Recently in class Category

First of all, many thanks to all y'all who've posted kind things about my leaving Pine Manor.  I will miss you, too.

Secondly, fans of Tayari Jones--friend of the blog and friend to my life--will be thrilled to know that her eagerly awaited third novel, THE SILVER GIRL, has found a home at Algonquin. 

Thirdly, Lorraine López's edited collection, An Angle of Vision:  Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots, is now available in paperback from University of Michigan.  Congratulations, Lorraine!  Full disclosure:  the title essay is by yours truly, and the book grew out of a raucous panel at the AWP a couple of years ago called "Trashy Women," which some of y'all kindly attended, thank you much.   (When over 400 people showed up, Lorraine knew she had a racehorse of a topic on her hands.)  The book includes work by Dorothy Allison, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Bich Minh Nguyen, Karen McElmurray, Heather Sellers, and other wonderful writers, including Lorraine herself and my own UNL colleague and friend Amelia Montes.  If you've ever been struck by the weird dissonance of class friction--even if you're not a woman or a writer, and even if you didn't end up in academia or publishing--then this book will move you and make you laugh.

Lastly but not leastly--and this is strictly personal--my sweet husband James and I made an offer on a home here in Lincoln.  It's a small condominium downtown, near where we've been renting for the past 2 and a half years, and it's definitely a fixer-upper, which is why we could afford to spring for it.  We're very excited (or is that panic?); I'm not sure if the fluttery feeling is a product of my profound (post-Wabash) commitment-phobia, or due to the hideous old turquoise carpet and popcorn ceiling.  (Alas, the decor is neither retro chic nor dazzlingly of-the-moment, but more like a pathetic from-the-land-time-forgot melange.  But the location is killer.) 

We should be in it by Christmas--the closing is during exam week.   Help!  If you have advice about moving, renovating, contractors, or anything related, please post!

I was so touched and proud last night to receive the Above and Beyond Award from Heartland Big Brothers Big Sisters.  In the Lincoln area, 1,009 women and men serve as mentors to local children and teenagers, and 5 of us were honored at a lovely dinner. 

It did feel a little weird.  As I stood there, having words read aloud about the mentoring relationship I've had with Amara for these past couple of years, I thought, Amara's the one who should be here.  She should be receiving this award, just for surviving her life.  Only the cash bar helped to ease this ontological angst. 

A lot of corporate donors were there, and I hadn't realized how expensive a program BBBS is:  it costs approximately $1,000 a year to support each mentoring match (in terms of paying office staff to run background checks, handle paperwork, and do monthly check-ins with each member of every pair).  But considering the payoff, it's not such a high price to pay.  It's a program that changes kids' lives, and it's a worthy cause.  If you have time (and patience, and you genuinely like kids), consider being a mentor.  If you're short on time but have some cash and want to change a child's life, consider making a donation; BBBS has been thoroughly vetted as a sound charity.

In totally unrelated news, writer Charles Baxter was here on Monday to give a lecture and a reading.  His lecture was on "lush style," and here are some quotable quotes (or rough paraphrases) for all you craft-talk gluttons out there:

In our own postmodern era, an era of irony, skepticism, and understatement, we live with an "aesthetics of suspicion."  Only established writers like Angela Carter or Toni Morrison can get away with a lush style; in workshops, lushness is "vetoed" or "sneered at."

"If you want to be cool, you can't be lush.  You can be one or the other, but not both."

Lushness is "undefended, naked, vulnerable, embarrassing."  It is a "hot style" that "works out of a fever" and is given to "unstable self-dramatization."

It often "refuses to give up the past," and instead "superimposes the past on the present through lyric expansion."

Whenever two time frames are superimposed, there's the possibility of lushness.  The lush style is nostalgic, backward-looking; Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, Garcia Márquez, and Nabokov, especially in Lolita, are all practitioners of the lush style.

"When the claim is being made that everyone should believe in an emotion and agree with it, lushness veers into the overripe, the coercive, the fraudulent, the manipulative.  It stops being poetry and becomes rhetoric."

"Lush styles are about fullness."  They are about being open and unprotected.  They believe in the possibility of transformational love.  Irony, by contrast, is a form of protection, and it is possible that we are all, now, over-protected.

"In a trashy, duplicitous culture" (like our own current culture, apparently), "irony, a cold style," is the default.  Since we are always being lied to, we are always skeptical.

Those were the highlights of his lecture on style, as predigested for you by Joy.  It was an unusual presentation; we were given a handout that began with 4 pages of sheet music by Rachmaninoff and instructed to follow along as the piece was played for us, which quickly separated the musical wheat from the chaff.  (I'm definitely chaff on that score.) 

I'm still thinking through the things Baxter said.

Well, it's another bad day for the University of Nebraska and financial scandal.  The Lincoln Journal-Star is on the job again, this time with a headline that reads

Academics aren't immune to economic downturns.  In my English department, we were asked to consider giving up our individual office phones to save the university money.  Fine; I turned mine in.  We were asked to keep some of the lights off in the interior hallways in our building, which get no natural light.  We did.  Up on my floor, we walk in gloom.  We were told to turn off printers when we're not actually printing something.  Fine.  Makes sense.  The university is trying to cut the (nominal) stipends given to Ethnic Studies professors who administer programs like Latina/o and Latin American Studies for their 8 weekly hours of administrative labor and student advising; there were hearings; the stipends are currently in limbo.

Last week, we received an email from the administration prepping us to expect further cuts--to hiring, to travel, etc.  These follow the job searches that were frozen last year.  There's going to be a special session of the Nebraska legislature due to a dive in state tax revenues, said the email, so we should prepare to think creatively about ways to tighten our belts further.  

Okay, fine.  We know the unemployment situation; we've commiserated with our colleagues in California and elsewhere; we know things are tough all over.  Hey, if they're cutting back even at Harvard, surely we can do without luxuries.  Right?

But not everyone at the University of Nebraska system is feeling the pinch.  Harold Maurer, chancellor of the medical center, "gets a 2009 Porsche Cayenne and membership to two Omaha golf clubs," while UNL chancellor gets a Lexus and  a country-club membership.  Athletic director Tom Osborne gets a 2009 Chevy Tahoe.  Bo Pelini, the football coach, gets not only a 2008 Nissan Armada and a country-club membership but also a 2008 Nissan Quest for his wife.  Over 50 administrators and athletic staff receive private country-club and athletic-club memberships, and over 80 get vehicles as perks, from 2009 Honda Pilots to BMW X5s to Saabs to Lexuses to Porsches.  The Lincoln Journal-Star broke the story last week.

"It is higher education upside down," responded Georgetown University's Pablo Eisenberg.  "The money ought to be going to academics, to those teaching." 

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  As scholars and artists, we've been schooled for so long in the hard truth of our own devaluation that Eisenberg sounds sweetly naïve.  Correct, perhaps, but naïve.  We all know what's most highly valued at academic institutions:  suits and coaches.  This new revelation--they get Porsches, we give up our office phones--is just the latest slap in a long, long series.

But how about this:  the money ought to be going toward reducing class size.  I have 20 students in graduate classes.  I have 30 in undergraduate classes--classes that are supposed to be discussion-based and writing-intensive.  How the hell is that supposed to work?  What does that say about the University of Nebraska's commitment to the quality of education? 

Get this: 

UNL Chancellor Perlman had lunch with a prospective donor and breakfast with another at The Country Club of Lincoln in recent weeks and often uses the club for UNL-related events, he said in an e-mail response to Journal Star questions.

How about this for a creative budget-trimming idea?  How about Perlman meets with prospective donors in his office?  (Where, presumably, he still has a phone.)  How about they have lunch at Panera? 

Oh, is that not how business gets done?  Oh, are golf courses the places where important deals get made?  Excuse me, but if the times they are a-changin' in light of the global financial fiasco (caused precisely by the greed and gambling of the golf-playing, Porsche-driving rich), then maybe the business practices of bureaucrats and coaches need to take the hit that everyone else is taking, because last time I checked, teaching and research don't get done by jacking up class-enrollment caps and cutting back on compensation for labor, either.

Next time someone asks me to pinch pennies, you'll hear me laughing all the way down my dark hallway.

"California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger line-item vetoed $20 million from the state budget which would have funded 94 domestic violence shelters and centers," according to a recent press release from the National Organization for Women.

Yet domestic violence increases by a factor of five when families slip below the poverty line.  With the recession's massive job loss, especially male job loss, more women and children will be at risk for physical and emotional trauma in the home. 

This is not the time to cut the safety net for vulnerable people.  If we can bail out bankers, surely we can provide safe haven for battered women and children.

Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years!  Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus!  Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!

Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry.  I have been going through it.  But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.

Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross.  Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years. 

What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning.  Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty.  At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie.  They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.

Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths.  We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film.  Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.

When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire.   I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with.  Livingston didn't say.

Gentle Readers, good news!  More magazine has just published this moving piece by the wonderful journalist Beatriz Terrazas.  It's about making peace with wrenching childhood trauma and with the imperfect, inadequate actions of the adults most responsible for protecting us.

It was my privilege to meet Beatriz when she took a memoir-writing workshop with Lorraine López and me at Macondo in 2008.  Our week together was so intense and sparked so much good work.  I loved getting to know Beatriz there in San Antonio and have since taught one of her other essays in the Chicana/Chicano lit classroom.

I love the bravery and strength of this new memoir piece and am so glad that More is sharing it with a broad readership.  Congratulations, Beatriz! 

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.

The Gloria Anzaldúa conference was a great experience!  I met some cool people, saw the hypnotic art of Chilean immigrant Liliana Wilson, and got to see Alicia Gaspar de Alba (author of Desert Blood, a novel about the Juárez femicides) and theorist/creative writer Emma Pérez speak. 

It was also a pleasure to give a pedagogical paper on a panel with my great UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil.  We talked about ways of teaching Gloria Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera:  The New Mestiza, which has been called one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century but which often meets with a difficult reception in the classroom, not only because of its ruptured, mixed-genre surface and incorporation of untranslated Spanish and Nahuatl, but also because it can feel threatening to people who've enjoyed social privileges due to their class, gender, race, or sexual orientation (and that manages to hit most people, one way or another).  Since it pushes every one of those buttons, and students can get defensive in response, it can be kind of challenging to teach.  (At Wabash and here in Nebraska, I have yet to teach a class full of working-class, queer Chicanas.  If I did, they'd probably all weep with joy upon reading it.) 

Our panel was fortunate enough to draw a beautiful audience of professors from institutions all over the country.  During Q&A, they shared strategies and ideas of their own, so it was really cool.

And now I'm back, blessedly back.  I love home, and I'm excited to get to work revising THE DESIRE PROJECTS, the novel I drafted last year.  And I do mean drafted.  I wrote the whole thing, about 360 pages, very quickly, in about two and a half months.  Some of it I still love; some of it's thin.  Honestly, some of it's even cheesy!  Totally cringe-worthy!  But this way, I can see the whole thing.  Now I can go back in and make changes, thicken characters, alter sequences, and so on.  

(This is apparently the way I work.  The whole draft of The Truth Book came out longhand in three quick weeks, at my one-and-only writers' residency, and then sat in a drawer for nine months while I taught, and then I revised it for about four months.  This is probably not the best process for writing a book-length work, LOL, but it's evidently mine.)

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that, long about the winter holidays, my agent (who'd been reading the draft, bless his soul) said I needed more suspense, and so I set myself to reading novels both literary and suspenseful.  I've done that now.  In case you're in the market, Kate Atkinson and John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, were the best authors of literary thrillers that I found, and I recommend their books, which are great beach reads or cozy-up-with-cocoa reads that don't insult your ear.

Having done my homework, I'm ready to dig back in, and with the exceptions of brief teaching stints at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference and the Pine Manor MFA residency, the whole summer stretches out, fat with writing time.

As those of you who've visited me know, I don't have a separate room of my own to work in; my husband and I share 600 square feet of living space in our apartment in downtown Lincoln.  So in one corner of the living room, my computer is set up on a tiny table.  I sit on the sofa (or in bed in the mornings) and write by hand.  Then, when I've got a solid chunk of pages, I go to my nook and type them in.  It's a little hard to concentrate sometimes, with James passing to and fro, but he respects my cone of silence, LOL, and I learned as a young mother/grad student to write anywhere, any time.  I realized then that if I waited for my surroundings to be perfectly conducive, the writing would never get done.  In contrast to waiting until late at night for your toddler to fall asleep or sitting in an empty corridor on campus between seminars, occupying a whole corner of a sunny living room feels like luxury.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that, in order to be a writer, a woman would need five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own--but hey, Virginia Woolf had servants all her life, too.  And no children to care and provide for.  Five hundred pounds of independent income a year in Woolf's era works out to be more than $40K today--and by independent income, she meant unearned.  Trust fund.  Inheritance.

Back when I first read A Room of One's Own in grad school, I knew that would never be me.  Yes, it sure would be nice if all artists received that kind of support, but I take much more inspiration from the example of single-mother Meridel Le Sueur, Woolf's contemporary, who would come home from factory work, picket lines, and protest marches to care for her two daughters at night.  In order to stay awake to keep writing once they were asleep, she would dunk her head in cold water.

I love Woolf's work, and I hope for the day when every writer does have leisure and space, but I'm so proud of all the writers who have proved and continue to prove Woolf wrong. 

Let that be you.  Even if you only have twenty minutes, write.  Do it.  Don't make excuses, because they'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy:  If you tell yourself you need pristine or particular conditions, then you will need them. 

Let go of all that.  Do your work.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about a bizarre dream I had in which I was writing a book about transnational adoption, complete with coloned title.  I Googled said title, First World Mothers, Third World Others:  Transnational Adoption in an Age of Global Imperialism, just to make sure it wasn't a real book--and it wasn't.  (The post received a great comment, btw, from Mary K. Stillwell, whose children are Colombian.)

Then this week at the university bookstore, I came across Outsiders Within:  Writing on Transracial Adoption from the very cool South End Press (a favorite), which looks like it addresses some of the same territory.  (It looks at both transracial and transnational adoptions.)  Here's the description on the back cover:

Healthy white infants are hard to find and expensive to adopt.  So white people looking to grow their families turn to interracial and intercountry adoption, often with the idea that they're saving children from terrible lives.  But as Outsiders Within reveals, although transracial adoption is generally considered win-win, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and even economic toll.

Through gripping essays, poetry, and art, transracially adopted writers and artists from around the world carefully explore this most intimate aspect of globalization.

I really like the fact that the contributors are adoptees.  When I was growing up, almost everything I encountered about adoption was written from the perspective and comfort zone of the adoptive parent, the (relative) power player in the triad.  It erased my perspective and made me wonder why I couldn't get with the program, which was obviously so great and fantastic.  As the no-punch-pulled introduction of Outsiders Within explains:

This book is a corrective action.  Over the past fifty years, white adoptive parents, academics, psychiatrists, and social workers have dominated the literature on transracial adoption.  These "experts" have been the ones to tell the public--including adoptees--"what it's like" and "how we turn out." 

I just love the bold, direct stance the book takes--a stance that echoes the voices of multiple transracial and transnational adoptees I heard at the conference of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture a few years ago. 

Writes adoptive parent Beth Hall,

Experts on their own experience, the writers of Outsiders Within offer an illuminating and provocative glimpse into the world of transracial [and transnational] adoption that will make many of us uncomfortable.  All the more reason to read it.

I've always wondered what the world would look like if, instead of spending $10K, $20K, $40K, $60K (!) to adopt a baby from another country, white first-world parents donated that money to organizations in other countries that would help parents keep their own biological children in health and safety and to organizations that would help stabilize those countries' economic and political systems.  (I guess there's a link here to the build-a-better-world way I think about immigration, but that's a post for another day.)  I hesitate to say this, because I fear I'll alienate my sweet, generous friends who've adopted from abroad, but having experienced maternal bonding with my own son, and the lack thereof in my childhood, I just can't help wondering what's better for the world and its babies.  Outsiders Within dares to go there.

I also often feel sad for the many children (of all ethnicities) who go unadopted here in the U.S. because they've been abused, neglected, and/or abandoned at older ages.  Instead of finding secure, loving homes, they cycle through our uneven foster-care system, because would-be adoptive parents don't want to take on potential "problem" children.  (And of course, many foster parents are wonderful and loving, but foster-care horror stories are too perennial for me to feel good about foster care as an option.) 

Also, because I'm cynical, I've often noted with dismay the way some white parents of foreign-born children display their adopted children like a badge of their own political enlightenment.  Easy enough to do, I guess, when you're not the one who bears the burden of constant social alienation and when social interactions always include praise for how generous you are. 

I've listened to such parents' talks, too, at adoption conferences, so I've heard several people articulate compelling variations on that perspective--yet I'm still troubled by the power dynamic.  (On the other hand--I've got to stop being my own devil's advocate!--biological children are entirely as vulnerable to being treated by their parents as Accessory Babies of one kind or another.  But back to the topic at hand.)   Mostly, I just have a lot of questions.

It's true that love has the capacity to cross all kinds of boundaries, but most of us who've tried it aren't naïve about the difficulties of border-crossing and its inherent potential for damage and explosive conflict.  Even while we're crossing, we bring our human limitations, blind spots, and prejudices with us.  It's a delicate business, as many of us know.  And as any adult adoptee will tell you, it's just not that simple.  Outsiders Within is all about the complexities, and I look forward to reading all the voices it includes. 

One of the poets in the collection is Laotian-American writer Bryan Thao Worra, who will be giving a reading here at UNL on Wednesday, April 1 in the Bailey Library (second floor of Andrews Hall) at 3:30 p.m.

Thao Worra will also be the keynote speaker at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 2  in the Nebraska Union Centennial Room.  His lecture, "Changing Cultures and Preserving Asian Traditions in the Midwest," is hosted by Asian World Alliance, and a dance troupe is performing, too.  The doors open at 5:30.

And fyi, also included in Outsiders Within is the essay "Lifelong Impact, Enduring Need" by UNL faculty member John Raible, who has this great blog that focuses on the issue of transracial adoption--and which happens, just now, to include a passage from Outsiders Within in its most recent post.