few.
~Zen Masters

The obligation of the artist is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
~Anton Chekhov

Do not be afraid!
~Angels appearing to shepherds tending their flocks by night

If you bring forth what is inside you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is inside you,
what is inside you will destroy you.
~St. Thomas, Gnostic Gospels

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling.
It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.
~Wei T'ai

All of these were huge for me. I was so scared writing that book, and these helped me, pushed me, comforted me. If you look, you can see them running through every page of my memoir.

So I'm grateful to Julia, and I wanted to pass these along. The other five "commandments"--and a Macondo report, I promise!--will come later. And many, many thanks to Joan Drury, founder and supporter of Norcroft, who helped so many women for so many years to do the writing they longed to do.

Two Quick Things . . .

2008-07-25T00:43:36Z

. . . before I get on the road.

First, my friend from grad school, Dave Pruett, wrote in about the Cixous/"Laugh of the Medusa"/ecriture feminine thread to say that he's been reading Nuala O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman and thinks it just might fit. So for those of you looking for examples of ecriture feminine, you might check it out. (I haven't read it yet, but I trust Dave's judgment.)

I remember loving O'Faolain's "7 Tips on How to Write a Best-Selling Memoir (even though nobody in the world is interested in you)" when it appeared in Ms. magazine a few years ago. Unfortunately, I couldn't find an online version for you. But it's a great piece, so track it down if you're interested.

Second, I mentioned Helen Elaine Lee's lovely story in a previous blog--the one she read at the Pine Manor residency that made me want to rush home and hug my husband, and I just wanted to tell you that it's called "Marriage Bones," and it appeared in Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Charles Rowell (of Callaloo fame) and published by Westview Press/Harper Collins in 1995.

There. Now I can drive south with a clear(ish) conscience.

Off to Macondo!

2008-07-24T15:11:21Z

My husband James and I are heading out tomorrow morning for Macondo, the writers' workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros. (Isn't she pretty in that picture on her website? And gotta love those boots, too.)

That's Sandra's house, the site of the original Macondo Workshop, below. Now the workshop has grown so big that it's housed at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.

I'm excited to be co-teaching a workshop on memoir with the gifted and hilarious Lorraine López, author of the great story collection Soy la Avon Lady, the YA novel Call Me Henri, and the forthcoming novel The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters, which I can't wait to read. Our masters-level students are knockouts, too: editors, authors, professors, and award-winning journalists. It's going to be tons of fun.

Macondo is terrific: warm, nourishing, and focused on both writing and on social justice activism. It's a great place, and I can't wait to reconnect with writer Maribel Sosa, who first suggested Macondo to me. It's where I've met so many cool people, including writer and Chicana lit scholar Amelia Montes, who brought me here to Nebraska, and Pat Alderete, about whom I've blogged before (here and here).

James & I'll be driving down from Nebraska and stopping along the way in Oklahoma City and Austin, to see my brother Tony, his wife Cool Julie, and fearless baby Indigo. I'm so excited.

My

In Memoriam

2008-07-22T22:34:59Z

I returned from Boston to learn that a lovely colleague and friend, Nick Spencer, had passed away unexpectedly over the weekend. He will be painfully missed.

Generous, kind, and smart, Nick was our graduate chair in the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His book is After Utopia, and he loved, studied, and taught twentieth-century American literature and critical theory.

I didn't know Nick well or for long, but when I arrived on campus for my initial interview, he welcomed (and interrogated!) me warmly, and that warmth continued throughout our interactions over the past year as we worked and socialized together. Nick was unfailingly thoughtful, interesting, and interested in other people.

We only talked briefly about our personal lives, but as I understand it, he came from a working-class background in Great Britain and worked his way through Oxford University and then, here in the U.S., through Emory. At UNL, he worked hard and enthusiastically on behalf of the department and the graduate students, and he worked hard and sincerely to help recruit minority students to our program. He was encouraging and appreciative. He connected with people. He was generous and gentle, a bright soul.

All of our hearts are a little bit broken today. To paraphrase Jane Austen, Where shall we see a better teacher, or a kinder colleague, or a truer friend? Nick, you will be so missed.

Back from Boston!

2008-07-22T14:04:51Z

I'm just back from a wonderful, whirlwind residency at Pine Manor College in Boston. It was a joy to see the students and faculty, and I love the readings at night in what used to be a grand old mansion and is now devoted to one of the most diverse women's colleges in the country.

I got to see my lovely friend (I always think of her as an Arthurian Celtic supermodel in deep cover as a contemporary librarian and mom), the YA author Laura Williams McCaffrey, who writes the blog Here There Be Dragons. She was reading from her forthcoming new YA novel, which will include panels of an original graphic novel within its text. (The graphic novel is a book some of the characters are reading, and the two texts are interwoven throughout the novel. Cool!)

Mike Steinberg, founder of creative nonfiction journal Fourth Genre, read from his lovely, dogged memoir Still Pitching, which I'm now reading. Thumbs up. If anyone you know loves baseball, Still Pitching is a no-brainer gift, but even as a clueless non-sports-fan, I'm still really enjoying it. I'm also reading More Daring Escapes, by poet Steven Huff, who's new to the faculty and who seems like a complete gem. He also has a weekly radio show, "Fiction in Shorts," on NPR-affiliate stations. (I understand that you can stream the show, and as soon as I find out how, I'll put up a link.)

I also got to see my beloved Laure-Anne Bosselaar, poet and LaureAnnetini maker extraordinaire, who gave a dazzling reading in that throaty voice of hers. Her work makes me swoon (and I learned, to my deep un-surprise, that she was taught and mentored by one of my all-time favorite living poets, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, who makes me high every time I hear her read). Laure-Anne not only gave a knockout reading but also made us her famous drink each evening, when the faculty sat out on the porch of the big old house where we stayed and talked writing and life for hours. It was like writers' summer camp.

Helen Elaine Lee read a beautiful story about an aging couple that made me want to run home and hold my husband. YA novelist An Na read from her new book, The Fold, and she did all the voices--a hilarious performance. An adolescent Korean-American girl is offered the "gift" of plastic surgery, which will make her look more "American"--i.e., more white--by removing or reducing the epicanthal fold in her eyelids. The gorgeous cover is below.

It was a terrific trip, with lots of great reunions with old friends and discoveries of new, especially the three lovely new students in creative nonfiction, who had the kindness (and stamina!) to keep showing up for three-hour workshops each day. Kerry, Cindy, and Erin: Thanks! Great job! You made the week great. And my former student Faye did a knockout job introducing my reading. She was so moving that it was a seriously tough act to follow. But what an honor to be introduced so warmly. Thanks, Faye!

New Graffiti Blog

2008-07-15T00:56:33Z

I just read the opening whirlwind manifesto on the blog Streetheart: Ethics of Graffiti. The writing's good, and the anonymous author really throws down:

The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?

He/she's not pulling any punches; see for yourself. I'm curious to see what comes next.

Playing with Boys

2008-07-14T00:59:12Z

Despite therapy for it (from a psychotherapist/commercial pilot, no less, and I recommend him), I am still afflicted by a lingering anxiety about flying. At least I can get on a plane now, though, and magazines or light reading help to distract me at thirty thousand feet--an excellent reason, I think, to have bought a novel for my trip this Tuesday to teach in the Pine Manor low-res MFA program.

I got Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Playing With Boys, her 2004 follow-up to the chica lit breakout The Dirty Girls Social Club. (And $5.99 in hardcover at Walgreen's--you can't beat it.) I just finished the first chapter, and I'll share this little bit from the voice of one of her co-narrators, Alexis:

As I often had to tell reporters, America was changing, fast. Tortillas now outsold bagels. Famously, Americans now ate more salsa than ketchup. Wal-Mart carried plantains, yuca, and Goya products. Kraft in the U.S. had come out with something they called "mayonesa," a Mexican mayonnaise with lime. Why? Not because they were nice. Because they had to. The top FM stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago now broadcast in Spanish, and the U.S. had become the world's fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country. I was one of those lucky people who had long existed in a United States that spoke Spanish and English with matching facility. I swung with ease between the cheesy comedy of Sábado Gigante and the cheesy comedy of WB sitcoms. Some academic types, like my professors at Southern Methodist University, called people like me bicultural. But with Latinos poised to make up one in four Americans in the blink of a big brown eye, I preferred to call it American.

And here's one more clip:

Dangit. He was married? I'd been hoping he wasn't, and was a little surprised, given the shameless way the boy had flirted with me, that he was married. Or at least I thought he'd been flirting. But that was the problem with me. I misread men all the time. I thought they wanted me when all they wanted was a sandwich.

I laughed out loud. Playing with Boys will be a frothy counterbalance to the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is 2600+ pages of Bible-paper, dense with theory, and from which I'll be teaching while I'm Boston. It's very, very good, and my friend, the lovely Laurie Finke at Kenyon, co-edited--but, as you can imagine, it's way less fun. Give me drama, sex, quips, and cultural observations any day.

LNK-ORD-BOS, here I come.

On Memoir and Money

2008-07-07T21:19:07Z

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.
~Kurt Vonnegut

I was excited to find out recently that a panel on memoir organized by UNL grad students Madeline Wiseman and Kelly Gray Carlisle has been accepted for next year's AWP conference in Chicago. Madeline, Kelly, Sue Silverman, Lucy Ferriss, Karen McElmurray, and I will be having a conversation about memoir, truth, lies, and the workings of memory.

Here's the description Kelly and Madeline wrote:

Czeslaw Milosz said, “It is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of wounds.” Our panel investigates the role of factual accuracy in memoir, why memoirists invent to improve the facts, and the difficulty in telling traumatic memory. What if research reveals conflicting truths? What is the cost of invention to the story? How do the psychological and physiological workings of memory, the act of writing, and the influence of the world outside the writer hinder or enrich the truth?

But what's on my mind right now is, How can a professor of memoir encourage student writers to be sincere and honest when wildly successful examples of cynical, dishonest memoir writers are flourishing?

Yesterday, I read Walter Kirn's evisceration of James Frey's new novel in the New York Times Book Review; you'll remember Frey as the falsifying memoirist upbraided by Oprah on national TV. Regarding his new novel, Frey told one journalist, "“I know I’m going to be slaughtered" by the critics (and Kirn didn't pull any punches), "but so be it. I’m much more concerned with what the people who spend their money on my book think of it, rather than the people in the ivory towers of the intelligentsia.”

And that really gets at the heart of the matter. Spinning the concept of honesty, of fidelity to facts, as a luxury of the academic elite, Frey spun his life into a tale of sensationalism and played a public hungry for gore. He cares about the people who spend money on him, and the payoff has been huge. Raised wealthy, Frey now owns not only a 3-bedroom condo in Soho, but a one-bedroom ($985,000) apartment next to it, along with a beach house in Amagansett. His new novel was purchased by HarperCollins for an estimated $1.5 million.

Frey told Vanity Fair about being affirmed by Norman Mailer. The two self-styled bad boys

talked about memoirs, a genre, Mailer said, that was by definition corrupt: “That’s why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self. Everything I’ve ever written is memoir, you know, is an inflated vision of the ideal Platonic self.”

Um. Or not. To me, it sounds like Norman Mailer's definition is by definition corrupt.

But how to encourage students to pursue genuine, honest, even un-sexy questions in their memoir writing, when the alternative is so lucrative? Why grow your soul, in Vonnegut's words, when you can tour like a rock star?

"Where any view of Money exists," wrote the poet William Blake, "Art cannot be carried on, but War only."

Any view. So if you're a writer, stop thinking about the monetary payoff. The true payoff comes in doing the work, and what you learn there.

You can write for money, too. Sure. We all have to pay the bills. Just don't lie to yourself (or the world) about which master you're serving when you pick up your pen.

What's Coming Up

2008-07-06T20:19:55Z

My novel manuscript, The Desire Projects, went into the mail to my agent last week--hurray!--and I'm now looking forward to my upcoming stint at Pine Major College's low-residency MFA program in Boston. If you're in the Boston area, check out the series of author readings, free and open to the public, which is kicking off on Friday, July 11 with Randall Kenan and Dennis Lehane. (I wish I were going to be there for that one, but I'm only on duty from the 15th to the end.)

Later in July, I'll be down in San Antonio, co-teaching a workshop on writing memoir with Lorraine López at the Macondo Writing Workshop. Macondo is a wonderful experience, generously founded (and funded) by Sandra Cisneros.

As someone whose post-novel-writing eyebrows still remain untweezed, I love Sandra's comment on her writing process:

I do know I am a very slow writer, and I don't write at all on the days I wear shoes and comb my hair. In other words, I am a writer when I stay home, don't see anyone, don't talk too much (which for me is very hard), and am quiet enough to hear the things inside my heart.
With Macondo, Sandra has created a very upbeat, supportive environment for writers, and the week-long program is designed as a masters-level workshop for writers committed not only to their work but also to activist and community engagement, so it's a wildly cool bunch of people. If you're interested, check it out.

Besides the fun of getting to live in the dorms at Our Lady of the Lake University for a week with a slew of great people, I'm excited to see San Antonio again. As a young person, I lived in San Antonio for six years (16-22)--it's where my son Grey was born--and it's always great to go back.

July 2nd

2008-07-03T00:21:59Z

Everywhere I've gone for the past couple of days, people have asked, "So what are you doing for the Fourth?" I say I'm going to a party at a friend's house, and then they tell me about their fireworks or travel plans.

But I'm not feeling all that festive. Six years ago today, my Dad shot and killed himself.

It's still hard. And it's mingled for me, possibly forever, with the sound of fireworks going off two days later, while I was still in shock. Every time there was a loud bang or pop, I could see that gun going off. It was bad.

Weird, huh? The anniversary effect.

If you have weird things in your life--weird anniversaries of horrible or sad things--please do honor them. Be kind with yourself when they roll around. Time might not completely heal all wounds, but it does buffer them eventually. For me, July 2nd is easier now than it was the first five times it rolled around after my Dad's death, but it's still not easy.

I'm thinking about my Dad today, and I sure do still miss him. Time doesn't change that.

Everybody, please love the people you have while you have them. You never know when they'll be gone.

So Proud!

2008-06-30T14:54:57Z

Linda Alcorace, my lovely student at the Pine Manor College MFA program, has a personal essay running in the L.A. Times today!

Linda, who suffers from the extremely rare Budd-Chiari syndrome, is waiting for a liver transplant, which is a very perilous situation, but she decided to pursue a writing degree anyway and has been working like a horse on her creative nonfiction. So this is especially fantastic news.

Hurray! Congratulations, Linda!