Recently in teaching Category

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?

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!

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

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.

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.  

One of my favorite books to teach at Wabash College, where I worked for ten years before moving to Lincoln, was the inimitable Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?  I love this book.  I loved teaching it to first-year writing students, not only because Tatum's writing is wonderfully logical, organized, and crystal-clear--a great model for students--but also, and more importantly, because she explains issues of institutional (structural) racism and white privilege in ways that anyone can understand.  It made me feel happy to be doing peace and justice work in the composition classroom, instead of talking only about paragraph organization and comma splices.

My father loved the book, too.  I gave him a copy and told him how excited I'd been to find it (at the GLCA Course Design & Teaching Workshop for multicultural education, which I'd taken as a junior faculty member).  He read it and was annotating it; he told me that it clarified things that had puzzled and hurt him all his life.  I found it on his little stand next to his armchair after he died.

One of my favorite students at Wabash, a young man named Daniel Zeno, who's now in law school at the University of Iowa, just wrote to update his friends on the work that he's been doing this summer with Advancement Project, a policy, communications, and legal action group in D.C. that works for racial justice.  Along with several other initiatives, Daniel has written a blog post for the Advancement Project's blog, Just Democracy, called "Undelivered Promises:  40 Acres and a Mule in 2008," about the new suit filed by over 800 Black farmers against the USDA.

He writes:

The persistent unwillingness of the USDA to address these problems of racism and discrimination, combined with the many other examples on the federal, state and local government level (Did somebody say Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans?) remind us all that structural racism is still alive. Structural racism is a direct result of a history of racism in the United States and continues to deny people of color equal opportunities.

Go, Daniel!

Hurray!  I've been doing nothing--and I mean nothing--but revising since I last posted, but I'm finally done!  Woohoo!  (Well, for the moment, at any rate--my best reader is going to read the manuscript and give feedback this week, and then it's back to the grindstone.)  After revising, the book weighed in at 395 pages, and I know size doesn't matter, but still, it's so massive that I can't help grinning.  This is the kind of page count you can generate when you deliberately choose to have no life . . .  :)

So, back to real life.  I got the most interesting question from a wonderful student at Pine Manor College's MFA program, where I moonlight, and I have some random thoughts in response, but I thought I'd throw it open to your collective wisdom and see what all of us can generate for her.

For a class I'm teaching at this summer's residency at Pine Manor, I've asked students to read in advance Hélène Cixous's famous essay "The Laugh of the Medusa."

My dutiful and smart student, who's already read the essay, writes: 

I am just wondering if you have any reading suggestions for what you'd consider "writing from the body" (especially) or "feminine literature" (since time has passed since 1976) and contrasting books/writing by women that you would not consider in that category.

Suggestions?  Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of--post 1976--Louise Erdrich's memoir The Blue Jay's Dance and novel Love Medicine, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (whoops--1972 pub date), fiction and poetry by Sandra Cisneros, and Lauren Slater's Lying.  And to me, Toni Morrison's work, starting with The Bluest Eye seems very much written from the body. 

On the negative side of the writing-from-the-body equation, and perhaps not what Cixous was calling for, there's Susanna Moore's novel In the Cut, Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss, and, in other un-cheer, Alice Sebold's excellent memoir Lucky. 

For pre-1975/76 publications that Cixous probably wouldn't have known about, I'm thinking of Meridel Le Sueur's classic short story "Annunciation" and H.D.'s creative manifesto "Notes on Thought and Vision," both of which have a positive vision, together with much of the work by Jean Rhys, which doesn't.

But all of these selections are debatable, and I welcome your feedback and alternatives.

And what books by women aren't in that category?  Hmm.  Where to start?  

Because of the Vanderbilt symposium, I've just discovered a blog I now love.  I am so turned on by my fellow panelist Heather Sellers' blog, Word After Word.  It's positive, smart, sane, pro-pleasure.  (And she's big on writing by hand, as I am.) 

I recommend it to anyone who's writing, wanting to write, trying to write, dreaming of writing, etc.  Look at the sections "Writing" and "Teaching The Practice of Creative Writing" (which is the textbook Heather wrote).  They're full of guidance, kind self-talk, and good sense. 

And now, for something completely different, a new middle school in Washington Heights is offering its teachers a salary of $125,000 plus an annual bonus of up to $25,000 more.  What's more:  in a breathtaking valuation of pedagogical excellence over bureaucratic skill, it will pay its principal only $90,000. 

The school's innovative founder, Zeke Vanderhoek, is basing his charter school's revolutionary salary system on research that shows that excellent teachers, more than any other factor, make the difference in the quality of education a school provides.  The Equity Project Charter School will test his hypothesis that they should be compensated accordingly. 

It's about time.

My favorite remark comes from 29-year-old teacher and TEP applicant Claudia Taylor: 

“I’m tired of making decisions about whether or not I can afford to go to a movie on a Friday night when I work literally 55 hours a week. . . .  It’s very frustrating. I’m feeling like I either have to leave New York City or leave teaching, because I don’t want to have a roommate at 30 years old.”

Read the whole story in the New York Times here, and apply here. 

As a first-generation college student who is, at the age of 40, still paying off her college loans--but who's grateful to have had the chance to go to college at all--I was struck by a new report that warns that "widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families." 

The New York Times states that, in terms of college degrees earned, Latinos and African Americans are "falling behind" whites and Asian Americans, and that "[e]conomic mobility . . . has not changed significantly over the last three decades."  The report is by the Brookings Institution, and there's bound to be controversy about the explanations for the differences; conservatives and liberals differ on the reasons for the gap.

But the hopeful news . . .