Month: November 2011

Teaching the Fiction of 9/11: Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This is the second entry in a series on teaching the literature of 9/11. Dr. Erin Templeton, Assistant Professor of English and the Anne Morrison Chapman Distinguished Chair of International Study at Converse College, answered a few questions about her experiences teaching 9/11 fiction.

Hetland: What 9/11 texts do you teach?

Templeton: I teach both Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (ELIC) by Jonathan Safran Foer and selections from an American literature anthology.

Hetland: What classes do you use the texts in?

Templeton: ELIC is part of an upper-level contemporary American novels course; the anthology pieces are for the second half of our American Literature survey (1865-Present; 9/11 is as close as we get to the Present).

Hetland: Why have you chosen to teach Safran Foer’s novel?

Templeton: Because 1) it is a terrific novel and teaches well, and 2) because it also presents us with other issues that jive well with other books on the syllabus, specifically with issues of textual materiality and form, narrative perspective, and relationships between past and present and between older and younger generations. Continue reading “Teaching the Fiction of 9/11: Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Getting Real: Teaching Creative Nonfiction

The other night, my wife and I accidentally got sucked into watching a Jersey Shore marathon. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s basically a high concept science fiction program that involves a group of grotesque orange aliens who derive sustenance from a diet consisting solely of hard liquor and whose highest form of compliment is to call someone a “Guido.” To be honest, the show is a little derivative of other science fiction shows that came before it—these aliens have the aggression of Klingons and the dull-witted brutality of the “toaster”-model Cylons.  My wife and I agreed that the show was stupid and a waste of our time, and we turned off the TV once we realized it was 3:30 in the morning and this marathon wasn’t going to be over anytime soon.

It’s as obvious as it is glib to point out that so-called “reality” television doesn’t resemble the world in which most of us actually live, but I worry that some people—and by some people, I mean some of my students—might mistake this manipulated footage and manufactured drama for something that resembles life on planet earth.  Chuck Klosterman suggested in his essay “What Happens When People Stop Being Polite” that MTV’s The Real World fundamentally changed how young people relate to each other—“People started becoming personality templates,” Klosterman wrote, “devoid of complication and obsessed with melodrama.”  Over the years, dozens of students have told me about auditioning for one reality show or another, and I could always tell which “type” they wanted to be—Sensitive Heterosexual Guy, Wild Party Girl, Intellectual-Yet-Approachable Black Dude.  The problem with reality television, really, is its tendency to reduce actual human beings into characters.  Static, superficial, underdeveloped characters at that. Continue reading “Getting Real: Teaching Creative Nonfiction”

Student Poets: Advice for Reading Aloud

poetry 2Today’s guest blogger is Adrian Arancibia, an author and critic based in San Diego, California. He is a founder of the seminal Chicano/Latino performance poetry collective Taco Shop Poets. Born in Iquique, Chile (1971), Arancibia is the co-editor of the Taco Shop Poets Anthology: Chorizo Tonguefire and author of the collection Atacama Poems.  He is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of California at San Diego and an associate professor of English at Miramar Community College. Arancibia’s creative work depicts and comments on the lives of immigrants; his critical work focuses on literature and its relation to social spaces.

Each semester, I trek to the A/V department, check out a small PA system with a microphone and stand, and bring the equipment to my creative writing class.  I tell my students that poems are meant be heard—so they need to learn to read their own works aloud.  They need to speak them.  In public. For the world to hear.  Through this experience, they find that the pieces they’ve cobbled together over the course of the semester take on new meaning.

First, I lay my ground rules. I repeat the rules I learned some 25 years ago, when I performed in a choir.   Yes, I was a “Gleek” before there was Glee on Fox television.  The lessons I learned from our director, Mr. Bolles, have helped me in my own public readings and still make sense for reading pieces aloud. And yes, most of my students will read their poems aloud in community readings at one point or another in their lives. Continue reading “Student Poets: Advice for Reading Aloud”

Writing a Poem by Not Writing a Poem

poetry 1Today’s guest blogger is Catherine Pierce, the author of two books of poetry, Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008) and The Girls of Peculiar (forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2012), as well as of a chapbook, Animals of Habit. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2011, Slate, Ploughshares, Boston Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

In the introductory creative writing course I teach, we spend the first half of the semester reading and writing fiction, and turn to poetry for the second half. This transition often provokes some anxiety. Many of my students have never written poetry before, and some have read very little—they come to the course with the assumption that poetry is highbrow and intimidating, and are cowed by the expectation that they will soon be writing their own.

I do several things to demystify poetry—insofar as it can and should be demystified!—early on. We read lots of contemporary poems, so that students can hear voices that echo their own with regard to syntax and diction. We talk about the lessons covered in the fiction unit that carry over into poetry, and into all creative writing, things they already know to do, and do well—striving for detail, imagery, and nuance, avoiding the heavy-handed ending, establishing a compelling voice, etc.  And we do daily writing exercises to keep the writing brain limber and to alleviate that initial fear that can come with staring at a blank page and knowing you’ve got to, somehow, put a poem on it. If we do small bits of writing every day, then that blank page becomes familiar—a friend, or at least an only-moderately-irritating acquaintance.

I kick off the poetry unit with one of my favorite exercises—it’s simple, but its simplicity is its key. I tell students that they’re going to be going outside for the next ten minutes. (I do this regardless of weather; some classes luck out with a 75 degree sun-filled day, but this fall found my students grumbling out into a chilly, heavy mist. I told them that great poems have been written about hardship.) While out there, they’re to do two tasks. First, I ask them to make note of three things they think no one else will notice—a line of ants streaming from a trashcan, a mismatched hubcap on a Honda in the nearby lot. And I ask them to write down the following beginnings of sentences:

The sky looks like:

The air feels like:

The day smells like:

Continue reading “Writing a Poem by Not Writing a Poem”

Teaching Literature: Student Contexts and Discussion Openers

BuntingToday’s guest blogger is Ben Bunting, a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Washington State University where he teaches undergraduate courses in Composition and Literature.  Bunting’s research and writing interrogates the concept of “wilderness” in 21st century America;  he’s also interested in ecocriticism, game studies, and medieval literature.  He plans to graduate in the spring of 2012.

After years of being one of the veritable army of literature graduate students who teach freshman composition, I was ecstatic to be given my first literature course in the spring of 2010. My excitement quickly turned to terror, though, when I realized that while I was teaching said class, I would also be preparing for my doctoral exams and beginning to draft my dissertation. I unashamedly admit that my first response to these complications was to try to design a class that minimized my day-to-day responsibilities as much as possible. However, this somewhat less-than-honorable approach actually led me to what I believe is a very effective method of teaching literature.

At the center of this approach is an assignment I call Discussion Openers, which puts small groups of students in charge of generating the class’s daily lecture and discussion content. At the beginning of the semester, I put students into groups and show them the course schedule; they then sign up for particular topics and/or readings that interest them. On a group’s assigned days, they are expected to “expand the class’s learning about an issue or issues from the readings beyond what is obvious in the text.” Rather than conceptualizing this assignment as a “presentation,” then, where the group simply shows their comprehension of the assigned readings while the rest of the class falls asleep, students are required to provide context to the readings. Some examples include:

Pedagogy Papers: Gone But Not Forgotten

This year, AWP (the Association of Writers & Writing Programs) is doing away with its pedagogy forums, a staple at its national conference for a number of years. An unfortunate effect of this decision is that there will be no more “pedagogy papers,” those one-page creative writing exercises written by instructors at all levels, from first-year grad students to full professors. Each year, AWP made available on its website a PDF file of thirty or so “Best of” papers, selected from all that got submitted.

No more.

If you’ve never perused these files, they’re worth a look. The papers cover all genres and are sure to spark ideas in the classroom. The good news is that the PDF files from past years are still available on AWP’s website. The bad news—actually, it’s just a bit inconvenient—is that you’ll have to hunt a little for them. On AWP’s main page, awpwriter.org, just type “pedagogy papers” (in quotes) into the search box. Each result takes you to a page where, with a little scrolling, you’ll find the PDF file labeled either “Exemplary Pedagogy Papers” or “Best of the Pedagogy Papers.” Download those files and you’ll be staring at several hundred useful, tested exercises for the creative writing classroom at all levels.

What do you think of the AWP’s cancellation of pedagogy forums?

Professionalization and the Workshop

I often find myself weighing the degree to which the workshops I lead should concern themselves with things other than the manuscript up for discussion. On the one hand, I believe in a workshop—especially at the undergraduate level—that focuses on writing, and not on what one does with the writing once it’s finished. Put another way, there’s no better element of professionalization than learning to write well.

On the other hand, part of being a writer means giving readings and submitting work for publication, and I’m not doing my students any favors by pretending otherwise, or by withholding information or advice that could benefit them. Beyond that, I would argue that the very process of preparing a manuscript for a public reading or for submission to a journal makes one a better writer. When I know that I’ll be reading my work in front of actual, live human beings, I’m suddenly able to see the work with fresh eyes and less patience. I become a better self-editor. Imprecise words, flabby phrases, and lags in pacing—not to mention typos—announce themselves loudly.

Similarly, when I prepare to submit a piece for publication, I find myself reading it through the eyes of someone who doesn’t already know me and who has no reason—or time—to give me the benefit of the doubt. The piece, in other words, must stand on its own, and it must stand out. Continue reading “Professionalization and the Workshop”

Riding the Metro Haiku

The undergraduate classroom might seem like the last place to introduce students to archival materials. We have so many other commitments—to coverage of historical periods, to literary interpretation and theory, to improving student writing—that it might seem like an extra activity that might simply take up too much class time. However, students can and should learn about the cultural conventions that affect the transmission of texts, and I would argue that their close readings of these texts is actually central to their understanding of what poems, plays, and short stories are and how they work. Reading various versions of a text can actually get undergraduates—and teachers—to work toward a clearer and more effective definition of close reading. The results of my students’ research consistently demonstrate that textual studies can actually inspire close reading and help students generate the questions that they can use in a variety of literature courses.

Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century. It also provides us with a short, easy way into discussing archival materials. This is how the poem appears in most literature:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Continue reading “Riding the Metro Haiku”