Winter

When the ground is snow-covered you really wonder why this isn't called Winter Semester.

I looked around my livingroom this afternoon. Since we gave up TV, the chairs are no longer pointed at the tube. They are pointed at the woodheater. This is one reason why I love winter, the woodheater. I love it that fire is the focal point of our house. I always feel sad when spring arrives and the heater goes dead.

I am excited to think of my students reading James Wright and Georg Trakl together.

Trickster Tales

The students performed the tales, and we had such a good time. Some of them went all out with wigs and props. The "Talking Penis" group had me laughing so hard I was crying. They solved the obvious problem of how to portray a talking penis by having one student (the penis) situated under a table. They hung a blanket over the table so the student couldn't be seen. He kicked the table when it was his turn and shouted his lines, once in a while laughing wildly (the tale calls for it).

Trickster tales are always better performed rather than read. I think the form almost demands a performance.

I am always amazed at the creativity and talent of young people. They had only a few minutes to plan their presentations, and they did a first rate job, all of them.

I just love being a college teacher.

50/50

Of all things, carrots.

Someone in the Honors Seminar brought a bag of mini-carrots on the last day of class and passed around the bag. Everyone was happily chomping on carrots as we witnessed final presentations.

Maria wrote a play, which we performed. Jacob gave a sermon. Libby did a work of art. And Jim, who joked while eating carrots, who placed a carrot here or there on his face to suggest some animal or other (forehead / unicorn!), wrote of Camus and Kierkegaard. Deadly serious stuff about death themes in Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman. But there he was, Jim, pretending to be a unicorn with a tiny carrot-horn. What a way for our time together to end.

Thus comes to an end my fascination with seeing if I could write 50 blog entries during 2008. I said I would do so and so I have. Amen.

38/50

Yesterday, I accidentally read the wrong student stories for my workshop, so I wasn't prepared. That's never happened before and I don't know what I was thinking.

In addition, one student also asked if we could have workshop outside, and I declined, and she pouted in a good-natured kind of way.

So last night I dreamed I was a workshop student, and I was unprepared. I had not read all the stories under discussion. The teacher was a former professor of mine, a thin, enigmatic, intense man with curly hair. It was night, and we all sat around a huge wooden table in the middle of some woods. The trees were black-barked and bare. The sky was clear. A big full moon shone through lacy branches.

I had several thick, unread manuscripts before me.

I thought to myself, How weird, this situation, this place.

32/50

The discussions with the two classes about The Bridge went very well. As usual, I was more on my game in the second class. By then I had found the true center of what I wanted to say and was able to lead the discussion more efficiently. However, both classes dealt with the difficult subject matter admirably. I was proud of them.

The Bridge does not seek to answer why people jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, but it does seek to explore how we deal with the suffering of others.

31/50

I had the best experience with my fiction workshop today.

Last night, I read the two stories that would be up for discussion. One story was about a young woman whose father is in the hospital dying of cancer. The other was about a young woman who is living with a group of friends who are deadening themselves with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, sex, and even school. Both stories were very richly detailed.

So last night, I had a dream that embodied both.

I dreamed about my own father's death at home, from cancer. I dreamed I was much younger than I am now. I returned home from school to find my father out of his bed and lying on the floor. I helped him back into his bed. He immediately turned into a piece of firewood and the bed turned into a smoldering "bed of coals." I thought how the fire was going to purge my father's pain, and, selfishly, my own grief, for I was tired of sickness and waiting for the end. Then I felt guilty and used a poker to separate the wood (my father) from the coals. This dream portrayed the conflict in the student's story, the conflict between loving her father and hating death.

The other story involved a bear. Now, there are erotic overtones in women's stories about bears. In a wonderful book by Marian Engel called Bear, a female character actually has sex with a bear. I thought my student's story also sexually charged. The story was about characters who were all essentially "dead." Spirituall dead. The story involved the narrator's moment of awarness. This moment came through a special interaction (not sex) that she had with the bear.

So the other part of my dream had erotic overtones. But that part of the dream, I will keep to myself!

Anyway, the discussion in class today was a lot of fun. Two strong stories. A great day in workshop.

30/50

Last night on 60 Minutes, Al Gore talked about his disappointment about losing the 2000 presidential race with George Bush. But he also talked about how that disappointment had led him into his new direction as an environmentalist. He said that we grow wise as a result of our disappointments and suffering.

I am reminded of Siddhartha, who was shielded from human suffering but who willingly left the fortress of his home and his imagination in order to experience it. He wanted to understand. He wanted wisdom.

I think that literature can also give us the experience of human suffering. Literature can make us more empathetic, more wise.

Like everyone, I've had many disappointments, and I can truly say that I don't regret them because I've grown as a result of them, not grown into bitterness but into a fuller realization of the human experience.

Today I will talk with two of my classes about the documentary The Bridge. I hope I can do a good job of it.

27/50

I had a good day at the university today. The students seemed to be in a good mood. They exchanged stories in the workshop and talked genially with each other. Then we spoke truthfully to each other about revising.

The Native American Literature students had a test and got response papers back. Even these tense happenings did not squelch their apparent good mood. Indeed, many of them wrote essays that had inspired me, and they mowed through the test quickly and efficiently. They are a good class.

In my last two classes (response to literature), I had some serious things to go over. We discussed Ovid's Icarus and Auden's "Musee Des Beaux Arts," and then we watched the first half of The Bridge, a documentary I've discussed here before. I thought it might be a downer for students, but the class seemed to open a lot of them up and I had an outpouring of writings waiting for me in my university Internet inbox by the time I got home. I can see that they are really making connections between all the literature we have read this semester and also connections between the literature and themselves. That always makes for a great day.

Emily Dickinson Dysfunction, Part 3

I came up with an idea tonight that I am hoping will contribute to a cure to my Emily Dickinson Dysfunction (EDD). I have started a secret blog dedicated to nothing but Emily. I will continue to thrash out my thoughts and discoveries on Emily here (along with my other ramblings). And then once I have digested the material enough, I will turn to the secret blog and record my journey there in a more "finished," "polished," or "poetic" form. I would like to try this experiment for at least a year. At the end of the year, I would like to have a personal notebook (case study) representing my journey to know Emily. This seems like a fun project. Most of all, a worthy project. I hope I will not quit on it. I hope my curiosity about Emily will sustain me for 12 months. I think this project will make me a better teacher and writer.

Emily Dickinson Dysfunction, Part 2

I might not have ever come back to Emily Dickinson, except that I felt I had to cover her to some extent in the Modern Poetry course. Almost all the textbooks credit Whitman and Dickinson as being important forerunners to Modern Poetry. While discussing Dickinson, however, I had to admit to my students that I felt as though I was being "busted," my lack of appreciation for her work made real in front of my captive audience. Some of the students spoke of their appreciation for her work; others fell in my camp, not totally turned off to her but rather perplexed regarding her work.

Subsequently, I have made it my goal to get to know Emily as best I can.

I used to be disappointed in myself for not being a fast learner, for being someone who had to struggle toward enlightenment. But now I recognize that for me the struggle is part of the blessing. Getting to know Emily and to admire her work (as I feel I am capable of doing) is going to be a significant journey for me.

As it has turned out, I share more with Emily than I ever could have imagined.

Although in the past I have been put off by her stark style, her ambiguous punctuation and capitalization, the contradictory interpretations of her work that perplex, I am just now coming to know the brilliant possibilities of her poetry.

More to come.

Student surprise

I was surprised by the level of discussion that happened in my two intro. to literature classes today. We were comparing and contrasting Ovid's Icarus telling to Auden's "Musee Des Beaux Arts." We had also recently watched The Bridge, the documentary about people who committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge (students also read "Jumpers" from The New Yorker.)

These are late afternoon/evening classes (4:30 and 6:00). I've taught classes at the time for several years. Students tend to be tired after a long day or sleepy because they've just eaten supper. But all semester the students have been awake and aware.

Today, given the subject matter (suicide), I expected nervousness and silence, but they were talkative and engaged. I was proud of them.

The Long Journey

Along Highway 1, near Big Sur, California. This is me standing at the base of one of the most curious land features along this highway.

Many people come to the Esalen Workshops in order to put their experiences into a context. They want to express their pain without being trite or luridly confessional.

During my workshops, I saw people dealing with all the aspects of the human experience with perseverence, courage, and dignity. I saw people laugh (great celebratory laughter) and I saw them weep at what they had written. It all happened in the most supportive atmosphere I have ever experienced.

Big Sur is an excellent setting for writing because so much of what is going on in the landscape mirrors our own interior journey. The ocean and the rocks are important symbols of experience; however I found this roadside phenomenon to be most characteristic of people's experience at Esalen. This is not stone; it is a mixture of sand, clay, and small stones, shaped by the wind and the rain. It crumbles easily and yet it has a deceptive appearance of solidity. This geographical feature is right next to the highway, and it makes me recall one of my favorite poems by Theodore Roethke:


In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones. ...


--excerpted from "Journey Into the Interior" by Theodore Roethke

Something that happened at Esalen

She was tall and slender. She came into the workshop in a sleeveless blouse. She had a tattoo encircling her upper arm. From something she'd read to me earlier, I knew she had a dying child. She listened to my prompt and wrote for twenty minutes. She read. It was a delicate ending to the book she would someday write. I could see the book in my mind's eye. When she finished reading, I closed the book gently and put it on an imaginary shelf. I wanted to cry because the book was so beautiful and now it had ended.

Strange Days

What a strange few days it has been. My mother-in-law died. I dislike the term, "mother-in-law," but it answers the question of relationship. I shall not say much, except what is obvious. We are all sad.

Meanwhile, my trip to California is coming up quickly. Some of the luster is gone because of the family tragedy. Allen even mentioned not wanting to go. My desire faltered as well. However, we are going. I will be teaching writing workshops again at Esalen in Big Sur. I have been looking forward to it for several months. Ultimately, I am happy to have the opportunity to see the Pacific Coast again. Brian (our son) will be living here and watching our animals.

My story "Trash" just came out in The Sun which has a new website. You can look at the contributor's notes of the issue that my story is in if you click >here<

Speaking of websites, for some weeks I have been trying to put together a website for myself. I had basically finished it except for a page where links got ruined. They still work but look bad. Now the site won't let me fix anything; it just keeps prompting me to make a new blog. I can't even delete the one I just finished. Oh dear. Maybe this is what I get for using a free service.

Strange days, strange days.

Posting is likely to be irregular until I get back on my pony again.

Changes

Drama of Life and Death. Theresa Williams. Collage.

I look back at the person I was when I first started blogging and I feel she is very different from the person I am now. Once the blog fulfilled a need I had to figure out who I was artistically. I'd pushed a book out into the world but felt lost about my where to go next with my writing. I was full of doubts. I felt bogged down in my academic work. I was trying to find myself artistically and professionally.

Lately, I've been thinking about quitting the blog. I've been thinking I don't need it anymore. I'm starting to feel grounded in my writing life. My teaching excites me in ways it hasn't for a long time. I have more ideas for stories than I will ever be able to write in a lifetime. I've found out why I write and why I write about what I write about. Many of the friends I started out with in the blogging world have disappeared. Their interests, too, have changed, and they don't come here anymore. I feel a pulling away where I once felt a strong connection to others out there. This place is visited less all the time; the comments are sparse. It may be time for a change. That may mean it's time for me to quit.

On the other hand, I don't want to be a quitter. I need to sort through my feelings about all this.

If I stay, this blog will no doubt change from what it has been. It may become more an academic exploration of subjects I'm interested in, a beginning place for some things I'd like to flesh out. It may become more about my teaching, too, than it once was. I just don't know.

I'm staying for now. I'm thinking it over. I'm thinking out loud. I probably shouldn't mention it, really, but if I don't, then I'm perpetuating a sort of lie and holding it inside myself, and that has never been good for me.

Classes start on Monday. I have finished all three of my syllabi, and there are many new people who will come into my life once again. We will go on a voyage together and hopefully create bonds, and good memories.

I am going to California in September, to Big Sur, to teach workshops at Esalen again. It was overcast today, breezy. The humidity was low, the air crisp and cool. Such days make me feel alive.

I read an entire book this afternoon and evening, something I haven't done in a long time. I've been picking up books for weeks and only been able to tolerate them in short bursts. My thoughts slide away and I have to put the books aside. But I read Ianthe Brautigan's memoir straight through today. It is about how she dealt with the suicide death of her famous father, Richard Gary Brautigan. I ordered the book after doing a short review at a book group at Library Thing called books compared. Doing the review made me curious about Richard Brautigan again. I have always felt a strange connection to him, a connection I've welcomed but that has always made me a bit uneasy, too. Doing the review and reading Ianthe's book, You Can't Catch Death, makes me want to write about the connection I have with Brautigan as an attempt to understand it.

I've met some new friends at Library Thing. I even started a group over there called Art is Life. I've looked in on message boards and groups before and have been frankly appalled at what I saw: a lot of cruelty, sniping at each other, and worthless conversation. I've never seen a group I wanted to belong to. But people at Library Thing are more like I am, I feel. I am at home there.

I'm not quitting the blog yet. I haven't decided yet what to do. That is the truth.

Preparing for the Fall

My note taking and letter writing desk. My Walt Whitman Box seems to be right at home.

For the last week or so I've been taking a lot of notes in preparation for teaching the course in Modern Poetry in the Fall. It's a 300-level course, so class periods are going to have to be devoted to considerably more than asking the students, "What do you think this means?" Truthfully, I can't think of an artistic movement more complex or confusing than Modernism, and the last thing I want is for the students to throw their hands up in despair.

Last night I worked on Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. I still have a lot to sort through regarding Stevens, but I wanted to tackle Ezra Pound this evening. This is the desk where I do my note taking and prepare my lesson plans. I write letters at this desk, as well. Occasionally I grade papers here, too, although in winter I most often do that in a cozy chair beside the wood stove.

Things Keep Coming Together

Photo: Unknown artist. I like using it to depict my writing life.

For a while, I had a separate blog for teaching. I couldn't reconcile my teaching life with my creative life. I felt I was stuck. Happily, the two parts of my life have come together now. Over the summer, I requested to be switched permanently to the English Department. My request fell on sympathetic ears. What this means is that beginning in the Fall of 2007, I will be teaching literature and creative writing classes exclusively (women's studies occasionally), no freshman composition. This semester things are better already; I'm only teaching one composition section, and there are only nine students. They are a sweet group.

For the last three years, I have been studying poetry. I have been reading autobiographies, biographies, and criticism. As it turns out, this was a very good thing, because one of my first new assignments in my new role as an English Lecturer will be to teach a course on Modern Poetry. All said, the Modern movement in poetry covers a time frame of about eighty years. The precursors are Whitman and Dickinson and the movement ends just after WWII. So this would include Eliot, Pound, Millay, Lorca, Auden, and so forth. So things have come together for me once more. A personal interest has ended up being professional preparation. I still need to do a lot more reading and preparation, of course, but I look forward to it! Something I've been wanting to do for a long time is to study Eliot's "The Waste Land" more closely. Now I have a very good excuse for doing that.

This week in the Angst to Art Seminar, we talked about Lorca's essay on the Duende. The students also submitted their Confessional Postcards, all of which were deeply moving. One nearly moved me to tears. The students are starting to warm up to each other. This is good because in April they will be sharing a personal story about some kind of angst they have experienced.

I will write more about all of this later; right now, I have much grading and preparations to do for next week.

By the way: it is cold outside! We are supposed to get down below zero tonight.

Avoiding Talking Heads & Dealing with Death

Because of the MLK Holiday, I only got to meet with my Imaginative Writing class and the seminar once this week. For the IW class, I put together a powerpoint presentation which took them through the construction of an entire short story. The story shapes were "the bear at the door" and the "quest." A "bear at the door" shape involves some force being exerted on the main character, forcing the character to act (or the character chooses not to act). In other words, something is at the door. Do you keep the door closed and ignore it or do you open the door? Somehow, I can't think about this story shape anymore without remembering that Saturday Night Live skit where the shark is going door-to-door trying to gain entrance so it can eat the inhabitants. The shark used many tactics, such as claiming it had a telegram or a candy gram. Once it said it was "Just a dolphin, ma'am." And isn't that just like all the trials that come to humans? These trials come dressed in many guises, don't they? I used "quest" to mean that the character goes on an exterior and interior journey towards self-realization.

The point of the lesson was to show them how to avoid the "talking head" story, the disembodied head who goes on and on with no attachment to the sensory world. One student said of the "talking head" story: "Yes, it's like being shut up in a dark room with someone who's talking." And I said, "Exactly! Not fun."

So I set up a scenario in which they could choose a male or female character. The character has been told to either pay the rent or get out. The character then goes on a foot expedition through town, pausing to eat, to dream in front of store windows, to remember events at certain landmarks, etc. The story ends with an image, a sensory experience expressing some longing the character has.

In the seminar, I treated the students to an episode of How Art Made the World, with Nigel Spivey. I showed them the episode about how ancient peoples used art to both comfort and terrify the onlooker regarding death. The point of the documentary was to show that humans are the only animal (that we know of) that knows it will someday die, so humans needed to find ways of accepting that. Art is one way humans chose to express their thoughts and beliefs about death. In an online Interview, Nigel Spivey talks about a poem by D. H. Lawrence, which I think must be "Ship of Death." Lawrence wrote it as he was dying. It is one of my favorite poems, and I've dealt with it in a blog entry before. Here is the first part:

Now it is autumn and the failing fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.


The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves and exit from themselves.


and it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one's own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.



This documentary was relevant to us because so many authors have death themes. It really is one of two grand themes in literature, the other being love. It is fascinating to read the psychological underpinnings of how humans deal with death.

Anyone who is interested in the Nigel Spivey documentary can go here: How Art Made the World.

My used copy of John Berryman's letters to his mother, We Dream of Honour, arrived this week. I've been collecting artists'/writers' letters for a while now, and Berryman's letters are among the best of what I've collected so far. Very rich, insightful, sometimes tormented, sometimes striving, always intriguing letters.

All in all, it has been a pretty good week.

"During December's Death"

Photo: Image from an album by Nick Drake

Delmore Schwartz mentions December in several of his poems. This is probably because he was born in December (8th). I think we all see deep significance in the month in which we were born.

December has always been one of my favorite months. It probably started out that way because of Christmas. Later, December signaled time off from school. My mother's birthday was in December and my youngest son was born December 30.

Now I appreciate December's darkness, the solstice, and all the solstice represents about death and renewal.

Delmore Schwartz didn't make the cut for the seminar I'm teaching. I'll still be able to share some of his personal lyrics with the class, though. Before Christmas, I allowed them to choose which authors they wanted to look at closely and they chose: William Blake, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Tobias Wolfe, and Dorothy Allison.

I suspect no one chose Schwartz because they'd never heard of him, so that's why it's important that I introduce them to this fine poet, at least. Schwartz's "During December's Death" definitely is about thresholds:

The afternoon turned dark early;
The light suddenly faded;
The dusk was black although, elsewhere, the first star in the cold sky
suddenly whistled,
And I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys on
roller skates
Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926,
And I thought I heard the dusk and silence raided
By a calm voice commanding consciousness:
Wait: wait: wait as if you had always waited
And as if it had always been dark
And as if the world had been from the beginning
A lost and drunken ark in which the only light
Was the dread and white of the terrified animals' eyes.
And then, turning on the light, I took a book
That I might gaze upon another's vision of the abyss of conscious-
ness--
The hope, and the pain of hope, and the patience of hope and its
torment, its astonishment, its endlessness.

Here is an image of death as the abyss, terrible death as it exists in nature, a place not ordered but chaotic, a "drunken ark." Schwartz focuses on the frightening moment before the dark predator--death-- strikes.

I think it's odd how this poem foretells Schwartz's death, almost as though he had a premonition that he would die white-eyed with terror.

I love the last lines, where the speaker, frightened by the voices from the dark, takes a book and searches for the hope of renewal that death brings: death's "hope...pain of hope...patience of hope...its torment, its astonishment, its endlessness."

What better month than December to embody all this? December is a threshold-month.

Delmore Schwartz loved poetry; he loved to write. I think he tried until the very end to give himself ENTIRELY to what he loved best; He encouraged his friend, John Berryman, to do the same. Without Schwartz's encouragement, Berryman probably wouldn't have gone as far as he did with his writing.

First Week

The Imaginative Writing class for Honors students really surprised me. It meets twice a week in the evening, 7:30-8:45. There are 15 students, all very young, in their teens or early twenties, except for man in his sixties who added the class on Wednesday as part of our SAGE program.

Monday was your run-of-the-mill first day; Wednesday was magic.

I hardly ever create a day by day syllabus for this class. I prefer to adjust the activities to the temperament and need of whatever group of students I have. So I thought and thought about what to do on Wednesday, finally coming up with what I thought was a decent idea late Tuesday night.

As with all creative exercises, I knew it would go one of two ways, flopsville or down the road of success. It was a success.

I started the class by showing that scene in Wonder Boys when Grady, James, and the literary agent play a story game. They pick out an unusual-looking person in a bar and create a story about that person. It's a really funny and entertaining scene. It doesn't hurt that I love all three of the actors, Michael Douglas, Tobey MaGuire, and Robert Downey, jr. I figured the students would enjoy seeing Tobey MaGuire in a non-Spiderman role. As it happens, none of the students had ever seen Wonder Boys.

So then I divided the class into two groups. One group came to the front of the class and pretended they were riding a bus. I asked each person to bring a prop, like a cell phone, backpack, book, etc. Then I asked, "What's their story?" The people in their seats wrote; then the groups traded places.

The real kicker was that I took my great creepy Santa and asked one student to hold it. For the other group, I asked a student to hold two potatoes, one in each hand.

After both groups had a chance to write, I played the music video on the Wonder Boys DVD, "Things Have Changed." I then let them write for 10 minutes and asked them to start their story with the line: "I used to care, but things have changed." I said they must repeat that line three times.

Then I asked each person to share something they had written. By this time, there were only about ten minutes left in the class. I was astounded at the level of creativity in this class! As you can imagine, there was a great scenario about the Santa, and several great scenarios about the two potatoes. There were also some fantastic riffs about the "I used to care..." topic.

They loved reading and listening to each other's ideas, at times laughing, at times declaring, "That was awesome!" After class, they huddled into groups and continued the conversation. As I walked across the dark courtyard to my office, one of the students called out, "Wait! I'll walk with ya!"

On the way there, my dog Buddha streaked past us, chasing a toy Allen had thrown. My family was waiting for me and I'd just had a marvelous class. Life doesn't get much better than that!

Later that night, I had an e-mail from one of the students, saying he was incredibly excited about the class. He said he kicked his roommate off the computer as soon as he got to his dorm and continued writing what he'd started in class. He said he still was randomly laughing at things that had been written and said that night.

Now, if I can just keep the momentum going!

Things are coming together more slowly in the seminar. We haven't gotten very far yet in the Native American literature class, although several students have shown a special interest in the topic. Finally, the developmental writing class is small, only 9 students, and quiet, except for a 44 year old woman coming back to school for the first time this semester. She is on the ball; she really wants it all; she is my delight.