May 2012 – Lit Bits

I suspect that most of us who teach at the college or university level look forward to summer not because we don’t have to teach, but because it’s an opportunity to focus our working hours on research and our development as faculty members. Of course, we create lists of writing and research projects that we want to work on – and my lists are always overly ambitious, to say the least.

But I think it’s also important to create reading lists. While I do take some time to read lighter fare (I’m looking forward to Nicole Peeler’s next installment in her Jane True series, for example), I like to create an academic reading list for the summer. I’ve generally tried to have a theme: a writer’s entire body of work or major works from a particular literary era where there is a gap in my own education. So, I’ve had summers of William Faulkner, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare (I’m an early modern scholar, not a Shakespearean per se), nineteenth century British novels (that one really just meant Vanity Fair and several Hardy novels).

I’m currently casting about for what my reading list should focus on this summer. I have a book to review for an academic journal and research-related reading to do, but that’s not the sort of reading that I’m talking about. Likely, I’ll settle on Ben Jonson’s work – I haven’t read many of his tragedies. Though, as I write this, I have to say that Frances Burney’s work also sounds appealing to me right now. I’m still undecided. Continue reading “Planning for the Summer”

As a student, I was never really a fan of writing exercises—they often seemed gimmicky or overly directed. Only once did an exercise ever turn into an actual story. (On my desktop I titled the exercise “Stupid Ron” because I so resented having to do it—I have since spent quite a bit of time apologizing to my then teacher, the beloved Ron Carlson; the story that resulted was published in Glimmer Train, served as the writing sample for my now tenured job, and won me a $5000 grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which I used to go to Bread Loaf.) Despite that one success, when I became a teacher I remained suspicious of writing exercises; they seemed like an awfully convenient way to expend a chunk of class-time. But, mostly because my students say they value them, I have gradually come to use writing exercises in my workshops. I still don’t do them (I don’t eat lima beans either, now that nobody can make me), but I’ve come to believe in their value.

The student-me was only ever assigned one kind of writing exercise, intended to inspire—to lead to the creation of new work. And I have never really been short of ideas for new work. But I’ve found that there are really three types of writing exercises; those intended for:

inspiration
exploration and revision
fun

Inspiration exercises often work best for beginning students who haven’t discovered that they are allowed to write about all kinds of things. For example, in my intro class this semester, I had the students brainstorm historical and current events that they’d like to write poems about. This was a pretty surprising idea for many of them, even though they’d just read a host of poems about the Vietnam War. In the intro class, I’ve come to depend on writing exercises as a way to get students away from more clichéd topics and styles—to break them of habits they were somehow born right into. Continue reading “The Workshop Workout”