Kendall Dunkelberg

Spider Lilies

I’ve always loved the fall, maybe because my birthday is in September. But in Mississippi, it’s hard not to love a season that finally means an end to weather in the 90’s and high humidity. Usually around mid-September we start to get cold fronts coming through, and the temps don’t rise quite as high after they’re gone. You can’t really say there’s a chill in the air (as I remember from growing up in Iowa, looking forward to the first frost).

Here, one sign that fall has really come is the return of the Spider Lilies. They pop up, usually right around my birthday, though this year they seem to be a little later than usual, probably be cause it’s been so dry. I always try to notice when they appear–even before they bloom, you can see a slender stalk growing from the grass (or wherever they appear).

The general term for this type of lily that comes up in late summer is the Surprise Lily, which is the title I gave a poem in my last book, Time Capsules. I was really thinking of the Spider Lily, but some people call them by the general term and others call them Hurricane Lilies because they come up in hurricane season, usually after a heavy rain. I’d like to think they’re wildflowers, but in reality, they are a non-native species that have escaped cultivation. Despite the fact that they’re really from Asia, not America, they have become part of the landscape here in Mississippi. Maybe their alienness is part of their charm. Fortunately, unlike some invasive species, they don’t appear to have a detrimental effect on the native environment. They don’t spread too much, and they don’t crowd out other species, but they do provide a little color this time of year.

Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates

It was nice recently to receive a contributor’s copy of a book that I’m in (briefly). I contributed a 3-page response to questions about Chapter 4, “Facilitating the Writer’s Workshop: Helping Students Become Good Critics (Of Themselves and Others).” I’ll leave it to others to weigh the value of my remarks, but I was intrigued to see the book in print and have a chance to see the contributions of authors Stephanie Vanderslice and Kelly Ritter, as well as the thoughts of other creative writing teachers who responded to the chapters.

I haven’t had a chance to read it cover to cover yet, but I am looking forward to it. What I have read is thoughtful and useful. I won’t say I agree with every point, though I haven’t found myself strongly disagreeing either, but the book is thought-provoking. It is aimed at the new creative writing teacher, often a graduate student or recent MFA graduate, who suddenly finds him or herself in an undergraduate classroom on the other side of the desk. It is full of practical advice — in the early chapters often focusing on the differences between graduate school and undergraduate creative writing classes, later giving advice on textbooks, terminology, and so forth. As such, it seems valuable to anyone who is new to teaching, and it earns its subtitle: ‘A Practical Guide and Sourcebook.’ New teachers will need to weigh the experiences of the authors and other contributors against their own experience and come to their own conclusions, but this thin volume will help them find many valuable issues to consider and point out avenues to explore those issues further.

Though I am not its primary audience (having taught creative writing for nearly two decades), I fell there is much that the seasoned professional can gain from the book. It furthers a conversation that is perhaps too rare in creative writing circles, at least in the United States. It argues that creative writing can be taught, and it makes its case for how this can be done.

Dueling Advice on Writing

This is the first semester in a long time that I’ve taught two writing classes at the same time. I have an introductory multi-genre Creative Writing class and an upper-level Poetry Writing Workshop on the same day. It might get a little schizophrenic.

Today I was teaching Image to the Creative Writing class, but will be talking about Authenticity to my Poetry class. One of the poets we’re reading talks about getting over the advice to use concrete imagery. In her writing, being authentic to herself and her voice meant becoming liberated to write about thought. Another poet describes how she was persuaded by a professor to incorporate more “authentic” ethnic images in her early poem, which then made the poem less authentic to her experience.

I often find that the best advice about writing is wrong. That is, it isn’t right all the time or for all people. I like having textbooks I can agree with and disagree with at the same time, trying to get students to see that there may not be one right answer, there may even be conflicting answers, but there is an answer that is right for them at that time.

Passion Flower

The other day, as I was walking the dog down to the river after a torrential morning thunderstorm, I happened to take a look in the kudzu that covers the hill on College St. behind the big white house that used to be Riverhill Antiques, and I saw several bedraggled passion flower blossoms.

I was glad to see them, though they had little of the almost alien beauty the flower usually holds; they were still recognizable from the violet fronds and the yellow stamens. They had stood up to the pounding rain, but even more than that, they had survived human attempts to wipe them out (doubtlessly unintentional).

Several years ago, I had identified the flowers a little further down the block, where now there is a well manicured parking lot. Then, the lot had a small creek (now subterranean) bushes, brambles, kudzu, spider wort, and passion flower. I had seen badgers down in the creek on a few occasions. It was a small patch of wild within the city, so I was saddened when bulldozers began leveling the lot and rooting up small trees and bushes. The culverts that channeled the creek underground, seemed a travesty. Now the lot is asphalt and grass that is watered by automatic sprinklers and undoubtedly fertilized and sprayed with herbicides. No dandelions, no spider wort, no passion flowers.

Looking for an image to put with this post, I learned that Passion Flower can be used to treat anxiety and insomnia. It has been thought to have a calming influence. I can’t speak as an herbalist, but just seeing these flowers had that influence on me. As we head into a new semester (today was our first day of meetings), I may need a good dose now and then, so I’m glad to know where to find them. I don’t plan on picking them or making tea or a potion from them — I would need to learn a lot more about it before I did — but as long as they are in bloom, I may seek them out whenever I need a little lift.

New Book Review

The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah’s Witnesses by Joy Castro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Joy Castro has written a riveting account of her childhood, growing up in the Jehovah’s Witness community. Many reviewers have commented that her description of this experience is accurate. Though I can not comment on that aspect of the book, I can say that I was struck by the humanity Ms. Castro expresses. Though the child abuse she suffered from her step-father was harrowing, we are given a full vision of the community in which she was raised. There is much sympathy and understanding for the values of the Witnesses, even as she explores the conditions that allowed the abuse to occur and to continue. I was struck by how similar the issues within this community were to the ones I experienced growing up in the 70’s. The similarities between the Witness community and the broader culture are as surprising as the differences. Certainly, the isolation that the children felt in school or from their own father who had left the church was a factor that allowed the abuse to go unnoticed. The belief that the father should be the undisputed head of the household also allowed the abuse to go unchallenged by the church. Though more pronounced in this community, the same issues existed and still exist elsewhere. This is a book of love, courage, and family, of betrayal and loyalty, and of hypocrisy and belief. It is not an easy read, but is a rewarding one.

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Painting the Porch

This summer we are finally getting our house painted. We’ve been trying to do this for awhile, now, and even hired a painter last year, but it’s finally to the point where he could start working. New regulations on certifying workers who disturb paint on houses older than 1980, which might have lead paint (ours does still have some), caused part of the delay.

We’ve chosen our colors and painted one small wall to test them. That was the easy part. We also decided to paint the porch rails, spindles, columns, etc. ourselves to save a little money. We may regret that decision when it’s all said and done, though our painter doesn’t seem to mind. It’s slow work! I’ve been scraping them for the past three days and getting near the point where I can paint, though there are a few patches I want to go back to this morning, and there are a few repairs I need to make before I paint too much, so we’ll see if I beat the rain that’s forecast for this afternoon.

Painting the porch is good from the perspective that it gives me more appreciation for what our painter is doing. We talk quite a bit while working not too far from each other. He gives a lot of advice on painting and prepping, and he has lots of stories. I’ve heard about half the houses in our neighborhood, and about his college experience at Concordia in Moorhead, where coincidentally, I know the athletic director, a friend of my sister. How an African American guy from Mississippi ended up there in the 1970’s, I’m not entirely sure, though I may find out. But I won’t give away all of John the Painter’s stories.

What I learn is that he knows a lot about what he does, and that he chose this profession, or fell into it, after being educated in another field. Maybe it fit his lifestyle better than his other career. Nothing wrong with that, and we’re glad to have a good professional painter to work with. From working on the porch myself, I’m reminded of all the work that goes into painting an old house. It’s not just slapping on paint, which I’d be perfectly capable of (though I might not like climbing the tall ladders to reach the gables and I would have to rent scaffolding to do much of the work). It’s not just painting, but getting to know your house.

Just like when we’ve painted the interior, when painting and prepping the exterior, you run into things that need a little work, and as our carpenter said: ‘now’s the time to do it.’ So I’ve been re-gluing the spindles that were sagging a bit, and fixing cracked pieces of the scrollwork below. There are a few boards that have been cracked and need to be replaced here and there. So I’ve made a few trips to the hardware store, as well. Nothing is too serious (so far), but the issues need to be addressed. All of that slows me down a bit, but it’s worth it.

A Great Summer Read

One Last Good Time

by Michael Kardos

I love the dark humor in these stories. The book is a linked short story collection in which the stories that have returning characters comment on each other and further develop the characters, though the collection does not read like a novel. Each story stands on its own, yet we get a fuller view of a small New Jersey coastal town the further we read into the book. It is wickedly funny and perceptive at the same time. Like a reflection in a funhouse mirror, we see our true selves, our nightmare selves, and perhaps even our fantasy selves all at once.

New Book Review

The Hands of Strangers by Michael F. Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this gripping tale of a child’s abduction and the struggles of one couple to hang on to hope despite all odds, Michael F. Smith evokes the darkest fears a parent can imagine. His prose is clean and spare, his eye for detail, impeccable. The reader is transported, not to the Paris seen by tourists, but to the small streets and back alleys, the metro stations and small cafés.

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Treasure your Word Hoard

Classes are over, exams are graded, and I finally have time to get back to the blog, which means I have time to write and think about something other than papers and exams! This morning on the walk, as I was processing last semester’s writing class and thinking about what I’d like to be able to communicate better to students, I was thinking about how poets use patterned language. My textbook (most textbooks) approach formal poetry with lots of terminology for meter, especially, which tends to turn students off. Terms are good to give students a handle to remember abstract concepts by, but they also make it seem as if when you know the term, you know how to do it, and if you don’t get the term you’re completely lost. Of course, that’s not true, especially with rhythm.

I’d like to get students to play with more kinds of sound patterning in a poem without worrying about strict meter or end rhyme. I want them to hear how the vowels and consonants across a line of poetry that sounds good are structured in one of many ways. Assonance and consonance are only a bare beginning to getting how sound can be repeated in different patterns. A poet chooses a word that means what h/she wants and that also has sounds that form a pattern with the other words in the line or stanza. To do this, a poet needs a large, active vocabulary.

This is when it struck me how limiting, pedantic, and stale that word is in English: ‘vocabulary.’ It hardly says anything. In Dutch, the word is ‘woordenschat’ or ‘word-treasure.’ The word ‘schat’ can also be an endearment, like ‘my little treasure’ — ‘schatje.’ This gives more of a mental picture of a collection of words that someone holds dear.

A ‘schat’ can also be the treasure that a dragon would keep, and this got me thinking about how the way writers work with words is much like the way dragons work with their treasure. A dragon’s treasure may be gold, but it may also be anything that sparkles or seems precious. The things in it may be old (ancient) or new, broken or functional. The dragon in folklore actively collects items for its hoard, flying out each day or night to find new objects to add to it. But the dragon does not ignore the things it has gathered, either. It constantly pores over the hoard to make certain nothing is missing — at least it does in the stories I vaguely remember.

Isn’t this a good image for the writer? We all have a relatively large vocabulary, I presume. We know words and recognize them when we read them, but writers are more likely to actively search through that stockpile of words to find the right one to put in the right place. Sorting is a key pastime of dragons, I presume. All writers are (or should be) constantly on the lookout for new words to add to their collection. Those words may be bright and shiny on the surface or they may be unassuming words with a long history of connotations that lend just the right nuance to our pile of language when placed carefully in just the right spot. We tinker with them and shuffle them and toy with them until a pattern emerges.

So I propose a new synonym for ‘vocabulary.’ I’d like to call it your word hoard. I know that won’t catch on any time soon, but maybe in the book about writing that I’d love to write in all my spare time, that’s what I’ll call it.

Nonfiction, what is it?

I’m constantly being asked this question, since the creative writing program I teach in has a class in it (that I don’t teach, but I’m the program director, so I get asked a lot anyway). It’s a tough one to answer, and usually I list some of the kinds of writing, I think might be in the class with the caveat that since I don’t teach it, the person who does might have other ideas.

But today we were covering creative nonfiction in my creative writing class as we start to think about genre, so I tried to be a little more specific with the help of our textbook. We discussed why some people don’t like the term. It makes fiction seem like the norm and anything else is an aberration. Is poetry nonfiction? By this definition, it is. One writer I was reading in preparation for class wondered whether there should be a genre called non-poetry (and I have to believe she said this somewhat tongue-in-cheek). And why not? Isn’t all prose nonpoetry: somewhat poetic, but not entirely?

The textbook I use (Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing) talks of creative nonfiction primarily in terms of the essay that uses some techniques of fiction (and poetry). [My beef with this book is that it doesn’t really do justice to poetry, but I try to compensate.] And nonfiction does or can use strategies from the essay, though it doesn’t have to. It can use strategies, like scene and even character, from fiction, but it doesn’t have to, and it certainly doesn’t use them the same way fiction does, usually. Plot is often less important in nonfiction. The dramatic tension of a scene doesn’t have to be as high or might not even be present. A scene in nonfiction can simply take us to a moment or a place without any drama or change — in a story I would expect that of a scene.

But in a poem, we often have scenic treatment of the material (imagism, for instance) without a plot or dramatic tension. In a poem we might speak of lyric tension. The arrangement of images in a poem or the arrangement of scenes in creative nonfiction often work in similar ways. Juxtaposition is part of the argument. Associations formed between scenes or images that aren’t connected by plot or linear logic work in a poem or in an essay. The poet or nonfiction writer may comment or may not. Associations based on the sound of the language or on the connotations of the words may be as productive as associations strung together on a plot.

As we discussed sub-genres of creative nonfiction, one of my students raised the question of whether blogging would fit. I agreed that often it would, though some blogs may be fiction or poetry, and some blogs might not rise to the level (sink to the level?) that would be called creative. Blogging may be the most ubiquitous form of creative nonfiction: the personal not-quite-essay, not-quite-story, not-quite-lyric-prose-poem. Maybe one day we’ll have to call all other writing nonblogging once blogging becomes the norm and everything else an aberration.