sunrises are for suckers

This is what sunset looks like from my office. I'd offer a picture of sunrise
over the San Diego skyline, but, well, no...

Due to a ridiculous amount of work in my life, I've been in the office before sunrise twice this week and gone home hours after sunset. This is not healthy, but it reminded me of a piece I wrote a few years back on the topic of sunrise/sunset personality types. So, as a hump day throwback, please enjoy "Sunrise, Sunset."

According to George Washington Carver, “nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.” As much as I love peanut butter, I have to disagree. Not completely. In an earlier blog, I concluded that sunrise is most beautiful in the mountains, but sunset is more beautiful over the ocean. 

Being back in San Diego, however, has reminded me of one of life’s true-isms: in a wrestling match, sunset on the Pacific beats sunrise anywhere over the head with a steel chair every time.

Don’t agree? Here are three reasons you should.

1. You don’t have to get early up to see it.

This isn’t a morning person/night person binary. It’s just common sense. I mean, seriously, early risers get everything – the worm, a quiet house, the best waves, an unfounded reputation for being go-getters. They also get a sense of ownership over the beauty of the moment, that self-serving pride that says “I deserve to see this because I set my alarm clock and didn’t ignore it when it went off.”

Slackers need a prize, and that prize is the most beautiful part of the day. We know we don’t deserve it. We know we’re unable to lay claim to having a hand in the experience. Maybe we just have a better understanding of grace because we have a much harder time convincing ourselves we should be given any based on our actions.

2. The death of color is always more vibrant than its birth.

Apologies to Robert Frost (and Pony Boy), but nature’s first green isn’t gold. (Irony alert: Microsoft Word’s grammar check identifies this version of his famous line as grammatically problematic. Guess humans are still better than machines at a few things, even if one of those things is not winning Jeopardy). No, nature’s last gold is gold. Just before they die, greens give way to the deepest, richest colors. And so it goes with the sunset. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched the light of the sun coming up and thought “those colors are amazing.” I can count the same number of times I’ve uttered those words as the Big Orange dropped into the ocean in the last ten days.

3. The Green Flash.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s probably because you either haven’t spent much time in Southern California or you’ve followed the age old of wisdom of not looking directly into the sun. But out here, we do it anytime the day is clear and the water is calm on the off chance we’ll get to see fingers of green light splay out across the water just as the sun dips below the horizon. It’s a rare event, but when it happens, you know you’ve been given a gift (unless you were also up to see the sunrise that same morning, in which case you assume you’ve earned a bonus for working overtime).

I’m sure some of you disagree. Please do, in the comments section below. While you do, I’ll be outside watching the sunset.

This post originally appeared on Relief Journal's blog.

A little bit like life...

The beginning of my first attempt to climb Mt. Whitney.
At the time, it felt like a failure when I didn't make the summit.
A few years later, I could see it for what it was. My beginning.

The best part of a new piece is the potential it holds. A story we're just beginning to write could, just maybe, turn out like we hope it will. We know it won't, but we suspend our disbelief at least until the first surge of words that drove us to the page begins to ebb and the old questions press in like the tide against our shore.

I have a file full of these starts. They all have merit. Potential. A particular bounce to them.

And they're all mostly just starts. No ends. No middles. Just first steps down paths I hope to return to someday when the next wave of inspiration/time/manic energy strikes me. In many cases, I never will.

But I keep them around, like headstones on the graves of people I could have known but didn't get the chance to follow though on building any kind of relationship. They remind me that I need to keep writing. That I need to push past the gleam of the new beginning to the dirt and mundane that comes with the uplift and connection of our closest connections. That I need to put in the work to really see whether they will break my heart or help it expand beyond the limits I impose on it myself. 

In essence, there really is no such thing as a false start. There are only the starts that end so I have the time and focus to make the ones I really need to pursue. 

Speaking of children speaking...

My boys. Even the power and beauty of the ocean cannot stop their talking.

I'm working on a theory derived via a major difference between my sons, one who is six years old and the other two.

Hey, if it was good enough for Piaget, it's good enough for me.

Here goes. Both of my boys are enamored with words...their own to be exact. From the time they wake up to the time they can no longer move their lips, this place is non-stop talking.

Non. Stop.

I am told (all the time) that this was how I was as a child. In fact, my siblings argue that I talked more than my boys combined. But they're older than me and prone to faulty memory, so I don't believe them.

Anyway, here's my theory: words are currency. More than money. More than precious metal. "More than even Legos!" as my older chatter box says.

What's interesting to me is how these two purveyors of mouth noise spend their words in completely opposite ways. (This way of looking at how one opens his or her word wallet has invaded my daily interactions. If you're talking to me, it's a safe bet I'm working like an accountant with your vocal ledger.)

Anyway, my older boy is an introvert with the sensitive clown gene. Precocious with his vocabulary, he likes to know and explain things to EVERYONE. This kid would give a go at explaining multiverse theory to Stephen Hawking, convinced the guy really just needs to see it from his perspective for it all to make sense.

But put him in the store and have the woman at the register ask him which superhero is on his shirt? Nothing.

Then there's the younger kid that keeps hanging around my house. At two, he's the guy at the party with everyone gathered around him, talking about the time he and Channing Tatum came up with the parody of Jean Claude Van Damme's Volvo commercial. He's the extrovert's extrovert with the performer's need to speak and act in such a way that you can't help but react to him.

He doesn't care whether you understand him or not, just that you love him and laugh at the appropriate times.

When I think about it, here's what my two pocket orators are teaching me: the value of words for both of them is in the forms of control they wield over what they are saying. In this is control; in this is the power to shape and direct meaning, and both of my boys understand this in very natural, unschooled ways.

In one, words manifest as a shield built of explanations and the ability to engage only those people he feels comfortable with. For the other, the same verbal skill set is a microphone and a stage that provide an audience for the things going on in his head. In essence, the way my boys speak is a better character inventory than any Myers-Briggs inventory I've ever seen.

In fact, that might be true for all of us when we think we're "just" talking.

Mary Karr on Wrestling with the Real

To begin this piece, let me be frank: after meeting her, I am an unabashed fan of Mary Karr as a person.

Being of a fan of her work is easy. Her first memoir, The Liar's Club, is credited by some with altering the rules of the genre. Her poetic line makes her nonfiction pop and her honesty drags that same poetry's toes through the mud so its arms can reach to the sky.

But what strikes me most about Karr is her pugnacious pursuit of real, carnal human representation. And this, I learned when she visited campus, begins and ends in her orientation toward life and grace as close-quarters combat. That is, if she's going to engage something - or someone - no punches are pulled, in writing or in conversation.

I think it's that drive toward real, personal experience that drives the authenticity in her work the most, at least from where I sit. When I read her third memoir, Lit, I suspected as much in passages like the following in which she describes her father’s final physical decline and her sense of culpability:

The day I moved Daddy to the hospital, he grabs my arm as we cross the lawn. I’m carrying his piss jug again. The checks I sent home never paid down the guilt I tote today for having disappeared from the pace he’s dying in, which is –in turn– a place dying in me….

Daddy’s last upright appearance was on the bar stool in the VFW, where one final shot of whiskey felled him the way German snipers had failed to. In an increasingly skeletal form, he kept breathing, though each week he’s sanded closer to the bone. But he’d been floating farther from me, starting when I’d left him–he’d left me? I never could decide–more than a decade before. 

The ambulance door seals me inside with him. Daddy’s good hand wipes his wet face then swats my hand away (117).

But it was in her remarks in a 2010 interview in Busted Halo where I found confirmation of my suspicion that Karr's confrontational honesty is the result of a deal with herself; it's the product of the same desire she found to get sober and turn toward faith.

"I think for me, my faith has been about realizing not that the suffering doesn’t exist, not that there isn’t evil….but now I accept mystery. There was no mystery for me before; I really thought I had it all figured out. And now I at least know I don’t know. I do believe that there is a loving and benevolent God who is omnipotent and all-powerful, and yet I believe Haiti happened. And I also believe at the nexus of suffering is where love is."

That's one of the best writing tips I took away from Karr's visit. Dogged honesty can't merely be the stuff of a writer's characters, but of a writer’s character as well. And for that to be the case, the writer must be willing to wrestle with their own dishonesty first before they attempt to bring truth to the page.

This is the fourth in a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first two posts here, here, and here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeannette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

Others, significant

As a writer, I find myself growing more and more concerned with significance. Not merely my own, but within the worlds and actions of my characters. The notion of meaningful action and influence is like an itch I can't scratch away.

Please note here my distinction between significance and prominence, professionally and fictionally. Our culture has an unhealthy habit of assuming the former in the latter, to our personal and general detriment. Prominence is given and taken away externally. Significance is ours to create.

Here is an unfiltered shot of our campus amphitheater, The Greek. Like most
first drafts, it has promise but needs some work to reproduce what I saw.

What is most interesting me, then, in relation to significance is the way in which I'm searching for it in the small moments of "small" lives. When I think about my characters, I want all of them - even the most static and instrumental - to operate in the paradigm that every moment carries the possibility of significance and that true tragedy is to live otherwise.

Finding the significance in the lives of main character is easy. But what about the guy cleaning the taco shop's drink machines? The woman selling phony skincare products to friends? The motorist who drives on rather than offer assistance?  

And here's an altered version of the original that went through several
digital drafts to finally approximate the colors and the contrast my limited
human eyes saw as I walked to my car at the end of the day.

This is why we revise and revise and revise. We work like the photo editing program I used to work on the picture above. On the left is the first draft, if you will. On the right, the "same" photo with layer upon layer of filters and contrast shifts and tint correction until what I wanted to hold the eye is better designed to do so. 

In essence, this is how I want to treat the small characters who do not, in their own right, seem significant. But, and maybe most significantly, these are the characters most like us. They live, they breathe, and they have the chance to do more for the world than the most "significant" among us.  

And that is the beauty of story. Unlike life, in which moments and people are gone long before we see what we could have done to make them matter or what they have done to impact our narrative, fiction allows me a space where I am forced to see that every moment and person is of consequence. I have limited time and my readers have limited attention. As a result, the real estate of the page is precious and not to be squandered.

And increasingly, this is the way I'm trying to live off the page. I find myself increasingly agitated by wasted time (and I've always been one to feel guilty for not making the most of my decreasing store of minutes in this place). I've always been a pilgrim in search of significance.

But now, I want to redefine my terms and stop substituting perception for human response, in my stories and my daily life.

Labor Pains

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

I spent a large chunk of last year designing the hybrid fiction class I’m piloting this term. 

How much? Well, taking into account the 15 month May to August gestation period. I calculate that I spent more than 350 hours on the process from inception to the beginning of the current semester. That time includes researching network theory, collaborative learning design, LMS and technology experimentation, meetings with training staff and colleagues, reading, shooting video lectures for YouTube, and of course writing all of the components of the class into a set of digital storehouses.

But more on that writing process. I totaled the word count from all of the files I created for the class to work: all the explanations, assignments, modules, syllabus, and transcripts. The grand total? 65,428 words.

And that doesn’t take into account the scores of emails I wrote to anyone involved in the process from the provost to the people outside of education I used as sounding boards for some of the crazier ideas I had. There were also conversations about the class I haven’t included in the hour count above as they were informally connected to the work I was doing.

So, what’s the net-net out of this situation?

There's a good reason I haven't gotten much done on my current novel project. I used up all the words and time and creativity I had for it on this class.

The Great Ones Punch in Combinations

In his writing and his clothes, Talese is all about the details. 

As a journalist and essayist, Gay Talese is famous for his exhaustive research. When he takes on a profile, he is relentless in talking to anyone who has any connection with the subject, down to (literally) the guy who shines his shoes.

His most well-known piece, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," is a remarkably personal portrait of Sinatra at what seems to be the moment where he is teetering at the apex of his career. Never will The Chairman be more influential or vulnerable in the same moment, and Talese manages to hold these two disparate conditions in the center of the frame throughout the entire piece with a simultaneity that is beyond impressive.

What's more impressive - he never spoke with Sinatra. You'd never know it from the essay, though, as Talese's penchant for deep research is on full display in a clinic on how open the lives of celebrities can really be, despite their efforts for control the public perception of their image.

 

But for my money, some of the best writing "advice" that can be derived from Talese's body of work comes from the 39 articles and profiles he wrote about Floyd Patterson over the course of his boxing career and beyond, culminating in his classic Esquire essay "The Loser." During their relationship, he saw the champ in triumph and defeat, in the ring and the training facility, in public and private, in general and specific detail.

In short, this is a different type of research, one we don't pay enough attention to - the four seasons approach. That is, see a place in all four seasons before you decide to move there. As Talese puts it in the foreword to his book Fame and Obscurity:

"And so it goes. The obsessions of a writer surface and reemerge in an unpredictable spiral; the techniques evolve, but the fantasies linger." 

The same mentality is absolutely critical when it comes to writing, despite what general culture tells us.The exigencies Web culture and increasingly short news cycles privilege the immediate response. But the long view cannot get lost in our rush to publish. Twitter does not provide the platform for introspection any more than a bumper sticker. And while there are times when immediacy is the necessary medium, it is also important that writers choose to move a little slower when the situation is complex and research a subject over time.

Take a page out of Talese's book and write in combinations.

Here's the video of his conversation with us at the Writer's Symposium in 2008.

This is the third in a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first two posts here and here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeannette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

A Note On...Writing That Is Personal

Dean Nelson, in his familiar position interviewing guests
at the annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea.

Another in the "A Note On..." series in which I ask writers I know or hope to know to blog about lessons they've learned about writing, the creative life, or just general topics they have an interesting insight into. Today's comes from my prolific friend and colleague Dean Nelson. The question at hand: are our lives interesting enough to write about? 

In the first few sessions of the Creative Nonfiction class I teach, I generally hear observations from students that they haven’t lived very interesting lives yet, so they don’t really have much to say.  I don’t try to dissuade them from that idea overtly. They might even be right. But my guess is that that their lives are plenty interesting, and others would love to read a well-crafted story from them. Wasn’t it Flannery O’Connor who said that anyone who had survived childhood has plenty to write about?

So I don’t force it. We just read things I hope will connect with them deeply. There is the story from the LA Times where the college girl describes the most difficult and easiest food items to throw up when she needs to play her meal in reverse (cinnamon-raisin bagels are toughest, in her experience; mint chip ice cream the most gentle). And we read about a boy whose very conservative mom takes him to a jazz club for his 13^th birthday, setting aside her view of those places in an effort to make him happy. And there is the story about the subway ride where a man fell and was as afraid as a wounded animal, and the others rallied around him. And there’s that one about the priest who assures the little boy dying of AIDS that “it will be all right,” when the priest knows it won’t be. 

Those stories usually focus on something that happened over a period of maybe an hour at the most, yet they are so well told, and they point to a bigger story, and they draw similar kinds of stories out of the students.

In recent years I have read student accounts that include: wishing for Skinny Girl respect while standing in front of one’s closet; charting her growth as a female by the kinds of hair styles she’s worn; attending the funeral of her boyfriend, and then trying to take her own life; trying to tell the girl he’s scheduled to marry that he is gay; describing a sexual assault; seeing one’s favorite band; worrying that one’s parents are getting a divorce; going to chemo treatments with one’s mom; finding out one has the breast cancer gene, and, well, you get the picture. These stories are interesting. They really happened. And they’re told in such a way that others want to read them.

I think that kind of raw, true writing comes from reading other raw, true writing, and from an atmosphere where there are no taboos, no judgment on content, but plenty of feedback on craft and storytelling. Most good nonfiction stories are true, in that the account and the facts are accurate, and are True, in that the story points to something bigger than itself, like fear, love, grace, forgiveness, guilt.

And so it matters greatly where one starts when one writes. Instead of writing about eating disorders, write about one time when you struggled with this issue. Instead of writing about racism, write about that time you were a racist. Instead of writing about God, or the American People, write about – well, you get the picture. This is all just a riff, of course on E.B. White’s advice, “Don’t write about Man. Write about a man.”

My last couple of blog posts at www.deannelson.net try to do this. They have also appeared on Donald Miller’s Storyline blog. The bigger the issue, the smaller the focus. I don’t know who said that. But I’ve repeated it often enough to make it mine.

I get a lot of examples in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, on the last page, called “Lives.” Check them out. You’ll see specific stories about people you don’t know, and they will make you start looking at incidents in your own life where you’ll say, “I should write about that.”

Yes, you should. They’ll be interesting. 

Dean Nelson directs the annual Writer’s Symposium By The Sea, writes occasionally for the New York Times, and teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University. 

Of books, and lives, uncovered.

You know what they say about books and covers, but in the ways life unfolds as a story it’s often hard to reserve that judgment.

Last week I was standing in front of the unmanned lifeguard station at dog beach watching my two-year-old up on the tower enjoying his independence and making sure he didn’t jump off. Suddenly, the people watching the beach from behind him all stiffened as people do when they’re witnessing something socially unacceptable. I turned to see a man, at least 70 with his pants gaping and round belly flopped over the open zipper, squatting down over the jetty rocks with a grunt.

Ocean Beach has a large homeless population, so I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wondering if he was about to use the rocks as his toilet. Happily, that wasn’t the case, but proceeding to take off his pants and socks continued the moment’s awkward trajectory.

Sometimes, though, there are storylines we still feel drawn to even when the cover is disconcerting.

At this point, the man simply waded in the water. And when the first wave hit his bare shins, he turned around with the widest Cheshire grin on his face. Another older gentleman, still fully dressed, stepped closer to take pictures as the first waded deeper into the water.

Content that nothing inappropriate was happening, I turned most of my attention back to protecting Judah, but something about this scene in the water kept drawing my eyes back to the scene in the ocean. The partially-undressed man had tucked the legs of his boxers up into his waistband to walk further out into the water, and he paused to flash his large belly to his friend for a picture as he took off his shirt.

The man on the shore gestured for the man in the water to go out deeper. He did. And when the wave hit his belly for the first time, a whoop of excitement from deep inside him sprang from his mouth. This playfulness continued as he wrapped seaweed around his neck and did a muscle-pose for his friend. The grin that lit up his face the moment he’d stepped into the water hadn’t left, and he was clearly and fully enjoying every aspect of the moment.

His vulnerability reminded me that the best stories are those that catch us by surprise when we uncover how invested we’ve become in the characters, because their stories give us insight into our own.

Within minutes, my perspective had shifted from wariness to being choked up with emotion. I have no idea what the man’s story was. I can imagine a few possibilities, but it doesn’t really matter. What I saw was a person so intent on being completely present and enjoying his moment so fully that he didn’t care what anyone else on the beach thought. I envied him and found myself worried that someone might stop him before his mission was complete.

I have spent far too much of my own life story worrying about how my audience perceives every situation. And as this tale unfolded before me, I felt God talking to me, telling me it was my time. Don’t worry; I’m not going to get naked on the beach. But my story is about to take a turn. I will be brave and vulnerable and expose my desires. I will be more afraid of missing my moment than of how people might perceive me. And I will worry less about the outcome and focus more on experiencing the journey as the story unfolds.

I will live, uncovered.

For the latest piece of original work, I found a writer hiding if my own home. Heather Murphy Clark teaches composition and raises the three children we call ours. A big fan of YA, she usually prefers to be a reader of stories, so I'm thankful she was willing to share one of her own reflections here.

On being "a soul in transit"

A shot from last night's concert off of Switchfoot's Facebook
page. Pictured are Jon and Tim Foreman, pro surfer and guy
I grew up around, Rob Machado, and my old friend Drew Shirley.
Check out the band at https://www.facebook.com/switchfoot 

Last night, I got the chance to see my favorite songwriter, Jon Foreman, play a show with my favorite band Switchfoot. It was amazing.

Jon (I'll call him Jon, because we shook hands at the post-concert meet and greet, so we're friends now) is a great writer, and not merely of the poetry that makes his songs speak. In many ways, he is a thoughtful observer of the way time slips past us when we're waiting for meaning to find us. And in that, he lives in tension.

When he visited the Writer's Symposium by the Sea here at Point Loma in 2008, Jon described writing as the process of returning over and over to an irritant, a thought that even after several attempts to articulate it demands more attention. In essence, it's not repetition but living that drives us back to the topics we can't put down.

And so it is with doubt and belief in his work.

The "opening act" for last night's concert as a screening of the group's new surf and concert documentary, Fading West. I'll be writing more about it later, but there was a comment Jon made in it that matters here.

"I know what I believe, but I have my questions and my doubts. For me, that is the journey. I'm looking for the melody....I'm a soul in transit."

If I think about it, this is where writers live. The world is neither complete certainty or doubt, but the conviction that the space between the two is what matters most. And in that is meaning.

There's a notion in storytelling and poetry that is not linear. Writers don't have a plan so much as an intention. They make maps rather than follow them. Somewhere along the way, they make meaning - for themselves. And then, if the story they're telling makes it beyond the walls of their preferred writing device, others make their own meanings of the story. Those meanings are neither their nor the writer's, but a fault line between the two.

And that's what makes story necessary.

Back in 2008, Jon Foreman visited Point Loma as part of the 2008 Writers Symposium by the Sea. Watch the entire video here:

This is the second of a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first post here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeanette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

If You Build the House, You Should Get the Keys

As technology dependent as my new class is, some groups
still return to the classics - in this case, a chalk board - when
planning their next week's story lines and concerns. I love it.

If I’m honest with myself, I think my hybrid fiction class is built, at least in part, on a small amount of petulance on my part. It never fails that I have a few students each semester, generally those unhappy with their grades, who tell me they wish they had more control over the coursework and experience.

It usually sounds a bit like this:

“You know Dr. Clark, I think I struggle because I don’t get to choose anything about what we do.”

Snarky comments about overreaching word choice and hubris aside, I think my response is this class. You want some control (which, if they were paying attention, these students would realize they’ve had all along), well let me make you very, very aware that you’re in control.

Hence the 9-week, self-directed small group writing process in which my students, in collaboration with the other groups in the class, are writing a novel-in-stories that I will publish electronically after the semester ends. With their names on it.

As I expected, this was at once and exciting and sobering, “you-got-what-you-asked-for” moments. But it has also led to inventive solutions on the part of my students who feel the need to jailbreak even a system designed to give them almost all of the creative control. And I love what I’m seeing as they work outside the systems and platforms I provided or required.

Some groups have created their own SMS repeater groups so all their texts automatically go to every group member. Others have created their own Google circles for the class, enabling the use of Hang Outs for meetings if they want to work remotely or if a group member is unavailable in person. They’ve even tried gaming the story constraints I put on their work (if I have to kill one more zombie storyline…).

In total, I left some gaps in the process to see what they’d do, and it has paid off in a number of ways, some of which I’ll likely build into the next iteration of the class. I can’t wait to see how the next group looks to break the system productively.

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

A Writer’s Prayer

Photo by Heather Clark

Maybe we can’t plot the moment when we were changed irrevocably; when we ricocheted off of greatness along a new course that would become our trajectory; when we saw, for a moment, what we wanted to reach for before we died.

Or maybe, if we look closely enough, we can.

I read a lot growing up. I don’t know a writer who didn’t. And, given my context, I read a broad swath of material. Hemingway when I was eight. Stephen King when I was nine. Catton and Hughes when I was ten. Austen when I was eleven. Didion when I was twelve. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare by the time I was fourteen. Alice Walker almost got me kicked out of high school when I was a freshman.  

Somehow, though, I missed Walt Whitman until I was a senior. Or, more precisely, until I was almost done being a senior.

Uncle Walt was like one of those bands you knew that you needed to “know” but you didn’t know how to “know” so you just pretended you knew what people who actually “knew” them talked to you.

Random Dude in High School: “You like Bad Brains, right? I mean, those guys were like pioneers.” 

Me: “Totally. I mean, I’m kinda partial to Black Flag because, like, Henry Rollins is a poet or something, but…”

Random Dude: “Totally.”

So it was with Whitman, until that sappy moment when, at the end of the senior slide show at the end of prom, when the Walt truck hit me. Let me set the unlikely stage. Kids in tuxes and formal gowns. On a paddle boat. Almost to the after party. Video slide show with Whitney Houston as a soundtrack. And then – cue the synth orchestra – the words of “Oh Me! Oh Life!” roll up the screen.

And there I was, through the swirl and clatter of gossip and teenage nostalgia and plates being cleared, transfixed by a poem I should have already known.

Oh Me! Oh Life!
Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                       

                                                        Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Source: Leaves of Grass (1892)

This. This was my moment. I always loved to read. But this, this simple profundity, this small moment of stable clarity in a world that felt like it just wouldn’t stop shifting under my feet. This was it.

I’m fairly certain this is the beginning of my journey as a writer, not that I knew it at the time. There were other influential points on the plot line, but this was my genesis moment. My garden and my fall and my intention to journey toward making sense of it all for someone else.

Twenty years later, I’m still working. Still grinding. Still trying to be even a cut-rate Walt. But I’m still certain of these things:

I am here.

The actors are still on the stage.

And my verse may still yet get read.

What was your moment? Who authored it? Let me know.

I Need a Role Model

No, seriously. Help me.

Recently, I’ve asked publicly, nay begged, for people to punch me in the throat if they hear me utter the following words aloud:

“So, I have this great idea for a class…”

Consider it a cry for help.

This hybrid fiction class is awesome. It’s pretty much all a creative writer working in academia could ask for – the freedom and encouragement to chase down a new way of helping students grow. In many ways, it’s like writing the story of the exact type of class I really want to teach and then enacting the story with real-life actors.

But the class is also extremely overwhelming, in that I had almost no models to work from when creating it and no body of reflections from others because there isn’t anything for them to reflect on in this vein. At least, not in creative writing circles.

My friend Trent created a somewhat similar course, but his aims and mine are vastly different in terms of student takeaway, which means the architectures of our courses diverge quite a bit. And outside of some standalone activities I’ve read about, I just haven’t run across this type of class.

This is not a subtle brag. It’s the reason for the bags under my eyes. Every class session, traditional or virtual, carries its own learning curve. Every flaw in the system, no matter how hard I worked to eliminate them, requires almost immediate attention.

And if this class is novel for me, the guy who spent more than a year researching and constructing it, then just imagine the combined apprehension and nervous energy of 20 students who thought they’d signed up for a traditional lecture and workshop fiction class.

 It is no tired business metaphor to say that while I am not building the plane while it’s in the air, but I’m definitely still bolting down the seats.

I just hope that all the work I've done makes the next redesign I'm planning - I'm looking at you Literary Nonfiction - a little bit less insane.

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

The Sentences of Saul (Sorta)

Dave Eggers makes interesting comments. He needs eight uninterrupted hours or he can't write. He knows how much it costs to ship a cannonball through the mail. He would classify his readings earlier in his career as performance art.

In terms of writing advice, I was taken with an off-handed comment he made at the 2012 symposium. He said that he has been greatly influenced by Saul Bellow's sentences, but you wouldn't think that by looking at his writing.

Counterintuitive a little, no?

When an artist says they have been influenced by another artist, we expect to see signs of it. If a painter says Banksy influences her, there should be more than just a general street-flavor to her work. If a guitarist claims Eddie Van Halen as a model and he doesn't drop in a heavy dose of tapping, we (well, at least I) question that. If a politician invokes Reagan or JFK, they'd better be doing more than biting nostalgia.

So, when an author lists another author as an influence and then seemingly distances themselves from their style, it's worth considering. How can someone be an influence and yet not "show up" in the work of someone who they are influencing?

And yet, this is probably the best piece of writing advice from the evening with Eggers. Let your influences be just that and not patterns you try to manipulate your work into replicating. Take a cue from the annual Bad Hemingway contest. Don't try to be your favorite author. Try to be what you admire in them.

In Eggers' case, he acknowledges Bellow's brilliance at the individual sentence level and aspires to pay that kind of attention to crafting his own. In the age of memes, we may be losing sight of the simple beauty that comes when we take in the art we consider great, strain it through our senses, intellect, and soul, and then produce our response to it rather than our sincerest attempt at repetition.

This is the first of a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeanette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

Friday Fiction

That's me, writing in the middle of the day on a family
camping trip this summer. I'm not sure it
was Friday, but on vacation, I feel like every day
is Friday, so I'm calling it one.
Also, the sippy cup is not mine, I swear...

I am fairly convinced that all writing work done on a Friday that is not under a specific deadline should be considered a double victory. The end of the week, with all its closing ceremonies and its proximity to the weekend, is a composing quagmire littered with the best of writing intentions. So, regardless of your word count, you should celebrate what you did get down today. 

So, whether you wrote 5 words or 500, I salute you. Job well done. 

Murder Was the Case They Gave Them

One of the reasons I love teaching the collaborative fiction class I'm piloting this term are the wonderfully creative and awkward emails it's creating. In that vein:

Hey group.
Just so you know.  Colton has informed me (Group 3) that they want us to kill off their character in the hit and run.  The only problem is that their character is male.  What do you think?  Can we accommodate them?  Interesting eh?
dk 

I love the way students are looking at each other's work in ways that are not merely theoretical, but in the very practical and functional context of creating of their own story and the larger novel it will be a part of. Getting students to understand that they are part of a larger narrative and must care about the other stories they come in contact with is really the aim of any writing course, or literature class for that matter.

However, this hybrid collaboration is really proving to be a very effective environment for producing that kind of insight. Even better, the desire to find it comes not from me or an assignment, but from the students themselves. 

The Show Must Go On (Without Me)

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

When I was a kid, I was a performer. A singer to be exact. I was five the first time I sang in public, 11 when I had my first Peter Brady moment and 18 when I was a small part of a performance in front of more than 100,000 people. And then, singing went away, and not by choice.

I can still remember the doctor telling me, “Well, it looks like you won’t be singing anymore.”

“For how long? A month? More?” I’d had to shut it down before, go on what voice coaches call “vocal rest” while my throat calmed down. I went a week without talking once. Almost killed me.

“No, no more singing. The way your system is, you just aren’t going to be able to sing without ending up doing permanent damage.”

And that was it. No more singing or concerts or that part of me that identified me as the singer. I was lost to say the least.

Years later, I had not found a replacement for that part me, an outlet for the side of me that likes to get up in front of a room and put on a show. And then I found teaching.

Every day, I faced five tough crowds of high school freshmen and seniors, and I did the dance. I taught grammar with stories and literature with jokes. I moved in and out of the desks, singling out students and tailoring a comment just for them before moving back out to the whole room. I shot down hecklers.

The Laugh Factory, it was not. But I was in my element. And that’s still what enables me to enjoy my job. Sure, my audience is older and my jokes include more references to post modern theory, but the basis of my day is the same. I’m on a stage.

Which is what makes my hybrid class so challenging for me. After four weeks of f2f training and instruction on fiction, I turned my class of 20 writers loose for nine weeks, moving into the role of digital management while they own the class experience, shaping it to suit their needs and the needs of the book they are writing collectively.

In essence, I’ve made them the performers and I’m now sitting in the audience. And the shift has been jarring.

But my hope is that in my sitting down, my students will be forced to stand up. And if the part of my new class designed to help students see the marketability of their talents is going to work, I have to do it. 

And take up a hobby to deal with the performance withdrawals. 

more now because of how much this hurts her

The following is an unpublished piece of fiction I wrote for a project I've since shelved. Enjoy.

In many ways I am drawn to just how much trouble I have with the infinite, or maybe not the trouble I have with it but the trouble it dredges in me when I want so much for there to be nothing beyond me, beyond the way my hands are shaking, beyond the sting of the burns on my fingertips where the gas I poured on her trailer splashed on my hands and the flame from the match I lit caught more than just the trailer on fire and after I was able to put my hands out by driving them into the loose snake’s home desert sand that’s stuck in everything I own after three months out in the Anza staring up into the stars that make it impossible to feel  limits anywhere when that’s all I want; just limits that make boundaries that make recognizable spaces out of my days and decisions (because they’re all decisions, all free will, all choice even when we aren’t making them for ourselves) but the limits are crushed when I look at the stars and the closest I come to praying is to beg out loud to anything that’s out there show me where the walls of existence are because maybe just maybe there are none and maybe just maybe what I see when I look into the flames of the trailer from just outside the circle of orange they create, the trailer she let me stay in for free and probably out of some kind of guilt, what I see is just how limitless it all is in how the flames rise up toward the pinholes of starlight that choke the blackness that would have been comforting without their whiteness and what really crushes me is how much space there is between the tips of the fingers of fire I made and the edges of atmosphere tainted with starlight and I’m about to turn away and walk into the darkness of the desert with my eyes down so I won’t have to look at it all anymore when I hear her car pull up in the squeal of brakes she knows she needs to fix but can’t afford to and before the car has completely stopped moving she is out of her seat and walking toward the metal box home that is now folding in on itself, the weight of its walls and the speed of the burning pulling it in on itself like a collapsed star turned black hole and I realize that I have backed up at least a dozen steps to make sure I am covered in the darkness and then I watch as she stops a short way from it all, probably at just the point where the heat of the flames and the uselessness of their reach pushes her back and for a minute or probably more she just stands with her back to me and I paint the expression she must be wearing on her face in my mind and then she begins spinning slowly, a wailing noise coming from her mouth and when she has turned to face where she can’t see me standing peace fills me for the first time because her face is wrapped in a mask of pain that looks like no movie I’ve ever seen and no description I’ve ever read or could ever write and I feel finite in the moment.

I do not hate her. I love her, more now because of how much this hurts her.

A Note On...Writing That Surprises Us

One of the regular features of my blog is the "A Note On..." series in which I ask writers I know or hope to know to blog about lessons they've learned about writing, the creative life, or just general topics they have an interesting insight into. To kick off the series, I asked my friend and former classmate Molly Ann Magestro to describe the experience of having one writing project catch fire in the middle of working on another. 

As I sit down to write this, I am six days away from finishing the fifth draft of a novel I’ve been working on for two and a half years. It takes place in a world I created, a world populated with characters I know better than I know some members of my family. It is the writing I’ve envisioned myself doing since I was a child who thought the most important part was filling the notebooks, not whether or not the story made any sense. I like to think I know better now.

I work on this draft every day. It is more 90,000 words long. I may not love all 90,000 of them, but I love the product they are becoming more than I love some members of my family. This is the work I take with me when I go on vacation and that I still do when my job teaching writing feels overwhelming and when amazing or tragic things happen in my life off the page.

***

           

As I sit here writing this, I am months away from finishing the first draft of an academic book about an idea I had a little less than a year ago. *Trigger Warning* The idea is that television shows sometimes do a terrible job when they take on the daunting prospect of representing rape narratives. The book focuses on some of my favorite cop shows and courtroom dramas. It is the writing that had you asked me about it six months ago, I would have had no idea what you were talking about and made you listen to me talk about my novel instead.

I work on this project every day. Some days that means writing, but most days, at this point, it means watching episode after episode of violent television. I enjoy watching television, but there are 295 episodes of CSI alone. This is the work I am invested in because I think it is important and worthy of study.

***

Only one of these books is under contract (fingers crossed for the other some day soon, though). It’s not the book where my heart lives. I essentially stumbled into writing a book about rape on television. I noticed a pattern that made me angry and, for me, doing something about it meant presenting at a conference where I met with an editor who offered me an opportunity.

           

The biggest reason I considered not taking advantage of that opportunity is because I consider myself, first and foremost, a creative writer. It’s a set of skills that I have been cultivating since I was a child, something I have gladly dedicated years of my life to. When I first began thinking about a non-fiction book project, the idea of taking a break from my creative writing was almost enough to convince me to say no. But here’s the reality of my situation: ever since I was small, I have always made opportunities to write creatively because without it, my life would be less. And I may never have another opportunity to write my other book (Assault on the Small Screen: Treatments of Sexual Violence on Prime Time Television Dramas is under contract with Scarecrow Press).

           

So maybe I won’t consider writing a different book as taking a break. I tell my students that any kind of writing they do helps them to improve every kind of writing they do. Working on this other book, and focus on this other type of writing, might just been the opportunity I didn’t know I was waiting for to help me grow as a writer.

             

Molly Ann Magestro has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She teaches creative writing and composition at UW-Washington County, and she has written many books that very few people have read. For now. She infrequently blogs about writing at mollymagestro.wordpress.com.

Taking One for the Team

This is the view my students see less of every day on campus in order to
work on their fiction. I admire their dedication every time I see it. 

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

Part of my new fiction class that I’m finding fascinating is that I have required groups to copy me in on any functional emails they send each other over the course of the week. This is a necessity in the hybrid portion of class because I need ways in which to keep up with the decisions various groups make within their own work and with the other groups in class.

Sure, it’s blown up my inbox a few times. But my observing their correspondence has also elevated the discourse most groups are having with each other about the stories they are writing collaboratively while also helping students distinguish the various different roles they play over the course of the class – Writer, Editor, Communication Specialist, and Group Lead – from each other.

An added benefit has been seeing students make choices I am almost certain they would not in a traditional class.

Exhibit A: One Student Voluntarily Cancelled a Trip to Mexico.

You read that properly. One of my students, upon taking over the role of Group Lead for the first time, emailed the rest of her group to check in on their progress heading into the weekend. This is the part of the weekly schedule when the majority of the week’s writing is being drafted and also the time when face-to-face contact among group members is at its lowest level.  

In her email, she told the group, and me by proxy, that she was staying in town rather than going on the trip with her friends so she would be around should her group need to contact her and clarify anything.

I was certain this was not her only reason, and she confirmed as much when I asked her about it the next day. But she said that it was the responsibility of being the leader, and not the other work she was planning to do over the weekend, that kept her from going. She also told me that she saw telling her group she wasn’t going as a way to motivate them to take their work seriously.

I can’t ask for much more than that. Caring enough about the class to put it ahead of a fun trip and setting an example of the work ethic she wants from her group by exemplifying it in her own actions?

I’m one proud professor. 

The Beginning of the Affair

Writers You Should Be Reading: Graham Greene

Writers You Should Be Reading is a regular feature of my blog in which I hope to introduce (or reintroduce) authors that are worth picking up and spending time with. Sometimes these will be new or emerging authors and other times they will be established figures. Either way, if you have suggestions for Writers You Should Be Reading, feel free to send them my way in the comments below.

There are few books that begin as perfectly as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Here’s the first paragraph:

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who – when he has been seriously noted at all – has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet night on the Common in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft, to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet.’”

In this passage, there is a notion, an intention, and an abstraction, but all are bound in the moment.

The notion: Control is fleeting and illusory.

The intention: To instigate within the reader a reflection on how concrete we find that illusion of control.

The abstraction: That we are entering a story about story, and possibly one about the Story.

The moment: The concrete and tangible moment when Maurice Bendrix is brought back in contact with Henry Miles, the husband of the woman with whom he had the aforementioned affair.

This is masterful storytelling; the kind in which the layers of it all blend seamlessly into a single notion – that we have been ushered into this world by Bendrix knowing full well that we are being fed an arbitrary and fabricated account of these characters’ lives.

And yet, we believe. That’s great fiction. That’s why you should be reading Graham Greene if you are not already.