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”

Seeing Molly Sweeney

I decided to read Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney just before I went to see the Irish Repertory Theatre’s recent production.  This is not something I always do.  Often, of course, I would have read or sometimes even have seen a classic play, but usually not immediately before seeing it again.  I was concerned that my emotional response wouldn’t be as immediate with the lines so fresh in my mind.  Molly Sweeney is a young woman, blind for forty years, just about to experience an operation that would give her sight.  It is a profoundly emotional time in Molly’s life and in her husband, Frank’s, life.

I read the play knowing John Millington Synge’s The Well of the Saints (1905), on a similar theme, and also knowing that Friel had been moved by Oliver Sacks’s “To See and Not to See,” which is about sight and knowledge.  All of these influences were here, but they were dwarfed by the power of actors Simone Kirby (Molly), Jonathan Hogan (Dr. Rice), and Ciaran O’Reilly (Frank).  Molly’s first speech caught me immediately.  Kirby’s delivery of the lines was so direct, so innocent, so filled with the ambiguity of fear and joy that I felt a rush of emotion.  If anything, reading the play immediately before seeing it intensified my pleasure and my response—even as I anticipated the lines I remembered best.

Everything depends on how the actors deliver their lines because this is a play with little overt action.  I’m sure some theatergoers might doubt that it is a drama at all.  In the tradition of Friel’s own Faith Healer, the actors stand and speak one after the other to the audience, telling them their very distinct view of the same story.  This may seem undramatic—and in the hands of a lesser writer it almost certainly would be.  But Molly Sweeney is riveting in part because the story is surprising and the actors are moving.  Storytelling in Molly Sweeney, especially from three points of view, constitutes significant drama.

Being able to bring your students to the theater after reading a play is usually regarded as a good idea.  I can see the reasoning behind it, and in this case I wasn’t sorry I’d read before, but I don’t always feel it’s the best idea. What do you think?  What have your experiences been, taking students to the theater just after reading a play?

 

 

Experiential Literature

I’ve been thinking about multimodal learning lately, and I’ve been drawn to the idea of making literature experiential, almost tangible. I’ve had my students work with the material, physical experience of literature in a couple of different ways – and I’ve been brainstorming other possibilities.

Perhaps the most obvious idea in teaching students to experience literature physically is to have students act out scenes from plays.  I don’t mean just having them read the scene aloud; rather, I mean having the students physically act out the play at the front of the classroom.  For example, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl includes a street scene with three separate shops and a group of characters moving among those shops, conversing and sampling the wares.  I think that this scene is often quite difficult for students to comprehend on the page, so I have students not only read it aloud, but also follow the stage directions.  I draw points on the board where the shops would be located, and recruit students to act the parts; then I have the actors move around the “stage” in the front of the classroom, with one extra student acting as a stage manager to remind people to move if necessary.  In this way, the students still sitting in the class can visualize what occurs, and the students acting it feel the almost dizzying experience of moving between these shops.  This is particularly useful in a play that’s deeply rooted to the city of London, a space that contemporaneous theater-goers would have known well. Continue reading “Experiential Literature”

Material Realities

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”

On Friday Night Lights and Teaching Character

MV5BMTYwNjIyMTYwOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTA2MDU1MQ@@._V1._SY317_CR12,0,214,317_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:

  1. 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”