William Bradley – Page 2

Photographic Memories: Using Photos to Prompt Writing

At some point while he was running, the kid’s batting helmet must have fallen off, because you can see his light blond hair—still short from the disastrous haircut his father gave him before his First Communion—practically glowing under the California sun. He’s in the second grade and his t-ball team is the Reds. Inexplicably, their t-shirt (the only “uniform” t-ballers get) is orange. He is sliding, kicking up dirt, but he has already passed home plate. Afraid that he’ll wind up short, he always waits until he has already tagged up to begin his slide. Sliding is his favorite part of the game—that, and the free snow cones they get after they play.

Obviously, this young athlete is me, and this is my wife’s favorite picture of me when I was a kid. I loved to play t-ball, though I obviously wasn’t very good at it. In t-ball—at least in our league—there were no strike outs, probably because swinging at and missing a stationary ball mounted on a tee wasn’t the sort of thing that tended to happen. It did to me, though. All the time. I would approach the tee confidently, bring my bat back, and then twist my entire body into that swing, to the point that my eye left the ball long before the bat in my hand woooooshed right over it. The grown-ups would let me do it over. Eventually, I’d wind up on a base. Continue reading “Photographic Memories: Using Photos to Prompt Writing”

On the Pleasure of Teaching “On the Pleasure of Hating”

When I first started studying, writing, and teaching creative nonfiction, I generally found myself attracted to contemporary American authors—Tobias Wolff, Phillip Lopate, Joan Didion, and others. They wrote in a language I immediately understood and made references to figures and events that were at least somewhat familiar. Even if I didn’t actually watch The Mickey Mouse Club or had never lived in New York City, I was aware that such things existed, and they weren’t all that far away from me. I had a little more trouble with older writers, because of that tired undergraduate complaint “I just couldn’t relate.” Yes, dear reader, your humble blogger was once one of those students who felt like his inability to immediately “get it” was always the fault of the writer—that the reader had no obligation to do any work himself.

I’m much less stupid now, of course, and as a result, I’m now able to really enjoy the opportunity to teach William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating,” an essay I just couldn’t appreciate the first time I read it in my early twenties, but find I enjoy—and “relate to”—more and more as I’m dragged, kicking and screaming, towards middle age. And I’ve been developing ways to get my own students to appreciate—and perhaps even “relate to”—Hazlitt’s 19^th century text.

First of all, what’s not to love about an essay called “On the Pleasures of Hating”? As far as awesome titles go, this one’s only approached by Phillip Lopate’s “Against Joie de Vivre.” As a reader, when you see a title like that, all you can really do is blink, raise your eyebrows quizzically, then shrug and say, “Well, okay. I’m listening.” It’s like if someone said to you, “You know what I hate? Orgasms.” You’re pretty sure you’ll disagree with this person, but you’re dying to hear the reasoning behind such an outrageous position. Continue reading “On the Pleasure of Teaching “On the Pleasure of Hating””

Writing as Revenge

I read Lorraine Berry’s recent Salon article “Dear Female Students: Stop Writing about Men” with great interest. I think she gives good advice that all college students—women and men– ought to hear: You’re not defined by your relationships; you are more than who you choose to date; someone else breaking up with you is not the most significant or interesting thing that has ever happened to you. But I was surprised to see her focus her essay on female students, and to learn that, in her experience, “The females in the class tend to write about a romantic relationship, and the males do not.” I found this interesting, because I have had almost the exact opposite experience. I can only recall one female student ever writing about her own romantic troubles, but I feel like I’ve read—as either a student or a teacher– the “guy’s break-up narrative” easily a dozen times.

To be sure, I don’t think I’m talking about the male equivalent of the type of essay Berry is talking about. She writes that “only once or twice in the nine years I’ve been teaching these courses has a guy expressed his need to understand why a relationship has fallen apart.” I haven’t really read that essay either. The type of relationship essay I’ve read from male writers tends—more often than not– to be more angry than reflective.

I first encountered this type of narrative during my senior year of college, in a workshop where a fellow student ended his own end-of-the-affair narrative with the triumphant line, “I was sick of playing that bitch’s games.” Even typing that line now, fifteen years later, I cringe both for her and for him—she was, after all, a fellow student on a campus of just over two thousand, and he certainly had no idea how committing such a line to the page and handing out photocopies to the class made him seem… well, less than gentlemanly. I came upon my second such narrative in the same class, where another student writer decried his ex-girlfriend as “promiscuous,” but only after lavishing attention on her “large-yet-firm” breasts as he lost his virginity in the front seat of a car. Continue reading “Writing as Revenge”

Introducing Students to Creative Nonfiction: The “I” and “Eye”

Today’s guest blogger is Angie Mellor, an Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina University where she teaches creative writing, creative nonfiction, and composition. Originally from Wisconsin, Mellor earned her B.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and an M.F.A. at Georgia College and State University. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Multicultural and Transnational Literature at East Carolina, and her work has appeared in The Whistling Fire and The Green Blade.

In my Introduction to Creative Writing class a few weeks ago, my students and I began discussing nonfiction. I was certainly surprised when the conversation began with this comment: “It’s boring.” When I asked why they thought of nonfiction as boring, it turned out that most of my students equate nonfiction with biographies. Once they learned that nonfiction comes in many varieties —such as the memoir, the personal essay, travel writing, and immersion journalism— they grew a little more curious about what type of nonfiction could work well for them.

However, the debate of what constitutes creative nonfiction continued. When one student, a communications major and campus newspaper editor, brought in a journalistic piece describing a particular place, students were shocked to find out that this could be considered nonfiction. Many were also hung up on the idea that nonfiction had to be a personal story, preferably a tragic one. We discussed that although personal tragedy is at the center of some memoirs, it is not a defining factor of nonfiction in general. In fact, the best nonfiction authors strive to go beyond the personal. Continue reading “Introducing Students to Creative Nonfiction: The “I” and “Eye””

Of Music and Memory: A Writing Exercise

In the small town where I live, one of our nicer restaurants often has their satellite radio tuned to a station that plays exclusively soft rock from the 80s and early 90s. Air Supply. Foreigner. A little Journey or, if we’re really lucky, solo Steve Perry. But there’s one song that seems to come on every time we eat there, one song that causes my wife to reach across the table, grab my hand and whisper, “Don’t sing. Don’t sing. Don’t sing. I mean it.”

The song I’m talking about is Chicago’s song “Look Away,” which a quick Internet search tells me was written by Diane “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” Warren. I didn’t know this until just ten minutes ago, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Like every other Diane Warren song I know, “Look Away” expresses its ideas about love in rather obvious, sentimental ways. The song is written from the point of view of a young man whose ex-girlfriend—with whom he still has a friendship—calls to tell him about her new love. In fact, the lead vocalist (whose name is not Peter Cetera) opens the song with the observation, “When you called me up this morning/ Told me about the new love you’d found/ I said I’m happy for you/ I’m really happy for you.” Of course, things aren’t really that simple; as it turns out, our speaker is still in love with his former paramour/ current friend, but he can’t possibly act on those feelings. For some reason. So he assures her that he’s “fine,” but then admits that “sometimes [he] just pretend[s].” In the chorus he tells her: “If you see me walking by/ And the tears are in my eyes/ Look away, baby, look away… Don’t look at me/ I don’t want you to see me this way.”

This is not a particularly good song. In fact, I don’t think it’s very good at all. But I love it anyway, and feel the urge to sing along with not-Peter Cetera every time it comes on. This desire has nothing to do with Diane Warren’s craft or not-Peter Cetera’s singing, and has everything to do with the memories this song evokes for me. Continue reading “Of Music and Memory: A Writing Exercise”

Sifting through the Phantasmagoria

When I was younger—a twenty-something graduate student working on a creative dissertation and teaching intro-level creative writing classes—I considered myself something of a creative nonfiction purist. I knew, of course, that trying to write absolute, Capital-T “Truth” that everyone could recognize was impossible. Our perceptions are inherently subjective, and language—useful as it is—is sometimes insufficient when it comes to capturing reality’s complexity. Nevertheless, I thought, we essay.

I took it as something of a personal insult when a best-selling memoirist turned out to have deliberately embellished his experiences with addiction and incarceration, or when another supposed nonfiction writer turned out to have invented her criminal background for the sake of drama. “Here I am,” I thought, “struggling to find those conflicts and contradictions that shape my life, that inform who I am, that make me me—and I’m trying to write it well, without fabrication, so that others will find this work worth reading. And then there are these people. They cheated.” Continue reading “Sifting through the Phantasmagoria”

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”