Unlike print-based genres—poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction—the dramatic genres, such as playwriting, are allied to certain material realities. By this I mean that what is mentioned in a script is not just for a reader’s mind, but is meant to be concretized before an audience’s eyes. I find myself frequently noting on drafts of student scripts that particular stage directions sound “expensive,” and I don’t mean this as a positive comment. I use this word to discourage writers from including elements that would make staging difficult—for example, impossible special effects and overly frequent scene changes. In a similar vein, I ask student authors to remember that acting is paid labor. Frequently, beginning playwrights will include a character—often a waiter—who does very little. In the professional theatre, the actor playing this character would have to be compensated for his or her work. Therefore, inclusion in the script means an added expense, and if it’s not a meaningful expense, there’s no reason for it. Continue reading “Material Realities”
Category: Uncategorized
On Friday Night Lights and Teaching Character
I confess, I’m one of those writers with a deep and abiding love of the much-missed Friday Night Lights, a television show that not only entertained me, but made me think about how I want to live and who I want to be.
Now I admit, I have loved a number of shows of the young adult variety, starting with but not limited to Felicity; Gilmore Girls, seasons 1-5; Veronica Mars, seasons 1 and 2; and—surely you were expecting this—every all-too-short second of the single season of Freaks and Geeks.
I suspect young adult television, much like young adult literature, has such a hold on me because it is often about people building their identities, determining their values, and shaping their characters (as we are wont to do when we are young).
And this is why I mention Friday Night Lights in the context of teaching creative writing. More than any two characters on television, high school football coach Eric Taylor and high school guidance counselor Tami Taylor were working hard every week to shape the values of their daughter, their high-school-age-charges, their no-longer high-school-age-charges, and even themselves. Continue reading “On Friday Night Lights and Teaching Character”
Writing about Setting
Setting is essential to narrative, but it’s something that students often overlook. My experience with teaching literature is that students want to talk about what happens next and often something that’s vaguely like character motivation, but they need help moving beyond plot. Talking and writing about setting forces students to look at the details of the narrative and requires a careful examination of the words on the page.
I often introduce setting by showing students clips from particularly atmospheric movies—The Shining’s opening sequence; Fargo; almost anything by Tim Burton. While watching the brief clips, I have the students make a list of significant (or not-so-significant) details that they notice about the setting. We then talk about how all of these elements and details work together to set the tone of the movie. That long opening sequence of The Shining, for example, intensifies the feeling of dread, and highlights the sheer isolation—both physical and emotional—of the main character.
Moving from movies to literature itself can be a bit complicated. I want students to do more than simply explain how the setting establishes the tone, because setting is more important than simply being part of the atmosphere. To do this, we talk about symbolism, typically within Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I have students come up with a list of symbols and have them work through what they might represent in the story. I try to steer discussion towards the physical objects—the items within the setting—as we work our way through the final act of the play. My favorite symbol is the mailbox: it is the way that information from outside of the home enters the Helmers’ apartment, the conduit between the public space and the private space. And only Torvald has the key. We discuss the way that this shows Torvald’s control over information and ultimately over Nora.
On a subsequent day, we read “Hills like White Elephants,” and we talk about the way that Hemingway describes the landscape. Students are pretty good at picking up on the importance of the train station setting – we talk about the difference between a train station and a fork in the road (and we’ve, of course, read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”). We discuss the relevance of these elements to the characters’ lives. We also discuss the fact that “I’m-so-minimalist-I-don’t-need-speaker-tags”-Hemingway devotes an entire paragraph to describing the scenery of the Ebro valley. Continue reading “Writing about Setting”
First Person Point of View and the Act of Storytelling
I’ve been thinking a lot about first person point of view lately, partly because I’ve been reading this new book of contemporary persona poems, A Face to Meet the Faces, and partly because I’ve become addicted to New York magazine’s hilarious recaps of American Idol, a show I can no longer bear to watch.
These recaps, which are one writer’s narrative of watching the program, make clear that there is the story (in this case the show itself).
And then there is the way that the story is told. Continue reading “First Person Point of View and the Act of Storytelling”
What Do You Envision?
Adapted from “Draw the Argument” by Barclay Barrios of Florida Atlantic University.
When I have my class read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” I begin discussion by telling the students to form groups of four and draw the poem together. Often, this is met with a bit of surprise and confusion; but eventually students sit together, read the poem, and draw a picture. Once the groups have finished, I ask one member of each group to re-create the picture on the board. We evaluate the pictures and then return to the poem for further discussion.
While this exercise may seem like a simplistic way to approach the poem, I think it’s a valuable way to bring students into the discussion – and to highlight their ability to actually interpret poetry – because:
- Drawing the poem encourages students to re-read the poem. So often students read poems quickly and don’t spend time deciphering the imagery and the figurative language. If they don’t get it immediately, they give up. My students tell me that poetry is “too hard” and that they’re not good at “reading between the lines.” This exercise can disabuse students of that notion: While drawing, my students are able to make sense of much of the poem without my intervention. Continue reading “What Do You Envision?”
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 19th 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””
Student-directed Questioning
One of our challenges as teachers of literature is to encourage students to move from simply answering questions we ask to formulating their own questions. To get at this, I have students write two discussion questions every day we meet as a class and e-mail them to me no later than 30 minutes before the class begins. From there, I take the questions, group them according to common themes and lead a seminar-style discussion. (This format works better in upper division courses, but this is easily adapted in larger first year courses by imposing earlier deadlines).
Students need to learn how to ask discussion questions, because too frequently they simply ask questions that focus on plot points or basic facts. While it’s important, certainly, to make sure that everyone knows what exactly happens, that focus doesn’t get at the interpretive work that makes literary studies enjoyably challenging. And it doesn’t encourage critical thinking.
So I give the students time to practice. For the second day of class I assign the students a brief reading (usually a few poems). In class, I pair them up and give them direction about how to ask questions; they work together to develop questions, put them on the board and then evaluate the quality of the questions; we collectively brainstorm ways to improve the questions that don’t open up discussion.
To get them started on writing the questions I provide two frameworks: one based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, and another based on the critical thinking paradigm developed by Richard Paul and Linda Elder*. With this latter option, I provide the students with templates of questions, which I’ll reproduce here: Continue reading “Student-directed Questioning”
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”
Reviving Patmore’s Angel in the House
Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and the co-editor of several books, including Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (UPNE / Brandeis, 2000) and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); his essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, notably Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He has written lesson plans and pedagogical materials for Poetry Out Loud, the Poetry Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, and has been awarded five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead summer seminars and school-year workshops on “teaching the pleasures of poetry.”
Years ago at my grandmother’s house, I stumbled on a little Victorian quatrain titled “Constancy Rewarded,” by Coventry Patmore. It’s a tiny piece of Patmore’s book The Angel in the House, which was something of a bestseller back in the days when books of poetry could actually be bestsellers. I loved the quatrain at sight, and teach it often.
We hear of Patmore’s volume now mostly thanks to Virginia Woolf, who noted as late as 1931 that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” The book itself, however, is long, self-divided, and much more interesting than the caricature that Woolf killed off. The quatrain from Canto XI Book II isn’t stuffy, repressive, or patriarchal. Quite the contrary; it’s positively frisky, if you read it right.
Here’s the poem:
I vow’d unvarying faith, and she,
To whom in full I pay that vow,
Rewards me with variety
Which men who change can never know.
Four lines, one sentence: how do you bring it to life? Continue reading “Reviving Patmore’s Angel in the House”
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””