Recently in teaching Category
I am so knocked out by the talent of my former students!
Faye Rapoport DesPres's lovely, wise essay, "Up to Nothing," appears in the Summer 2010 issue of Hamilton Stone Review. Anyone who's ever cared for an elderly relative will resonate to the narrator's attempt to reconnect with her husband on a hiking trip--while dealing with the fact that they've left behind his mother, who doesn't want to be left.
Faye's essay "Forty-Six," which examines the narrator's feelings about the loss of youth, also just appeared in the marvelous online journal Ascent. Congratulations, Faye! These must be heady days for you.
It was my privilege to work with Faye when I taught at Pine Manor College in Boston, and I hear that Pine Manor MFA student Jim Kennedy's beautiful, beautiful essay "End of the Line" was a finalist in a contest at Creative Nonfiction and will soon be published in an issue of that journal.
Graduate Faye Snider's lovely essay "Goldie's Gold" was accepted recently by Alimentum, and if you're a foodie and don't know about that journal, you should definitely check it out. Hurray, Faye! I look forward to reading "Goldie's Gold" again.
By the way, I learned that Pine Manor is now offering fellowships and need-based scholarships, and I think that's kind of rare for a low-res program, so if you've considered pursuing an MFA and money has been an obstacle, you might want to check out their program. I'm no longer teaching at Pine Manor, but I love the people there and think they've got a great thing going--which is obvious from the success of their graduates!
Here in the Ph.D. program at UNL, Tom Coakley, an active-duty military officer, wrote an essay, which appeared in Fourth Genre 12:1, that contends with the impossibility of describing/critiquing things that are classified. (Most of us worry about what our mothers will think if we publish this or that. Tom worries about being court-martialed.) His Fourth Genre essay, "How to Speak about the Secret Desert Wars," is brilliant, and if you can lay your hands on it, it will knock you out. It's incisive, critical, authoritative, experimental, beautifully written. He makes art out of a hell that should never have been.
The lovely John Chávez had 3 poems in Issue 5 of Palabra. Here's one I love:
I like the way it moves so fluidly among modes prophetic, imperative, even elegiac--and casual, too ("etc."). John's vision is both tender and clear-sighted.
Aside from publishing his own work, John is actually already in the process of editing (with Carmen Giménez Smith) a collection of Latina/o writing that explores where the field is moving now. So ambitious!
What is wonderful is when you can feel it a genuine honor to work with your students: when you can admire them and learn from them as well as offer what you have. I love teaching. It is a gift.
Faye Rapoport DesPres's lovely, wise essay, "Up to Nothing," appears in the Summer 2010 issue of Hamilton Stone Review. Anyone who's ever cared for an elderly relative will resonate to the narrator's attempt to reconnect with her husband on a hiking trip--while dealing with the fact that they've left behind his mother, who doesn't want to be left.
Faye's essay "Forty-Six," which examines the narrator's feelings about the loss of youth, also just appeared in the marvelous online journal Ascent. Congratulations, Faye! These must be heady days for you.
It was my privilege to work with Faye when I taught at Pine Manor College in Boston, and I hear that Pine Manor MFA student Jim Kennedy's beautiful, beautiful essay "End of the Line" was a finalist in a contest at Creative Nonfiction and will soon be published in an issue of that journal.
Graduate Faye Snider's lovely essay "Goldie's Gold" was accepted recently by Alimentum, and if you're a foodie and don't know about that journal, you should definitely check it out. Hurray, Faye! I look forward to reading "Goldie's Gold" again.
By the way, I learned that Pine Manor is now offering fellowships and need-based scholarships, and I think that's kind of rare for a low-res program, so if you've considered pursuing an MFA and money has been an obstacle, you might want to check out their program. I'm no longer teaching at Pine Manor, but I love the people there and think they've got a great thing going--which is obvious from the success of their graduates!
Here in the Ph.D. program at UNL, Tom Coakley, an active-duty military officer, wrote an essay, which appeared in Fourth Genre 12:1, that contends with the impossibility of describing/critiquing things that are classified. (Most of us worry about what our mothers will think if we publish this or that. Tom worries about being court-martialed.) His Fourth Genre essay, "How to Speak about the Secret Desert Wars," is brilliant, and if you can lay your hands on it, it will knock you out. It's incisive, critical, authoritative, experimental, beautifully written. He makes art out of a hell that should never have been.
The lovely John Chávez had 3 poems in Issue 5 of Palabra. Here's one I love:
Just North of Nowhere
There is only one heart in my body, have mercy on me.
--Franz Wright
Often the changes one yearns for,
one has to suffer. Unless,
waiting near the undershade, the elderberry,
the aster, etc.,
the world is close to blooming,
heart-drawn in minor notes, tuned to the open sun.
Then, how simple to assemble it all (the breaks
in the human vessel).
Like a boy gripping rain on white branches,
you will build
a reliquary in your chest.
Fill it with two watts of light.
Once filled, the moon will exit like a lullaby
from your humming rib cage's hollow.
There you will find a heart,
& waiting nightly you will sing it to sleep.
I like the way it moves so fluidly among modes prophetic, imperative, even elegiac--and casual, too ("etc."). John's vision is both tender and clear-sighted.
Aside from publishing his own work, John is actually already in the process of editing (with Carmen Giménez Smith) a collection of Latina/o writing that explores where the field is moving now. So ambitious!
What is wonderful is when you can feel it a genuine honor to work with your students: when you can admire them and learn from them as well as offer what you have. I love teaching. It is a gift.
Many thanks for the kindness of Anne, Faye, and others whose steadying words are helping me think and feel my way through the strange crux of my grandfather's passing.
The late, great Lucille Clifton left us this:
And from "Knowledge" (which, unfortunately, isn't available online), from an 1864 drawing of four Victorian men dissecting and studying a naked female corpse:
Today I meet with the four grad students who've chosen to do teaching internships with me. They're great women (is it a coincidence that they're all women?), but I have to say it's pretty weird being observed, class after class after class. We meet regularly to discuss pedagogy and professional issues. They keep journals; I read them. They notice everything. I've never done this before, and it's a little unnerving. I hope it all turns out to be useful to them.
The late, great Lucille Clifton left us this:
For bracing, unflinching honesty about the self and others, check out Natasha Trethewey's two new father poems in the latest issue of New England Review. From "Elegy," addressed to her father, about fly-fishing together:why some people be mad at me sometimes
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine
I can tell you now
that I tried to take it all in, record it
for an elegy I'd write--one day--
when the time came. Your daughter,
I was that ruthless. What does it matter
if I tell you I learned to be?
And from "Knowledge" (which, unfortunately, isn't available online), from an 1864 drawing of four Victorian men dissecting and studying a naked female corpse:
I love the way both poems go to the mat, and I love the way they jostle together an uneasy mix of feelings with such clarity and precision.. . . how easily
the anatomist's blade opens a place in me,
like a curtain drawn upon a room in which
each learned man is my father
and I hear, again, his words--I study
my crossbreed child--
Today I meet with the four grad students who've chosen to do teaching internships with me. They're great women (is it a coincidence that they're all women?), but I have to say it's pretty weird being observed, class after class after class. We meet regularly to discuss pedagogy and professional issues. They keep journals; I read them. They notice everything. I've never done this before, and it's a little unnerving. I hope it all turns out to be useful to them.
Perhaps the only thing more special than experiencing a major wardrobe malfunction--as in, your adorable silk wrap blouse comes unwrapped without your knowledge--is experiencing it in front of 30 undergraduates, while you stride blithely about the room, lecturing, unaware of the silk ties dangling down like lovely fluttering tails.
That was Wednesday. We were doing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Alas, a mere safety pin of one's own would have done nicely. Woolf might have expected, 80 years on, that women would have managed to not only have careers but also dress themselves. Sigh.
Once I discovered the malfunction, I managed to finish class by pinning my elbows to my ribs, holding the slippery thing in place and faking (unconvincingly) aplomb.
I'm laughing even now, typing this.
Women readers who are also writers of personal narrative or poetry, here's a publishing opportunity for you, a collection edited by my lovely graduate intern, Jill McCabe Johnson, who's a poet herself. Jill also directs Artsmith, a nonprofit with residencies, workshops, and more up on Orcas Island.
Work has been crazy, people. I've been serving on two search committees (very exciting), while simultaneously reading a kajillion grad apps (impressive yet demoralizing--so much talent that won't get in), while preparing, in my spare time, that dreaded annual summation of one's worth: the Merit Review File.
Ah, the ritual of the Merit Review File. Listing every last professional thing one's done over the year is a recipe for madness, and trying to squish it all into a coherent narrative? Well, human, please. And just rereading those stacks of student evals is a test of courage. (You want me to provide what? I mean, I like my students, and I care about pedagogy, but the student-as-entitled-consumer model sometimes gets a little out of hand. Oh, for those halcyon days of pipes, sherry, elbow patches, and unquestioned professorial authority to slap an unexplained grade onto work--oh, wait. Maybe not so blissful.)
Knowing that your senior colleagues will be judging it all--and that their judgment will translate into dollars, or the lack thereof, in your paycheck each month--makes the whole process a little nervewracking. This year, we have to go through the motions (and get ranked) even though there's likely to be a salary freeze, which makes the whole thing seem like a exercise in wasted effort.
If you're an academic yourself, you've probably already heard this sad story of a woman, a gun, and a tenure denial in Alabama. As a kind of snapshot of public opinion, the many comments after the story interested me; they reveal the general public's skepticism toward tenure as an institution, academics' frustration with the difficulties that sometimes plague the tenure process, conservative glee that a highly educated "elite" snapped, and liberal dismay about gun control laws--as well as surprise that a woman has now joined the job-related mass-shooting club. I feel so sorry for the professors who were cut down, and for the families who mourn them. (Thanks to Barb for the heads-up on the story.)
Just briefly, I want to express gratitude that my own tenure process at Wabash was so clean. It's true that I did work at an all-male school, and it did lean right, while I lean left. I experienced my share of nasty sexist exchanges during my ten years there. Yet when it came to tenure and promotion, I was treated with tremendous fairness at every level of review, from my department all the way up to the president of the college.
Since then, as a participant in tenure decisions, I've always seen them handled with immense care, generosity, and scrupulous professionalism. My experience has not included the kind of factionalism or personal vendettas that some of the New York Times readers' comments imply. If someone does make an unprofessional comment during discussion of a file, that view gets corrected and sidelined.
With only 35% of teaching carried out by tenured professors now, you can see why the decision process would be so fraught, and why a professor like Amy Bishop would feel outraged. It's part of larger systemic problems in academia that have, for financial reasons and driven by administrators importing a business model into the academy, shifted the bulk of teaching to underpaid, undervalued adjuncts and TAs. (I liked the comment that said no administrator should make a higher salary than the lowest-paid instructor.) It's wrong. It raises the stakes. It makes people crazy.
But it's not worth killing or dying for. It's just a job, people. We need to disinvest our sense of identity from our careers. We have passions, the natural world, families, lovers, children, pets, our neighbors, the guitar, painting, singing--whatever moves us. We're rich beyond measure.
Professional rejection hurts, and it's humiliating. Yes. Been there. But the thing to do is to go home, cry, lick our wounds, get hugged by our loved ones, and get back up on the pony--or pick a different pony altogether.
Kindness--not just to our peers but to ourselves--is always an option.
That was Wednesday. We were doing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Alas, a mere safety pin of one's own would have done nicely. Woolf might have expected, 80 years on, that women would have managed to not only have careers but also dress themselves. Sigh.
Once I discovered the malfunction, I managed to finish class by pinning my elbows to my ribs, holding the slippery thing in place and faking (unconvincingly) aplomb.
I'm laughing even now, typing this.
Women readers who are also writers of personal narrative or poetry, here's a publishing opportunity for you, a collection edited by my lovely graduate intern, Jill McCabe Johnson, who's a poet herself. Jill also directs Artsmith, a nonprofit with residencies, workshops, and more up on Orcas Island.
Work has been crazy, people. I've been serving on two search committees (very exciting), while simultaneously reading a kajillion grad apps (impressive yet demoralizing--so much talent that won't get in), while preparing, in my spare time, that dreaded annual summation of one's worth: the Merit Review File.
Ah, the ritual of the Merit Review File. Listing every last professional thing one's done over the year is a recipe for madness, and trying to squish it all into a coherent narrative? Well, human, please. And just rereading those stacks of student evals is a test of courage. (You want me to provide what? I mean, I like my students, and I care about pedagogy, but the student-as-entitled-consumer model sometimes gets a little out of hand. Oh, for those halcyon days of pipes, sherry, elbow patches, and unquestioned professorial authority to slap an unexplained grade onto work--oh, wait. Maybe not so blissful.)
Knowing that your senior colleagues will be judging it all--and that their judgment will translate into dollars, or the lack thereof, in your paycheck each month--makes the whole process a little nervewracking. This year, we have to go through the motions (and get ranked) even though there's likely to be a salary freeze, which makes the whole thing seem like a exercise in wasted effort.
If you're an academic yourself, you've probably already heard this sad story of a woman, a gun, and a tenure denial in Alabama. As a kind of snapshot of public opinion, the many comments after the story interested me; they reveal the general public's skepticism toward tenure as an institution, academics' frustration with the difficulties that sometimes plague the tenure process, conservative glee that a highly educated "elite" snapped, and liberal dismay about gun control laws--as well as surprise that a woman has now joined the job-related mass-shooting club. I feel so sorry for the professors who were cut down, and for the families who mourn them. (Thanks to Barb for the heads-up on the story.)
Just briefly, I want to express gratitude that my own tenure process at Wabash was so clean. It's true that I did work at an all-male school, and it did lean right, while I lean left. I experienced my share of nasty sexist exchanges during my ten years there. Yet when it came to tenure and promotion, I was treated with tremendous fairness at every level of review, from my department all the way up to the president of the college.
Since then, as a participant in tenure decisions, I've always seen them handled with immense care, generosity, and scrupulous professionalism. My experience has not included the kind of factionalism or personal vendettas that some of the New York Times readers' comments imply. If someone does make an unprofessional comment during discussion of a file, that view gets corrected and sidelined.
With only 35% of teaching carried out by tenured professors now, you can see why the decision process would be so fraught, and why a professor like Amy Bishop would feel outraged. It's part of larger systemic problems in academia that have, for financial reasons and driven by administrators importing a business model into the academy, shifted the bulk of teaching to underpaid, undervalued adjuncts and TAs. (I liked the comment that said no administrator should make a higher salary than the lowest-paid instructor.) It's wrong. It raises the stakes. It makes people crazy.
But it's not worth killing or dying for. It's just a job, people. We need to disinvest our sense of identity from our careers. We have passions, the natural world, families, lovers, children, pets, our neighbors, the guitar, painting, singing--whatever moves us. We're rich beyond measure.
Professional rejection hurts, and it's humiliating. Yes. Been there. But the thing to do is to go home, cry, lick our wounds, get hugged by our loved ones, and get back up on the pony--or pick a different pony altogether.
Kindness--not just to our peers but to ourselves--is always an option.
Categories:
Note to self: In next life, do not pursue academic career. (That's assuming I misbehave myself sufficiently to come back as a human, rather than as one of my aspirational species, like a porpoise or a gorilla, who got it, in my opinion, right. Alas, I'll probably pay for my sins by pursuing, in Barbara Kingsolver's phrase, "the hominid agenda" all over again.)
Classes are gorgeous, my four graduate teaching interns are perfect, the job candidates beginning to mill about the campus are brilliant, and we have more files in graduate admissions than I can shake a stick at, but we are moving house this Saturday. What was I thinking? My life is in boxes just as the insanity of the spring semester is swinging into gear.
And yesterday, since this big gooey cake needed further icing, I managed to drop my cell phone down a flight of stairs, shattering its innards, which refused to respond to all my desperate ticklings. I am now the bewildered owner of a new phone smarter than I am.
Writing, literature, deep thoughts? Ha. Forget about it. I'm just posting to let you know I'm still alive.
And now, to prep.
Classes are gorgeous, my four graduate teaching interns are perfect, the job candidates beginning to mill about the campus are brilliant, and we have more files in graduate admissions than I can shake a stick at, but we are moving house this Saturday. What was I thinking? My life is in boxes just as the insanity of the spring semester is swinging into gear.
And yesterday, since this big gooey cake needed further icing, I managed to drop my cell phone down a flight of stairs, shattering its innards, which refused to respond to all my desperate ticklings. I am now the bewildered owner of a new phone smarter than I am.
Writing, literature, deep thoughts? Ha. Forget about it. I'm just posting to let you know I'm still alive.
And now, to prep.
Categories:
It's an evil winter wonderland out there, with crazy 22-below-zero wind chills and walls of horizontally blowing snow. Our apartment building is so old--with its original 1905 windows semi-intact--that I woke up this morning with a breeze blowing across my face. This is not the kind of holiday chillin' I hankered for.
All of our books are gone, already hauled in boxes over to the new (better insulated!) apartment, and our art is down, so the walls even look nude and cold here. Just our furniture, clothes, and computers remain. We move on Saturday the 16th.
Classes start Monday, and as I prepare for the first week of the semester, I'm taking heart from the words of Anatole France: "Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good flammable stuff, it will catch fire."
I like this very much.
But of course, I can't help but wonder if the notion that I can open minds by trying--that teachers do so, as we often tell each other and ourselves--is a kind of vanity in itself.
Rather: In what ways is my own mind still closed? How can I learn to open it? That seems like the more honest and gentle way to move forward. Teachers do succeed in opening minds--we hear about it from grateful students who write to say so. But I think it may be in ways we don't even anticipate, much less plan for. Students remember the most casual comment, dropped in haste. Small things make an impression. That's why teaching is such a careful business. It's good practice in mindfulness.
I'm teaching intro to women's literature--to women, for the first time!*--and autobiographical nature writing, which is a new course for me. In women's lit, we're beginning with fairy tales (widely understood by scholars to be the narrative products of women: mothers, nurses, the much denigrated "old wives") and then working through about 200 years of intertextual responses: Jane Eyre, The Yellow Wallpaper, A Room of One's Own, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Bluest Eye, The Bloody Chamber, The House on Mango Street. Should be interesting.
In autobiographical nature writing, we'll be reading environmental lit--and writing, writing, writing. We'll go outside once the weather warms up, but before that happens, we'll be watching two documentaries, which I recommend highly if you haven't seen them: Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides and Arctic Dance: The Mardy Murie Story.
Grey left. I did howl--quietly, at home. Parenting is such an ambivalent practice. One loves so passionately, so profoundly--yet really wants the kid to grow up and get on with life. I won't go into detail about the particulars of our situation. I'll just say this: I always face Grey's visits home (now that he's been away at college) with trepidation--there will inevitably be tensions, arguments, friction, as he defines himself and his life in a different way from ours (and lets us know that in no uncertain terms)--and yet, I'm always wrenched with sadness when he leaves. It took me a good 24 hours to recover after his bus pulled away. Are other parents laid so low? Is there a manual for this?
*Teaching women's literature and feminist theory at an all-male college is an education unto itself. I recommend it highly. For short periods.
All of our books are gone, already hauled in boxes over to the new (better insulated!) apartment, and our art is down, so the walls even look nude and cold here. Just our furniture, clothes, and computers remain. We move on Saturday the 16th.
Classes start Monday, and as I prepare for the first week of the semester, I'm taking heart from the words of Anatole France: "Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good flammable stuff, it will catch fire."
I like this very much.
But of course, I can't help but wonder if the notion that I can open minds by trying--that teachers do so, as we often tell each other and ourselves--is a kind of vanity in itself.
Rather: In what ways is my own mind still closed? How can I learn to open it? That seems like the more honest and gentle way to move forward. Teachers do succeed in opening minds--we hear about it from grateful students who write to say so. But I think it may be in ways we don't even anticipate, much less plan for. Students remember the most casual comment, dropped in haste. Small things make an impression. That's why teaching is such a careful business. It's good practice in mindfulness.
I'm teaching intro to women's literature--to women, for the first time!*--and autobiographical nature writing, which is a new course for me. In women's lit, we're beginning with fairy tales (widely understood by scholars to be the narrative products of women: mothers, nurses, the much denigrated "old wives") and then working through about 200 years of intertextual responses: Jane Eyre, The Yellow Wallpaper, A Room of One's Own, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Bluest Eye, The Bloody Chamber, The House on Mango Street. Should be interesting.
In autobiographical nature writing, we'll be reading environmental lit--and writing, writing, writing. We'll go outside once the weather warms up, but before that happens, we'll be watching two documentaries, which I recommend highly if you haven't seen them: Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides and Arctic Dance: The Mardy Murie Story.
Grey left. I did howl--quietly, at home. Parenting is such an ambivalent practice. One loves so passionately, so profoundly--yet really wants the kid to grow up and get on with life. I won't go into detail about the particulars of our situation. I'll just say this: I always face Grey's visits home (now that he's been away at college) with trepidation--there will inevitably be tensions, arguments, friction, as he defines himself and his life in a different way from ours (and lets us know that in no uncertain terms)--and yet, I'm always wrenched with sadness when he leaves. It took me a good 24 hours to recover after his bus pulled away. Are other parents laid so low? Is there a manual for this?
*Teaching women's literature and feminist theory at an all-male college is an education unto itself. I recommend it highly. For short periods.
Categories:
Good and patient readers, thank you for checking back! Grading final essays has kept me snowed under. I just emerged on Tuesday from reading over 600 pages of student prose, my brain feeling like ground meat that's been kicked around on a dirty floor.
The baby got here safe and sound (after 20+ hours on Greyhound), and we've been enjoying his cheerful company. It's turning out to be a quiet holiday for us: we did manage to have one of my favorite people in Lincoln over to dinner (a feat; we are not natural-born entertainers), but other than that, our festivities have involved packing books into boxes and checking in at the new apartment, which was signed, sealed, and delivered last Friday (hurray!) and is now hung floor to ceiling with sheets of plastic while the workers do their magic.
The draped plastic billows and blows in the fan's wind, and a thin fog of plaster dust veils the air. The apartment's actually kind of cool and beautiful like that, especially at night with the parking garage's lights beaming eerily through the darkness. I mean, not a look I'd want to keep. But cool.
Mostly, we're just catching up and kicking back. I'm so glad we didn't hustle up to a family Christmas in Chicago that my biological mother wanted us to attend. It would have been frantic. Quiet and slow = good.
In work news, I've gotten fascinating responses from a university press (about a book) and from a scholarly journal (about an article). In both cases, one of the two outside blind readers--part of a process designed to ensure objectivity--loved the manuscript, while the other one loathed it.
What's worse, the university-press editor told me that the positive reader's report about the book doesn't count; it was too "effusive." What matters to the editorial board is the report that ripped the project up. Sigh. Even after all this time--and knowing academics up close--it's still kind of demoralizing. One feels stupid. One feels the pain of one's best efforts bashed. But "revise and resubmit" is our bread and butter, and we all have to learn to take criticism impersonally. C'est la vie.
I'm supposed to draft, revise, and polish an intro for the book over the holidays--20 new pages in 2 weeks--and I'm not loving that prospect. Familia and all.
Honestly, I'm trying to take stock right now, and the fact is, I'm feeling scattered, fragmented, stretched too thin: modernist lit, Latin@ studies, creative nonfiction, writing a novel, editing a collection of other people's essays (and that doesn't begin to address the committee load here). Most people with an academic position explore and master one field in a deep, focused way. In English, folks generally tend to be scholars or creative writers, not both. Plus, I'm genuinely interested in pedagogy (newsflash: not all professors are--are you aghast?), so I read a lot about that, as well as occasionally publish little pieces about teaching strategies that work.
I'm doing too many different things, and none of them deeply enough to feel a calm, confident sense of real expertise.
For example, I recently received a really nice invitation to be on a panel at the Modernist Studies Association conference. Okay, fine, lovely to be asked. But honestly, the MSA conference, which I've attended twice before, makes me feel wildly anxious. Everyone is veddy, veddy scholarly, über-technical, and thoroughly saturated in Modernist studies and high theory. Among them, I feel unwashed.
Similarly, a journal editor invited me to write about polyphonic feminisms. People: I didn't know what polyphonic feminisms meant. I had to look it up.
So why did I say yes to both? I don't know. I am thinking that through.
It doesn't make sense. When what I'm sure I long to do is sit quietly and dream up stories and write them, and I have a dayjob that lets me do that, why do I keep committing to things that stretch me beyond my expertise, make me anxious, and destroy my sense of calm? (I'm not exaggerating. Calm: destroyed. You can ask James.) Am I that genuinely interested in the material? Do I--despite my protestations--actually relish the intellectual challenge? Or am I driven by the anxious fear that if I say no to anything, the invitations will all dry up?
Ah, yes: what an academic contemplates on Christmas Eve. Merry, merry. Deck the halls.
Vastly more compelling is my immediate dilemma. The presence of Grey, who is both something of a bon vivant and a militant vegan, makes planning festive holiday menus a challenge--but a challenge to which I'm attempting to rise. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to convert my insanely swoony New Orleans-style bread pudding into a vegan version. (The whiskey sauce alone requires an egg and 8 tablespoons of butter.)
I'll report back to let you know how the EarthBalance and egg replacement powder work out.
In the meantime, I wish you the happiest, warmest, friendliest of holidays. (And if the holidays happen to be sucking for you right now, go here.)
Peace on Earth, sweet people. Thank you for being with me for another beautiful year.
The baby got here safe and sound (after 20+ hours on Greyhound), and we've been enjoying his cheerful company. It's turning out to be a quiet holiday for us: we did manage to have one of my favorite people in Lincoln over to dinner (a feat; we are not natural-born entertainers), but other than that, our festivities have involved packing books into boxes and checking in at the new apartment, which was signed, sealed, and delivered last Friday (hurray!) and is now hung floor to ceiling with sheets of plastic while the workers do their magic.
The draped plastic billows and blows in the fan's wind, and a thin fog of plaster dust veils the air. The apartment's actually kind of cool and beautiful like that, especially at night with the parking garage's lights beaming eerily through the darkness. I mean, not a look I'd want to keep. But cool.
Mostly, we're just catching up and kicking back. I'm so glad we didn't hustle up to a family Christmas in Chicago that my biological mother wanted us to attend. It would have been frantic. Quiet and slow = good.
In work news, I've gotten fascinating responses from a university press (about a book) and from a scholarly journal (about an article). In both cases, one of the two outside blind readers--part of a process designed to ensure objectivity--loved the manuscript, while the other one loathed it.
What's worse, the university-press editor told me that the positive reader's report about the book doesn't count; it was too "effusive." What matters to the editorial board is the report that ripped the project up. Sigh. Even after all this time--and knowing academics up close--it's still kind of demoralizing. One feels stupid. One feels the pain of one's best efforts bashed. But "revise and resubmit" is our bread and butter, and we all have to learn to take criticism impersonally. C'est la vie.
I'm supposed to draft, revise, and polish an intro for the book over the holidays--20 new pages in 2 weeks--and I'm not loving that prospect. Familia and all.
Honestly, I'm trying to take stock right now, and the fact is, I'm feeling scattered, fragmented, stretched too thin: modernist lit, Latin@ studies, creative nonfiction, writing a novel, editing a collection of other people's essays (and that doesn't begin to address the committee load here). Most people with an academic position explore and master one field in a deep, focused way. In English, folks generally tend to be scholars or creative writers, not both. Plus, I'm genuinely interested in pedagogy (newsflash: not all professors are--are you aghast?), so I read a lot about that, as well as occasionally publish little pieces about teaching strategies that work.
I'm doing too many different things, and none of them deeply enough to feel a calm, confident sense of real expertise.
For example, I recently received a really nice invitation to be on a panel at the Modernist Studies Association conference. Okay, fine, lovely to be asked. But honestly, the MSA conference, which I've attended twice before, makes me feel wildly anxious. Everyone is veddy, veddy scholarly, über-technical, and thoroughly saturated in Modernist studies and high theory. Among them, I feel unwashed.
Similarly, a journal editor invited me to write about polyphonic feminisms. People: I didn't know what polyphonic feminisms meant. I had to look it up.
So why did I say yes to both? I don't know. I am thinking that through.
It doesn't make sense. When what I'm sure I long to do is sit quietly and dream up stories and write them, and I have a dayjob that lets me do that, why do I keep committing to things that stretch me beyond my expertise, make me anxious, and destroy my sense of calm? (I'm not exaggerating. Calm: destroyed. You can ask James.) Am I that genuinely interested in the material? Do I--despite my protestations--actually relish the intellectual challenge? Or am I driven by the anxious fear that if I say no to anything, the invitations will all dry up?
Ah, yes: what an academic contemplates on Christmas Eve. Merry, merry. Deck the halls.
Vastly more compelling is my immediate dilemma. The presence of Grey, who is both something of a bon vivant and a militant vegan, makes planning festive holiday menus a challenge--but a challenge to which I'm attempting to rise. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to convert my insanely swoony New Orleans-style bread pudding into a vegan version. (The whiskey sauce alone requires an egg and 8 tablespoons of butter.)
I'll report back to let you know how the EarthBalance and egg replacement powder work out.
In the meantime, I wish you the happiest, warmest, friendliest of holidays. (And if the holidays happen to be sucking for you right now, go here.)
Peace on Earth, sweet people. Thank you for being with me for another beautiful year.
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The University of Nebraska-Lincoln actually closed up shop today! Hallelujah for a much needed break for all concerned. My dear Chican@ lit students just won themselves two extra days to write their papers, which means their work will be two days' better written. Win-win.
I trudged and gallumphed home through the little drifts with my face wrapped up like one of the sand people on Star Wars. So cold! Horizontal snow! It's not quite at white-out stage yet, but I'm definitely flashing back to that part when Ma ties a rope from the house to the barn to go do the milking.
My marvelous, beautiful, dear old friend Jill wrote to request my reading list for the modernist women's lit course, about which I've been generating so much overheated blather on here, so I thought I'd pop it on here. I'll leave off the scholarly readings and just give you the juicy books, which are listed in chronological order:
Actually, I'll post the little syllabus-commercial, too--you know, the part at the beginning that makes it sound like we're going to be having all kinds of intellectual fun together?
Let me just say a word about Jill. We met during our first year of college when we were both 16 (she's one month younger than I am, to the day)--a time when, honestly, we should not have been left unsupervised. Those were raucous days. She was hopelessly glamorous and exquisite, like the subject of a Tamara de Lempicka painting, and knew how to smoke and dress. A very few years later, she was kind enough to share a house with me, walking distance from the campus, and I remember that her kitchen hygiene was significantly more advanced than my own, to our mutual chagrin. She once dated a boy I later dated, so I suppose we had similar tastes. We both married and divorced rather young.
She's witty and smart and went on to get her doctorate in art history--with, if I'm remembering correctly, a thesis on Suzanne Valadon and a dissertation on Elaine de Kooning (but I could be screwing that up)--and now she's an esteemed museum curator. In fact, I think she's my only female friend from college (am I forgetting someone?) who went on to become an academic--in the arts & humanities, no less. (Our male pals who went on for Ph.D.s generally got them in the pocket-protector disciplines.)
Jill and I aren't close; we don't get in touch often. We've seen each other only a few times over the years, and we occasionally email. But I just like her so much, and admire her, and old friends are still the best kind, I think. Last summer, after she attended a college reunion I couldn't make it to, I got to have a long phone conversation with her, and not only did she give me the acerbically funny scoop on the crimes and misdemeanors of our old crowd, but just hearing her voice was a joy.
And now she makes time to read modernist lit? For fun? My hat is off.
I trudged and gallumphed home through the little drifts with my face wrapped up like one of the sand people on Star Wars. So cold! Horizontal snow! It's not quite at white-out stage yet, but I'm definitely flashing back to that part when Ma ties a rope from the house to the barn to go do the milking.
My marvelous, beautiful, dear old friend Jill wrote to request my reading list for the modernist women's lit course, about which I've been generating so much overheated blather on here, so I thought I'd pop it on here. I'll leave off the scholarly readings and just give you the juicy books, which are listed in chronological order:
My personal favorites are Hurston, Rhys, Mansfield, and Latimer, in no particular order. They're all knockout. And of course Woolf is important and how could you not read her? But sometimes her prose feels stuffy and tight, a bit cautious. (How can I say that about such a groundbreaking writer? I don't know. I mean, of course I'm glad she broke the ground she did. But personally, I just like something with a little more rawness, a little more sensuality. A gut-punch. A French kiss.)Katherine Mansfield, Stories (1910-1923)
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1925)
----, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
Margery Latimer, Guardian Angel (1929, 1932)
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934)
Meridel Le Sueur, Ripening (1927-1945)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Actually, I'll post the little syllabus-commercial, too--you know, the part at the beginning that makes it sound like we're going to be having all kinds of intellectual fun together?
I know, I know: it sounds like a thrill ride, doesn't it? I hope Jill thinks so.During the last twenty years, an astonishing amount of recovery and reconfiguration work has been done by feminist scholars on women’s texts of the modernist period. In 2009, we no longer have to argue for these texts’ and writers’ validity, contributions, or value.
What kinds of new questions can we now ask about these texts, as informed by our own scholarly interests (ecocriticism, postcolonialism, narratology, performance, trauma studies, spatiality, etc.)? What interesting patterns emerge when we read diverse women’s texts of the period in conjunction with each other? What happens when we read women’s modernisms across boundaries of nation, sexuality, canonicity, religion, physical ability, race and ethnicity, and class?
Let me just say a word about Jill. We met during our first year of college when we were both 16 (she's one month younger than I am, to the day)--a time when, honestly, we should not have been left unsupervised. Those were raucous days. She was hopelessly glamorous and exquisite, like the subject of a Tamara de Lempicka painting, and knew how to smoke and dress. A very few years later, she was kind enough to share a house with me, walking distance from the campus, and I remember that her kitchen hygiene was significantly more advanced than my own, to our mutual chagrin. She once dated a boy I later dated, so I suppose we had similar tastes. We both married and divorced rather young.
She's witty and smart and went on to get her doctorate in art history--with, if I'm remembering correctly, a thesis on Suzanne Valadon and a dissertation on Elaine de Kooning (but I could be screwing that up)--and now she's an esteemed museum curator. In fact, I think she's my only female friend from college (am I forgetting someone?) who went on to become an academic--in the arts & humanities, no less. (Our male pals who went on for Ph.D.s generally got them in the pocket-protector disciplines.)
Jill and I aren't close; we don't get in touch often. We've seen each other only a few times over the years, and we occasionally email. But I just like her so much, and admire her, and old friends are still the best kind, I think. Last summer, after she attended a college reunion I couldn't make it to, I got to have a long phone conversation with her, and not only did she give me the acerbically funny scoop on the crimes and misdemeanors of our old crowd, but just hearing her voice was a joy.
And now she makes time to read modernist lit? For fun? My hat is off.
. . . is frightful, but lovely, too. I've been indoors most of the day, watching the snow swirl down. It's sticking and thickening on the ground; tomorrow's hike to work should be interesting.
This weekend has been devoted to graduate students' manuscripts, both scholarly and creative, both Pine Manor and UNL, and I must say, I'm a lucky teacher. They're just off-the-hook brilliant. (The weekend's also been devoted to rectifying a recently observed chocolate deficiency in my diet, but enough about that.)
I'm excited that so many of my students are writing about Margery Latimer. Remember my worries? Well, several students are writing really excellent, smart papers about her work, pointing out things I never thought of. Ahhh. Sigh of relief. Other students are writing about Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Meridel Le Sueur, and others. Some of the papers are definitely conference-worthy. I didn't know a graduate lit course could be this much fun!
Today's the 6th, which means James and I have 8 days left until we sign on our new apartment. The closing's set for 10 a.m. on the 14th, and I can't help counting down the days. Our living room and hallway are already starting to fill with boxes and miscellaneous items I can't understand why we own.
And young Grey's getting ready to take his finals, after which he'll be heading west to spend his holidays here, and our flamboyantly fake little purple Christmas tree is already up and lit. Sparkly. (After years of doing the whole go-out-to-the-tree-farm-and-personally-select-one-for-slaughter-and-rope-it-to-the-car thing, I'd had enough.)
All told, December and January should be lively, chaotic, and fun.
This weekend has been devoted to graduate students' manuscripts, both scholarly and creative, both Pine Manor and UNL, and I must say, I'm a lucky teacher. They're just off-the-hook brilliant. (The weekend's also been devoted to rectifying a recently observed chocolate deficiency in my diet, but enough about that.)
I'm excited that so many of my students are writing about Margery Latimer. Remember my worries? Well, several students are writing really excellent, smart papers about her work, pointing out things I never thought of. Ahhh. Sigh of relief. Other students are writing about Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Meridel Le Sueur, and others. Some of the papers are definitely conference-worthy. I didn't know a graduate lit course could be this much fun!
Today's the 6th, which means James and I have 8 days left until we sign on our new apartment. The closing's set for 10 a.m. on the 14th, and I can't help counting down the days. Our living room and hallway are already starting to fill with boxes and miscellaneous items I can't understand why we own.
And young Grey's getting ready to take his finals, after which he'll be heading west to spend his holidays here, and our flamboyantly fake little purple Christmas tree is already up and lit. Sparkly. (After years of doing the whole go-out-to-the-tree-farm-and-personally-select-one-for-slaughter-and-rope-it-to-the-car thing, I'd had enough.)
All told, December and January should be lively, chaotic, and fun.
Tomorrow, my Chican@ lit students and I will be discussing Lorraine López's bleakly hilarious, moving short story of cultural loss and reclamation, "Soy la Avon Lady," the title story from her collection that won the Miguel Mármol Prize when it came out in 2002.
I'm wondering about an idea for a possible scholarly article that explores the role of the city as a site of interpersonal misreading in contemporary Chican@ short fiction. Here's the basic notion. Displaced from the locating context of village, family, and homeland of origin, Chican@ characters on their own in the metropolis become subject to diminished legibility, misreading each other and/or being misread, sometimes to humorous effect but sometimes with devastating and violent results. I'm thinking particularly about stories that foreground the role of the city, such as Viramontes's "Cariboo Café," Chacón's "The Biggest City in the World," Troncoso's "My Life in the City," and this story, "Soy la Avon Lady," by Lorraine. In each, ethnicity, history, and identity are at stake. In each, there's some degree of alienation from Mexican culture. In each, individuals' spatial mobility plays a significant literal role in the story. How are all these facets working together?
And are there questions of genre to be asked? Why does this set of issues crop up so markedly in short stories? (Maybe it's just as prevalent in novels and poetry, and I'm not reading widely enough.)
I'm just kind of kicking this idea around, wondering what it means and what, if anything, I can/should do with it, in a scholarly way. If you're familiar with these stories and/or with the issues and want to respond with your take on it, please do. I'd really welcome your perspective.
And if you just want an entertaining and thought-provoking read, definitely check out "Soy la Avon Lady." I can't wait to hear what my students say about it tomorrow.
I'm wondering about an idea for a possible scholarly article that explores the role of the city as a site of interpersonal misreading in contemporary Chican@ short fiction. Here's the basic notion. Displaced from the locating context of village, family, and homeland of origin, Chican@ characters on their own in the metropolis become subject to diminished legibility, misreading each other and/or being misread, sometimes to humorous effect but sometimes with devastating and violent results. I'm thinking particularly about stories that foreground the role of the city, such as Viramontes's "Cariboo Café," Chacón's "The Biggest City in the World," Troncoso's "My Life in the City," and this story, "Soy la Avon Lady," by Lorraine. In each, ethnicity, history, and identity are at stake. In each, there's some degree of alienation from Mexican culture. In each, individuals' spatial mobility plays a significant literal role in the story. How are all these facets working together?
And are there questions of genre to be asked? Why does this set of issues crop up so markedly in short stories? (Maybe it's just as prevalent in novels and poetry, and I'm not reading widely enough.)
I'm just kind of kicking this idea around, wondering what it means and what, if anything, I can/should do with it, in a scholarly way. If you're familiar with these stories and/or with the issues and want to respond with your take on it, please do. I'd really welcome your perspective.
And if you just want an entertaining and thought-provoking read, definitely check out "Soy la Avon Lady." I can't wait to hear what my students say about it tomorrow.
The official announcement has gone out, so I thought I'd share my news with you: I've resigned from Pine Manor College's low-residency MFA program, where I've taught since 2006.
It's a lovely program, and I've enjoyed working with the wonderful, hand-picked adult students and with the stellar faculty. Co-teaching, first with Mike Steinberg (who founded Fourth Genre) and then with Randall Kenan, will remain a permanent highlight of my teaching career, and I've had the honor of working one-on-one with some truly extraordinary apprentice writers--warm, talented people I'll never forget.
But it was time to go.
My position at UNL is full-time (and sometimes much more than full-time, like this week, when we're reading 90+ applicant files for a position in Ethnic Studies). The weekends and evenings when I should have been writing were often slated for Pine Manor students' manuscripts.
While burning the candle at both ends used to be my MO, I'm 42 now, and skimping on sleep takes its toll. Perhaps just as importantly, I no longer feel comfortable skimping on my own work, putting it off to some indefinite future moment. I want every hour.
Even in an economic downturn, when I'm grateful to have work, working two jobs came to seem less and less tenable. Three years of doing so was just right.
I'll miss my friends, and leaving behind the pleasures of Pine Manor--especially those late-night, front-porch conversations, fortified by Laure-Anne-tinis and literary chisme (like summer camp for writing faculty)--brings its regrets, for sure, but stepping off into a new free space is invigorating. Wish me well!
And if you've ever, ever even once, dreamed of devoting more time to your writing and getting some serious, intensive instruction, I recommend Pine Manor without reservation. It's an excellent, solid, rigorous program, the faculty is just terrific . . . and the campus is soooo pretty.
It's a lovely program, and I've enjoyed working with the wonderful, hand-picked adult students and with the stellar faculty. Co-teaching, first with Mike Steinberg (who founded Fourth Genre) and then with Randall Kenan, will remain a permanent highlight of my teaching career, and I've had the honor of working one-on-one with some truly extraordinary apprentice writers--warm, talented people I'll never forget.
But it was time to go.
My position at UNL is full-time (and sometimes much more than full-time, like this week, when we're reading 90+ applicant files for a position in Ethnic Studies). The weekends and evenings when I should have been writing were often slated for Pine Manor students' manuscripts.
While burning the candle at both ends used to be my MO, I'm 42 now, and skimping on sleep takes its toll. Perhaps just as importantly, I no longer feel comfortable skimping on my own work, putting it off to some indefinite future moment. I want every hour.
Even in an economic downturn, when I'm grateful to have work, working two jobs came to seem less and less tenable. Three years of doing so was just right.
I'll miss my friends, and leaving behind the pleasures of Pine Manor--especially those late-night, front-porch conversations, fortified by Laure-Anne-tinis and literary chisme (like summer camp for writing faculty)--brings its regrets, for sure, but stepping off into a new free space is invigorating. Wish me well!
And if you've ever, ever even once, dreamed of devoting more time to your writing and getting some serious, intensive instruction, I recommend Pine Manor without reservation. It's an excellent, solid, rigorous program, the faculty is just terrific . . . and the campus is soooo pretty.
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