May 11 2013

Teachers Pay Teachers: also known as “Robbing Peter, Paying Paul”

Teacher Timesavers: FREE Online Resources

Teacher Timesavers: FREE Online Resources (Photo credit: CSD’s Learning Division)

This past week, I read a fascinating article by Corinna Meier over at Best Colleges Online. It was well timed, as the two colleges where I work are engaged in next-year-planning discussion of all sorts of issues: pedagogy, organization, online education, new programs on offer.* So the business of teaching has been on the brain lately, and along comes this piece about innovations in education.

The article, “Teachers Pay Teachers…in Higher Ed?,” is about a curriculum-swap website where teachers can post lesson plans, reading materials, and other teaching-related materials they’ve produced, and other teachers can pay to download the materials. The idea, as I understand it, is to provide overworked teachers without the time to develop curricular materials of their own a place to find useful lessons or readings or whatnot and save themselves some precious time, while also providing the teachers to do produce curriculum (often in their own “free” time, off the clock) with some much-needed — and much deserved – compensation. Hence, the name “Teachers Pay Teachers.”

Meier’s article, which is well written and fairly even-handed, explores the evolution of the website from a resource for K-12 teachers to a forum for higher education, where it hopes to compete with the higher-ed trend of so-called free online education, known in the biz as ”massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. The idea, apparently, is that college professors who might agree with the idea of freely shared information but don’t really want to starve can sell their course materials via Teachers Pay Teachers, disseminating information in the kind of collegial curriculum-swapping most college teachers already engage in but now earning money for doing so.

Which sounds just peachy.

Except the whole enterprise, from K-12 to higher education, suffers from a pretty absurd failure of logic. Or just basic math.

In Meier’s article, we learn about a University of Georgia adjunct named Josh Boldt. Boldt seems to buy into the idea of freely sharing teaching information online, particularly in ways the help protect the rights and the work of teachers. Last year, Boldt created a spreadsheet in Google Drive that logged the pay and working conditions of adjuncts, and then he opened it up to the public so adjuncts around the country could contribute. The idea is that having free access to this kind of information would help adjuncts protect their rights and normalize their salaries. It was such a hit that it has since developed into the website The Adjunct Project. So he seems like a prime candidate for contributing to a site like Teachers Pay Teachers. Except, he isn’t.“I don’t like the idea that we could make knowledge proprietary,” Boldt told Meier. “I’d much rather create an open environment where teachers share with each other for free.”

And that’s the catch. Because Teachers Pay Teachers seems to be a literal a name: it’s not really “extra compensation” for teachers — it’s an added expense for the teachers who buy the curriculum. It seems to be simply moving money from the left hand to the right. Or, to borrow the old phrase, it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul.

MIT professor Stuart Madnick seems to think this is how it’s always been. “Madnick said [. . .] there is a long history of professors writing and selling textbooks, and others buying them to use in their classes,” Meier writes. But Madnick’s analogy isn’t really accurate, at least at the college level, because professors are provided with free desk copies of course books. Sure, someone has to pay for those books, but typically either the college pays for them, or, more often, the publishers give the books to teachers gratis. The textbook writers make money, as they would on Teachers Pay Teachers, but the teachers who adopt those textbooks don’t have to pay that money — it comes out of the pockets of the provider or the institution.

Which raises, for me, the most important question about the whole enterprise: What’s in it for Teachers Pay Teachers? In the case of textbook publishers providing free books, they know they’ll recoup the costs many, many times over, because if a teacher requires a text, dozens, sometimes hundreds, even thousands of students will have to buy that book. And that’s where the publishers make their money. But in the case of Teachers Pay Teachers, what’s their pay-off? It’s unlikely to be a free dissemination system, like Josh Boldt’s Adjunct Project — otherwise, why charge money at all? Why not just post the teaching materials in a Google Drive-like database?

More likely, the website takes a cut of the sale, something akin to Amazon profiting from user-generated content by taking a (small but significant) percentage of each sale. I can’t say that for certain, because the Teachers Pay Teachers website doesn’t clarify this anywhere that I can find. It might come up when you sign up to participate, but I haven’t done so, because I already share teaching materials with colleagues — for free. So if I did want to engage in a larger community of sharing, I’d be more likely to look for or start a free file-sharing service, because, much as I’d love more money, I tend to agree with Boldt about feeling leery of monetizing information.

All that aside, I should point out that teachers do have the option of providing their materials for free, and the site boasts of having more than 90,000 such materials available for free, so maybe it’s still worth signing up and checking out. If I do dive into it this summer, I’ll keep you posted.

Overall, I’m glad to have found Meier’s article, and I recommend that anyone interested in this new trend in teaching go check it out.

* Speaking of new programs: Have I mentioned that Pacific Northwest College of Art, where I teach writing and literature, is rolling out a new BFA in Writing this coming Fall? It’s an amazing program that will treat writing as a studio art, and I’m proud to be a part of it! You can find out more about it here: http://www.pnca.edu/programs/bfa/c/writing

Apr 28 2013

You need to read this poem

A couple of years ago — almost exactly — I got invited to visit a classroom of Emirti women who were studying young adult lit in Abu Dhabi. They were working on writing a children’s story, and the teacher wanted me to talk to them about creative writing and to walk them through some exercises. But I also found out they were reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s novel Habibi, and on a whim, I contacted the author. (She lives in San Antonio, near where I grew up. I liked to think we shared something.) To my great delight, she replied, and we swapped a few emails about writing and what the Emirati women were working on. I found Nye beautifully generous and encouraging.

You should read this poem, “A Well Traveled Woman,” that is going viral. You can see her generosity, and her beauty.

Apr 27 2013

Controlled Hallucinations, by John Sibley Williams

ImageMy pal John Sibley Williams has a new book coming out. He’s published a bunch of chapbooks, but this one is his debut book-length collection of poems, Controlled Hallucinations. 

I know John, and we’ve talked about his poetry before. He’s a bit of a classicist, not in any formal sense but in the sense that he eschews “raw” and “edgy” in favor of intimacy and reflection. Or, as the press release from FutureCycle Press puts it: his poetry “weaves universal themes and images with the basic human reality of touch, word, and what is lost in their translation.”

Take these lines from poem IV:

There’s no pattern to our astonishment.

Birds don’t know
the weight placed on them.
They look down and see
us looking up.

That is all it takes
when there is no gravity
but flight
and falling.

It’s a beautiful first book from a terrific poet, and you should order a copy.

You can thank me after you’ve read it. 

 

Apr 16 2013

On Boston

Twice in my teaching life, I have sat in rooms with students and tried to find the words to convey tragedy. The first time was twelve years ago, in my first year — my first month — of teaching outside of grad school. When I learned of the attacks on September 11, 2001, I was on a long commute through the Texas backcountry and I had a good hour or so to process the events and plan what to say when I met my students on campus. When I did finally arrive at school, I’d decided to simply dismiss class so students could call loved ones or meet with friends and process, but I also left the classroom open in case students wanted to talk as a group. I told them that there are few better places to talk about these sorts of things than a college classroom. And almost all the students did stay, and we talked. I realized later that the resulting discussion was as important for me — maybe more important for me — as it was for them.

When I learned of the attacks on April 15, 2013, I was already in the classroom, down in McMinnville, Oregon, between classes. I had maybe 20 minutes to read online as much as I could about what had happened, and no time at all to plan what to say. My plan for the next class was to conduct a group-building exercise designed to promote audience awareness, language building, and camaraderie in my students’ small workshop groups. We were playing the game Taboo. As students came into the room, I could see that none of them had heard the news — or if any had, they weren’t talking about it — and so I decided, in the space of about five minutes as students arrived for class, that I couldn’t derail that exercise. The communication — and the fun — were too important. So we played the game Taboo. We laughed, and we celebrated correct guesses and earned points, and we had a fun couple of hours. When class was over, one student stayed behind. Last week, this same student had lingered and talked with me about how hard it was for him to make friends, and one reason he’d come to college in the first place was just to meet new people and try to make new friends, and he was having a very hard time doing that. Yesterday, he lingered with a huge grin on his face, and he told me my class was the coolest class he’d ever had. He said I made learning fun. I wondered how differently he might have felt if I’d abandoned the game and discussed the news instead, and I was glad we’d played the game. I also realized that I had needed to laugh, too.

My last class, though, was my creative writing workshop, a small class of bright, thoughtful second-year students, some of whom I’ve taught before. One of the essays we were discussing in class was Susan Straight’s “Travels with My Ex,” an essay partly about racial prejudice and the knee-jerk assumptions we make about people. Just before class, a friend of mine — a scholar in postcolonial Arab literature and culture and an Arab-American herself — posted on Facebook a link to a Washington Post piece: “‘Please don’t be a Muslim’: Boston marathon blasts draw condemnation and dread in Muslim world.” She added to the post the comment, “What it’s like in my head today. *sigh*”

I put that Post editorial up on the projection screen and shared (with her permission) some of my friend’s other comments with my students, and we talked about the essay in the book and the article on the screen and the events in Boston. We didn’t talk a lot about Boston, but we made a space for it. And it was enough.

I value my students so much for that. There’s something special — something that, for me, feels important, even necessary — about knowing that when I approach these subjects in my classroom, I am responsible for so much more than my students’ education: I am a curator of their experience of these events. I am an editor to their stories, working with them to shape their comments and process their experiences. I am a quilter stitching together from their discussion a warm, safe place in which to lie down and cry.

And they are all these things for me.

And I am so grateful for that.

Just one month ago, many of the writers and editors and publishers I know were in Boston. They weren’t there to run — they were there for the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. I didn’t get to attend, but I enjoyed all the updates and photos on Facebook and blogs, because they reminded me of the only time I’ve been to Boston, back in April 2006, for the annual joint conference of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. When I was in Boston, I spent a whole afternoon visiting the Boston Public Library — the first public library in America and a model of public libraries around the world even today — and many of my friends in Boston last month made the same literary pilgrimage.

The explosions yesterday happened just across the street from the library’s north side.

I have no idea what it feels like to run that stretch of Boylston Street, let alone to run it in the Boston Marathon. I have no claim to any special connection with the events of yesterday, other than that the trauma was experienced by human beings like me, and the people who raced in to help were human beings I want to be like. But I know what that area of Boston looks like, what it feels like to walk it in the springtime.

I understand how important it is to preserve that. I understand why people will return to that street, spring after spring. I understand why they will never be scared away.

Here are some other things I’ve been reading today. Not news. Commentary. Reflection. Calls to action. Love.

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Apr 12 2013

Louisiana research trip: the numbers (and the end)

To wrap up my posts about the trip and the research and my book, I thought I’d share some numbers.


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My trip lasted 10 days, including 2 days of travel.

In those 10 days, I visited:

  • 8 specific locations connected with events in my novel
  • 2 wildlife refuges, where I walked 3 trails (I walked one trail 3 times)
  • 2 historical re-creation villages totaling 24 historic Acadian houses and buildings
  • 1 excellent display on the aquatic ecology of the Louisiana wetlands
  • 2 public libraries and 1 university library
  • 3 colleagues (2 writers/professors, 1 writer)
  • 4 experts in folklife and/or architecture and 1 wildlife scholar
  • 1 coffeehouse, 1 bar/restaurant, 1 Golden Corral and 1 Waffle House
  • 3 uncles and 2 aunts, 1 great-aunt, 2 cousins, both parents, and the graves of my grandparents and great-grandmother
  • 5 cemeteries
  • 2 battlefields
  • 4 churches
  • the Family Dollar in Cameron 4 times
  • the Cameron Ferry 6 times (that’s 6 times heading west, and 6 times heading back east)
  • 2 beaches (Holly Beach and Cameron’s Jetty Pier Park)

In all, I drove almost 1,150 miles.

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At the libraries, I spent more than 16 hours reading from 19 books, and I wrote almost 4,000 words of notes.

I took more than 1,000 photographs.

I saw more than 30 alligators in 5 different locations, including 1 in the wild while I was all alone.

I also saw 2 marsh rabbits, 3 different kinds of snakes, a flock of coots, countless ducks, gulls, pelicans, and herons, dozens and dozens of turtles, and a nutria (just before it raced into the brush and disappeared).

I saw 2 people ahorseback in the roadside marsh.

I saw 2 airboats out in the bayou.

I had at least 6 moments of euphoric epiphany about my book.

I had comments of support and enthusiasm from countless friends and family, and a couple dozen requests for copies of the book when it gets published.

And I had one hell of a good time.

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Apr 11 2013

Louisiana research trip: the people

In Louisiana, I had the terrific good fortune to meet with some wonderful people. The librarians and staff at the Cameron Parish Library and the Calcasieu Parish Public Library, in particular, deserve more praise than I can offer for their patience and help during my trip. I also am tremendously grateful for the volunteers at the Vermillionville historical village — the experts in history and culture were fantastically helpful and informative, and the re-enactors gave me an excellent sense of the Cajun people who lived in the area, complete with accents, expressions, and personal stories. Also, the woman working the register in the gift shop was exceptionally friendly and helpful (or, maybe not “exceptionally” — friendly and helpful tends to be the rule in the South): she talked to me about the area and the food, and she eventually directed me to the Acadian Village, complete with discount on admission there.

The staff in the Southwest Louisiana Lake Charles Convention and Visitors Bureau also were terrifically helpful, and they directed me not only to some important historical sites around Lake Charles but also out to Vermillionville and the Acadian Village, as well as the Cajun Village in Sorrento (though I couldn’t get out quite that far this trip, I regret it, as I’ve recently discovered the excellent blog of the Cajun Village’s marketing director, Justin Newhart — you should check it out).

I also want to thank Gay M. Gomez, a researcher on Louisiana wetlands. I met her at the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, where she volunteers in the Visitor Center, and she provided a lot of helpful information not only about the plantlife but also about the history of the area. And she, too, was delightfully friendly — she even wrote down my name and promised to keep an eye out for my book when I get it published.

But it wasn’t just the academic experts I appreciated. The locals, the experts on living in the area, were fascinating and helpful as well.

In Cameron, the only store is Family Dollar, but it was right next to the Cameron Motel, so I was in there almost daily the first half of my trip. I wound up in a kind of piecemeal conversation with the main cashier, bits of dialogue spread over several visits. The first time I was wearing my backpack, and she asked if I was just passing through, as though I were some romantic itinerant breezing into town. I told her I was in town to do some research for a book (I was on my way to library, actually). On another trip to the store, she told me how her mother had come from Maryland, where her parents had kicked her out of the house for getting pregnant. Which is how they came to Cameron, Louisiana. She said most folks had come there from somewhere else. Another trip, she asked me what sort of books I wrote, so I told her I was currently working on a historical novel set in the area. She looked at me askance and said “You won’t find much history around here. It’s all gone, from the storms or just people leaving.”

IMG_2099Just outside of town there are still twisted hulks of cars, the glass gone and the trim rusting, slumped in the ditches and the marsh. Tossed or washed there by Hurricanes Rita and Ike. They’re still sitting there, after all these years. No one’s ever bothered to move them. It’s eerie — it’s like the hurricane just blew through a few months ago. It was also a stark reminder that my aunt Jeanette and uncle Brad had been driven out of the bayou by the hurricanes.

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My aunt and uncle laughed when I told them where I was staying. “There ain’t nothing out there,” my aunt joked. Of course, having lived out in that area for decades, she then began to direct me to a couple of good restaurants in the town of Creole, a bit farther north and less affected by the hurricanes.

Another uncle, Bill, also laughed about my staying in Cameron. I told him, “I know I’m in the middle of nowhere, but I’m also in the middle of everywhere I need to be this trip.” He joked, “You’re in the middle of two gators, maybe!”

Back at Brad and Jeanette’s, Brad asked what my book was about. I told him it was about two women trying to survive alone in the bayou.

My aunt Jeanette and uncle Brad.

My aunt Jeanette and uncle Brad.

He said, “Shoot, that is hard. You can’t do it. You can’t live alone out there in the bayou.” (In his thick accent, he pronounces bayou as “buy” with just a hint of an aspiration, like “uh,” at the end.)

Then Brad told me a story about “two old boys” who had taken a girl into the bayou on a boat, just to ride around, but they’d gone out there in the wrong time of year, when the water was still cold but the mosquitos were in full force. “The skeeters is terrible out there, and they started getting eat up by all them skeeters, couldn’t get away from them. So those boys jumped out the boat, jumped into the bayou to try and get away from the skeeters, but they got caught in the mud. That girl stayed in the boat, but them boys got stuck in the mud and couldn’t get out the bayou and they died there from hypothermia. The bayou is dangerous. It’ll kill you.”

Of course, my aunt and uncle survived the bayou just fine. They’re the kind of rugged, determined people who know the land, understand it. It took three floods and two direct hits from hurricanes to finally drive them out of the bayou, but my uncle Brad, especially, still waxes nostalgic, remembering his four horses and his hutch of rabbits, his duck blind and deer blind, his land. You can hear the weight of what he’s lost — and what he still carries around with him — in his voice when he talks about home.

I’d like to think that my aunt and uncle are the emotional heart of the novel I’ve written. Not just the rough and rugged romance of Buford and the girl, but also the connection to the land that Buford and the old woman feel, and the yearning for it even in the face of hardship.

IMG_3100And despite all the scoffing and joking about how empty Cameron Parish is these days, there are still plenty of people happily sticking in the area and preserving old traditions. Driving along highways 27 and 82, I kept seeing cars parked on roadsides and young couples, some in their teens or early twenties, mucking around in the ditches and canals with nets and traps, crawfishing. These are the dates they go on. Or I would see families at bayou-side “recreation areas,” the only recreation to do being fishing, kids with poles and parents dipping nets into the water while gray pelicans glided in military formation out over the water. At the Jetty Pier Park in Cameron, middle-aged couples fished with long poles out in the Gulf while whole caravans of families lined up in massive RVs and sat in folding chairs, barbecuing and blasting zydeco on stereos.

I found a lot of excellent historical facts and botanical details on my trip to Louisiana, immensely helpful information, but these people were the main reason I’d come to Louisiana. I wanted to meet my own characters. I wanted to know that I had been careful with the culture and the dialect. I’m sure I still get things wrong here and there, but I respect these people — some of whom are my own family — and I want to do right by them in the novel. I want to know that I’ve conveyed their strength as well as my characters’ quirks, their humanity as well as my characters’ occasional inhumanity, and how their determination expressed in my characters help my characters survive their desperate circumstances.

I need to thank some other people as well: Sarah Loghin and Max Hooper, both from Cajun blood, for their feedback, ideas, and strong encouragement as I posted updates about the trip on Facebook; my writer friend Erin Entrada Kelly, who turned me on to the research of Kelby Ouchley and later directed me to excellent food and beer in Lake Charles (her hometown) — you should keep an eye out for her upcoming novel set in the region (see her website); all my friends and family who expressed such enthusiasm for my updates on the trip and for the book in general; and especially to my family: my parents for driving all the way out there from the middle of Texas to see me, my aunts and uncles — Brad and Jeanette, Bill and Shirley, Jay — and my great-aunt Lydia and my cousins Joanne and Ted for feeding me good homegrown vegetables and taking us all out to visit the graves of my grandparents. And to my Grandma, whose letters about growing up in Louisiana and stories about our family helped me understand so much about so many things; and to my Papa (it’s pronounced “paw paw”), whose quiet strength and fearlessness will always inspire me (and whose excellent gumbo I will never forget). I miss them both, and I am so grateful to have been able to visit their graves this trip.

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Apr 10 2013

Louisiana research trip: the bibliography

People who’ve been reading this blog for years will know the score. Way, WAY back in 2009 (that’s, like, two generations ago in blog years), I started the first draft of my Civil War-era novel set down in Louisiana. And even though the story itself isn’t true, there were so many historical facts and regional details I didn’t want to mess up that I took some time out to do some research, and I got so involved in it that I wrote a whole series of blog posts on how to research for fiction.

But then I knocked out the draft and I set aside the research. Hurray for me!

Except that wasn’t nearly the end of things. Because I knew all along that when I finished that first draft, I would still need to do two things: one, I’d have to revise the hell of out it. And two, I’d need to visit Louisiana and walk around in the bayou and refresh my childhood memories of the place. And both endeavors would involve more research, just to cover my bases.

I tinkered with the book off and on over the years, but last summer, in 2012, I finally got around to revising the novel wholesale, and while I worked on it, I sat down to stacks and stacks of books. For my first draft, I was overseas, where the libraries didn’t have much on the American Civil War (why would they?), so I relied heavily on internet research and emails to librarians and other experts. But this time, I was in the States, and I finally had access to those holy tomes, the dusty old books in the stacks. And boy, did I read.

That research fleshed out what was missing in the novel, and the revision that resulted was more or less perfect. There were still a handful of what I considered minor details that I’d want to check against the actual region, and I wanted to hit the public library in Cameron, Louisiana to pick up any local material my own nearby libraries wouldn’t have. But that was about it — I mostly wanted to make my trip to Louisiana so I could walk in the world of my novel and make sure it all felt real.

And I did. And it was amazing. (I’ll write about that later this week.)

But in the library, I also wound up reading another dozen books or so, and I was finding such great material that I drove up to Lake Charles and hit the library there as well. In all, I made my way through 20 more books on local history, culture, language, folklore, weather, and so on.

(I showed the list to my students, who are writing research papers right now, because I wanted them to know I was down in the trenches with them, doing research of my own. They collectively gasped. One said, “Are you kidding me with that?” I said, “Nope. This is what you all should be doing. This is what your research should look like.”)

So, here, all compiled into one epic list, are the sources I looked at while writing, revising, and double-checking my novel, including both print and web resources. Looking back, these 70 or so sources seem like a hell of a lot of reading, and it was, but bear in mind that I started this three and a half years ago. Also bear in mind that when I was in high school, I was planning to get a history degree before I switched to English in college, and I still love reading this stuff. I know a lot of writers who hate doing research, and I get why, but no kidding, this is fun for me.

Anyway, here’s the giant list of stuff I read for the novel:

* I haven’t actually read Gay Gomez’s two books yet, though I browsed one of them in the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge’s visitor center. But I met Gomez at that visitor center, where she was volunteering, and we talked about her books and the region for a while. They’re on this list because it’s a working bibliography, because I do plan to read them soon, and because I got to meet the author, who was generous and friendly.

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Apr 9 2013

Oregon Book Awards 2013

OBA_2013_Final_Cover-5Last night I had the terrific honor of attending the Oregon Book Awards ceremony here in Portland. Better still, I got to sit down front, with my writer pal Hobie Anthony and poetry nominee Carrie Seitzinger and her partner Matty Byloos. Before and after the ceremony, I chatted with fiction nominee Alexis M. Smith and double-nominee (in nonfiction and creative nonfiction) Kerry Cohen and her partner James Bernard Frost, as well as writer Jenny Forrester and Literary Arts program coordinator Mel Wells.

And then there were ALL the people I missed out on reconnecting with or meeting for the first time, partly because when you get drawn into drinking circles it’s hard to leave and circulate because you’re having so much fun, and partly because there were SO MANY PEOPLE there and I would never have gotten to them all. I was once in the proximity of a conversation with Reader’s Choice winner Cheryl Strayed (who host Elissa Schappell aptly dubbed the Oregon literary scene’s Meryl Streep), and someone told me that creative nonfiction winner Storm Large (who gave probably the most honest and endearing acceptance speech last night — I was utterly won over by her) had passed by my group before any of us had a chance to congratulate her. I wanted to find Scott Poole and applaud all over again his gorgeous, hilarious, comically stunning poem composed from the names of all the finalists, all the finalist book titles, and all the award category names! I wanted so much to thank fiction winner Ismet Prcic for his beautiful acceptance speech about the nature of art — a perfect ending to the evening!

Honestly, though, I just can’t do the evening justice. If you weren’t there, you would need several different accounts of it just to get a sense of how important — and how much fun — it was. So, here are a few more versions of last night’s events:

Afterward, I walked home in the quiet night, over the Broadway Bridge to cross the black Willamette, and I thought about how immensely fortunate I am. Not only to be an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient, but also just to be a part of this writing community — to be a writer in Portland. The community here is large, and it would be easy to get lost in the crowd, but it isn’t a crowd — it is, as Mel Wells put it afterward, a family. All the writers and all the readers, regardless of genre or medium, are so supportive of and appreciative of each other. All night long, as writers rubbed elbows with writers, I never once heard someone launch into some discussion about their own work unbidden — everywhere, everyone kept asking, “So what’s your next book?” Or “When can we work together?” Or, “How can I help spread the word about you?” Even me — every person I met last night, friend or stranger, asked when they would get to read my book. (I hope my agent is paying attention to this post!)

And the thing is, this isn’t an inflating experience. I’ve never felt my ego at risk of swelling. Instead, it’s a humbling experience, a profoundly egalitarian communion of artists. And I love that.

And I love them.

And I love Oregon.

Apr 8 2013

Louisiana research trip: the photos

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What follows is a series of photos — just some of the photos I took — from my trip to southwest Louisiana to research the final details of my Civil War novel, Hagridden. While my book isn’t strictly, solely historical, it is set in a certain historical and regional reality, and what details echo history or geography or biology I wanted to know I’d gotten right. A lot of those details — battles, historical figures, mapped terrain — I could find in books or online (about which I’ll post next), but a lot of the important human details I needed to see or smell or hear firsthand. That’s what this trip was mostly about: to live for ten days in the world I’d written and know that what I’d written could be true.

The women waited, their weapons never far from hand, but for days on end the only sound in the marsh was the wind in the rushes.

This is in the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge, in Southwest Louisiana. The Wetland Walkway trail is actually a bit farther north and east of where I imagine the women living, but the terrain and the wildlife is all the same. In the book, I refer to their home territory as, alternately, the bayou, the marsh, or the saltmarsh. This is not a mistake. In fact, much of the area that now makes up the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge is a mixture of all three: freshwater marshes farther north, saltwater marshes farther south, and the deeper pools and ponds and waterways that make up the bayous, like the water below:

[A] spectral figure emerged hat and shoulders from the rippled surface of the backwaters. He carried a long walking stick with which he plumbed the path before him, and tied to the top of the stick hung a heavy black sack. He pushed his way through the weedy murk and emerged onto the damp ground of the reed beds dripping and naked save the wide black hat on his head.

Those who knew how to discern them might have made out other sounds, the soft splash of a gator slipping from the prairie grass into the muck and water, the rustle of ducks breaking for the sky or the dip of a heron beak as it fished the shallows.

These three photos are from various spots around Cameron Parish: the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge (the gator), a small pond and bit of marsh out behind a cemetery in Cameron (the birds) and the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge (the heron).

He took the ax and the empty sack and hiked out toward the lake to foray the steamy rim, climbing over cypress knees and mucking through the mud up his calves, until he found a felled cypress trunk draped with heavy ferns and Spanish moss. He collected the moss and packed it into the sack, then he hacked away a section of the trunk and heaved and rolled it until he’d got it onto the nearest patch of dry land he could find. [. . .] With the ax he hacked several pillars a foot square and about two feet long, each tapered at one end. [. . .] At home he paced off his longest timbers and arranged a rough frame of cypress pillars every few paces. He laid the rails across the pillars and began to construct a new foundation. [. . .] By the end of the week he had the true walls framed and raised. That weekend he mixed his moss with mud from the marsh and constituted a new batch of bousillage, which he packed between the studs before he skinned the walls in tongue-and-groove siding.

One of my favorite passages in the novel is when Buford rebuilds his house. And I was careful to have him construct as near to a traditional Cajun home as he could manage on his own. Historically, Cajuns would help their neighbors raise their homes, but Buford’s a bit of a loner, a doggedly self-reliant man, and he’s building the house in part to prove something to the girl he’s trying to seduce. So he winds up cutting some corners, skipping the traditional high-pitched roof and the attic “garçonniere” (the attic room where a family’s boys slept) and roughing together a smaller one-room version of the house in the photo above. Still, this house, in the excellent historical Cajun village of Vermillionville outside Lafayette, is a solid example of the house Buford is working on.

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[T]hey reached a low-roofed hut thatched and camouflaged in the marsh reeds, the door barely tall enough to crouch through. Inside they tossed their collection onto a small but similar pile near the door, which the girl arranged hastily while the old woman stepped out the back and dipped a tin cup into a barrel of water and drank deeply, the water running in streaks down her dusty neck. The girl joined her and did the same, then they each drank again. The old woman left a splash in the bottom of her cup and tipped her head to pour the last down the back of her neck, while the girl returned indoors and braced the hut’s small door ajar then lifted a hatch in the roof with a pole and propped it open. They both collapsed panting on a rickety pallet bed with a thin lumpy mattress stuffed with grasses, the pillows toward the rear and their feet aimed at the door, the open hatch directly overhead for the meager breeze it offered.

This was the biggest and best surprise of my whole research trip. In my novel, I have the women living in a small reed hut they built themselves after they lost their regular house. I made that up — I wanted to show how resourceful and independent they were, but also how simply and desperately they had to live (and the hut practically disappears into the marsh, making them hard to find). Lo and behold, huts like that are a real thing in the bayou! They’re called palmetto houses, and they’re typical of Native tribes in the region. So, just like that, I’ve decided that the old woman is part Native and built the hut because it’s the only kind of house she knew how to build herself. (Also, the tribe I’ve decided she descends from, the Chitimacha, are known not only for these houses but also for their strong women and gender equality, which explains my character’s fierce will and refusal to cow to men.)

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They took almost half an hour to drag the men to the forgotten well in the marsh, near a long-abandoned homestead where now remained only the well and a packed foundation they alone would recognize.

Conversely, this was probably the most frustrating — but important — discovery during my trip. In my novel, this well is essential to the story. Except this isn’t a well — it’s a cistern. It’s behind a mid-19th century house in Vermillionville, the historical village outside Lafayette. When I found it, I asked one of the village’s history experts about it, and he explained that most Cajuns and other settlers of the era pulled their water from the nearby bayou or built these brick cisterns to collect rainwater (much like the rain barrel the women keep behind their hut). But they never sank wells.

I’d also talked with locals in Cameron, who said all their water was city — no wells. I talked to the city water authorities — no wells.

This was a serious problem for me for a long while. But then, up in Lake Charles, I visited the central branch of the Calcasieu Parish Public Library, and I found the book The Battle in the Bayou Country, by Morris Raphael, in which I discovered this passage:

Still nestled among ancient oaks and magnolias is Dulcito, the stately mansion, located about five miles west of New Iberia, which played an important role in the Teche campaign. The big beautiful home, which overlooks ‘Lake Tasse’ (now known as Spanish Lake), was mustered into service by the Confederates as a temporary field hospital for wounded soldiers. The unique water well, said to be the deepest in the area, evidentally accommodated the soldiers from nearby Camp Pratt which was spread out over a wide area.

Aha! So wells not only are possible but existed during the Civil War!

Of course, Dulcito was a “stately mansion,” not some homestead out in the bayou. Still, the well is possible — and in my novel, the old homestead has long been abandoned, the useless well the only sign it ever existed. So here’s the story: some relatively well-off sugarcane planter built a somewhat sizeable home out in the marsh and foolishly sank a well. The well was useless, the house too remote, and eventually the planter abandoned the place, leaving behind this hole in the ground.

So there. Problem solved.

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When day rose in a fog over the marsh they were awake already, resetting their crawfish traps and bringing in the wash they’d abandoned the day before.

This is behind the Cameron Motel, where I stayed while touring the area and conducting my research. It was a happy accident of nature, actually, to have this fog, not only for the photo but also because this was the second of the two days I planned to spend all day reading in the Cameron Parish Public Library. Later, it rained in successive thunderstorms. But after this, I had perfect weather the whole trip.

A sharp gust rocked them on their small ridge and they were awash in the dueling crash of the rustling trees back on the chenier and the crashing Gulf before them. The girl reeled in another crab and dropped it clacking in the bucket. Out on the horizon, a bank of clouds arose in shades of indigo and steel, a feathery brush drifting down from the lip to the edge of the Gulf.

This is out on the Gulf just west of Holly Beach. The actual spot I pictured the women fishing and crabbing is a bit farther west of this, where the grassy ridges are south of the road and closer to the beach. I drove down the beach that direction, but my rental car wasn’t meant for bouncing over the rougher bits of the shore, so I didn’t get quite as far as I wanted. Still, the weather was, by accident, perfect for the scene I’d written.

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Around midday they turned north and entered Leesburg by the rope ferry over the Calcasieu, passing three black boys fishing from the bank with bent cane poles, and they followed the main road along the bend in the river, passing from building to building, peddling goods wherever they could: in the two shops they could find, at the livery, in the boarding house parlor. Sometimes on folks’ own doorsteps.

This is Acadian Village, also outside Lafayette and similar to Vermillionville but with rougher houses and no re-enactors. I snapped a photo because it serves as a convenient stand-in for Leesburg, the town the women visit about halfway through my novel. Leesburg was wiped out in a terrible hurricane toward the end of the 19th century, and when it got rebuilt, it was renamed Cameron — the town I stayed in during my research trip. Cameron, of course, has since been wiped out by Hurricane Audrey in 1957 and by Hurricane Rita in 2005, and was heavily damaged by Hurricane Ike in 2008. They’re still rebuilding, but, like the characters in my novel, they refuse to give up in the face of any devastation, manmade or natural.

There is an interesting detail in the passage from my book, though: the earlier drafts, all the way up until this trip, had the women crossing the Calcasieu by bridge. Today, the Calcasieu is a shipping channel, dredged deeper and wider during WWII, and can only be crossed by the Cameron Ferry. But even when it was a shallower, narrower river, it never had a bridge. I spoke about it with a researcher volunteering up at the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, the excellent Gay Gomez. She explained about the dredging of the channel and then told me the “old-timers” would tell stories about swimming their cattle across the river. So, no bridge.

At both Acadian Village and Vermillionville, the layout of the houses mimics the bayou with narrow channels and streams. Acadian Village offers bridges over these waterways, but at Vermillionville, they added a small rope-drawn ferry, so I added one to the novel.

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They both knelt in the grass and scanned the prairie about, looking for a place to hide themselves as well as the likeliest spot to find the scattered troops. The girl spied a ditch running low through the grass off to the south, and near it a stand of scrubbrush. They whispered in broken code and devised their plan, then the girl handed her cane spear to the woman and they separated. The woman slipped off toward the ditch where she lay prone with her chin in the dirt, hidden by the shadow of the tree, while the girl ran into the open prairie, loosening her skirts to fall about her legs as she scanned the flat horizon.

Late in the book, the women discover reports of a nearby battle and rush out of the marsh into the prairie to find it, hoping to cash in on the goods from whatever fleeing troops they could kill. This is very near where that encounter takes place.

The air was damp and heavy, and their hair hung flat in their eyes but they did not need to see, so often had they come this way in the last three years. They took their time and trusted their feet, and at length they found a rotting wooden plank that led from a knee of root to a shabby boardwalk. They alit on the walk and followed its zigzagging path to the shack they sought.

The photo on the left is a covered platform in the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge. The photo on the right is an historical mercantile (and functioning gift shop) in the historical Acadian Village, outside Lafayette. Taken together, they’re a kind of reference point for the rickety lakeside shop of Clovis, the corrupt old blackmarketeer the women sell their ill-gotten goods to.

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This isn’t from the book at all. But all through my trip, I visited cemeteries looking for Civil War-era graves. I was looking for anyone who was alive at the time, including people who were 19th-century “baby boomers” born during or just after the war. I found plenty, but this is the one I felt compelled to share: James D. Standfield, born March 8, 1854, died September 5, 1919 and buried in Niblett’s Bluff Cemetery, west of Vinton, Louisiana, near the old Civil War fort overlooking the Sabine.

At the foot of his grave, there is a small stone with a US flag and the initial UCV:

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“UCV” stands for United Confederate Veteran. Stones like this mark the graves of Civil War veterans who fought for the South. James Standfield was a Civil War veteran. When the war began, he was 7 years old; when the war ended, he was 11.

The characters in my novel never encounter a soldier as young as James Standfield. And I don’t regret omitting that detail one bit. There were too many child veterans of the Civil War in real life; I don’t need to add any fictional ones.

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Apr 7 2013

Louisiana research trip: the beginning

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A traditional Cajun house in the Acadian Village, outside Lafayette, Louisiana.

A couple of weeks ago, during the last ten days of March, I used the funds from my Oregon Literary Fellowship to travel to southwest Louisiana to research the final details of my Civil War novel, Hagridden. I stayed in Cameron and travelled all over the region, visiting libraries and wildlife refuges, touring museums and historical villages, talking with experts in history and botany, listening to locals and walking the streets and bayous and beaches.

During the coming week, I’ll be posting about the trip. Tomorrow, look for a lengthy post of photos from the trip, accompanied by quotes from my novel and some details about the research. Later this week, I’ll post a bibliography of the material I read, before and during the trip, in print and online. And then I’ll wrap things up with a kind of retrospective of the whole experience.

In the meantime, I want to thank, again, Literary Arts for giving me this amazing opportunity through the fellowship. And if you haven’t read the opening excerpt from the novel, you can find it online at SOL: English Writing in Mexico.

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