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And what shoulder…

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.”

This morning, William Blake’s “The Tyger” is running through my mind—and through my shoulders. Four beats per line, four lines per stanza: that’s sixteen push-ups every quatrain. I’m gunning for a hundred, but I’m not there yet. Poetry helps.

I started this poetry/fitness kick last summer, when my wife introduced me to Steve Speirs’ book 7 Weeks to 100 Push-Ups. The first week or two went fine, but as the numbers in the final sets grew longer, I could only hit the target if I found something to focus on other than the aches in my delts and triceps. Metrical poems did the trick. Line by line, beat by beat, they held my attention, even as they let me calculate how far I’d gotten. Continue reading “And what shoulder…”

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

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”

Group Plot Exercises

Because student writers are often suspicious of plot structure, believing it to be too mathematical or too cliché, it’s helpful to teach plotting as mechanics rather than invention, as usage rather than creation. Students should learn to exercise their “plotting muscles,” and with practice they can become confident in their abilities to build solid plot structure.

In class, I use a sequence of out-loud group storytelling exercises. By emphasizing quickness and collaboration, these exercises urge students to see plot as a skill to be practiced, rather than as a unique art object to be labored over. By working quickly, students learn that plot can be generated without unnecessary headaches. And by attending carefully to what comes before and trying to adapt to the developing plot, students work toward what Aristotle would call a “unity of action.”

Here’s how the exercises work:

STEP ONE. The class tells a story one word at a time, going around the room two or three times. This step serves largely as a warm-up, but it also demonstrates that plot balances individuality and utility — sometimes a student is lucky enough to get a noun or verb; other times, an article or preposition is required. This step can be repeated until students are comfortable. Continue reading “Group Plot Exercises”

Change of Style, Change of Subject: A Reading Strategy

“A change of style,” says Wallace Stevens, “is a change of subject.”

I quote that line to students all the time because it sums up one of the keys to saying interesting things about almost any poem. Teach this concept—really teach it, so that it becomes “truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, / reflex action,” as Robert Hayden says—and you’ve given your students a powerful way to attend to any piece of writing.

As Stevens reminds us, whenever a poem’s mood or idea changes, so will its style, with some kind of shift, no matter how slight, in its rhythm, diction, phrasing, sound, or ratio of sentence to line. By extension, anywhere you spot a change of style, you’ve spotted a shift in substance, even if the ideas seem, at first glance, the same.

To introduce this reading strategy, I like to use Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.” The poem’s scenario is familiar, and spelled out clearly enough to be accessible even to wary readers:

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you—

Then, it will be true. Continue reading “Change of Style, Change of Subject: A Reading Strategy”

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”

Beyond Realism

Teachers of beginning playwriting are wise to lay out certain rules that can boost the success of student writers. Buzz McLaughlin’s The Playwright’s Process—a textbook I use—puts forward “A Few Initial Guidelines” (17-19). Many of these guidelines are useful; however, I believe McLaughlin goes too far when he asserts that beginning playwrights should write in a realistic style (18).

While realistic drama has its place in the classroom, I question the notion that realism must come first. Such a premise denies the primary reason dramatists write: not to recreate life—which can be watched as it unfolds in any laundromat or public place—but rather to tell a story aloud.

Playwriting is best understood as a logical step in oral storytelling: first, describe an incident; then, add dialogue to that description; next, recite the dialogue with appropriate attitude (acting); and, finally—when the story overwhelms the capacity of the solo teller—ask friends to join in and take on roles (drama). Nothing in this process suggests the necessity of any imitation of life with its nitty-gritty details. Furthermore, theatre history tells us that drama did not begin with what we would call realism; so why begin with it in the classroom? Certainly, many of drama’s most lasting successes—the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, for instance—are not realistic and are nothing like words overheard in a café. Continue reading “Beyond Realism”

Looking Ahead: Assignment Ideas

For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching creative writing is finding new ways to break students out of their routines, getting them to look at their world and describe it a little differently, a little slant. This semester, I gave my introductory students an assignment, based on an exercise of John Gardner’s, in which they wrote 250-word sentences that might appear in a story. The assignment, I hoped, would make unavoidable a deep consideration of details, clarity, pacing, and of course mechanics. It gave them fits, in the best sense—but in the end they cooked up some doozy prose, also in the best sense. In fact, some of the best writing all semester was contained in these long, long sentences. I suspect that’s because when building and wrestling a sentence of that length, students can’t help focusing on the parts and the whole simultaneously. They see that form is content, that punctuation carries meaning, and that this sentence (and, by extension, all sentences) demands nothing less than our most considered attention.

I’m going to use that assignment again.

Next semester, I also plan to spring a “radio drama” assignment on my upper-level fiction workshop. I’m thinking that students would work in pairs, create a drama that is five minutes long, with nothing but dialogue and sound effects. No voiceover. My hope is that the assignment will cause them to pay close attention to dialogue and narrative structure. It should also be fun. We’ll play the finished five-minute recordings in class, maybe burn CDs with everyone’s work—an audio anthology of radio dramas. Perfect for long car rides.

So my question, as this semester draws to a close, is this: What have you got up your sleeve for the spring?

You Write, Too?

I’m always surprised when, weeks into a semester, I’ll say something in class that prompts a student to tilt his head at me and say, “Wait—you write, too?”

Meaning—you don’t only teach this stuff, but you actually do it?

I’m not talking about my upper-level or graduate students, who enter class with a sense of their professors’ professional interests and activities. But my introductory students are often surprised to learn that when I’m not in the classroom or at office hours, I’m at home doing exactly what I’m asking them to do: writing.

We sometimes take it for granted that our undergraduates know what it is to teach at the college level—that creative writing instructors are also creative writers. That we, too, struggle for the right form for a poem or the best way to end a story or the most honest and vivid way to present an essay. We, too, drink coffee; we, too, stop ourselves from wasting time on the internet. We doubt ourselves, and then we think we’re brilliant, and then we realize that, no, we aren’t. We fret over deadlines. We fret over fretting. We worry that no one will “get” what we’re writing; we worry that everyone will. The biggest difference between us and our students is that we’ve read more books and written more words. We’re further along in an apprenticeship that only ends when we’re in the ground. Continue reading “You Write, Too?”