Responding to Atlanta

Today, I had planned to write another post in my series “How A Writer’s Craft Can Be a (more) Anti-Racist Textbook,” but after this week’s mass killing of mostly Asian-American women in Atlanta, I feel the need to respond first. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but it’s important when trying to teach in an anti-racist manner (and thus, when trying to write about that) to acknowledge current events and respond to racism whether it is in the national news or on campus.

Even though the news and public officials are still saying the shooter’s motives are unclear, it’s impossible not to see that there are racist motives involved. It may be true that other motives are also involved, but it can’t be ignored that the shooter targeted three Asian businesses and that one of the three was across town from the other two businesses. You only have to look at the map to know that this was a targeted attack. Statements from local police that seek to downplay the fact that this was a hate crime only serve to highlight the racism that allows a heinous crime like this to be conceivable.

Violence and threats against Asian-Americans have risen dramatically in the past year. It is important for everyone to stand up against this culture of hate and violence and stand for communities of color, as we have after the mass shooting in El Paso or with Black Lives Matter protests last summer. I don’t have answers, but to remain silent is to be part of the problem. Listen to our Asian-American leaders and members of your community and stand with them.

Where I’m Coming From: The Origins of My Workshop Practice

How A Writer’s Craft Can Be a (more) Anti-Racist Textbook, Part 3

Let me just put it out there: I’m a straight white guy, so you’d be justified in asking what right I have to write about anti-racist anything. My goal in writing this series of posts is not to co-opt the discussion or to tell anyone how they ought to teach, but instead is to reflect on the thoughts of others whose ideas ought to shape the way I teach. As a textbook author, I also want reflect on the book I’ve written and how it might be used in an anti-racist setting. With A Writer’s Craft, I didn’t set out to write an anti-racist book, which is why I say it “can be” and “can be more” anti-racist. As part of that reflection, I feel it is only fair to reflect on and reveal the origins of my own workshop practice.

In discussions of anti-racist creative writing pedagogy, often the Iowa workshop model is held up for criticism. I didn’t go to the Iowa Workshop, though was born and raised in Iowa, went to Knox College not far away, and made many pilgrimages to Iowa City to attend readings and visit Prairie Lights. One of my good friends did go through the Iowa Writers Workshop as a poet, and from her stories, I can certainly believe that the portrayals of the workshops there are fairly acurate. It sounded like a stressful, highly competitive atmosphere, though I’m sure it also has its bright points.

At Knox, two of our main creative writing professors, Robin Metz in fiction and Robin Behn in poetry were Iowa grads. Samuel Moon, the poetry professor when I first arrived, had gone through the University of Michigan. I know we were trained in a workshop model that was at least influenced by Iowa. Neither Robin Metz nor Robin Behn followed it closely, though I do remember they used the rule that the writer had to be silent while their work was discussed, which many writers have criticized as colonialist. I don’t remember that rule being quite so oppressive, though I don’t think we stuck to it religiously, especially with Sam Moon or Robin Behn, and as a white guy, I might not have noticed if we did. With Robin Metz, I remember long and heated discussions, and I think the writers were allowed to engage after a time, maybe because we also were allowed to drink and smoke during our evening workshops.

I won’t say we were never egotistical or overbearing — I’m sure we were. We were also young and foolish, and it was the 1980s. We had several very good writers of color in our group: Tawanna Brown, Audrey Petty, Vita Cross, Jonathan Joe, Dennis See, and Khusro Mumtaz spring to mind. I can’t speak to their experience of our workshops, but I do think that our professors treated everyone equally and we had (and have) great respect for those writers. I hope they experienced it that way. For all its flaws, Knox provided a sound pedagogical foundation, and many of us have gone on to successful writing careers.

My second education in writing, though, was at the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago, where I was fortunate to work with Marc Kelly Smith, a founder of the poetry slams, and David Hernandez and Street Sounds, who often performed there. I consider this my almost/anti-MFA period. Academic poetry was not privileged in a poetry slam environment to say the least, and there were many writers of color we were in awe of. One fall, I had the good fortune to work with Robin Metz and David Hernandez in a writing workshop for Robin’s Urban Studies students — I made coffee and got to sit in on their discussions, and I got to learn from David’s kind, encouraging mentorship. Marc Smith, Sheila Donohue, Cin Salach, and I formed a poetry performance group we called The Bob Shakespeare Band. For a while we had a Tuesday night poetry show at a another Chicago club, performed at the Green Mill, and took our show on the road to a college on Chicago’s West Side and to Ann Arbor for a slam competition. We had a lot of fun, and I relearned or unlearned much of what I’d learned in college about poetry and writing in general. Collaboration, multi-vocal poetry, and audience participation were all parts of what we explored.

Later, I did my graduate work in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. I studied Dutch, German, French, and English, plus lots of literary theory and non-English texts in translation. It was there that I was first exposed to postcolonial literature, for instance, and there that I became a graduate instructor in English and learned to teach composition. I’m grateful that Texas was on the cutting edge of teaching comp as rhetoric and using peer critiques in writing instruction. My Knox workshop experience stood me in good stead, but I also learned a lot from the rhet/comp program, from my fellow grad students, and my own students.

I remember one student — I’ll call him David Alvarez, though my memory of his real name is a little foggy. I know his last name started with A because he was first on my roll. He was a bright student, but he struggled with writing. He was the first person to tell me about racial profiling, long before it became a thing. He described how he and his friends were often stopped by the police as suspected immigrants, even though he was a seventh-generation Texan. His first language was Spanish and he spoke with an accent, so in school he had always been told he couldn’t write, yet he was very intelligent and really only lacked confidence. I remember sitting with him in my basement office (a closet, really) and having him tell me about his ideas for a paper. I took notes and when he finished talking, I read them back to him. He was amazed and wondered how I had come up with those ideas. I said he told them to me. I had just summarized and rearranged a little. I handed him his outline, and suggested that he record his ideas for papers and then write down notes from his recordings. Writing in English presented challenges for David thanks to all the negative feedback he’d gotten, but he had great ideas and could write much better than he believed he could.

I hope my class boosted David’s confidence, but I’m not writing about it now to brag. Instead, I want to emphasize what I learned from him: how not to pre-judge someone for how they look, how they dress, or how they talk. I had a similar experience at Mississippi Univerisity for Women, where I’ve taught for over a quarter century. A few years ago, two black men showed up in my World Literature class and sat in front at the edge of the room, both with their hoodies up. I will confess that my first reaction was to assume that because I could hardly see their faces they would be disengaged. I’m grateful to colleagues and African American writers I know who’ve been outspoken about wearing hoodies — this was not too long after Trayvon Martin was killed, as I recall, so it could even be seen as a political statement. I gave these students positive written feedback on their writing assignments (something I haven’t always taken the time to do for students when I’ve had a lot of grading). Pretty soon the guy in front started speaking up in class and his friend who sat behind followed a few days later. My attitude changed because I took the time to notice. They might have checked out if I hadn’t, and that would have been my fault. They also might have stayed quiet, but still done well in the class. They were both good students, in other words, and they only needed to be invited into the discussion.

I’ve been that student. After high school, I spent a year as an exchange student in Belgium, going to a high school and living in a family where everyone spoke Dutch, or Flemish to be more precise. When I arrived, I had utterly no knowledge of the language, though we did receive a week-long language and culture school in the summer. After that, we had to learn everything on our own and from our families by immersion. So I’ve been the student who was confused and on the outside of every group. I was also the exotic American exchange student, so most students and teachers wanted to help me out, but it was still an incredible challenge, and I think it helps me put myself in my students’ shoes when they are facing those challenges.

Flemish is really just a name for the dialects of Dutch that are spoken in the northern half of Belgium, and the Flemish are incredibly proud of their dialects. I learned the standardized Flemish taught in school well enough to translate Flemish poetry later. I also learned enough of the dialect spoken in Ghent that I could understand my host-grandfather and my host-mother when they spoke it. And I learned that speaking a non-standard dialect doesn’t mean you’re unintelligent, but instead is a sign of your close ties to your community. This is a lesson I’ve taken into my composition and creative writing classes.

My creative writing pedagogy has also been informed by the pedagogy panels I have participated in over the years at AWP, and I’m grateful to them for introducing many of the ideas that have been transforming workshops for decades. My good friends from Knox, Anna Leahy and Mary Cantrell introduced me to this group, where I also have become friends with Stephanie Vanderslice. I wouldn’t be the teacher I am without the conversations we’ve had.

My creative writing students have also been instrumental. When I first started teaching and got comments on my course evaluations that students thought I wanted them to write a certain way or write like me, I probably was defensive. But I’ve also learned to listen to those comments, to try to find ways to ask questions, provide options and choices, and let students do more of the talking. This was one reason I started using small group workshops in which I ask students directed questions about excercises they’ve written. The directed questions and instructions for commenting on and adding to each other’s writing helps keep those workshops focused, but what I’ve discovered is that their conversations about each other’s writing around the edges of the planned discussion are often what is the most productive. These small group workshops also serve as training for the larger group workshops later, and they have led to revising the workshop model to loosen up the rule that the writer must be silent (a topic I plan to revisit later in this series of posts).

I teach at a state school that is 80% women and nearly 40% African American. I have had students of all colors and all genders and gender identities. I remember the first student who asked to be called by a different name — she wanted to use a male-sounding name, and this was some years before trans rights became part of the national conversation. Because writers often use a psuedonym, I said it was fine. After that, I’ve always asked whether someone has a preferred name that isn’t what’s on my roll. Some years later, another student asked the same question, revealing that he was trans and I was the first professor he had approached about it. We had a discussion about what it would mean to take a name other than Savannah in class, since we were several weeks into the semester at that point. We agreed on what name would be best, and that was the name he used for the rest of his time in our program. I even got used to his rather graphic poems about serial killers.

I don’t mean to suggest that I am perfect. I know that I have biases and that I still have a lot to learn. What I do mean to suggest is that I have been fortunate enough to have good mentors, friends, and role models. I’ve learned to listen to my students and to realize that a colonialist workshop model would never work at a school like mine — I would have the authority to use it, don’t get me wrong, but it would be terrible for my students. An anti-racist workshop also needs to be an anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist workshop. It challenges instructors and empowers students. It is in a fairly long tradition of rethinking creative writing pedagogy of which I’ve been fortunate to play a small role and to learn from those who have been leaders. That is what I’m attempting to do now by engaging with these books through this series of posts.

Some Thoughts on Craft

How A Writer’s Craft Can Be a (more) Anti-Racist Textbook, Part 2

The word “craft” can sometimes take on a negative connotation in discussions of anti-racist workshops, and I get it. Strict ideas about craft have often been used as justification for certain kinds of writing over others, and yet craft does not have to be monolithic and judgmental. Craft should be a set of tools and ideas about how things can and maybe do work, but not a yardstick to measure how ‘great’ or ‘inferior’ something is.

In her introduction to The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Felicia Rose Chavez states, “The anti-racist model confirms craft as an abstract concept; participants collectively define the workshop vocabulary” and later argues that “all workshop participants have equal access to the language of craft.” She has a whole chapter on craft later in the book, so I hope to return to this in more detail, but for now what I get from these statements is that craft isn’t inherently wrong, but access to craft and student empowerment to define craft are the main issues.

Similarly, Matthew Salesses, in “25 Essential Notes on Craft” on LitHub calls craft “a set of expections” of an audience that are not universal but are standardized. They can be challenged, in other words, and different groups of readers will see craft differently. It is valuable to know these expectations, but not to be defined by them.

Both of these ways to think about craft are similar to the way it is handled in A Writer’s Craft. I talk about craft, not in terms of rules, but in terms of conventions. Conventions change over time, they are different from one culture to another. Conventions are what work, but also what has become accepted, sometimes arbitrarily. Yet it is good to know what they are, so you know what readers expect. Students develop their knowledge of the vocabulary of craft, yet these terms are presented a choices rather than rules.

Take point of view, for instance. In the chapter on “Perspective,” we look deeper than the surface level of first-, second-, or third-person point of view by examining depth of first person POV for both witness and central characters and also from the perspective of time, whether the narration is immediate, reflective, or removed. Similarly, with third person, the narrator can be omniscient or limited, internal, external, or anywhere in between. Tense also makes a difference, as it does with first person. Second-person point of view can refer to the reader, a specific person, or anyone. Point of view is presented as series of choices that affect the expectations of the reader, but no point of view is seen as better or more sophisticated than another. Which perspective you choose affects the expectations of a reader and the kind of information you can or must reveal, so there are better choices for different effects, but there’s no universally right choice.

Poetry is treated similarly. Though I try to present the basics of traditional English prosody, I also present students with alternatives like syllabic verse, Anglo Saxon verse, free verse, and non-western forms. We look at how rhyme is viewed differently in different cultures, with some sounds accepted or rejected as rhyme sounds at different times and in different places. Throughout the book, the emphasis on craft is on understanding the choices that writers can work with and the understanding that literary craft is constantly evolving.

Though shifting points of view can be a problem in a final draft, in an early draft it’s common. Noting where a writer shifts from a limited to an omniscient perspective or from first person to third or from past to present tense is not about correcting an error. The point is to make writers aware of where those shifts have happened, so they can make a conscious choice about which convention they want to follow. And if shifting perspectives is the desired effect or matches the narrator’s voice — we’ve all heard people tell stories orally and change tenses, for instance — then the decision is whether it can be done consistently enough to work or whether it will seem too confusing or sloppy to the reader. I always say that a rule is only a rule until it’s broken well enough to establish a new convention.

My stance on craft is that students need a knowledge of it so they are empowered to make their own choices. Some aspects of craft are based in how language works, others are based on conventions that have changed over time and from culture to culture. By acknowledging this and by including a discussion of other traditions, I hope that A Writer’s Craft can be useful in opening up students to their own exploration of craft, while also teaching some essential vocabulary of craft that helps writers talk to each other about what we do. Many of my students are going into education and will need this vocabulary, both for the standardized tests they need to pass and for teaching in the classroom, yet I hope my book helps them understand craft as a complex set of choices, not as a set of hard-and-fast rules.

One way A Writer’s Craft can be improved in this regard, it is by exploring more elements of craft from other cultures and communities. That is one aspect of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop and Craft in the Real World that I am eager to learn from. It’s also something I’m always looking to learn from my students, and as I emphasized in the previous post, it’s something I encourage instructors to bring to the table. I don’t claim to have all the answers, though I hope to provide plenty of valuable insights. In any workshop, instructors and students should engage in lively conversations about craft. A Writer’s Craft provides a starting point for those discussions.

How A Writer’s Craft can be a (more) Anti-Racist Textbook, Part I

Let me just say, I’m reading The Anti-Racist Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez, and I’m looking forward to reading Craft in the Realy World by Matthew Salesses, two books that came out this year that are rethinking creative writing pedagogy in the light of anti-racism. I’ve read articles by both writers, and as I dig into their books, I’m thinking specifically about my creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft, and how it may or may not dovetail with these ideas. At first, I thought I might wait until I had finished both books to write about them, but it seems necessary to acknowledge how important this moment is for creative writers, and also how anti-racist creative writing pedagogy builds on critiques of the workshop model that have been ongoing for years.

One main reason I decided to write A Writer’s Craft was because I wasn’t satisfied with the book I was using at the time and how often it talked down to students or prescribed rules. So I set out to write a textbook that teaches craft and yet is also open to new ways of thinking and talking about craft. That’s one reason I chose to title the book “A Writer’s Craft,” not “The Writer’s Craft” or something more prescriptive. I wanted to suggest that the book presents the thoughts of a writer about craft, but not a definitive statement on craft — even though any book makes a claim for a certain level of authority.

In the Introduction, I include a “Note to the Instructor,” where I encourage you to present you own views, to argue with the positions I take in the book, to engage in a productive dialogue with the book, to assign chapters out of order or to bring in supplemental materials. These are things I have always done with the textbooks I’ve used. By including this in the Introduction right before my “Note to the Student,” where I encourage students to take an active role in their learning as well, I give students permission to read the “Note to the Instructor” and to see that everything in the book should be part of this conversation in which they can be participants.

Another choice I made when putting this book together was not to include an anthology of stories, poems, essays, and plays. The main reason I did this was because of the cost. Obtaining the rights would drive the price of the book higher, and I want a book that is affordable. But the other reason is that I always felt I should use the readings in a book I had required students to buy, but I also felt limited and restricted by those readings. This choice allows instructors to use examples from online magazines or anthologies, where they can choose very recent writing that is a good fit for their students: to represent their communities and/or to challenge their stereotypes or notions of what a literary text ought to be.

I didn’t write A Writer’s Craft specifically to be an anti-racist textbook, in other words, but it can be used that way, which is something I want to encourage. As I read more deeply about the anti-racist workshop model, I’m planning a series of posts that go into more detail on these and other choices in the book, on how in a second edition, or through the supplemental materials I can provide in A Writer’s Craft Community, the book can be more openly anti-racist.

I have a number of ideas of what I’ll write about in these posts, and I’m excited to discover more as I continue my reading. Two posts I’m planning soon are: some thoughts on craft and some thoughts on how I arrived at my own teaching practice. Look for those soon.

In Praise of Kind Rejections

I had one of the kindest rejections of my poetry book manuscript this week from NewSouth Books, who unfortunately is no longer publishing poetry, though they put out one of my favorite collections a few years ago, Jacqueline Trimble’s American Happiness. They could have not even read my query and just written to tell me that their focus had changed and no longer includes poetry. Instead, they also wrote:

We value your friendship and dedication to Southern literature, and hope to work with you for decades to come in bringing the South’s best and brightest writers to the forefront. Clearly you are among their number; these poems you’ve given us the opportunity to read are staggeringly beautiful.

Words like these keep you going. They’re a reminder that every submission you send out, whether it’s a poem or a book, may be read by someone, and even if they can’t publish it, your work may have an influence. From the other side of the editor’s desk, it’s a reminder that every time a poem is sent back, it sends a message. I know from experience editing Poetry South why a personal note isn’t always possible, but it’s a good reminder to write one when it is. Thanks to NewSouth for taking care with their submissions and taking the time write.

Submitting Poems

One of the benefits of completing SubTracker is that I’m getting back into submitting my poems again. I never stopped completely, of course, but my submissions slowed down when I made the decision to leave behind my old system and get to work on a new way of tracking them. Now that I’ve committed to the switch and gotten SubTracker running well enough to distribute it, I can focus more on getting my own work out the door. Two snow days with freezing temps (rare in Mississippi) haven’t hurt.

Over the weekend, I added to my pages on SubTracker on this site with a page on Importing Data into SubTracker, Using SubTracker, and Modifying Subtracker. It is my hope that these will help people get started, and I see that a few downloads have already occurred.

One thing I did this morning might be very helpful. I opened the Submissions_Out query for editing, and removed the sorting in the query itself. This will let me sort the query results in more ways, for instance by date submitted. I did that this morning, and went back to some of my oldest submissions. I was able to clean up a few things, like marking one as returned because I hadn’t received a response in the time they said I would and another because it had been marked as “completed” in Submittable and wasn’t showing on my Declined list. I also queried a few journals that had held onto my submission for six months to a year. This kind of housekeeping is important to do, and SubTracker will make it even easier than my old system, thanks to this sorting.

While I was working with my Submissions_Out query, I next sorted it by title to see which titles were out at more than one place. The ones that were only still out at one place or that had been stuck at places longer than I wanted, are titles that I will submit to more places soon. I don’t go crazy with simulataneous submissions, but the way things go these days, it’s best to have titles out to at least a few places at a time and to keep resubmitting as things come back to me. Sorting this query by title will help me do that. And of course, the Submissions_In query will tell me when a title isn’t submitted anywhere at the moment. I don’t have many of those right now, though I did go through and “retire” a few that I’m not planning to submit again or at least not much.

Having SubTracker working helps because A) it’s good to have a system that can do these things to keep better track of submissions, B) now that I’ve committed to it, I know I don’t have to keep records on two systems, as I did during my transition, and C) if I’m not working on the database, I should have more time for writing and submitting.

SubTracker Now Available

It’s been a long and interesting journey to take my old SuperCard project for tracking submissions and transfer my data to a LibreOffice database. After getting things working to may satisfaction, I’ve spent the last week or two tweaking the database and making it look a little nicer, then I deleted my data, so I can make it available to others. SubTracker, as I am now calling it, is downloadable as a Zip archive that contains the database and a Readme file.

Posting the file on my website is the first step in allowing others to use the database to track their own submissions. I have set it up to work well for me, but I have also made it fairly easy to modify by creating lists where you can change or add to the Kinds (poem, story, book, chapbook, etc.), Genres (poetry, fiction, CNF, etc.), or Types of places (magazine, book publisher, fellowship, etc.). You could even use this database to track MFA program applications, readings, artist residencies, etc.

Next steps will be to add a discussion of common issues, such as how to import existing data into the database. If you haven’t been submitting for long, it will be easiest to enter data manually, but if you have years of submissions and you’d like to bring them into the database, it is possible to do so with a little planning.

Help on how to use LibreOffice or OpenOffice to navigate the database will also be forthcoming. Your questions and comments will help me know what help is needed. Though I can’t guarantee support for something I’m making available for free, I do want to answer questions here on my blog.

I hope SubTracker will be useful to you and make your writing life a little easier.

New Review of A Writer’s Craft

It’s always fun to find a mention of something you’ve done. The other morning, I came across a recent review of my textbook, A Writer’s Craft. As it turns out, a site called Lost In Book included it last month (Dec. 20, 2020) in their round-up of 7 Best Creative Writing Books for Beginners. Thanks to the author Eruslan Yilmaz for including it at #3, right after Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction and Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story. It’s not totally clear whether their numbering is a ranking or just list of the best seven books they found. Mine is the first in the list that is multi-genre, and they note that it begins with chapters that discuss writing practice common to all the genres, then has chapters on individual genres, including digital media and literary citizenship to provide  “a comprehensive understanding of creative writing as a discipline and fostering creativity.”

Many thanks to Eruslan Yilmaz and Lost in Book for featuring A Writer’s Craft.

What I’m Up To: Jan. 2021 edition

January is always a tough month on my blog. Despite the New Year’s resolutions to post more regularly (that I’ve mostly stopped making), life gets pretty busy. That’s true, even more than usual, this year. Besides the normal start of the semester flurry of getting classes online, getting students in classes, admitting new students, etc., there was, of course, the inauguration and all the news from Washington as a distraction.

Closer to home, the normal tasks of a department chair, like putting together the summer and fall schedules while juggling classes and students for the current semester, were complicated with a major revision to our English major that our department has been working on for the last two years. That meant writing up 17 proposals to revise our major and create five concentrations (instead of 3): Literature, African American Literature, Creative Writing, Professional Writing, and English Teacher Ed. We realigned our requirements, added new classes in Digital Writing and Black Women Writers, and modified existing classes to create Professional Writing, Applied Linguistics, and Young Adult Literature. And Spanish and Philosophy got into the act with a few curriculum and course changes, including a new course in Spanish to substitute for study abroad by working with local native-Spanish speakers.

Most of the work to get to this point was done in the Fall and earlier, but writing everything up in proposal format took a fair amount of time. We then had our department meeting to vote on all proposals, and then put it all together to send to the dean and on to the curriculum committee.

In the midst of all this, we had a faculty member resign (for unrelated reasons), so we juggled his classes and I put together a proposal to hire his replacement. That position announcement, for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in English / Creative Writing Fiction is now on our school’s website.

So I apologize for not posting more about the normal subjects on this blog. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to those soon. In the meantime, I have a few last details to figure out for our fall schedule!

More Fun with Libre Office Base

As I wrote last, I’ve had some success moving my submissions from my old self-made system to a database, using LibreOffice Base. I was able to set up database tables for my Titles, Places (Magazines, Book Publishers, Prizes, etc.) and link those with a table for each Submission (one title per submission, though I can see all the submissions I’ve made to each Place when I view the place). So I can view everything I’ve ever submitted, and it all works reasonably well. That’s a huge success. I was even able to design a couple of forms to view each Title and Place with their corresponding Submissions. The problems started when I went to link those databases and write a “form” to enter data.

Here’s the thing about databases that makes them powerful but also takes some getting used to. Each entry in a table needs a Primary Key, which is a unique identifier, usually an integer that is created automatically when you add a new record so that no two recrods have the same primary key. I was able to add primary keys to each of my tables and to cross-reference the existing primary keys for Titles and Places when I brought in my Submissions, but I’m still not used to relying on them, so my databse design is a little wonky. It will be easy enough to fix, but it has taken me awhile to admit that I need to fix it.

I’ve learned that I can create a form with a List Box control that can look up information from one table and store other information from that table. In other words, my list box can allow me to select a title from the Titles table and put the corresponding TitleID primary key in the Submission record, and I can do the same thing for Places. That’s great, but because I’m not used to working with databases, I wanted to store the TitleID, Title, and Genre for each submission, and couldn’t find a way to do that. I could only look up and store one field at a time.

A helpful person on an OpenOffice forum told me I was going about it all wrong, as I was beginning to suspect. (LibreOffice is one implementation of OpenOffice, so they’re essentially the same thing.) I shouldn’t store the Title in both the Submissions and the Titles tables, but should rely on the TitleID and use a databse query to pull the other information from Titles when I read Submissions. Or at least, I think that’s what s/he meant, though I could be explaining it wrong. It gets a little confusing, and I know I have some reading to do to figure out how to use the Query feature, though the helpful person from the forum did send me a couple of examples that are close to what I’ll need (thank you very much!).

I can go back to my Submissions table and delete the fields for Titles, Places, Types (of places), and Genres (of titles). Then a Submission record will just have SubmissionID, PlaceID, TitleID, Date(s), and Response, but none of that pesky text. I’ll have to figure out how to use a query to show me the information I need on certain forms and learn more about subforms and form tables to show the data in the format I want. I have more work to do, in other words, before I can have my database working the way I want, but it can be done, just not the way my non-database brain would have thought.

Incidentally, I’m glad I exported the data the way I did. As I was setting things up, I linked my tables together in Relationships with Primary Keys and Foreign Keys, which is essentially the database terminology for referring to another table’s primary key in a table, and setting them up so that when the primary key gets changed or deleted, that also gets done to the foreign key in the linked table. I got a few errors as I did this and had to search to find out why. As it turned out, some of my Titles didn’t had an empty TitleID field in the Submissions record. Why? I found a couple of misspellings and a few titles whose name had been changed over time. In my old system, the old name could still be out there and wouldn’t be updated. Moving to a relational database should fix that problem. In my Submissions spreadsheet, I could find the empty fields and figure out which TitleID they should have held. Unlike a computer, I can see my old title and remember what the new title is or correct the typo and then look up the right number.

If I hadn’t included the title with each submission when I exported it, then it would have been a lot harder to find and correct the errors with just numbers for identification. But databases work better with limited and accurate information, so the work I’m doing now to clean up my information and set it up correctly will make it all work much more smoothly in the future.

In the process, I may decide to change Genre to Genre and Subgenre and set up two small databases for those, so I can use IDs so I can store those in the database instead of storing text. Then I could have Poetry as genre and Translation as subgenre, for instance. Or Poetry as Genre and Book as Subgenre. I could do the same for Type of place. I could also set up a database of submission Responses to limit those but also make it possible to add options. But we’ll see if I get that ambitious right away.

Now is the best time to do a lot of this, though, since I haven’t started actually using the database yet. But it’s also the start of a new semester, so I have lots of work to do on my syllabi and lots of classes to figure out in my department and students to help sign up for those classes. I can’t devote a whole day to it, in other words, as I could over break. But I can work on it off and on for the next week or so, and I might have a database I’m ready to use and ready to share before too long.