Sometimes, as a creative writing professor you just want to put your foot down. My colleague, Kate Schmitt, told one workshop if any of them used the word flow again, they’d have to go stand in the corner. One of my beloved professors, Ron Carlson, told us we weren’t allowed to put clowns in our stories. Continue reading “When is a Mistake Truly a Mistake?”
Month: March 2014
When Organization Fails
I am both very organized and a complete organizational nightmare. I am thankful that computers can easily and quickly search documents for key words. I would never find old teaching material otherwise, because I am both a hoarder of the old stuff and a person who dallies with organizing systems, then tosses them aside. (I did finally purge a large portion of my paper files last year, but I’ve still got a box of teaching files that I want to keep on hand.) Continue reading “When Organization Fails”
Why Teach or Study Literature?
I was a little nervous to tell my father my plans to major in English with a creative writing emphasis. Though my parents had always emphasized the importance of literature—my mom was a high school English teacher, and my dad would read us Mark Twain and John Steinbeck when we were kids—I felt like my choice would strike him as being completely impractical. Continue reading “Why Teach or Study Literature?”
Categorizing the Things in Tim Obrien’s “The Things They Carried”
When I teach introduction to literature, I almost always teach Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” And when I teach that I have traditionally begun the class period by writing a list of objects from the story as students call them out. We then talk about what the objects mean and what they say about the characters, and we’ve generally attempted some work at categorizing them. Continue reading “Categorizing the Things in Tim Obrien’s “The Things They Carried””
Why I Teach Literature
For the epigraph to the preface of the latest edition of Literature: The Human Experience, I chose a few sentences from an interview given by David Foster Wallace: “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. Continue reading “Why I Teach Literature”