National education standards?

People who know me know how ready I am to rail against standardized education.  I have long believed in student-based teaching, so while I agree that we ought to hold our students to some level of excellence, the standards of that excellence should be established in cooperation with the students–each student should have not only the opportunity but also the obligation, the responsibility to participate in his or her education.  I admit that with the exception of some seminars for an Upward Bound program in Texas and my work with teen creative writers in Wisconsin, I’ve never taught anything but college, so perhaps my educational ideals don’t translate quite as well to grades K-12.  But I also grew up with an inside perspective on primary and secondary education:  My mother is a lifelong schoolteacher and has taught virtually all elementary grades and some middle school, and she continues to teach third grade.  Both my in-laws also are lifelong schoolteachers, serving not only in the classroom but also as librarian and UIL coach (my mother-in-law), and as bus driver, driver’s ed instructor, and principal (my father-in-law).  My sister, too, is in education, working with pre-Kindergarten children.  So I have a deeply familiar awareness of public education.

Which is why I find the current push for national education standards in the US so interesting.  My inclination, of course, is to rail against the move, because standardization across whole states is problematic enough–standardizing over the whole nation is, my gut tells me, just asking for trouble.  Susan Ohanian, herself a former English teacher and an opponent of the standards, seems to agree with me:  According to a Washington Post article (found online through MSNBC), Ohanian “said standards deny teachers the ability to judge what should be taught and when. ‘If we don’t trust teachers to do that, then we have no business leaving them in the classroom,’ she said.”

Besides every academic’s pedagogical (or egocentric?) desire for classroom autonomy, though, I have another reservation about the current push for national standards.  As the standards’ proponents and the Obama administration put their case, we need these new, more rigorous standards in order to make the US more competitive internationally.  I agree that in terms of what we offer our students, the US has fallen far short of our promise (as any educator can tell you, the tragic irony of No Child Left Behind was that because it sacrificed educational rigor in favor of meeting arbitrary benchmarks, it wound up “leaving behind” more children than ever).  Yet I have never viewed education as a competition, not between students or between schools, and so to view it as a competition between nations rankles me.  In competitive education, some students “win” but a great many students lose, because the very nature of competition demands it.  This is a part of America’s national identity, perhaps, at least since the Cold War–as Americans, we must beat “them,” whoever “they” happen to be in a given moment.  Yet I have always been more collectivistic than individualistic, and I have long viewed the best education as cooperative rather than competitive.  And in my view, raising our standards simply so we can “beat” some imaginary educational foe takes the focus away from where it should be:  on the students, whose only competitive concern should be to exceed their own perceived capabilities, to become the best human being they are capable of becoming.

Still, I am pragmatic enough to recognize that standards do serve a purpose, and that properly designed and compassionately implemented, they can benefit students and education in general.  The national standards movement, as it’s presented in the Post article, is interesting, and if I can dream of a utopia in which teachers maintain a significant degree of input into these standards, and in which the standards allow a wide breadth of flexibility, I can certainly admire the Obama administration and the pro-standards educators for the direction of their work.  Because if we have to have standards, at least this movement is working toward elevating them, and anything that improves a quality of education, I can find a way to get on board with.

But these are just my thoughts, and the cooperative collectivist in me would love to hear comments from other teachers, especially those on the “front lines” of K-12 education.  If you’re a teacher at any grade level (that includes college), leave a comment.  If you know a teacher, pass this along and ask them to leave a comment.

A short story

Just a short note to say I’ve added a previously published story to the site here.  One of my first short-shorts, “Consuela Throws Her TV Away,” appeared in Orchid: A Literary Review back in 2003, but it was never available online and the magazine has now stopped publishing, so I thought it might be nice to offer the story here, since it’s so short.

You can find it at the link above, or through the link on the Publications page.

Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah will leave a gaping hole in literature.  His influence on my own work is strangely subtle and roundabout (I know him more for his influence on others–especially Tom Franklin–than for anything else), but when I think about the stories I’ve read, I realize how deeply effective they were.  For all the brashness of his style, his content sneaks in from between the lines, like a splinter you didn’t realize you’d picked up or where you could have got it, but then for no reason, when you’re nowhere near anything that could ever leave a splinter, you discover one in your fingertip.  I’m reading a story or working on my own, and I think, what should this sound like?  How should I go about this?  And there’s the memory of Hannah’s work, the fuller impact of which is only now apparent, and even now I know I haven’t felt all there is to feel in the story.  But it’s okay–he’s sometimes hard to read at first because the truth in his fiction is so sharp and glaring, but he’s the kind of writer it’s easy to go back to, once you’ve adjusted.  Best of all, he makes you feel that great writing is possible.  A lot of the writers I admire most frustrate me sometimes, because I read them and I think, God, I’ll never be this good.  Hannah’s that good too, but he goes about his fiction in a reassuring way, as if behind each word is a quiet assurance that you just need to keep at it, that writing is work but you can make it work for you.

Godspeed, Barry Hannah.  And thanks for the fiction you left us.

A Writer’s Notebook: Outrunning the Critic

This comes from Brian Kiteley‘s The 3 A.M. Epiphany, some exercises from which appear on his University of Denver web page.  For the exercise (which I copied and pasted below), click here.

  1. Sharon works as a bookkeeper for a senior center on the backside of town.
  2. Sharon knows her husband is distracted, knows he loved someone once more than he loves her now.
  3. When the rain starts, Sharon always stops whatever she’s doing and steps outside, or opens a window, or pulls to the side of the road and shuts off the engine to hear the rain drum against the roof of the car.
  4. Once, in high school, Sharon got high in the girl’s locker room after soccer practice, and even though it wasn’t something she enjoyed at the time and has never done since, once in a while she wonders if she ought to try it again.
  5. The smell of the old folks at her senior center makes Sharon want to cry, because it always reminds her of her own grandmother alone in some nursing home, forgotten by the family when Sharon was too young and later too poor to do anything to help her.
  6. In the middle of sex—ever since she first started having sex, but especially since she met Mark—she gets the urge to sing like Robert Plant just to hear the sound of it.
  7. Most people who meet her think Sharon is distant and dry.
  8. When the baby died in her womb and she miscarried in the bathroom at work, she had no idea she’d even been pregnant.
  9. She’s never told her husband and she never will.
  10. Colorado has always seemed like a such a romantic place.
  11. Sharon likes Western novels even though she can’t stand to read the details of the shootouts—the violence feels so long and unnecessary, the writing so cheap.
  12. Her hair has never had a mind of its own—she hears other women complain about this in their own hair, but Sharon envies them, her own hair lifeless and at its best when it’s just tossed back in a ponytail.
  13. Mark’s job at the grocery store pays the bills, but it doesn’t feel right, and maybe part of his distance is tied up in that more than anything else; Sharon wants so much more for him but knows saying so out loud would just make things worse.
  14. If she could get rid of one thing that Mark brought into the marriage, she’d get rid of his beer cap collection, or at least make him do something creative with them, like mount them on a board or trim the kitchen cabinets with them.
  15. If she could get rid of one thing she brought into the marriage, she’d get rid of her piano, because it’s just so big and hard to maintain and she’s never been interested in playing it.
  16. Sharon is bored to tears with math.
  17. Her sister lives so far away Sharon never gets to see her niece and nephews, and thank god for that, because after the miscarriage the last thing she wants is for her damned biological clock to start up.
  18. All that blood, it still haunts her, turns up in her dreams in the most sickening ways: blood in her breakfast cereal, her nose running clots and fetuses, her legs tangled up in yards of umbilical cord  and the blood swiping streaky bands around her ankles, blood in her hair in the shower, blood running over Mark’s face and shoulders and gleaming under the flat white fluorescents in some huge grocery store she’s never actually been in and him utterly unaware of why she’s staring at him and screaming, that same expression on his face when she wakes sobbing in the night.
  19. When the letter arrives telling her she’s died and the insurance is canceling her account, she thinks at first it’s some joke her father has organized, because he does that sometimes.
  20. Sharon wishes people saw the world the way she sees it.
  21. In middle school, she spent an entire weekend holed up in her room, only emerging to eat, and she didn’t say a word for two and a half days, not even to ask for a soda or to say goodnight.
  22. Her mother said she was acting like a nun and for six whole months Sharon considered converting to Catholicism just so she could join a convent, because she liked being quiet and by herself sometimes and she thought that’s all being a nun would entail.
  23. If George Clooney and Denzel Washington knocked on her door and offered to run away with her if only she could choose between them, she would lose them both just standing there in the doorway trying to decide.
  24. Sometimes she sneaks out of bed in the middle of the night and turns on the tv in the living room, huddled in the dark on the floor just inches from the screen, and watches old black and white movies with the sound off.
  25. Sharon sometimes daydreams about visiting her own funeral, a shade in the corner behind the wreaths of flowers and the potted plants, and watching to see which people weep and which smile fondly over memories of her and most of all how Mark would react, would he sit there stone-faced and lost without her or would he fidget and glance around and wonder how long before he could drive away and forget it all, and when she gets the letter in the mail from the insurance company telling her she’s dead, she thinks this might be her chance to find out.

Kiteley’s web page includes 25 selected exercises; I used #23:

Outrunning the Critic. Write 100 short sentences about a character you are working on in a piece of fiction. The sentences should not connect and should not follow one another in any logical way.  The idea of this exercise is to force you to outrun your own thoughts and intelligence and critical mind.  Be careful not to be monotonous, using the name of your character or a pronoun to start each sentence.  A better exercise would be to write 200 or 500 sentences about this character, but 100 sentences is still enough of a stretch to make this useful.  The idea for this exercise comes from a collaboration the poet John Yau did with a painter, which was to match 1,000 small watercolors with sentences by Yau.  John Yau is the author of Edificio Sayonara, Forbidden Entries, and Hawaiian Cowboys, among other books.

The Sharon in these sentences is a character in two stories, one finished and already making the rounds but the other still in very rough draft mode.  The first story is from her husband Mark’s POV, and because of some of Mark’s issues, he never gives us a full picture of Sharon.  In the second story, I wanted to focus on Sharon, but I have found that, thanks for Mark, I don’t know her very well, so even though I have the story idea down (she gets a letter informing her she’s been mistakenly filed as “deceased” by her insurance company, and things unfold from there), I’ve had a terrible time trying to write my way into it because I don’t know enough about her character.  Hence, this exercise.

I only wrote 25 sentences just to keep things brief for the post, though I do plan to keep pushing this through the full 100.  Of course, I also know enough about my own process to understand that I’ll probably latch onto an idea and start working on the story before I hit 100 in pure exercise mode.

Women writers

I can’t write a post about women’s literature.  I could, but it’s not my field of study and I’d just wind up offending the scholars who know what they’re talking about.  But I can list some of the women authors and poets I admire most, which is all this is.  And by all means, if I’m missing someone you think I should be reading, please let me know–I’m always happy to take up new books.

I’ve divided the lists into three sections.  The A-Team (couldn’t resist the reference) includes the women I read most often and look forward to reading more of, and for them I’ve written short reviews.  The B-Team is just a list (for now) and includes women whose work I’ve loved but I haven’t read enough to comment on them more fully–these are the women I need to read more of.  Finally, the CW-Team, which includes the women whose books on craft have taught me the most about writing–and, in fact, they far outweigh the men on my writing shelf.

Also, before I get into the lists, I want to honor the publishers who specialize in women’s fiction, because the feminists of a not-distant-enough past were right:  Writing had been for too long a man’s world, and if you wanted to argue that it still is I wouldn’t debate the issue, so kudos to those publishers who promote women authors and women’s fiction.

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The A-Team | The B-Team | The CW-Team

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The A-Team

Jane Austen Karen Armstrong Judy Blume Sandra Cisneros
Louise Erdrich Beth Ann Fennelly Debra Monroe Alice Munro
Annie Proulx JK Rowling Sappho Mary Shelley

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Jane Austen

She’s slightly out of alphabetical order, but that’s because in my book, Jane Austen is always at the top.  Insightful social commentary?  Check. Deeply developed characters?  Check.  Biting wit?  Check and check.  Hilarious satire that’s unafraid to poke fun even at Austen’s own work?  Go read Northanger Abbey! She can seem dry or slow-paced by our standards today, but Austen remains popular because she understood how to write minutely observant and socially specific stories that nevertheless acheived a timeless universality.  Pride and Prejudice alone has been adapted several times into film just in the last decade or two, including a Mormon version and a Bollywood version, and more recent prose editions have even added zombies.  And if zombies aren’t a sign of P&P‘s continued relevance, I don’t know what is.  (Vampires, maybe, but I’d be awfully surprised if someone isn’t working on a “Dark Persuasion” novel right now.)  Austen has everything we academic writers go to grad school to learn, and she executes her craft brilliantly.  And for that, I will always love her.

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Karen Armstrong

She has become my go-to author for quick but insightful introductions to religions and religious history.  She generally keeps the books short, especially for her overview works, but she manages to pack in a lot of information into her books, and her scholarship is superb.  Best of all, she handles her subjects with an impressive degree of equanimity, as though she was some kind of journalist nun (she was, in fact, a nun).  She has never been one to hold back on criticism, sometimes sharp and hard for some to swallow, but if she expresses any bias in her writing, it’s a bias in favor of honesty, truth, and understanding.  In a field too often prone to gross generalization or exclusive specificity, Armstrong manages to strike exactly the right balance.

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Judy Blume

Surprised to find a YA author on the list?  Don’t be–I admit I don’t read it as often as I did when I was a kid, but I think too often YA fails to get the credit it deserves as serious literature.  But Judy Blume is here not only because her books are good but because she herself is outstanding.  I’ve had the great privilege of hearing her speak and the even greater privilege of meeting her, and she remains one of the most astute, vocal, and engaging writers I’ve ever come across.  Her passion for defending intellectual freedom and the right of all people–especially children–to read and to learn is astounding, and she gives generously of her time, her efforts, and her money to help support those causes.  Plus, she writes really excellent and timeless youth lit:  I remember feeling shocked when I learned that Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was neither published nor set in the early `80s (it first appeared in 1972!), because when I read that book I thought she was writing about me.  That’s great fiction.

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Sandra Cisneros

Cisneros makes the list primarily on the strength of her two excellent fiction books, The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek, as well as her poetry collection Loose Woman.  She imbued those works with a kind of desperate honesty, a fervor for the unblinking truth, and her words and images sing on the page with a vividity you don’t often find these days, yet she doesn’t strip down her prose as many “honest” writers tend to do–she maintains an infectious rhythm in her language, in her prose and her verse alike, that makes you want to hum her words.  I need to read some of her longer works (I have a copy of Caramelo I’ve been meaning to get round to for ages), but the memory of reading and rereading these early books is still very close in my mind.

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Louise Erdrich

Some might disagree with this, but Erdrich has a kind of quiet honesty about her work, whether it’s poetry or essays or (my favorite) fiction.  I confess I don’t ordinarily go for quiet–I usually prefer loud, rowdy, violent, in-your-face fiction–but her work is so inviting I can’t resist.  When I’m behind on my New Yorkers (as I am now, by several months), I tend to read the articles and save the fiction for later, but I always stop when I see an Erdrich story.  She has a way of seeing a story from all sides, not just in her multiple-narrator stories but within a single story as well.  And the imagery in her poetry somehow is suggestive without seeming abstract, explicit without seeming overly concrete.  It’s not always what I’m looking for in literature, but when I am, she’s a great writer to go to.

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Beth Ann Fennelly

I can’t praise Fennelly enough.  She is hands-down my favorite poet, with the best of the beautiful insight and sharp honesty I love in poetry.  Whether her subject is motherhood or academic life or Southern culture (she is a transplant from Chicago but has set roots in the South, as she expresses so superbly in her poem “Kudzu“), she writes with the voice of a kitchen knife–nothing fancy or fine like a scalpel, nothing crafty like an Exacto, just a simple instrument but sharp and clean all the same.  And then there’s her memoir, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother, one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read on any subject, and while it retains the keen insight of her poetry, the prose of her nonfiction is somehow looser, more conversational and therefore more engaging, almost comforting.  (Almost–Fennelly never sugarcoats pregnancy, childbirth, or motherhood.)  Best of all, though, she takes her role as poet seriously enough to want to pass along what she knows, and word is she has a loyal following of students at Ole Miss.  She is certainly one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing.

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Debra Monroe

I have two of Monroe‘s novels I need to get round to, but if they’re anything like her short fiction, I’m going to love them.  She has a knack for writing stories with a similar scope and feel to another of my favorites, Alice Munro, but she goes about her work in something like the opposite manner.  Both write realistic, open-ended literary fiction with a deep understanding of character, but where Munro feels organic, Monroe is precisely controlled; where Munro usually employs a distant, omniscient narrator, Monroe dives into an intimate familiarity with her narrators and characters.  Munro’s stories seem to build toward an idea, but Monroe has said she actively builds away from ideas, consciously taking turns she herself wouldn’t expect.  And where the effect of Munro’s fiction is often haunting, the effect of Monroe’s is thrilling.  Still, nothing in her work feels forced or contrived, nothing feels rushed (like Munro, Monroe enjoys the long story), and as controlled as her stories are, she knows enough to leave plenty of realistically rough edges and soft corners.  Her characters are messes not because that’s the cool thing to do to characters these days but because her characters are people, and we’re plenty messy all on our own.  And for digging up all that mess and organizing it for me to read, I gladly return to her fiction again and again.

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Alice Munro

Munro is frustratingly good. Her style is fairly straightforward, usually a now passe omniscient narrator that she still makes seem real and fresh.  And because her work is so straightforward, when I read her I want to go hit my own short fiction and try to write like her. But her style is also terrifically subtle, so there’s little on the surface to imitate, and after a while I’m just staring at the blank screen thinking, How the hell does she do that?

I think Munro is probably the epitome of the character-driven writer. I recently read her collection The Love of a Good Woman, and the last story I read was “The Children Stay,” which is quietly beautiful and unsettling as an itch, and while I was sitting around afterward trying to figure out how the hell she did it, I realized that story isn’t really even about anything. A woman has an affair and leaves her husband. This happens all the time and we’ve read the story again and again.  But over thirty-four rich, leisurely pages, Munro wallows in the psychological mud that is this woman’s inner thoughts on the subject, why she did it, what she thinks of the aftermath. In terms of plot, almost nothing happens–there’s rarely anything explicitly active in the story–but in terms of character, the ramifications of the story keeps going long after the end. I still don’t know how the hell she does it, but thinking about it in those terms reminded me of the Chekhov line about his ideas for stories:  According to Francine Prose, “Once, when someone asked him his method of composition, Chekhov picked up an ashtray.  ‘This is my method of composition,’ he said.  ‘Tomorrow I will write a story called “The Ashtray.”‘”  Like Chekhov, Munro reminds us that a story doesn’t have to be about anything, but it should wind up being about everything, and Munro pulls that off brilliantly.

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Annie Proulx

People used to complain about Annie Proulx‘s short fiction, claiming her prose was loose and sloppy.  But then she wrote The Shipping News and everyone fell in love with her for a while.  Now she’s writing short fiction again and people are complaining about The Shipping News, claiming it’s too tight and stylized, to aware of itself, compared with her brilliant short fiction.  I say Proulx isn’t willing to sit still and write what’s already been written–she pushes herself and the craft of fiction, and she’s brilliant for it.  I loved The Shipping News precisely for its stylization even as I love her recent fiction for its softer edges and more open spaces.  But the best reason I like Proulx is that I know someday we’ll be complaining about her Wyoming stories, and it’ll only be because she’s written something new and maybe better.

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JK Rowling

Sometimes the readers who view Harry Potter as children’s literature get angry at the more adult themes Rowling explores in the later novels.  And sometimes the readers who want to take the later novels seriously dismiss the early books as simplistic and cheap.  And this is what makes Rowling so ingenious:  She managed to write a series of novels in which not only the characters but also the audience and therefore the style matured as it went.  The early books are for children because Harry Potter was a child; the later books are uncomfortably adult because Harry Potter has been violently thrust into an adult world.  Yet throughout the series, Rowling maintains plot continuity and steady character development that would have been difficult to pull off in one novel, let alone seven.  CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein were dismissed as cheap kiddie lit in their day, too, and I suspect that in time, our children and our children’s children will be studying Harry Potter alongside Frodo Baggins and Aslan the lion not as pop lit or the latest thing to fill a college classroom but as serious, far-reaching literature.

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Sappho

Plato called her the “tenth Muse,” and I’d be foolish to make any list of women writers that didn’t include Sappho.  But I’m including her here not because she was a kind of protofeminist poet but because her poetry is simply beautiful.  The richness of her romantic poetry lies not in ornament but in honesty and simplicity, a voice so clear in the lines that you feel the yearning yourself, even knowing you’re reading a translation.  And her use of the second person makes that yearning all the more devastating–and appealing–to behold.  I read her work and I wonder, if I had access to ancient Greek, would her poetry make me weep?  I suspect it would.

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Mary Shelley

A lot of people beat up on Shelley, especially her most famous novel, and they call her sloppy, unrestrained, even frivolous.  I can see why–there is a kind of fury behind Frankenstein that renders it difficult to swallow at first.  But it’s a fury that rings true in the context of the story and the theme, I think, and her other works show a writer keenly aware of her craft.  But the thing that fascinates me most about Shelley is her role as a science fiction pioneer, not only in Frankenstein but also in her slow but haunting novel The Last Man, widely considered the first apocalyptic novel.  With all our attention on the masculinized (and zombified) rewrite of Pride and Prejudice or the deeply male narrative of Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant The Road, and with the upcoming interest in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction in general (my friend Darin Bradley‘s upcoming novel Noise is one such book), I think it’s important to remember where it started.  Mary Shelley dared to create life in fiction, and then she dared to destroy it, and we owe her a lot for that.

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The B-Team

  • Jonis Agee
  • Jackie Kay
  • Robin McKinley
  • LM Montgomery
  • Toni Morrison
  • Marjane Satrapi
  • Alice Sebold
  • Nance Van Winkle
  • Alice Walker

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The CW-team

  • Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
  • Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
  • Jesse Lee Kercheval, Building Fiction
  • Ann Lamott, Bird by Bird
  • Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
  • Diane Thiel, Crossroads: Creative Writing in Four Genres
  • Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

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(PS: I just discovered this is my 100th post.  Not terribly impressive, I guess, by blog standards, but a milestone nonetheless.)

Dr. Seuss was Greek

I just wanted to jump in here and say hello to my friends and brothers at Sigma Phi Epsilon–Wisconsin Theta.  SigEp is an outstanding fraternity based on the ideal of a balanced man and promoting the core values of Virtue, Diligence, and Brotherly Love.  They seek to undo the negative stereotyping associated with many fraternities, which was the reason I agreed to serve as the Faculty Adviser for the WI-Theta chapter when I worked at UW-Platteville.  The men there made me proud, dedicating themselves to a fully balanced college experience, focusing on scholarship, fitness, service, and genuine brotherhood.  I felt privileged to serve as their adviser, and when I left to move overseas, the men did me the further honor of inducting me as a Renaissance Brother as a sign that I had modeled the values they hold dear.

Why do I mention this here?  Because Theodor Seuss Geisel, our beloved Dr. Seuss, was himself a SigEp, from Dartmouth (class of 1925), and today is the Dr. Seuss’s birthday.

Patrons of writing and teaching: The Muses

Dance of Apollo with the Nine Muses
Dance of Apollo with the Nine Muses, by Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536)

As I reviewed my list of writing patrons today, I realized that most of my patrons are women.  I don’t know why this is, or what this might mean for my writing.  A few years ago a friend pointed out The Gender Genie, an online gender analysis tool for prose–just paste in a chunk of text and it would tell you, based on (dubious) algorithms and (probably outdated) psychological linguistics, whether the text was “masculine” or “feminine.”  According to the Gender Genie, this post was written by a man.  But when I plug in a passage from my novel, which is narrated in the first person from a woman’s perspective, the computer tells me my narrator’s voice is authentically female.  And maybe I have my female patrons to thank for that.

March is Women’s History Month in the US, so I’ve been thinking about my patronesses lately, and I figured there’s no better way to start the month than with the Grandes Dames of lady patrons:  The Muses.

I could spend hours writing about which Muses I’m claiming here, because scholars disagree (surprise surprise!) as to who they were or how many existed, and the debate’s been going on for millennia.  Two thousand years ago the Roman Varro and, later, the Greek Pausanias claimed three Muses, with Pausanias naming them for their attributes:  Aoidē (“song” or “voice”), Meletē (“practice” or “occasion”), and Mnēmē (“memory”). In Delphi, the three Muses went by the names of lyre chords, while elsewhere they were named after Apollo as his daughters (see the pic above).

But later still, the Muses bumped up to four and became daughters of Zeus and Plusia.  Pierus, who was sometimes called the father of the Muses, claimed seven Muses, while Homer and Hesiod set the number at nine.

Calliope, from Neil Gaiman's Dream Country
Cover of Sandman #17, Dream Country 1; "Calliope" (1990). Art by Dave McKean.

In general, I like simplicity and the literary Rule of Three, but in this case I’m a sucker for the more complicated system set up in the Neoclassical era, which describes nine Muses and gives each guardianship over a specific aspect of the performance and literary arts.  And queen among them, as any Neil Gaiman fan knows, is Calliope.  (In the haunting self-titled short story from Gaiman’s third Sandman volume, Dream Country, Calliope is a tortured sexual prisoner passed around from one frustrated writer to the next.)*

In the Neoclassical tradition, Calliope is the oldest of her sister Muses, and she is usually counted as the smartest and most assertive, too.  And because the Neoclassical system liked associating icons with ideas (one innovation Steve Jobs can’t claim), each Muse got a symbol; Calliope’s was an emblem of writing, usually a writing tablet or a roll of paper, though sometimes (if she was lucky) she’d get a published, bound book to carry around.  We all should be so lucky!

Calliope
Detail from Les Muses Uranie et Calliope, by Simon Vouet (c. 1634)

Calliope isn’t alone, though, and as much as I rely on music for inspiration while writing, I should give a respectful nod to Euterpe, Muse of music.  In fact, our word “music” comes from the Greek mousikê, related to mousa, Greek for “song” or “poem,” and most of the Muses’ various incarnations are related to sound, song, or lyrical verse.  Three of the nine Neoclassical Muses are associated with music directly, and a fourth represents dance and is accompanied by a lyre.  Even Calliope, whose purview is strictly the written word and epic poetry, bears a name that means “beautiful voiced” and is today a word for a musical instrument.

I also admit a soft spot for Clio, Muse of history, whose emblem is the scroll; and for Melpomene, Muse of tragedy, who is often depicted carrying the theatrical mask of tragedy in one hand and a deadly weapon in the other.  In fact, all the Muses deserve our admiration and gratitude (the others are Erato, Muse of lyric poetry; Polyhymnia, Muse of choral poetry; Terpsichore, Muse of dance; Thalia, Muse of comedy, and Urania, Muse of astronomy).  And however many Muses there are, I’m grateful for all of them in all their guises.

* Full disclosure: I agree there’s a kind of latent sexism in the Muses being women, inspiring men to great art but rarely permitted to create or share their own great art.  This was in many ways the horror and the tragedy at the heart of Gaiman’s excellent Sandman story.  But we are here to celebrate, and the world is not without brilliant women who inspired themselves–Plato once complemented the poet Sappho by calling her the “tenth Muse,” for instance.  I intend to follow this Patrons post with my own musings on great women authors and poets.  Feel free to beat me to the punch, though, and comment here and list your own.

Chile earthquake

Though the scale of the recent earthquake in Chile was significantly larger than the one in Haiti, the damage has so far been mercifully less. Still, Chileans are going to need help to recover from this traumatic disruption, so as I did with Haiti, I’m going to list some relief agencies you can contact to donate or to get directly involved. Most of those organizations are the same, so today I’m going to short-cut it and simply link to my list for Haiti and also link to the excellent list offered by the Huffington Post.  But look for a separate post on Chile and a link on my home page in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to revisit the excellent post on writing with compassion that I mentioned a month ago.

A Writer’s Notebook: Revision

I’m chest deep in a revision of my novel right now, but I’m also reading Alice Munro, who makes me want to work on short fiction. So I figured this week, I’d put my hands together and do a revision exercise on one of my long-problematic short stories.

Because this is slightly complicated, I’m going to explain the exercise up front. It doesn’t come from any particular source but is more an amalgam of basic tips in most writing texts, things I’ve learned from experience, and a bit of advice Tom Franklin once gave me (I’ll explain the reasoning at the end).

The exercise goes like this: Take a piece of working fiction, something you’ve gotten far enough to have typed up, even revised a few times already. Then turn off the computer, dig out the writing notebook or the old yellow legal pad, and rewrite the text longhand, from scratch. You can refer to the typed text if you need to, but try to avoid it–you are rewriting the story that’s in your head, not transcribing the text on the page. Once you’ve rewritten the story long-hand, open a new file on your computer and type that story, making any changes you feel necessary as you go.

So, what appears below are three versions of the first few paragraphs of my story. The initial version is not the original (this story already has been through more drafts than I can keep track of), but it was the working draft before I started the exercise. Between the pages of the writing journal, I’ve transcribed verbatim the handwritten version, and then below that I’ve pasted in my retyped version.

Version 1 | Version 2 | Version 3 | The exercise

Version 1 (the “original”):

Phil kept his eyes closed most of the three-hour ride south out of the hill country to the Texas coast. No one else existed—the seven other teens laughed and bounced on the long bench seats of the white touring van as Mack, their youth leader, sped down I-37 and then the small Rockport streets and then the sandy beachside roads, but Phil had muffled his ears with the headphones of his new Walkman. He only opened himself to the world when Mack braked the van too hard and swung after the lead car; Phil’s head bounced on his tinted window and Diane, the red-haired girl next to him, slid into his thigh. The faded Lincoln ahead of them had ducked off the broken asphalt of the beach road and onto the seashell drive toward Summerplace. As Diane moved back to the middle of their seat, Phil sat up away from his window and watched the Gulf of Mexico glint between the dunes of Mustang Beach.

The youth group jostled and elbowed each other in their rush to exit the confines of the van. Only Phil remained in stasis, floating instead out there in the gray-blue sky of ocean horizon, white-rimmed and picketed with the distant shafts of oil derricks, daydreaming. Side two of the Peter Gabriel tape he’d borrowed from his brother played in his headphones, the new Walkman on his lap. He closed his eyes, the chorus of “Lay Your Hands on Me” chanting through his brain.

The breeze blew off the Gulf with a scent of fish and petroleum and salt and seashells. The spiny grass shoots clumped in the dunes twisted and snapped in the breeze. The old building creaked behind them. Its white paint peeled in the salty wind. Two liver-spotted old chaperons and three teenagers waited beside the Towncar in the gravel and shell drive. The teenagers bounced out into the saline air of the Gulf, where they stumbled with second-hand suitcases and sports bags that served as backpacks. The boys heaved and grunted and made sure their sleeves fell high on their arms as they flexed, then they fled indoors under the weight of their bags. The thin screen door banged twice each time it sprang shut, and the dining room smelled of dust and concrete floors and picnic tables. Diane stood in a stairwell with the girls, but Phil did not stop to watch her.

Version 2 (the handwritten version):

To drive from the Texas hill country, through the snarl of San Antonio and then down I-37 to Corpus Christi, takes three hours. Many make it in two, but with a van full of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds balancing over seat backs and laughing and jostling each other, stopping once for sodas and bags of corn chips and once more for what everyone insisted was an emergency bathroom break at a little gas station outside Pleasanton, it took three hours. Mack, the youth leader driving the van, enjoyed the trip. He was young himself, just twenty-four, and he laughed and jostled as best he could behind the wheel, grinning into the rearview mirror or elbowing Luke, the boy who rode shotgun. Only Phil, his eyes closed and his headphones on, a ________________ cassette playing on his Walkman, rode in silence. He’d bought a Coke and a box of Nerds candy at the first stop but he’d stayed in the van for the second, kids shoving out past him. He kept his eyes closed. The Walk-man, which his grandmother had bought him last Christmas, before she’d died, had a switch that reversed the tape automatically, playing one side then the other. It flipped sides four times on the trip. He was listening to ________ as though in a dream, the song now as much in his head as in his ears, when the van lurched down a side road too fast and Diane, the red-haired girl next to him, slid into his thigh.

They had ducked onto a broken asphalt beach road. Diane scooted to the middle of their seat and apologized–put her hand on his forearm when she said it–and then they turned again onto a long drive paved in broken seashells. He looked at her hand, but he could not look at her, so he looked out the window instead, the humped dunes bristling with scrabby grasses and beyond them to the Gulf of Mexico, the gray-blue sky over the thin ocean horizon, picketed with the distant shafts of oil derricks.

When the van stopped behind the old Towncar that led them, the kids spilled out into the shell drive, laughing and chasing each other to the back where their duffels and backbacks waited. Mack walked forward and shook hands with Bully, the old church elder who’d come along with his wife Della. The shouts of the teenagers mixed in the salty air with the scattered calls of seagulls. Only two remained silent: a twelve-year-old, who no one knew well because he was the youngest, and Phil, who kept his headphones on and surveyed the dunes across the road, the wide porch with a raised pool, the sandy old building where they would spend the week in church retreat discussing Jesus and the importance of faith while three hours north, Phil’s grandmother lay in a funeral home, being dressed and made up for a viewing and a funeral Phil was not allowed to attend.

Version 3 (the retyped version):

To drive from the Texas hill country to the Gulf of Mexico takes three hours. The route they drove, through the snarl of San Antonio and then down I-37 to Corpus Christi then over the bridge to Mustang Island, took three and a half. Mack, the youth leader driving the van, enjoyed the trip even though he claimed he could make the run in two hours if it weren’t for old Bully, the church elder, driving the Lincoln Towncar ahead of them. But he only said this to impress the teenagers he oversaw, to earn the respect of youth, and because he was still young himself, just twenty-four. He did not bark at the teens to quit draping over the backs of their seats, to quit shouting and wrestling and tossing Corn Nuts at each other. Instead, he laughed along with them, jostled as best he could from behind the wheel, elbowed the boy Luke riding shotgun. Only Phil rode in silence, his eyes closed and his headphones on, a Bryan Adams cassette playing on his Walk-man. When they stopped in Pleasanton for Cokes and snacks he’d stayed in the van, the other kids shoving out past him. He kept his eyes closed the whole trip.

The Walk-man, which his grandmother had bought him last Christmas, before she’d died, had a switch that reversed the tape automatically, playing one side then the other. It had flipped sides four times on the trip. He was listening to “Heat of the Night” as though in a dream, the song now as much a part of his mind as his own thoughts, so he was slow to react when the van lurched down a side road too fast and Lane, the red-haired girl next to him, slid into his thigh. They had ducked onto worn beach road, off the main drive through the state park toward Port Aransas. Lane scooted back to the middle of their seat, said sorry though it was only the shape of the word through the Bryan Adams in Phil’s head. She touched his forearm when she said it. Phil looked out out the rows of humped, grassy sand dunes slipping past the window like an EKG, rises and dips in one long rapid line, and then they turned again up a seashell lane toward Summerplace. Phil looked back at Lane’s hand but it was nowhere near his anymore.

When the van stopped the kids spilled out into the shell drive, laughing and chasing each other or collecting their duffels and backbacks from the rear. Mack walked up to the Towncar and shook hands with Bully and with Bully’s wife Della. Phil switched off the Walk-man but left the headphones on. The muffled shouts of the teenagers mixed in the salty air with the scattered cries of seagulls. Only two remained silent: a younger boy, only twelve, who no one knew well or even by name, and Phil, who stood away from the van and surveyed the dunes across the road, the choppy late-May Gulf and the gray-blue sky over the thin horizon, the little shaft of an oil derrick. The huge two-story house behind him, a beach retreat, wide raised deck and a couple of balconies but with sandy, pealing paint on the slatted siding. and a screen door that hung at an angle and clapped in the Gulf breeze. At Summerplace they would sleep and eat and pray for a week, they would learn about Jesus and the function of the church youth group and the importance of faith while three hours north, Phil’s grandmother lay in the mortuary, being dressed and made up for a viewing and a funeral Phil was not allowed to attend.

The kids bounced on the balls of their feet, bags hung on shoulders on slumped against hips, while Bully and Mack did a head count. The boys flexed their muscles and the girls pretended not to notice. The wind smelled of fish and gasoline, and all the teenagers fussed with their hair. Then Mack waved them all in and they sprinted under the weight of their bags, dashing through the screen door and letting the spring slap it shut. They huddled in the dim dining room, dust on all the tables, and waited for their room assignments. Lane stood in a stairwell with the other girls, but Phil did not stop to look watch her.

The explanation of the exercise: One of the biggest obstacles to any revision is the familiarity of the text. Typed, it looks final, polished, and we are wary of making any drastic changes. So to get past that, we have to make the text unfamiliar, we have to remove the finality of the written version. Tom Franklin says one of his favorite revision techniques is simply to make the text look different, to change the font or the page color or anything else you can do just to make the text look different. More powerful than that is the desperation of losing a story altogether–several years ago, I lost the file of a novel I wrote as a college student, and I became frantic. The book wasn’t very good, but I was desperate not to lose all that work. Fortunately, I had the hard copy on paper, so I set about retyping it and in the process discovered that I was making profound changes to the story. The results were MUCH better than the original.

As for the handwriting: I have found that handwriting creates a different feel in prose than typing does. The story feels slower, more deliberate. That’s not usually my style, or so I like to tell myself, but with this story, I have always wanted a slower pace, a more contemplative mood, and handwriting slows down my thinking process as well as my writing. Plus, it makes the text look drastically different and more forgivably rough, so when I go back to type it up, I’m free to make changes that would feel harder in a typed, more “finished” text.

Of course, not all revision is good revision. Revision often reminds me of Joey trying to help Chandler break into Monica’s secret closet on Friends: They’re hunched down by the doorknob as Joey meticulously works in the keyhole with a pair of bobby pins, and finally he looks at Chandler and shrugs and said, “For all I know I’m just locking it more.” These revisions could be worse than the earlier version, or more likely, parts are better and parts are worse, and I’m working blind with bobbypins here–I have no idea if this is unlocked yet or not. So feel free to chime in: Leave me a message telling me what changes you like, what changes you hate, and what changes I haven’t made yet but need to desperately.

A Writer’s Notebook: First line

For the exercise, see below.

Henrietta stood nervously on the railway platform watching the passengers disembark. She could smell the grime down between tracks, the grease built up in the undercarriage, the stale odor of the passengers as their sweat and breath mingled with their alcohol, their cheese sandwiches, their dry newsprint, all of it recycled through the train’s air system and exhaled into the station as soon as the doors opened, the gasp of a railway car desperate for new–if not fresh–air.  There had been a time when Henrietta wanted to gasp herself, to expunge the odors and then never breathe again, but she’d grown used to it now, had accepted her role in things:  to sense, to feel and smell and taste the world around her as no one else could.

And then the passengers touched her.

She had sipped a drink that morning, just an ounce but it was enough to deaden things, yet here it came just the same, the electric jolt through her nerves, the synapses overheating, a fog of unprocessable sensation in her brain, all these human beings, all these lives and emotions and energy washing over her, slipping into her, filling the subatomic gaps between each cell in her body, swelling her beyond herself.  She always thought of her childhood in these moments, of the toys she would buy for a quarter from the machines in the grocery store, the little plastic capsules rattling with tiny dinosaurs, lizards, trolls, which she would take home and drop in a bowl of water and watch expand, soak up the water and triple, quintuple in size.  Once, she had tied a string in coils around a tiny alligator then dropped it in the bathroom sink.  When it expanded it did so in grotesque rings, swollen bulges through the string until it looked segmented, more a worm than an alligator.  One leg had popped free but the rest were tied tight against its body and it looked tortured with that one free limb growing out from its rippled bands of green foam flesh.  Then something skittered loose in the water, slipped away and swelled on its own–the string had cut through one clawed foot.  The tip of the tail followed, shooting away like a life raft, and then the nose.  It happened like that, segment after segment cutting loose and drifting in the sink, a disembodied nightmare of an alligator.

When Henrietta had discovered her gift, her curse, in adolescence, she swore never to wear tight clothing again, not snug jeans or bracelets or strappy shoes, never even wore a bra.  Filled with the sensations of others and the memory of that alligator in the sink, she was terrified.

When the announcer blasted over the speakers to call the train’s departure, she flinched, and she whimpered, but she was getting used to this by now.  She opened her eyes and scanned the bright windows of the train.  It was full, as before.  She could not risk the enclosure, the long-term proximity to all those people, and so she waited, again, for the next train, and the next, until at last she could find a car with only a few people, where she could ride without the urge to scream.

And then the passengers touched her.

She had drank that morning, just an ounce but it was enough to deaden things, yet here it came just the same, the electric jolt through her nerves, the synapses overheating, a fog of unprocessable sensation in her brain, all these human beings, all these lives and emotions and energy washing over her, slipping into her, filling the subatomic gaps between each cell in her body, swelling her beyond herself.  She always thought of her childhood in these moments, of the toys she would buy for a quarter from the machines in the grocery store, the little plastic capsules rattling with tiny dinosaurs, lizards, trolls, which she would take home and drop in a bowl of water and watch expand, soak up the water and triple, quintuple in size.  Once, she had tied a string in coils around a tiny alligator then dropped it in the bathroom sink.  When it expanded it did so in grotesque rings, swollen bulges through the string until it looked segmented, more a worm than an alligator.  One leg had popped free but the rest were tied tight against its body and it looked tortured with that one free limb growing out from its rippled bands of green foam flesh.  Then something skittered loose in the water, slipped away and swelled on its own–the string had cut through one clawed foot.  The tip of the tail followed, shooting away like a life raft, and then the nose.  It happened like that, segment after segment cutting loose and drifting in the sink, a disembodied nightmare of an alligator.

When Henrietta had discovered her gift, her curse, in adolecense, she swore never to wear tight clothing again, not snug jeans or or bracelets or stappy shoes, never even wore a bra.  Filled with the sensations of others and the memory of that alligator in the sink, she was terrified.

When the announcer blasted over the speakers to call the train’s departure, she flinched, and she whimpered, but she was getting used to this by now.  She opened her eyes and scanned the bright windows of the train.  It was full, as before.  She could not risk the enclosure, the long-term proximity to all those people, and so she waited, again, for the next train, and the next, until at last she could find a car with only a few people, where she could ride without the urge to scream.

This is a first-line exercise, in which you take a sentence–usually at random–and use it as the beginning of a piece of writing.  Usually, you should freewrite from the first line, scribbling down whatever comes to mind, a kind of free-association game.  It can be timed, or you can simply write until you’ve exhausted your ideas (at which point, in some exercises, you can reach for a new sentence and keep working).  For the record, I wrote until I’d run out of ideas, and except for the usual spell-check at the end of things, I did indeed freewrite–this is unrevised.  I know the rules.

This first line comes from Lori Ann Bloomfield’s blog, First Line, since it was my conversation with her that prompted these weekly exercises in the first place.

And if anyone’s curious about the utility of this particular piece of writing: I might adapt this as a scene in a vampire novel I’ve had ideas about for years now.  But it doesn’t have to have wind up in a story to be useful.  I enjoyed the description, especially the challenge of starting with a train–I’ve ridden my share of subways and metros, but I’m not well versed in proper train stations.  So it was nice to give that a shot today.