LT's ICRN ENGL489 Advanced Portfolio Workshop
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LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 [email protected] www.leetorda.com |
Spring 2015 Office Hours:
Tuesdays 2:00 to 4:00 Fridays 11:00 to 12:00 (noon) and by appointment. |
From 27 February 2015 Small Press Fiction and CNF
If I were to pick the essay that I liked best, it would be “What the Body Knows.” I like it for many reasons. First, I appreciate this woman’s knowledge of the land. I do not have that knowledge. I have a different knowledge, but it’s not that and, like my idol Annie Dillard, this writer does. She reminds me of Dillard when she writes about landscape in Alaska.
Another thing I very much appreciate is the structure of the essay. If we were mapping this essay out, we would be five pages in before we understand that the author is discovering that she is pregnant on this trip. That’s a neat trick. To bring us along imagining this is about a literal adventure to suddenly have us understand that this, too, is a figurative adventure. So if the story of her Alaska trek is blue, say, post its. Then the wall would be largely blue for five pages. Then, though, it would be, stereotypically, pink. Because there we get a page that indicates that the author is pregnant. We spend time in Alaska here, still, what she notices what she sees is marked then, by her pregnancy. Her writing builds in this section, her very language and sentence structure. They carry us like the river she is paddling on. The physical labor of seeing the journey through becomes powerful. And then the trip is over and she is sad, and the last part of the essay will then become, on our imaginary mapped wall, all pink. Because as this journey is over, this new one begins. The parallels of a new landscape—her body this time—and the labor to see the journey through, are, again, evident in the text in terms of space on the page and in her sentences, her language. The last line brings us back to the epigraph—daughters from the ends of the earth. She was literally at the end of the earth, and it is where her daughter first came to her.
It’s an elegant, beautiful meditation.
I have to add a line here about another piece of nonfiction “The Fiction Writer,” which, had you asked me three quarters of the way through the essay, I would have said I hated. And I still find the first three quarters a bit whiney. This novelist all jealous of someone who, we are to understand, hurt her. This whole thing about wanting to please others so much. So wimpy and treacly. I hate reading crap like that. And the whack job Natalie. I don’t even admire the writing all that much—the trope of repeating that line about fiction and belief. The way she sets off a single sentence to tell us that we should pay attention to something. She’s got a lot of guns on the table that are going to go off, and I don’t like or care about them .But, but, but. Then we get to the end. And after whining and telling us about the crazy that is Natalie, she shifts, she talks about belief and faith very differently. We understand that fiction is an act of hope, and that to believe the fiction is to believe in a better version of this world and ourselves. And there is where the magic of the essay lies. And, in retrospect, the essay brings together ideas about the role of fiction in our lives throughout the text all the while we are learning about Natalie’s fictions that were both hurtful and helpful in the lives of the people around her. It’s a neat trick of CNF to be able to use real moments to make larger points—to work it requires we believe it.
I have not talked much about fiction here, but the craft of fiction helps us write better nonfiction. The ability to pull an image out and make it mean something from real life comes from fiction. In fiction we make up things to mean things—and we have to hope that we believe them enough as readers and writers have write them true enough to be believed. That’s often hard. It’s why things labeled nonfiction must really, really be true because if they aren’t we wouldn’t believe them. Dialogue is something that nonfiction is using more and more. I do not particularly care for dialogue in nonfiction, but I see that it brings a kind of immediacy and realism to the essay (though, back to this problem of truth, I don’t always believe people are saying what we say they are saying in CNF). Narrative is driven by change—things have to happen to the people or place or idea that the writer is talking about. And both fiction and nonfiction in the essays we read chronicle change in the characters that inhabit the universes of these stories—because they are characters in fiction or nonfiction.
I am writing an essay right now called “The Unnecessary Walk.” It is about exactly that, my habit of taking walks I don’t need to take and sometimes don’t really have time to walk. I like to walk, and I’m good at it. I do this thing where I walk from South Station up through the garden and down the promenade all the way to back bay or to mass ave. I walk what would take me a few T stops to cover. And though I really am not from here, I love the park and the gardens. I love to read the plaques. But the essay is also about infertility. About not being able to have children. They are related thematically because my habit in life is to think there is always time enough, but, when it comes to having children, that is not at all the case. And, also, sometimes when you talk unnecessary walks you end up lost. It’s not a sad essay like this sounds, it’s an essay about how life just is sometimes. How we make choices and decisions and we live with them. What I learn from these essays is subtlety. I fear being obvious in my writing. My father was an artist and I would look at his work and much of it was really solid. Really good. But he would too often go just one step too far. And I don’t know really how to explain that except to say that sometimes you need to leave well enough alone and let the reader figure it out, but my father often didn’t in his paintings and I fear that I do the same thing in my writing. Seeing how the obvious lies next to the subtle in these pieces, how the lived life and the sad life weave together. That’s useful and reassuring. And I want to be better with language. I want to have the voice that I have, but I want it to be the essay voice of me, not the teaching voice or the email voice or the casual letter to my Aunt voice. They are good voices, an essay voice should be different. It should have a certain rhythm and a certain vocabulary and I want to work on that. These pieces made me think a lot about it.
From 20 February 2015 "Super White" and creative nonfiction, part I
I enjoyed super white. I am not like this guy. I know no one famous and have never met anyone famous. And I have not become famous or anything like that. And I am not depressive. And I often don't like essays by people that are famous or even remotely so. But I like this essay, and in part it is because I like his tone. I like how he delivers the story of his life. This is an essay about finding oneself, essentially, which is a terrible cliche, and in the hands of a lesser story-teller it would have been a debacle. But this guy is a pro in his own way.
So, that, in the end, is really why I like this essay. I appreciate that nothing is wasted, not an image, not a scene, not a word, not a moment. Everything speaks to each other and builds in important ways to a conclusion.
And, speaking of conclusions, I very much value the epilogue. Because it undoes the raveling of the essay. In that last scene, the young fan with the teddy bear is carried off, but our writer, the hero of this essay, is touring with David Byrne, and we've just read a paragraph where our main character is saying that the long ago shouting scene somehow sunk into David Byrne's head and, eventually, led to David Byrne coming to recognize his greatness. That's sort of cliche, and as I read I thought this--how it was too neat, but then I get to the epilogue and unravels it all by saying that, in the end, people are nuts and people like David Byrne meet lots of nuts, so many that he doesn't even remember his nuts moment with the author, and that crazy and depressed is, in fact, crazy and depressed, and not some thing to be romanticized. It's harsh, but real, and it saves the essay from sappiness.
So it's an essay about finding yourself--where you fit in, how you get on with life, but it is also not really about that at all. The author is as much as admitting that life goes wherever and you follow it. But he does it in this really writerly way.
Write about writers/texts you want to write like, why, and how
I have a very distinct memory of getting to the boar's head scene in To The Lighthouse and reading the passage where Mrs. Ramsay is trying to get Cam to sleep. It was her semicolons that stopped me. She didn't use them like commas exactly and she didn't use them as periods either. She was wayward with them, but their was an intuitive rightness to it as well, and I remember reading and re-reading the passage trying to determine the logic of how she did it. I know that shortly after that I used a semi-colon for the first time, having never really used any punctuation besides periods (with much success) and commas (with naivete and not all that correctly). I got to a point where I was using too, too many of them, and it led to messy sentences that grew to Jamesian lengths without making Jamesian sense.
I became a real reader of the essay in graduate school, and really, I would say, found my genre. Virginia Woolf wrote a lot of essays and I read those, but I read a lot of other essays and I read The New Yorker. In particular I read the movie reviews of Anthony Lane, and if you've never read his reviews, well, I'm sorry for you. They are brilliant. He has a vocabulary unequaled in English today. I wish I could use words like he does, but I just don't know as many as he does. I have often wondered what he does to know all those words. I can't believe that he uses the thesaurus feature on microsoft because I've seen, in student papers, where this leads. He is British, I think, and perhaps that explains something. But he must read a lot and often because I don't know how else he can use words like "lugubrious" and "lacunae" and not sound like an ass.
I also have read and re-read An American Childhood by Annie Dillard in my life, and, if this where a fairy tale, I would say that this one fits just right. Dillard is an essayist, and she is consumed with ideas about place, and so her topic resonates with me. But also her style which vacillates between long, winding sentences with vibrant language that colors a world, her world, in perfect and right shades. But she peppers her writing with short, declarative sentences and even fragments so that sometimes her stuff reads like poetry. And, all and all, not a word is wasted in her effort to turn a blossom into a full bloom--which is how I think about how an essay or a novel unfolds. It starts as a small thing with promise but not much else, and, depending on a lot of things but with some luck, ends up a complicated beauty that you don't want ever to leave you.
From 13 February 2015 Young Adult Literature
Earliest Writing Memory
I have no memory of writing at an early age. Unlike so many of my students, I personally did not fancy myself a writer. I was content, entirely, with being a reader. It could be that, when I was a child, I thought that I was going to be a doctor. I did not like or do home science. I was not curious about bodily functions or illness. The only reason I can explain to you why I wanted to be a Doctor was that I liked to baby sit. That is perhaps a wrong-headed reason to become a Doctor (I did want to be a pediatrician), and thank goodness for AP Chemistry for wiping the idea from the slate. So, my point, I was not a writer. Though I did win a contest in 3rd grade for my illustrated poem titled, appropriately enough for this snowy season “The Falling Snow.” I highlighted the snow in neon orange crayon, and, still, I won. So it had to be the verse that sold it. But I have no memory of writing until, probably, 13, when I started a diary, in earnest. I named my diary because the other diarist I knew at the time, Anne Frank, named her diary. I liked Anne. I thought we would have been friends. It remember keenly feeling the loss of that friend. And so I named my diary in honor of her. The next real memory of writing was when I strong-armed my sister and our shared best friend (not really—no one can share a best friend) into being in the “PCII” club, which was inspired by the Pickwick Club, a literary society made up of the 4 March girls in, yes, Little Women (thank you very much). My sister had not actually read the book, and so I made her be Amy. It was years before she realized that I made her the jerk sister. Our friend Tammy was Beth, because Beth was nice, not because she died, and Tammy was a goody-goody. You’d think I’d have been Jo, but that would have been ungracious. Of course I wanted to be Jo, but so did Tammy (I knew though the goody-goody wouldn’t say), and so I was Meg. And, in truth, I’m a lot like Meg in all the worst ways.
But I wrote like Jo. I wrote serialized fake novels about girls being kidnapped by rogues who, surprise, were actually princes. I was not much of a feminist then. And I wrote science fiction after watching an episode of Star Trek. And I tried to write a western because I watched re-runs of Bonanza. TV was my earliest influence, really. But it never amounted to anything. I never finished a story and one day I came home and Jean (my mother) who was more tidy than sentimental, took all my half-finished and half-baked stories and tossed them all. I ended up with a drawer full of socks. Such is life, I guess, and, after all, I’m no writer, really, I’m a reader through-and through.
What YA story would you write?
I would write about two sisters growing up in a Mob family, whose parents are murdered, and they are sort of tossed around from family to family because nobody knows what to do with them. One saw the murders, the other didn't, and the one who didn't is super violent, and the one who did is super protective of her. Their father came from a rich, white family, and their mom, the daughter of the mobster, is hispanic, and they don't really fit anywhere, but they make a place for themselves by taking care of each other. In the book, they have some run ins, and, in terms of plot, they are always trying to figure out who killed their parents. I have this idea that the older sister is always saving her younger sister from fights that are escalating in nature, until the discover the killer and then watch him die. Then the littlest sister doesn't want to be violent anymore. And they move to California to live with some crazy outcast Aunt.
From 6 February 2015
ICRN for Technical Writing
So, if it's not clear to you, I do love talking about technical and professional writing for several reasons. I am a practical person and words that do work in the world are words that matter to me. And that, my young friends, is, first and foremost what T&P should do--work in the world. How do you do that successfully? Well, I think that it needs to not be any longer than it has to be and, in fact should be shorter. It should know the audience--sick parents giving their kids medicine? Engineers picking a drill bit? Local goverment trying to decide what bridges to reinforce? Or trying to put together that poang chair? That's your audience. Know about them. Know about how they read and the format that works best. And know the purpose. What are they doing with that information.
OK so then what does it look like, besides as brief as it possibly can be. It needs to be correct and brief, but not necessarily simplistic. If you need to use a task specific work, fine, but explain that word.
It employs design: white space, font size and choice, images, bullets, numbers/lists, warning signs, whatever. It uses design to organize information rather than just to make a document look pretty.
It employs visual rhetoric. I touch on this above, but it uses pictures, charts, graphs, those images to denote warnings or steps or a thing you could try but isn't totally necessary. It uses the visual, again, not just to look pretty but to draw a reader's attention to what most needs to be read and understood.
It is typically not meant to be read cover to cover and is organized that way.
There's one last thing that is not a characteristic of the genre, but that I think is worthwhile to talk about today when we started class talking about internships: tech writing made me a better writer. It made me think about argument and organization and brevity in really important and useful ways. It improved my writing in serious ways by forcing me to learn grammar and punctuation not for correctness but for rhetorical power and clarity.
From 30 January 2015 ICRN on Blogs
Funny thing, I don't read blogs. Well, no, OK, here is the actual thing: I guess I do read blogs. I read the New Yorker blog. What I didn't know is that the New Yorker blog posts that show up on my facebook page are not, in fact, articles in the actual magazine. The thing that is confusing is that sometimes things that show up on my facebook page from the New Yorker are articles from the magazine, but, I've come to realize, that they are different from the blogs. Same writers, of course, but different kinds of writing. First off, they are super topical. If something happens one day, the bloggers blog about it the next. Sometimes they are related to things in the magazine. So say a movie is reviewed in the New Yorker, in the blog, someone might write some sort of commentary about past movies of the director or actor--or some sort of zeitgeist in making movies these day.
There are no pictures in NYer blogs. But the language, well, it's New Yorker language.the quote on the website is from a blog by Adam Gopnik. So thinking about that, one thing I'd say is that the authors aren't experts on what they post on the blogs the way they are in the Magazine. That gun control article is one of them. He's not a crime reporter. But on the blog he can have an opinion about things. That's true about the blogs. Super opinionated. So it's not journalism; it's commentary. The other blog that I think I read with some regularity, is Slate, which is an online magazine to begin with so for me their articles and their blog posts read sort of similar, except maybe the blogs are more opinionated.
When I think of some blogs, I think of really short posts. Or really stupid posts. Or I think about memes, listicals (shitloads of listicals floating around blogs on facebook I think). I think about blogs that only have pictures of cats. But I don't' read blogs like that, because I'm too old fashioned and I like to read things and I feel guilty when I look at pictures of too many cats. Huff post used to be a blog to read, but it's not so much anymore. And Huff post is interesting because it used to be a serious news blog.
I see blogs as a way young writers figure themselves out sometimes. And established authors use it to keep fans interested in what comes next. And I haven't even talked about people who read and respond to blogs--which could be a whole genre in itself. There is a name for mean people who respond in mean ways to other people's blogs, but I can't think about it, but you can listen to a really great story of a blogger's experience with one such a person. You can listen to that here.
That's sort of a bloggy thing: to include more than just text. I guess I already talked about that.
Last thing: Julie and Julia, The Happiness Project--both of those started out as personal blogs that caught on and then got made into books and, at least for Julie and Julia, it got made into a movie. My point is that it is easy to think that blogs are rinky dink and amateur. And certainly blogs function in all sorts of ways from a a Huff Post behemoth to the blog you keep that you don't tell anyone about, ever. But a really clever blog can capture the imagination of a wide audience and, sometimes, become something that looks a lot like success. Just saying.
From 23 January 2015 (Take Me Home response and Mentor Text Memoir In-Class)
Take Me Home response
I appreciate the intensity of nostalgia that he manages to bring to bear in such a short space. I sense is wild desire to return to this time—or perhaps not return but to remember it with precision and soul. I appreciate the definitiveness of the connections he makes. He writes about specific authors and specific texts and about specific reading experiences (there is no better word for it). I respond as a fellow reader—I remember my own “fever reads” the exact term I use for my experience with certain books—like a flu, I would be bound to bed for the days and nights it took me to finish a book. I’d be in a fog for days. As Bradbury says, only in childhood is that possible.
Language: frenzy, elation, enthusiasm, hysteria—all versions of that experience, slightly different each one. All in one sentence. Sulfered---the noun turned into the right verb for the right occasion—direct and succinct and picturesque.
Filled with warm exhalations. It’s so romantic with a capital R. Expressing the humanity of the moment.
Whispered itself fat. Again. A noun used as a verb. It avoids complicated language and yet it could not be more perfect. It does real work in the piece. And I love how fat is used here. Not a pejorative. It’s an example of plenty.
And the neatness of the story: the reading, the experience, the translation of both into his own writing. It is traditional nonfiction. And I appreciate that genre, that form. This has all of it: it has research. It has experience. It has reflection. It has a clear perspective and it has a true voice. Ray Bradbury has been writing a long time by the time 2012 came along. He died soon after. He had a lifetime to develop that voice and diction and perspective. I don’t think you can just learn that. You have to write that in the place that you are at when you are there. My point is, RB wasn’t writing this way when he was a young man.
It’s sentimental of course. Sentimental is not really of the moment. But the occasion calls for it, I think. The point of these short pieces in the magazine were to recall intense and important reading moments and to identify what it meant to the writer. And, again, this is part of the genre. The topic suits the genre. It is old-fashioned, but me, personally, I’m not all that fond of experimental nonfiction. Other people can write it and other people can read it.
Mentor Text Memoir In-Class
The moments are of course cumulative. I was not a reader and then I was one. I was not a good reader and then I was one. I was not a writer. And then I was one. I read Little House on the Praire, over and over and over. I read Little Women, over and over. Gone with the Wind. Over and Over. I dust the old copies with special care now. If they were people I would take their arms and walk them to the most comfortable chair and kiss them tenderly on their brow and serve them tea and toast.
But you have to read on. And I did. I read all of Jane Austen. I read all of all of the Brontes. I read all of Edith Wharton. I am very thorough reader. It’s not enough to ever read around, only through.
On and on through books about queens (real) and horses (imagined) and first ladies (real). I am leaving out the difficult moments. I’m leaving out the two failed attempts to read Wuthering Heights. I’m leaving out Portrait of a Lady and that unhappy ending. But I became a very fast and excellent reader, able to spot some imagery miles and miles away. I am no fun to go to the movies with—there is no plot I haven’t read before.
And then I read Virginia Woolf. I read To the Lighthouse because I wanted to be the sort of girl who read To the Lighthouse, but I didn’t know how to read To The Lighthouse. I had to slow down and reorient myself to reading. Suddenly, I needed to understand the semicolon. Woolf loves semicolons. I’m still not sure, but it feels to me that she uses them as a kind of cross between a comma and a true semi-colon. It separates out her bits of stuff and ideas and moments and images. There is a passage when Mrs. Ramsay is walking with a young man and he is rhapsodizing about walking in the world with a beautiful woman. I have the most vivid memory of reading the whole paragraph with all those semicolons, like I was sailing on a choppy sea, and then stopping and reading it again. I wanted to understand this piece in a way that I had never wanted to understand a paragraph before. I wanted to understand how she was using the semicolons. I wanted to understand how they were working to make the passage work the way it did. I’d never done anything like that before.
Maybe I’m wrong and I did read other things like that, but I feel certain this was an important moment. Because I think after that is the first time I tried, myself, to write with a semicolon. I tried them on like a new outfit. Sometimes I overdressed. But then I learned.
If I were to pick the essay that I liked best, it would be “What the Body Knows.” I like it for many reasons. First, I appreciate this woman’s knowledge of the land. I do not have that knowledge. I have a different knowledge, but it’s not that and, like my idol Annie Dillard, this writer does. She reminds me of Dillard when she writes about landscape in Alaska.
Another thing I very much appreciate is the structure of the essay. If we were mapping this essay out, we would be five pages in before we understand that the author is discovering that she is pregnant on this trip. That’s a neat trick. To bring us along imagining this is about a literal adventure to suddenly have us understand that this, too, is a figurative adventure. So if the story of her Alaska trek is blue, say, post its. Then the wall would be largely blue for five pages. Then, though, it would be, stereotypically, pink. Because there we get a page that indicates that the author is pregnant. We spend time in Alaska here, still, what she notices what she sees is marked then, by her pregnancy. Her writing builds in this section, her very language and sentence structure. They carry us like the river she is paddling on. The physical labor of seeing the journey through becomes powerful. And then the trip is over and she is sad, and the last part of the essay will then become, on our imaginary mapped wall, all pink. Because as this journey is over, this new one begins. The parallels of a new landscape—her body this time—and the labor to see the journey through, are, again, evident in the text in terms of space on the page and in her sentences, her language. The last line brings us back to the epigraph—daughters from the ends of the earth. She was literally at the end of the earth, and it is where her daughter first came to her.
It’s an elegant, beautiful meditation.
I have to add a line here about another piece of nonfiction “The Fiction Writer,” which, had you asked me three quarters of the way through the essay, I would have said I hated. And I still find the first three quarters a bit whiney. This novelist all jealous of someone who, we are to understand, hurt her. This whole thing about wanting to please others so much. So wimpy and treacly. I hate reading crap like that. And the whack job Natalie. I don’t even admire the writing all that much—the trope of repeating that line about fiction and belief. The way she sets off a single sentence to tell us that we should pay attention to something. She’s got a lot of guns on the table that are going to go off, and I don’t like or care about them .But, but, but. Then we get to the end. And after whining and telling us about the crazy that is Natalie, she shifts, she talks about belief and faith very differently. We understand that fiction is an act of hope, and that to believe the fiction is to believe in a better version of this world and ourselves. And there is where the magic of the essay lies. And, in retrospect, the essay brings together ideas about the role of fiction in our lives throughout the text all the while we are learning about Natalie’s fictions that were both hurtful and helpful in the lives of the people around her. It’s a neat trick of CNF to be able to use real moments to make larger points—to work it requires we believe it.
I have not talked much about fiction here, but the craft of fiction helps us write better nonfiction. The ability to pull an image out and make it mean something from real life comes from fiction. In fiction we make up things to mean things—and we have to hope that we believe them enough as readers and writers have write them true enough to be believed. That’s often hard. It’s why things labeled nonfiction must really, really be true because if they aren’t we wouldn’t believe them. Dialogue is something that nonfiction is using more and more. I do not particularly care for dialogue in nonfiction, but I see that it brings a kind of immediacy and realism to the essay (though, back to this problem of truth, I don’t always believe people are saying what we say they are saying in CNF). Narrative is driven by change—things have to happen to the people or place or idea that the writer is talking about. And both fiction and nonfiction in the essays we read chronicle change in the characters that inhabit the universes of these stories—because they are characters in fiction or nonfiction.
I am writing an essay right now called “The Unnecessary Walk.” It is about exactly that, my habit of taking walks I don’t need to take and sometimes don’t really have time to walk. I like to walk, and I’m good at it. I do this thing where I walk from South Station up through the garden and down the promenade all the way to back bay or to mass ave. I walk what would take me a few T stops to cover. And though I really am not from here, I love the park and the gardens. I love to read the plaques. But the essay is also about infertility. About not being able to have children. They are related thematically because my habit in life is to think there is always time enough, but, when it comes to having children, that is not at all the case. And, also, sometimes when you talk unnecessary walks you end up lost. It’s not a sad essay like this sounds, it’s an essay about how life just is sometimes. How we make choices and decisions and we live with them. What I learn from these essays is subtlety. I fear being obvious in my writing. My father was an artist and I would look at his work and much of it was really solid. Really good. But he would too often go just one step too far. And I don’t know really how to explain that except to say that sometimes you need to leave well enough alone and let the reader figure it out, but my father often didn’t in his paintings and I fear that I do the same thing in my writing. Seeing how the obvious lies next to the subtle in these pieces, how the lived life and the sad life weave together. That’s useful and reassuring. And I want to be better with language. I want to have the voice that I have, but I want it to be the essay voice of me, not the teaching voice or the email voice or the casual letter to my Aunt voice. They are good voices, an essay voice should be different. It should have a certain rhythm and a certain vocabulary and I want to work on that. These pieces made me think a lot about it.
From 20 February 2015 "Super White" and creative nonfiction, part I
I enjoyed super white. I am not like this guy. I know no one famous and have never met anyone famous. And I have not become famous or anything like that. And I am not depressive. And I often don't like essays by people that are famous or even remotely so. But I like this essay, and in part it is because I like his tone. I like how he delivers the story of his life. This is an essay about finding oneself, essentially, which is a terrible cliche, and in the hands of a lesser story-teller it would have been a debacle. But this guy is a pro in his own way.
So, that, in the end, is really why I like this essay. I appreciate that nothing is wasted, not an image, not a scene, not a word, not a moment. Everything speaks to each other and builds in important ways to a conclusion.
And, speaking of conclusions, I very much value the epilogue. Because it undoes the raveling of the essay. In that last scene, the young fan with the teddy bear is carried off, but our writer, the hero of this essay, is touring with David Byrne, and we've just read a paragraph where our main character is saying that the long ago shouting scene somehow sunk into David Byrne's head and, eventually, led to David Byrne coming to recognize his greatness. That's sort of cliche, and as I read I thought this--how it was too neat, but then I get to the epilogue and unravels it all by saying that, in the end, people are nuts and people like David Byrne meet lots of nuts, so many that he doesn't even remember his nuts moment with the author, and that crazy and depressed is, in fact, crazy and depressed, and not some thing to be romanticized. It's harsh, but real, and it saves the essay from sappiness.
So it's an essay about finding yourself--where you fit in, how you get on with life, but it is also not really about that at all. The author is as much as admitting that life goes wherever and you follow it. But he does it in this really writerly way.
Write about writers/texts you want to write like, why, and how
I have a very distinct memory of getting to the boar's head scene in To The Lighthouse and reading the passage where Mrs. Ramsay is trying to get Cam to sleep. It was her semicolons that stopped me. She didn't use them like commas exactly and she didn't use them as periods either. She was wayward with them, but their was an intuitive rightness to it as well, and I remember reading and re-reading the passage trying to determine the logic of how she did it. I know that shortly after that I used a semi-colon for the first time, having never really used any punctuation besides periods (with much success) and commas (with naivete and not all that correctly). I got to a point where I was using too, too many of them, and it led to messy sentences that grew to Jamesian lengths without making Jamesian sense.
I became a real reader of the essay in graduate school, and really, I would say, found my genre. Virginia Woolf wrote a lot of essays and I read those, but I read a lot of other essays and I read The New Yorker. In particular I read the movie reviews of Anthony Lane, and if you've never read his reviews, well, I'm sorry for you. They are brilliant. He has a vocabulary unequaled in English today. I wish I could use words like he does, but I just don't know as many as he does. I have often wondered what he does to know all those words. I can't believe that he uses the thesaurus feature on microsoft because I've seen, in student papers, where this leads. He is British, I think, and perhaps that explains something. But he must read a lot and often because I don't know how else he can use words like "lugubrious" and "lacunae" and not sound like an ass.
I also have read and re-read An American Childhood by Annie Dillard in my life, and, if this where a fairy tale, I would say that this one fits just right. Dillard is an essayist, and she is consumed with ideas about place, and so her topic resonates with me. But also her style which vacillates between long, winding sentences with vibrant language that colors a world, her world, in perfect and right shades. But she peppers her writing with short, declarative sentences and even fragments so that sometimes her stuff reads like poetry. And, all and all, not a word is wasted in her effort to turn a blossom into a full bloom--which is how I think about how an essay or a novel unfolds. It starts as a small thing with promise but not much else, and, depending on a lot of things but with some luck, ends up a complicated beauty that you don't want ever to leave you.
From 13 February 2015 Young Adult Literature
Earliest Writing Memory
I have no memory of writing at an early age. Unlike so many of my students, I personally did not fancy myself a writer. I was content, entirely, with being a reader. It could be that, when I was a child, I thought that I was going to be a doctor. I did not like or do home science. I was not curious about bodily functions or illness. The only reason I can explain to you why I wanted to be a Doctor was that I liked to baby sit. That is perhaps a wrong-headed reason to become a Doctor (I did want to be a pediatrician), and thank goodness for AP Chemistry for wiping the idea from the slate. So, my point, I was not a writer. Though I did win a contest in 3rd grade for my illustrated poem titled, appropriately enough for this snowy season “The Falling Snow.” I highlighted the snow in neon orange crayon, and, still, I won. So it had to be the verse that sold it. But I have no memory of writing until, probably, 13, when I started a diary, in earnest. I named my diary because the other diarist I knew at the time, Anne Frank, named her diary. I liked Anne. I thought we would have been friends. It remember keenly feeling the loss of that friend. And so I named my diary in honor of her. The next real memory of writing was when I strong-armed my sister and our shared best friend (not really—no one can share a best friend) into being in the “PCII” club, which was inspired by the Pickwick Club, a literary society made up of the 4 March girls in, yes, Little Women (thank you very much). My sister had not actually read the book, and so I made her be Amy. It was years before she realized that I made her the jerk sister. Our friend Tammy was Beth, because Beth was nice, not because she died, and Tammy was a goody-goody. You’d think I’d have been Jo, but that would have been ungracious. Of course I wanted to be Jo, but so did Tammy (I knew though the goody-goody wouldn’t say), and so I was Meg. And, in truth, I’m a lot like Meg in all the worst ways.
But I wrote like Jo. I wrote serialized fake novels about girls being kidnapped by rogues who, surprise, were actually princes. I was not much of a feminist then. And I wrote science fiction after watching an episode of Star Trek. And I tried to write a western because I watched re-runs of Bonanza. TV was my earliest influence, really. But it never amounted to anything. I never finished a story and one day I came home and Jean (my mother) who was more tidy than sentimental, took all my half-finished and half-baked stories and tossed them all. I ended up with a drawer full of socks. Such is life, I guess, and, after all, I’m no writer, really, I’m a reader through-and through.
What YA story would you write?
I would write about two sisters growing up in a Mob family, whose parents are murdered, and they are sort of tossed around from family to family because nobody knows what to do with them. One saw the murders, the other didn't, and the one who didn't is super violent, and the one who did is super protective of her. Their father came from a rich, white family, and their mom, the daughter of the mobster, is hispanic, and they don't really fit anywhere, but they make a place for themselves by taking care of each other. In the book, they have some run ins, and, in terms of plot, they are always trying to figure out who killed their parents. I have this idea that the older sister is always saving her younger sister from fights that are escalating in nature, until the discover the killer and then watch him die. Then the littlest sister doesn't want to be violent anymore. And they move to California to live with some crazy outcast Aunt.
From 6 February 2015
ICRN for Technical Writing
So, if it's not clear to you, I do love talking about technical and professional writing for several reasons. I am a practical person and words that do work in the world are words that matter to me. And that, my young friends, is, first and foremost what T&P should do--work in the world. How do you do that successfully? Well, I think that it needs to not be any longer than it has to be and, in fact should be shorter. It should know the audience--sick parents giving their kids medicine? Engineers picking a drill bit? Local goverment trying to decide what bridges to reinforce? Or trying to put together that poang chair? That's your audience. Know about them. Know about how they read and the format that works best. And know the purpose. What are they doing with that information.
OK so then what does it look like, besides as brief as it possibly can be. It needs to be correct and brief, but not necessarily simplistic. If you need to use a task specific work, fine, but explain that word.
It employs design: white space, font size and choice, images, bullets, numbers/lists, warning signs, whatever. It uses design to organize information rather than just to make a document look pretty.
It employs visual rhetoric. I touch on this above, but it uses pictures, charts, graphs, those images to denote warnings or steps or a thing you could try but isn't totally necessary. It uses the visual, again, not just to look pretty but to draw a reader's attention to what most needs to be read and understood.
It is typically not meant to be read cover to cover and is organized that way.
There's one last thing that is not a characteristic of the genre, but that I think is worthwhile to talk about today when we started class talking about internships: tech writing made me a better writer. It made me think about argument and organization and brevity in really important and useful ways. It improved my writing in serious ways by forcing me to learn grammar and punctuation not for correctness but for rhetorical power and clarity.
From 30 January 2015 ICRN on Blogs
Funny thing, I don't read blogs. Well, no, OK, here is the actual thing: I guess I do read blogs. I read the New Yorker blog. What I didn't know is that the New Yorker blog posts that show up on my facebook page are not, in fact, articles in the actual magazine. The thing that is confusing is that sometimes things that show up on my facebook page from the New Yorker are articles from the magazine, but, I've come to realize, that they are different from the blogs. Same writers, of course, but different kinds of writing. First off, they are super topical. If something happens one day, the bloggers blog about it the next. Sometimes they are related to things in the magazine. So say a movie is reviewed in the New Yorker, in the blog, someone might write some sort of commentary about past movies of the director or actor--or some sort of zeitgeist in making movies these day.
There are no pictures in NYer blogs. But the language, well, it's New Yorker language.the quote on the website is from a blog by Adam Gopnik. So thinking about that, one thing I'd say is that the authors aren't experts on what they post on the blogs the way they are in the Magazine. That gun control article is one of them. He's not a crime reporter. But on the blog he can have an opinion about things. That's true about the blogs. Super opinionated. So it's not journalism; it's commentary. The other blog that I think I read with some regularity, is Slate, which is an online magazine to begin with so for me their articles and their blog posts read sort of similar, except maybe the blogs are more opinionated.
When I think of some blogs, I think of really short posts. Or really stupid posts. Or I think about memes, listicals (shitloads of listicals floating around blogs on facebook I think). I think about blogs that only have pictures of cats. But I don't' read blogs like that, because I'm too old fashioned and I like to read things and I feel guilty when I look at pictures of too many cats. Huff post used to be a blog to read, but it's not so much anymore. And Huff post is interesting because it used to be a serious news blog.
I see blogs as a way young writers figure themselves out sometimes. And established authors use it to keep fans interested in what comes next. And I haven't even talked about people who read and respond to blogs--which could be a whole genre in itself. There is a name for mean people who respond in mean ways to other people's blogs, but I can't think about it, but you can listen to a really great story of a blogger's experience with one such a person. You can listen to that here.
That's sort of a bloggy thing: to include more than just text. I guess I already talked about that.
Last thing: Julie and Julia, The Happiness Project--both of those started out as personal blogs that caught on and then got made into books and, at least for Julie and Julia, it got made into a movie. My point is that it is easy to think that blogs are rinky dink and amateur. And certainly blogs function in all sorts of ways from a a Huff Post behemoth to the blog you keep that you don't tell anyone about, ever. But a really clever blog can capture the imagination of a wide audience and, sometimes, become something that looks a lot like success. Just saying.
From 23 January 2015 (Take Me Home response and Mentor Text Memoir In-Class)
Take Me Home response
I appreciate the intensity of nostalgia that he manages to bring to bear in such a short space. I sense is wild desire to return to this time—or perhaps not return but to remember it with precision and soul. I appreciate the definitiveness of the connections he makes. He writes about specific authors and specific texts and about specific reading experiences (there is no better word for it). I respond as a fellow reader—I remember my own “fever reads” the exact term I use for my experience with certain books—like a flu, I would be bound to bed for the days and nights it took me to finish a book. I’d be in a fog for days. As Bradbury says, only in childhood is that possible.
Language: frenzy, elation, enthusiasm, hysteria—all versions of that experience, slightly different each one. All in one sentence. Sulfered---the noun turned into the right verb for the right occasion—direct and succinct and picturesque.
Filled with warm exhalations. It’s so romantic with a capital R. Expressing the humanity of the moment.
Whispered itself fat. Again. A noun used as a verb. It avoids complicated language and yet it could not be more perfect. It does real work in the piece. And I love how fat is used here. Not a pejorative. It’s an example of plenty.
And the neatness of the story: the reading, the experience, the translation of both into his own writing. It is traditional nonfiction. And I appreciate that genre, that form. This has all of it: it has research. It has experience. It has reflection. It has a clear perspective and it has a true voice. Ray Bradbury has been writing a long time by the time 2012 came along. He died soon after. He had a lifetime to develop that voice and diction and perspective. I don’t think you can just learn that. You have to write that in the place that you are at when you are there. My point is, RB wasn’t writing this way when he was a young man.
It’s sentimental of course. Sentimental is not really of the moment. But the occasion calls for it, I think. The point of these short pieces in the magazine were to recall intense and important reading moments and to identify what it meant to the writer. And, again, this is part of the genre. The topic suits the genre. It is old-fashioned, but me, personally, I’m not all that fond of experimental nonfiction. Other people can write it and other people can read it.
Mentor Text Memoir In-Class
The moments are of course cumulative. I was not a reader and then I was one. I was not a good reader and then I was one. I was not a writer. And then I was one. I read Little House on the Praire, over and over and over. I read Little Women, over and over. Gone with the Wind. Over and Over. I dust the old copies with special care now. If they were people I would take their arms and walk them to the most comfortable chair and kiss them tenderly on their brow and serve them tea and toast.
But you have to read on. And I did. I read all of Jane Austen. I read all of all of the Brontes. I read all of Edith Wharton. I am very thorough reader. It’s not enough to ever read around, only through.
On and on through books about queens (real) and horses (imagined) and first ladies (real). I am leaving out the difficult moments. I’m leaving out the two failed attempts to read Wuthering Heights. I’m leaving out Portrait of a Lady and that unhappy ending. But I became a very fast and excellent reader, able to spot some imagery miles and miles away. I am no fun to go to the movies with—there is no plot I haven’t read before.
And then I read Virginia Woolf. I read To the Lighthouse because I wanted to be the sort of girl who read To the Lighthouse, but I didn’t know how to read To The Lighthouse. I had to slow down and reorient myself to reading. Suddenly, I needed to understand the semicolon. Woolf loves semicolons. I’m still not sure, but it feels to me that she uses them as a kind of cross between a comma and a true semi-colon. It separates out her bits of stuff and ideas and moments and images. There is a passage when Mrs. Ramsay is walking with a young man and he is rhapsodizing about walking in the world with a beautiful woman. I have the most vivid memory of reading the whole paragraph with all those semicolons, like I was sailing on a choppy sea, and then stopping and reading it again. I wanted to understand this piece in a way that I had never wanted to understand a paragraph before. I wanted to understand how she was using the semicolons. I wanted to understand how they were working to make the passage work the way it did. I’d never done anything like that before.
Maybe I’m wrong and I did read other things like that, but I feel certain this was an important moment. Because I think after that is the first time I tried, myself, to write with a semicolon. I tried them on like a new outfit. Sometimes I overdressed. But then I learned.