The Tallest Men on Earth

There’s a band called “Tallest Man on Earth” that for quite awhile I thought was called “Tallest Men on Earth.”  And I was disappointed to realize I was wrong (never mind that the band is just one guy and so the singular is appropriate), because Tallest Men on Earth just sounds so much more interesting than Tallest Man on Earth.  This to me is the perfect lesson on titles.  When you see something titled “The Tallest Man on Earth,” you know, or at least you assume you know, exactly what it’s about (he’s a Turk named Sultan Kosen, and he’s eight foot three).  But if you see something titled “The Tallest Men on Earth,” that sets a greater mystery—it raises a reader’s curiosity right away.

At the moment, in fiction, nobody is coming up with better titles than Karen Russell.  Her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, establishes her sense of humor, the stories’ strangeness, and their originality.  But she topped that with her second book, Swamplandia!, a title that I sometimes call out just for the fun of it.  Never have I loved an exclamation point more.  It’s a title that actually gets stuck in my head.  Easy to remember when you’re in the library or the bookstore or recommending things to friends.  And like St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, it sets the reader up for what’s to come—a strange, atmospheric novel set largely in an alligator theme park.

Students often struggle with titles.  They use a lot of clichés.  Or puns.  Or abstractions. They often use words that appear in the very first sentence or line of the piece.  My advice to students is twofold:

1)     You want a title that will draw readers into the poem/story/essay before they read it.

2)     You want a title that helps readers see the poem/story/essay in a new light after they’ve read it. Continue reading “The Tallest Men on Earth”

Helping students engage with lectures and other content

In addition to teaching literature and writing courses, every fall I teach a course that develops skills for student success.  Recently we worked on note-taking. The exercise I used reminded me that when we give lectures, we need to make sure that our students connect with the material we’re presenting.

The exercise is this: Students watch a brief video lecture (I like Liz Coleman’s TED talk from a few years ago, “Call to Reinvent Liberal Arts Education”); they take notes and then compare and discuss their notes.  However, what I discovered recently is that when my students watched Coleman’s brief lecture (18 minutes!) they began to get tired and stopped paying attention, the longer the talk went on. This really defeated the purpose of watching Coleman’s lecture, especially because she presents her most essential points toward the end of her talk.

My students missed the big point.  They got information, but they couldn’t do with it what they needed to.

Continue reading “Helping students engage with lectures and other content”

Unpublished, but Non-Perishable

Some of you may have noticed that my author bio reveals that I’ve recently changed my institutional affiliation—I have left Chowan University in North Carolina and accepted a position teaching creative writing and literature at my alma mater, St. Lawrence University in upstate New York.  I’ve written before (though not for this blog) about my undergraduate years and the vital role that my professors played in turning me into the writer and thinker I am today, so you can probably understand that I’m quite excited to be back, teaching alongside the scholars and artists who inspired me when I was an 18-year-old, flannel-clad Gen-Xer who had a vague idea that he wanted to be a writer, but didn’t quite know how he was going to get there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about 18-year-old Bradley these past few weeks.  Part of me almost expects to run into him, walking across the quad or coming out of the dining hall.  Part of me feels like I already have run into him—or run into his doppelganger from 2012, at any rate.  I’m teaching two creative writing classes and one literature class this semester, and these students are—for the most part—really enthusiastic about what they’re reading and writing.  I’ve taught thoughtful and ambitious students before, of course, but never so many at one time.  So it’s been an exhilarating experience.

One thing I’ve noticed about the undergraduate writers I’m teaching this semester is that many of them seem savvier about things like publishing opportunities and grad school programs than I was when I studied here.  I’ll be giving a talk later this semester to the students who work on the campus literary magazine, and one thing that the student who organized the talk told me they’d definitely be interested in hearing about was how I got editors to pay attention to my work, and what advice I have to give about getting creative work published. Continue reading “Unpublished, but Non-Perishable”

The Greek Chorus: Or, You Will All Have to Participate

When teaching plays, I can generally find a handful of students who are very willing to read parts, though I usually have to wait rather patiently to find enough students to read all the parts (and patience is not a strong suit of mine).  But, of course, I want all students to participate.

I’ve found that Greek tragedies provide a good opportunity for participation. They feature a number of characters – and always have a chorus.  Everyone can be in the chorus. There are some ways to approach Greek tragedies that could lead to some discussion of how the plays were themselves performed.

First, it might be useful to talk about the fact that, in ancient times, the individual characters of the play were originally performed by three actors who wore different masks.  This means that actors would have played more than one role, since most of the plays have more than three characters – Antigone has seven characters and Oedipus Rex has eight, plus various guards and children.  In an effort to think about how the actors might indicate the different roles, it might be useful, then, to have the students bring in props – or better yet, make masks – that signal each character. Continue reading “The Greek Chorus: Or, You Will All Have to Participate”

Web of Truths: 5 Sites for Creative Nonfiction

This is not a proper blog post, I admit, but it seems to me that some teachers of creative nonfiction might not be aware of all the resources that are out there on the web, free of charge, that might be useful in a creative nonfiction classroom.  Here are five of my favorites. By all means, include yours in the comments—especially if you edit or read for a magazine with a significant online presence that instructors and students ought to be aware of.

1.  Brevity. Edited by Dinty W. Moore, Brevity is an excellent online magazine of brief nonfiction, from some of the best writers in the field.  From Brevity’s description:

“For more than a decade now, Brevity has published well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form, along with craft essays and book reviews. Though still committed to the mission of publishing new writers, Brevity has enjoyed an embarrassment of recent riches, including the work of two Pulitzer prize finalists, numerous NEA fellows, Pushcart winners, Best American authors, and writers from India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, and Japan. Authors published in Brevity include Sherman Alexie, Lia Purpura, Terese Svoboda, John Calderazzo, Steven Barthelme, Mark Yakich, Ander Monson, Caitlin Horrocks, Jon Pineda, Brenda Miller, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Robin Behn, Abby Frucht, Barbara Hurd, Bret Lott, Ira Sukrungruang, Rigoberto González, Judith Kitchen, Michael Martone, and Diana Hume George.”

Work from Brevity has been anthologized and reprinted in venues including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Utne Reader, the Short Takes anthology, the Best Creative Nonfiction anthology from W.W. Norton, and many recent writing textbooks.

2. Brevity Blog.  For news and commentary about the form, nothing beats Brevity magazine’s blog, which is updated frequently.  Any time there’s a debate in the world of creative nonfiction, you can count on some smart blog posts from a variety of contributors. Continue reading “Web of Truths: 5 Sites for Creative Nonfiction”

Letter to Lauren (Who is Freaking Out, Who is Feeling Underprepared, Underread, Under Everything), On the Occasion of Her Entering Graduate School

I am telling Lauren in Texas (and Anna in Ohio and Emily in California and Colleen in Chicago) to take a deep breath. (I’m not telling them the feeling of being unprepared, under-read, behind never really goes away.) I’m telling them what Jerry Stern told me when I similarly freaked: develop a subject. To enter graduate school with a passion or two, your own little corner where you maybe don’t exactly reign, but you know your way around, a bit, gives you a place to be.  A thing you can be known for.

Lauren will read all of Carson McCullers, and everything she can find about Carson McCullers. Every letter, every blog, every journal article. Every biography. Brochures from the house tour. If it’s Carson, Lauren (who has wisely named her dog Carson) reads it. Meanwhile, over in Ohio, dear Ann’s on her 18th-century-unmarried-American women kick—good, good—and Emily’s making her way to California, torn between short story cycles, Hemingway, and the graphic novel.  Good!  Good. That’s all you have to do.  Don’t even try to keep up with the new Eggers, Franzen, Chabon, Munro.  Don’t worry: Moby didn’t happen then and it’s not going to happen now. Forget about the vow to do Russians in winter. Keep up with your courses.  And fall in love: with your subject. One author. Part of a period. Japanese pillow books. Mine your tiny patch of land to its deepest depths. And you’ll be fine!

When you get to graduate school, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed. You constantly feel dumb. You didn’t read enough in undergrad, and the books you read were the wrong books! Don’t worry. Go narrow. Stay put. Continue reading “Letter to Lauren (Who is Freaking Out, Who is Feeling Underprepared, Underread, Under Everything), On the Occasion of Her Entering Graduate School”

Who Died and Made You Author?

Sometimes literary theory is pretty distant from the practical work of teaching. Think back to that time you brought your panopticon or your phallus (Lacan’s, I mean!) into the classroom, and to the moment in the middle of your excited explanation of the revolutionary ideas delivered to you across the Atlantic and through that one class in grad school when you realized it wasn’t helping  your students understand “A Rose for Emily.” The connections between the work with theory that we do in our training and our research often can seem part of another world than the one in which we teach.

I was reminded the other day—on the occasion of one of those curious confluences of events that happen when you’re doing a lot at once and all of the different things swim together in a river of caffeine—that this is not always the case. I’d just read D. T. Max’s new biography of the late David Foster Wallace, and in an interview I did with him (here) asked him about the revelation that Wallace had voted for Reagan. It seems to have been a surprise to many of his readers, who had come, through their reading of Wallace’s fiction and essays, to see him as squarely on the other end of the ideological spectrum. They thought they had a sense of the man from reading what he wrote, and this bit of news blurred the picture they’d constructed of him. Continue reading “Who Died and Made You Author?”

Creating a Syllabus for Introductory Multi-Genre

This week, I’m creating a syllabus for my multi-genre creative writing course.

I believe new writers should delay the genre decision for as long as possible. I believe in trying out genres as one does running shoes, asking how will this move me? My introductory mixed-genre course centers on interrogating genre, inventing genre. I believe a kind of wildness and abandon and deliberate rejection of constraint serve new writers well.

What’s most important at the beginning—of a writing life, a semester, a program of studying writing—is to play. And this play must be in the service of one thing: mastering one’s ability to get to one’s own truth.  Learning the in-depth intricacies of point of view in fiction, or seven ways to present character, isn’t as important, in my opinion, as learning how to come up with some subjects that engage the writer as much as the reader, and how to approach those subjects in ways that allow for discovery and surprise, depth and meaning. Continue reading “Creating a Syllabus for Introductory Multi-Genre”

Prior Knowledge: A Reminder to Myself

Recently, I taught Art Spiegelman’s short graphic essay “Mein Kampf” to my first year composition students.  I realized quickly that they were unaware of Spiegelman’s seminal work, Maus, which was something of a problem, because it’s part of what the piece is commenting on.  I did my best to explain to the students to basics of Maus and found a couple of images that I could project from the computer.

We did our best to have a discussion — and in terms of my goals for the day we achieved them.  I was able to have students look beyond the words to the way that the words and the images interacted and complemented one another.  But I felt like something was missing from the discussion — most especially the students’ ability to truly appreciate the work.

This is something I worry about a lot.  It’s also something I suspect most of us run into a lot. We know our pop culture references are lost on our students (and theirs are lost on us).  That’s expected — and I’m so far past that threshold that I roll my eyes at myself along with my students.

But when it comes to other types of prior knowledge — especially the type that’s necessary to understand literature — I think we’re facing a different sort of problem.  A certain amount of prior knowledge is necessary when reading any literature, and that’s even more true for those of us who teach a lot of literature from earlier eras (or “back in the day,” as my students always say, whether we’re talking the 1990s or the 1590s). Continue reading “Prior Knowledge: A Reminder to Myself”

Shifting Genres

When I was a child, and my dad was a theater grad student, he adapted a couple of short stories into plays (one was Walter Wangerin Jr.’s “Lily” and the other was Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”).  I remember the plays only hazily, but I was always struck by how interesting it was to shift the genre.  It’s certainly something that filmmakers do all the time – how many film versions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are there, after all?

Sometimes we complain about adaptations – some of us feel that they’re misrepresentations of the work on the page.  Ultimately, though, they’re interpretations.  It’s obvious that a Shakespearean adaptation is an interpretation – it’s drama, so it’s meant to be interpreted.  But shifting from one non-performance genre to another – a short story to a play, a poem to prose – might seem like something that we purists don’t really like (and I admit to often being one of those purists).

However, I think that we can use that genre shift in the classroom.  Some of the other bloggers here have suggested encouraging students to shift genres in their own creative writing.  I think we should consider doing it from time to time in the literature classroom as well.  Having students rewrite something – or even act out something – as a classroom exercise is an interpretive act that requires them to pay attention to details and pay attention to theme.  It can help students untangle that which they find confusing. Continue reading “Shifting Genres”