Historical Markers

Columbus, MS, Marker
Here’s a writing exercise I haven’t given to any of my classes (yet), mostly because I’m not sure when they’ll be driving.

Stop at a historical marker. It may be one you pass on a regular basis without sopping or one that you see on a trip. Read the marker and look around you. Note at least four interesting words from the text of the marker and at least four interesting things in your field of vision. These words do not have to go together, and the more you find, the more you’ll have to draw on. Once you’ve made your lists (either while you’re still at the marker or later) begin a text (poem, story, essay, etc.) by combining words from the marker with the descriptions of things or motions or colors, etc., that you saw. Ideally you will be combining something of the past with something of the present.

The point of the exercise is not to write about the subject of the historical marker, though that might happen, but to allow both the present and the history of a place into your writing to provide greater depth. That’s why it’s best to actually be there. If you don’t have your notebook with you, take a picture of the marker. Nonetheless, having been there will give you memories and impressions of the place that a picture someone else has taken of a marker won’t provide. You know the sounds and the temperature of that place on the day you saw it. You know where you had just been and where you were going, who you were with or who you were going to see, and a million other things about the experience that give it an emotional depth for you, which you can mine in your writing.

This is an exercise that I have done, though a little less formally than I’ve described it here. A couple summers ago, my family and I were traveling around the midwest and saw markers indicating we were on a continental divide. This led to a poem or two, as I contemplated the idea of a watershed, that just a slight rise (not the mountain chain we usually think of) can mark the difference between water flowing north or south, east or west (or northeast/southwest, etc.). Subtle variations in our landscape have a dramatic effect, when all the results pool into Lake Michigan or Superior, for instance. Taoists call this principle of water seeking the downward path of least resistance wu wei and recognize its power.

Thinking of the world in those terms, human interactions on the surface of the planet seem insignificant, as my son’s science homework reminded me today. He was studying the earth’s mantle and core, and learned that the radius of the earth is approximately 4,000 miles (give or take a few for mountains or deep ocean trenches, wrinkles in the peel of the apple, as the homework assignment described it). What are we in this perspective? Spores of mold migrating around on the skin of a great, big, round potato?

(Barb Johnson’s discussion of pomme de terre, the French term for potato (as opposed to the Cajun patate reminded me that the potato is a more appropriate ‘earth apple’ — the Dutch have the same dichotomy aardappel in standard Dutch patat in dialect).

Morning Walk in Snow

This morning was a rare snowy day in Columbus, Mississippi, and Zinneke and I took our usual walk along the Riverwalk. On the way, all was quiet. Not many vehicles on the street, and only a few pedestrians. Some of our friends were down near the river, sledding with kayaks. Once we got to the main Riverwalk, we were on our own with only footprints and animal tracks. Snow on all the fields and the branches of the trees, slush in all the lower areas of the path, though the bridge over a small creek had a couple of inches of soft, white snow on it. Time seemed to practically stand still. The only sound, it seemed, was the crunch of my shoes and the dog’s paws in the snow. Walking back into town, was walking back into real life. A few more people out and a couple of dogs on the street. The snow lasted all day, along with a little of the glow of a quiet morning walk.

New Year’s (blog) Resolution

Early this New Year’s morning, I had a dream of teaching a creative writing class in an apartment. All my students showed up gradually, starting at 1:00 a.m., since the class time hadn’t been announced. I had them all do calisthenics to warm up and dreamt up several ideas for class. I probably won’t make all my creative writing students do stretches before class next semester, but this dream did lead me to make up a resolution for the blog this year — write more (obviously) and include more writing exercises. So here is a first one…

Take a Hike

Go for a walk of at least 10 minutes. Don’t avoid the weather (though it’s all right to use an umbrella, raincoat, parka, sunscreen, etc.) On your walk consider an idea for writing. The idea does not have to come from the walk, though it may. You might start out with an idea in mind or look for one during your walk. Let the experience of the walk influence your thinking. Allow the weather to influence the mood or a random event (traffic, animal sighting, encounter with a person, etc.) to enter the scene you are working on. Either bring a small notebook with you and write down your ideas at one or more stopping points in the walk or immediately upon returning from the walk, sit down and work at least 15 minutes on a draft.

This kind of exercise goes back at least as far as Wordsworth’s idea of emotion recollected in tranquility. Goethe was also well known for taking long walks when writing, and Wallace Stevens said he composed most of his poems while walking to and from the office in Hartford Connecticut. Many poets have credited the rhythm of walking with the cadence in their poems, and it is often a good idea to introduce reality through random elements in a creative work.

Comfort Food: Pumpkin Bread

Everyone has their own ideas about comfort food. I know I certainly have my old stand-by’s, dishes that I gravitate to when I need that little something extra. Often those are the foods of our childhood, but now and then we find new ones. Risotto is one of our faves for its rich, creamy texture, though it takes lots of stirring before it’s done.

Today, though, Aidan and I made what may become another of those special dishes: pumpkin bread. The recipe was fairly easy — a lot like zucchini bread or banana bread, but with pumpkin we had baked a few days ago (in a pan with an inch or so of water in the bottom). It was a big pumpkin, so we’ve made pumpkin risotto, pumpkin pasta, soup with pumpkin, etc. The bread is one of those true comfort foods, though, and that’s probably because of the spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove (or alspice, but we were out).

The recipe comes from one of my favorite websites: Pick Your Own. I’ve gone here to find local u-pick orchards and to find recipes for anything you can pick in one. They usually have good ideas, and their pumpkin bread recipe, though basic, is great (they even tell you how to cook a pumpkin and what kind to select — we ignored most of that advice because we had already bought the pumpkin for a jack-o-lantern that never got carved, and I had already baked it the way I had heard to do it before).

I did alter the recipe, based on experience and the comments on their site. A couple people mentioned using apple sauce, and I remembered that in any carrot cake, quick bread, etc. recipe, you can usually substitute 1/2 the oil with the same amount of apple sauce. It’s a great way to make a low-fat recipe out of something fairly decadent, and it works great. I also cut the sugar, though not as much as some people did. I used 2 cups instead of the 3 that the recipe calls for or the 1.5 that many people used. (I kept some more sugar because the pumpkin we started with wasn’t too sweet to begin with, and we wanted to give one of the loaves away.)

You don’t even have to eat it to enjoy this bread. Just the aroma is enough, though once you’ve had a whiff of it, you won’t be able to not eat any! It’s less decadent than pumkin pie, and is easier to put together, but the taste is almost as good. So next time I have some pumpkin around (canned will work, too) and am in the need of a little extra warmth in my life, I know just what to make.

Happy Holidays….

A few thoughts on eBooks

A student in one of my classes has started bringing a funny little book to class — her Kindle. She loves it, and I can see the allure (especially given the weight of most students’ backpacks), but we’ve come across a problem. Her Kindle editions don’t include the original page numbers! So how can she cite her source?

If I had known before she bought her device, I might have recommended against the Kindle, and not just because the name sounds too much like my own (and makes no sense — though the iPad name has been criticized as well). I would have recommended an iPad because it does so much more than a Kindle and because I’m an Apple fan, though I do like the e-Ink screen on the Kindle.

Page numbers are the biggest issue, though, when reading books in an academic setting. They are a feature that should be possible to turn on or off, in my opinion, depending on how and why you want to read. When searching for a solution, I came across a GoodReads post that suggested book clubs might want page numbers so everyone can know if they are on the ‘same page.’

That search led me to what may be the solution (or a partial solution) for Kindle owners. The eBook format by ePub does include original page numbers. It is the format used by Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the iPad, and several other e-Readers. Naturally, the Kindle doesn’t support it, but there may be a work around.

Fortunately there is an ebook management program called Calibre The software is open source and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it will convert your ePub eBook file to the MOBI format that the Kindle will read.

I haven’t tried this, but here is how I assume it should work. If you want to read a book for academic purposes (or to have page numbers that correspond to an original print version), BUY the ebook in ePub format or another format that has original page numbers. Keep a copy of that formatted file on your computer. You can use Calibre to read it as a reference for when you need the page numbers. Convert the file to a copy in MOBI format and sync this with your Kindle. Now you can read the book anywhere on the device of your choice (the one you own) and still have access to page numbers.

If you haven’t bought the ePub version of the book, then I recommend you either do that, buy a cheap used copy in print, or borrow someone’s print copy when you are ready to look up the page numbers. This will be painful, but it’s what you need to do in order to properly cite the page in a paper. (On an exam, I may allow references to chapters, though that is only useful when the chapters are relatively short.)

If you don’t own a Kindle, then I would recommend against it for use in college or any other setting where knowing what page you are on would be useful. Look into other readers like the iPad, the Nook, etc. that do give you access to the original page numbers (not the page of the book when you’ve formatted it for viewing on your screen — some formats will give you this number based on the words that fit on a screen as formatted, not based on the original page number from another physical edition of the book).

If you like the Kindle best as a reader, then you should look into ways to access the page numbers from a standard edition and then purchase a ebook formatted with that information so you can access it somehow — even if you read it on the Kindle or other device that doesn’t support page numbers. I will agree that finding the page number on an electronic format of the book is probably easier than locating it in the physical book (which is why I want the true page number in your papers!) because you can search for the quoted passage.

For better or worse, eBooks will likely become a part of academic life more and more in the near future. Dealing with the issues of citation is something we will have to do. It may be that someday eBooks will be so ubiquitous that we don’t need to reference pages anymore, but for now when the printed book is the standard format, it still is a necessary requirement. So before you buy your eBook reader or at least before you buy your next eBook file, look into the format and whether it has all the information you need, like page numbers, especially if you need to use the book for a class.

Depending on where you buy your eBook file, though, there may be DRM (Digital Rights Management) software that keeps you from converting the file to another format or from playing it on another type of player. I haven’t tried this or researched it enough yet to know for sure. Do look into that before you spend money on an eBook or a reader. If I learn more, I may post a follow-up here.

Finding Myself

One of the joys and pains of authorship is finding yourself in print. Of course, it is a joy when you have slaved over a manuscript and seen it through to publication. Nothing compares to the moment a new book comes out or a poem appears in a magazine.

But is it vain or is it just necessary to occasionally search for yourself? I mean when you get that itch to Google your name. Is it a bad thing? Today’s experience tells me it is necessary, and this isn’t the first time this has happened to me… The good news is, I found myself. I just didn’t know where I had gone.
On a happy note, Google Books came up with a reference to my translation of a poem by Paul Snoek that is quoted in A Literary History of the Low Countries. You’ve got to love that. Not only does it help promote Paul Snoek, whose collected poems I spent many years with and would still like to publish more of in translation, but it is a scholarly use of my book Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus. Now who could complain about that?

It was a little more unsettling, though, to find two of my translations of poems by Luke Gruuwez and Charles Ducal on a blog that I didn’t know about. On the one hand, I’m honored to have been included. On the other hand, this is use of copyrighted material without my permission. Now, since I wouldn’t expect to be paid for a blog publication, and these are not translations of poems that I am actively trying to publish elsewhere, I simply wrote the publisher of the blog to request that they ask for permission before they make an further use of these or other translations of mine. I thanked them for considering my work, and suggested some other poets whose work I have translated, so perhaps something good will come of it after all. And it is nice to see my name in print (or pixels) and be recognized as a translator.

Still, it does give you pause. If you are a writer and you have published work, it may not be vain to Google yourself. It is probably a habit we all need to get into, if for no other reason than the protection of our copyright. Of course, in this case, I’m more concerned that there was a publication that I didn’t know about than with any loss of value. However, if I were trying to publish these poems in a magazine, then publication online might make that impossible. An author or translator needs to be informed when his or her work is being used (unless it is fair use, such as quoting a passage).

I’ve heard horror stories of poets who have found their work plagiarized — published under someone else’s name. Maybe we should all Google more than just our names. So the next time you ask me if I Google myself, don’t be surprised if I answer: “Yes, as often as possible!”

It Could Have Been Music

As I turn from grading exams and essays back to getting ready for this year’s Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium, coming up in less than two weeks, I am thinking about this year’s theme. It could have been a musical theme, at least judging by our poets.

Shirlette Ammons’ book includes an extended play CD with music from her group Mosadi, which has played with bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Known as a stellar performer, Shirlette is bound to give a great reading on Friday morning.

Mitchell L. H. Douglas has dedicated his first book of poems to the legacy of soul legend Donny Hathaway. His book Colling Board is formatted like an old LP record with two sides and alternate takes of poems that retell events of Hathaway’s life from different perspectives.

Sean Hill also uses musical call and response in his rendition of life in the twentieth century African American community in Milledgeville, Georgia. And Beth Ann Fennelly has been influenced by blues and rock and roll, according to a critic writing for Booklist.

Front Row Happiness

My internal geek is happy. I finally found the solution I’ve been looking for, and it’s been right there all along — an overlooked piece of Apple software, Front Row. (Click on the icon to see what Apple has to say about it.)

When we first bought the Mini, I knew it came with FR, but didn’t really give a hoot. After all, FR is primarily billed as a way to run iTunes or watch Apple’s iTunes video, using a remote control. Big deal, right? We use Netflix for streaming movies and don’t want or need a lot more. Internet video (Kim and Aidan are enjoying ESPN3 which we get through ATT DSL service, since they watch Alabama football), and we watch some movie trailers or youTube videos now and then. None of that works with Front Row (or at least it won’t work without some tweaking).

But what we do have that I was looking for a better solution for viewing are personal videos — lots of them. Aidan takes fiddle lessons, and we record every song as a short video clip. I had been making VCDs of them, but this took many steps, lots of time, lots of disk space, and quite a few CDs and DVDs to store them on. I was running out of both time and disks and really wanted to use the computer to play them, as long as it’s connected to a TV. Makes sense, right?

It worked, but it was ugly and challenging to use QuickTime to view the video. We had to open individual files by clicking on them, and this brought up the biggest limitation of connecting the Mini to a TV as the monitor — the type on screen, when viewed from the distance of the couch (optimal for watching movies) is too small. We’ve worked around this for web browsing, but using the Finder to do much is a pain. Certainly, I didn’t want to click through the Finder to get to each movie, then expand it to full screen mode, and finally play each song.

So I was looking for a viewer like iTunes to help me organize my content, and I couldn’t find much of anything for a Mac that would work. That usually means one of two things — I want to do something few other people are interested in OR Apple has already invented it. I tried a few programs that might work: iTunes wouldn’t play our video format, so I would have had to convert every file (one step I was trying to avoid). QuickTime won’t browse a folder. iPhoto might have worked, but seemed counterintuitive to me, and I wasn’t sure about formats.

Then I happened to see Front Row and realized I might give it a try. As it turns out, it will play any movie (in a QuickTime format, I suppose) in your Movies folder, as well as playing online content from iTunes or content in your iTunes library. Better yet, it recognizes folders within the Movies folder, so I can organize movies by date or by groups of lessons, keeping the newest ones on top, but allowing us to go back and review older songs and find them quickly. If I want, I can put subfolders within each main folder to hold different versions (we tape slow versions, and some versions of the difficult fingerings, as well as a couple of different versions that his teacher plays on different days or with variations to the melody, but after awhile Aidan doesn’t need all these slower versions, since he’s learned the song).

The best features are that the interface is simple and intuitive. We can use an Apple Remote or the keyboard, and we just use arrow keys and enter to go from directory to directory or from song to song and choose what we want. It’s easy to get out of when we’re done. The text is big enough to read (white on a black background, so it’s very visible), since it’s designed to be used with a TV as the monitor. And finally, the movies play at full screen automatically.

Front Row would work well for any kind of personal video — home movies or whatever. I’ve seen people who use it to play their DVD libraries that they’ve ripped to the hard drive (something I don’t imagine we’ll ever do). I need to look into using it to play Netflix, but I don’t think that’s available yet. I have heard that Boxee does something similar, but haven’t tried it out yet. For now, I’m happy to play with Front Row for awhile and organize our personal video files for easy viewing.

Since Front Row is so simple to use, and it won’t take me long to organize the songs into folders, maybe I’ll have time to actually learn a few of the songs Aidan can play!

The Real Point

I’ve been thinking about my last post, and though I’m happy with what I wrote, I do feel I fell into the trap that most educators get caught in when talking about the value of what they do. We tend to think of the future. We educate students so they can go out into the world and use their education. We hope that they will have productive careers that will benefit themselves and society, so we base our value judgment on the future. The future is very hard to judge because the causal relationship between education and any future success is nearly impossible to prove. Luck plays a role. Drive plays a role. The economy and other bigger forces play roles that affect our students lives as much or more than we can. What we give are tools. Our students, as they go out into the world, are responsible for how they use those tools.

So it seems to me that a better place to look for the point to teaching creative writing (or at least an equally valid place to look) is in the present. Teaching creative writing in a university setting has value because the work that students produce while they study creative writing has value.

When we go to see a performance of a college play, we don’t ask how many of the cast will ever end up on Broadway or in Hollywood. (Or at least I sincerely hope we don’t!) We applaud the students for their effort, which often has resulted in very good performances. Could all those students survive and present equally good performances every night, given the rigors of professional acting? Probably not. Will all of those students have the drive and good fortune to be successful in a drama career? Probably not. Yet they have come together to create a performance that moved an audience. They have bonded together as a cast to create a work of art.

The same could be said of a musical performance or of a gallery exhibition. So why do we hear this argument so infrequently in relation to undergraduate (or graduate) creative writing?

Last year, my colleague Bridget Pieschel and I worked together to put out a retrospective issue of the Dilettanti student literary magazine for Mississippi University for Women’s 125th anniversary. As we went back through the past issues (including previous incarnations of the magazine as Ephemera and Oh Lady!), we found many pieces of merit — more than we could use — including, of course, some the early writings of Eudora Welty. Yet there were many other writers within those covers who never went on to fame. Their work was equally inspiring, perhaps more inspiring because it was not overshadowed by later, greater works.

A student literary magazine is a great document of the history of a writing program, of course, but it is not the only thing we produce. Every final portfolio has merit and is a milestone for the student. In producing a magazine, taking part in a writing club, organizing a reading or a conference, or taking part in a workshop, students build a community of writers. With any public performance or publication, students add to the community experience of their university. Though these community building skills will serve them well in the future, the value of those activities is felt in the present as well.

In other words, when a student comes to me and says she wants to be a writer, my job is to help her become a better writer now. I hope that the seeds I plant will take root and will help her later in life, whether or not she does become a professional writer. Yet even if the only value she gets out of her education is what she accomplishes that semester or in the four years in our program, that experience ought to be valued. Education, especially for creative writers, is not just about what we will become, but it is about who we are and what we produce today.

What’s the point?

At the beginning of the semester, I sometimes stop to wonder what is the point to this education thing, especially for undergraduate creative writers. Often at AWP conferences, panels bemoan the number of writing programs out there (usually MFA programs but it applies to undergrad as well) and lament the prospects for their students. Some go so far as to wonder whether they should even allow their students to take their classes (though they do). In this day and age, when college tuitions continue to rise and when students are increasingly practical in their choices of major (or believe they are), how do we justify what we do?

On the one hand, it is tempting to simply justify it because it exists. Poetry has been around for thousands of years, and fiction as we know it for nearly as long. Creative writing has been part of human culture since humans learned to write, before that there was storytelling and oral poetry, so there should be no need to justify teaching it. Oh, that life were so simple.

Students (or their parents) want careers. Actually, many students don’t want careers, or if they do, they want exciting careers, and ‘famous writer’ is right up there with ‘film star’ for some of them. Yet if that were the promise we held out to students, then I might agree that teaching creative writing is unethical. Rare is the student who will go on to a career as a writer, though they do exist and I know several of our alums who are well on their way. Even rarer is the student writer who will someday be ‘famous,’ though that may depend on how one defines fame. So I am looking for something a little more practical in what we teach.

Ultimately, it boils down to two things: self-awareness and expression. Really, aren’t these the hallmarks of a liberal arts education? They may be developed in many fields, but no fields are more appropriate to this than the creative fields of writing, art, music, and theater.

Most students seem to take creative writing classes because they have a desire to express themselves. In order to do this, they must by definition, know themselves, and the process of creative writing involves considerable exploration of the self. Though it is not psychoanalysis — there is no analyst in the room — the creative writing class provides this opportunity, as any art class might. This clearer understanding of the self may be more beneficial to the student in the long run than any professional education, even if it is never directly applicable to a career. It may help the student choose a career or decide when to change careers, who to marry (or not), what to do in her/his ‘spare time,’ etc.

Certainly, creative writing classes can not take credit for every decision students make in the rest of their lives, but there is value in fostering a thoughtful self-awareness. Of course, many students may still make a mess of their lives (who doesn’t at some point) and cope with their messes for better or worse, and this is an aspect of learning that is impossible to grade or assess. Some of those ‘messes’ may lead to brilliant works of art, for which we also can not take full credit, anymore than we can be blamed for a lack of brilliance.

So I usually come round to fostering expression as the main value of what we do as teachers of creative writing. If anything, I hope we teach (and can grade and assess) care with language. Creative writers should pay more attention to how they write what they write. The language of a poem should be beautiful (or intentionally and beautifully ugly), even if the subject is not. A paragraph of prose fiction should be musical as well as informative. Writers should choose the word that is right in a given context, not just the most expedient word, but the word that means, sounds, and feels right. Syntax matters for the patterns it creates (not just grammatical correctness), and paragraphs, poems, stories, even essays are developed with a structure in mind, though that structure often arises out of the material rather than being imposed from outside.

This attention to detail and care for language carries over from writers’ creative works to all their writing. Emails from a writer ought to be better written than most others. In an age of information, when we are flooded with ‘communication’ vying for our attention, the messages that are well crafted will stand out from those that aren’t. There may be more need for poets and writers than ever before, and more need to develop the skills of a writer for those who do want to stand out and make their mark, whether that is with a book of poems or novel or with a memo or blog or tweet or whatever the next technological innovation will bring.

Let’s face it, most creative writing students aren’t hell bent on a career. They may end up in a closely related field, or they may end up doing something completely different from what they studied in college in order to make a living (which is true for students in any major), yet the skills students develop in a creative writing class will stand them in good stead no matter where they go or what they do.