This is a phenomenal presentation — from Margaret Atwood! — on the changes taking place in the publishing industry… and why we shouldn’t freak out about it. My favorite bit is her definition of “publishing,” because the rest of this presentation stems from that one seminal idea, and it’s awesome.
The video of her presentation is a full 33 minutes long. (You read that correctly: minutes.) So it takes a while to load. But it’s totally worth it.
After a blisteringly energy-packed sets-hair-on-fire Book Camp 2, the O’Reilly’s Tools of Change #toccon publishing conference in New York rolled forth on February 14-16. I gave an author’s-view keynote on February 15 called ‘The Publishing Pie,’ which you can see at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6iMBf6Ddjk It’s a new experience for me, speaking to techfolk- they’re so sharp their brains poke through their skulls like the pins in the Scarecrow … Read More
There’s been a lot in the news lately about state employees in Wisconsin protesting the attacks on their rights and their livelihoods. I posted about it here a week ago. Many of those protesters are teachers, K-12 as well as higher ed, and (at least as importantly, I think) their students. These protesters, many of them teachers, have been braving long nights and bitter days, stubborn resistance from blind legislators and angry retorts from a smaller crowd of counter-demonstrators. These protesters, many of them teachers, have crowded together shoulder to shoulder, heels on top of toes, inside the state capitol building; and they huddled together in the freezing sleet and dark winter streets.
Where do they find the strength?
Well, in the case of the teachers, they’ve been facing this and worse for ages, often from their own neighbors, friends, family members, even the parents of their students. They’ve been facing down ignorance and prejudice for longer than any of us would care to admit. They’ve done so with a fortitude that is hard to fathom. And they do it for a pittance.
Why put themselves through all this for the little reward our society is willing to give them?
For the answer to that, I direct you to teacher and slam poet Taylor Mali, who gives our thunderous war cry in this astounding poem, “What Teachers Make”:
All day I have stuffed my ears with music like soaked cotton; now, the gentle thrum of distant construction, the drift of passing traffic, and the quiet afternoon breeze feels like my eardrums exhaling.
The Jersey Devil, not Ryan Werner. Though the resemblance is uncanny. (Image via Wikipedia)
Rock star and writer and guy-I-refer-to-a-lot-because-we-swap-ideas-on-writing-all-the-time Ryan Werner has a new story up at Jersey Devil Press. In the same vein as Ryan’s music-based flash fiction over at Our Band Could Be Your Lit, this story, “Carbon,” is based on a rock song, this time Bruce Springsteen‘s “Adam Raised a Cain.”
It’s really cool. Go read it.
Then listen to some Springsteen, because Ryan claims to hate the guy but I think The Boss is pretty damned cool.
No one was going to believe her, but the dog would not stop barking. She was the only woman he had ever met who wore sensible shoes and a g-string. Margot got the idea from an article she read in a women’s magazine. It was an island on no map. Had he just winked at her? The man at the store had said it was easy.
It started snowing at midnight that Christmas Eve. This New Year’s Eve was going to be different. It did not look anything like the photograph. Dave was wrong again. Except for that time when he was ten and had found a dead bird, Luke had never seen a dead body, until now. It was annoying but Susan had to admit her mother was right. The carnival came to town once every year. Josh had been walking towards the hill on the horizon all morning. It was hard to believe there could be more than one. Rachel could not stop laughing.
The piece of paper fluttered slowly down and landed on the sidewalk in front of Erica. Frank stood on the subway platform waiting for the train to arrive. Monique had not been here for a long time. Spring bloomed suddenly that year, catching even the optimists by surprise. It was exhausting to even think about.
The dog sat with his head cocked, staring at the still figure of his master. The sad gap left by the felled tree surprised William every time he looked out the window. Chris had always hated the color green, everyone knew that. The night it happened there was a thunderstorm. It was inevitable that they would meet.
This is a strange amalgamation, not only of words but also of exercises. What I’ve done is essentially combine the idea of “found poetry’ with the first-line story exercise: I’ve pieced together a story from the first lines suggested on Lori Ann Bloomfield’s First Line blog. It happened by accident, as most found art does. I was going through that blog and recording, in a file on my computer, all the first lines. I wanted a resource for future use should I ever need a first line to get the writing started. But as I wrote them down, in order, starting way back on Week 1 in November 2008, I noticed that a story was unfolding all by itself. The first line fit very neatly with the second line (or rather, with the second first line). The third line kept the female character but introduced an idea just different enough to generate interest: what does the dog thing have to do with the clothes thing (let alone a g-string!)? But that line fits quite neatly with the fourth, and then another odd turn — this time bringing the “he” of the story into more direct play — and so on….
The resulting “found story” isn’t perfect. There are too many questions too soon, I think, and the story veers off track in ways that are not just interesting, they’re potentially distracting. And of course there are way too many characters bouncing around in this thing, so one of the first changes I’ll probably make is to consolidate characters. A handful should be plenty.
But that’s the plan for next week: I’m going to take this “found story” as the rough draft and work with it to see if a clearer, more functional story might emerge. And I’ll post that next week as a revision exercise.
If that budget passes, Wisconsin will not merely be in trouble; Wisconsin will be doomed.
The budget proposes to cut state spending on higher education as well as health services; will actively reduce the take-home pay of state employees, in part by requiring state employees to pay more out-of-pocket to their health benefits, and this includes teachers at all levels; and — most dangerously — will eliminate state employees’ right to collectively bargain, effectively destroying any chance they might have of ever regaining their current (already minuscule) pay and benefits.
Such a wound to state employees’ pay and benefits will have a ripple effect not just across the state in real time, this year, but also across time, negatively impacting health, education, and workers rights for decades to come. This, in turn, can only dig a deeper hole in Wisconsin’s economy, not improve it.
When I taught college in Wisconsin, I had a colleague (now retired) who argued quite passionately and effectively for increasing faculty salaries. In one meeting, he put it this way: “I didn’t take monastic vows of poverty!”
At the time, I remember thinking (but never said aloud), “Well, my friend, that’s where we’re different, because I have taken monastic vows.”
Scholar/monk in a scriptorium. Mural in the 5th Ave. branch of the NY Public Library, 31 January 2008.
I’ve long revered the connection between higher education and monastic orders. In the West, this tradition dates most obviously to the late middle ages, which is why our “cap and gown” regalia so closely resemble clerical vestments (the “hood” of masters and doctoral degrees derives from the hoods that monks wear). In my beloved Buddhist tradition, this connection also exists, most evident in the formal courses of study and degrees offered within the various schools of Tibetan Buddhism (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, for instance, holds a “geshe” degree, which is the equivalent of a PhD in Buddhism, complete with area specializations and grueling oral exams).
A few years ago I attended a series of teachings from the Dalai Lama in Wisconsin, and during a Q&A session, one audience member explained to His Holiness that she wanted to focus on her Buddhist studies more intently and wondered if she should leave her profession as a school teacher and become a nun. His Holiness advised her against it. Instead, he said, she should make her profession a part of her practice, particularly because she was a teacher. “My compassion is just a word,” he said. “You are living it!”
I’ve always viewed academia as a vocation rather than as a mere job; it’s something we do not for the money but despite the money. And for that reason, I view my entering into this notoriously underpaid and undervalued profession as a kind of de facto vow of poverty.
Image by patrikmloeff via Flickr
But more recently, I’ve been thinking about this issue from another perspective. In Buddhism, as in monastic Christianity, there has long been an understanding that the laity will support their teacher monks and nuns financially, on the understanding that the work these monastic scholars do directly benefits each of us through access to education and indirectly benefits all of society by advancing the course of human knowledge. It doesn’t always work out this way, of course — look at all the Christian monasteries who have had to turn to wine production, for just one example, in order to supplement their income from donations. And when you see yet another book on the shelf from some Buddhist teacher or another and you wonder how many times these revered gurus can say some variation of the same thing, understand that they publish so many books partly because their monasteries, schools, and libraries need the funding.
And when you see your child’s teacher behind the cash register at Wal-Mart on the weekends, or your college professor turns up at your door to deliver your pizza, understand that they’re there because they need the money we as a society haven’t been willing to give them.
If you have kids, ask yourself what your child’s education is worth. What is your child’s future worth, in dollars? When your child’s teachers send home notes asking for your help providing resources for the classroom — writing utensils, paper, books, glue — you will probably ask yourself, Don’t they have this stuff in school? Why do I have to provide everything? The answers are these: No, they do not have this stuff in school, because the school’s budgets are too low. And you would be providing these things one way or another, either through taxes or through your own shopping trips or through fund-raisers hosted by the students themselves, but if you provided them through taxes and the schools are able to use their educator discounts and bulk-order discounts and buy everything up front with your tax dollars, you would wind up spending a lot less out of pocket for those supplies, and our students will all have a lot more of the materials and opportunities they need.
(If you have kids that you homeschool yourself, these are different issues, and because I wasn’t homeschooled, I don’t have the same understanding of these issues that you do. One the one hand, you don’t get to benefit from government funding at all and have to foot the bill yourself for everything. I’m a proponent of state funding or subsidies for homeschooling, but of course that would require more state oversight of your teaching methods; I think that could be a good thing or it could be problematic, but I’d love to hear your input—please, pass it along!)
If you have a kid in college, or if you are a college student yourself, consider this: Classes are getting larger, curriculum is getting less rigorous, and consequently students are learning less, but this is not because the teachers lack academic rigor. Not at all. It’s because the universities are losing billions in state and federal funding, and in order to make up for those shortcomings they are hiring fewer full-time faculty and more part-time and adjunct faculty. These part-timers and adjuncts are the same people we would have as full-time professors — with the same qualifications, the same academic rigor, the same devotion to their given disciplines — as any tenure-track faculty member, but because they have to work part-time, in larger classrooms, with fewer resources, they find themselves stretched so thin they have no choice but to give less to each student. Take away their benefits like health insurance or retirement income, and they wind up having to teach more classes, often on several campuses, stretching their time and energy even thinner, giving even less to each student. In this environment, faculty salaries start becoming devalued, dropping to meet the lower salaries of adjuncts rather than adjunct salaries rising to reflect the value they provide a university; faculty then spend more time fighting for their very livelihoods and less time on scholarship and teaching. Meanwhile, the universities also have to cut back on how often they update textbooks, how regularly they upgrade classroom technology and how well they maintain that classroom technology, and the caliber and frequency of visiting scholars and artists that can enhance a student’s academic experience.
All of this results from poor funding. And we control that funding. We have the ability to demand that our government better funds our schools and colleges and universities; we have the ability to demand that our government better supports our teachers. And when our politicians wonder where that money is going to come from, we have the opportunity to volunteer it. That money will come from us, and we should be happy to pay it.
I urge you to get online and find the website for your state government. If you need help, try the resources at the League of Women Voters, who keep tabs on your government for you. Look up your state’s budget and find out how much your state is giving to education. I will guarantee you it’s not enough. So while you’re there, find your state representatives and contact them to demand increased spending on education. And if you live in a state that is considering cutting education funding (and with 46 states lined up for just such a cut, chances are you do), contact your representatives and demand they vote against those cuts!
And in case you think this is just about the teachers, consider this: on Monday, students across Wisconsin staged `60-era-style mass walkouts in schools, colleges, and universities as a sign of their support for their teachers. They marched down to the Wisconsin state capitol and demonstrated inside and out, demanding that their legislators “kill this bill.” Because if Walker’s budget passes, teachers will be so severely damaged financially that many will have no choice but to leave the profession or leave the state; and without those teachers, these students said, the students’ education and their futures will be doomed. This isn’t about my friends’ salaries. This is about the future of education. This is about you.
A while ago, a freelance writer named Meredith Southard contacted my wife and asked to interview her for a short article on the librarian profession (because, you know, my wife is an awesome librarian); that article, which turned into a kind of profile feature about my wife, was accepted for publication and now appears on Imagination Cafe‘s Career-O-Rama. Check out “Job-a-palooza – Librarian” to see the article on my wife.
Good news! It’s taken a while to get it online, but the new issue (Vol. VI) of Ampersand Review‘s online edition is out now, and it contains my story “Horror Vacui.” Check it out.
Actually, check out all of Ampersand — the review and the press — because they’re some of the coolest literary-minded people on the web. I’m pretty damned thrilled to be included in their online edition. Thanks, gang!
Samuel Snoek-Brown 