Student Commonplace Site

From my mother–again and again throughout my childhood

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. 🙂

I’m still learning to maneuver my way around wordpress, and as classes near, I wanted to streamline the process of checking my students’ required commonplace books. So I created a site just for the students.

Visit Creative Writing at Longwood

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Dig For Something Shiny

I’m requiring my students to keep online commonplace books. And I try to practice what I preach 🙂

So….visit Something Shiny: One Writer’s Commonplace Book.

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Still so much to conquer: E. Ethelbert Miller

Wisdom from an interview with my friend, the poet E. Ethelbert Miller:
Just when I needed reminding…
Thanks, E, and much love, much gratitude.

“But where’s the apprenticeship? And that’s the word to use: apprenticeship. Not model, not workshop, apprenticeship. The difference between an apprenticeship and a workshop is that I will sit here and take only one person. You may watch me do something and then we would do something together. And every time I would correct it, but we would do it together. We might be making a wall together. You’re standing and I’m standing and we’re talking and stuff like that. I don’t see anybody workshopping their poems that way. Now you have people claiming, “That’s my student,” “That’s my teacher,” but that’s from a workshop. That’s not an apprenticeship. So if we put that word in, we have a different type of relationship. In the future, for us to produce these new type of writers, they will have to come out of a situation where there’s an apprenticeship that’s taken place.

The mentor could lock you in the room with the “cube.” You go back to the Samurai Trilogy, I think in the second, no maybe the end of the first Samurai when the monk traps the guy. He traps him in a room. The guy had all the physical strength. He was a brute. The monk looked at him and said, “Once you have mastered everything in that room, I’ll let you out.” And you look around, there was nothing but books….Now what’s the catch? In the next episode, the door opens, he comes out and he is clean. What’s the catch? Now you gotta put it into practice! He walks out, he’s walking around, walking through the woods, you know, and all of a sudden a bunny or something comes out and he jumps, OK? And then the monk appears and says, ‘See, you still have not conquered.'”

The interview can be read in full at Post No Ills
Visit Ethelbert’s blog

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I dreamt a white horse

I dreamt a friend on a white horse, all speed and laughter, so much laughter. Bide your time, he said, this is not the one. Then he lit a cigarette and grinned.

Horse’s Adventure
by Jason Bredle

The horse discovered a gateway to another
dimension, and with nothing else to do, moseyed
into it just for grins, and man, you
don’t even want to know what happened
next—it was just, like, Horse at the French
Revolution. Horse in Franco’s living room.
Horse on the moon. Horse in a supporting role
in an episode of ER. Horse being shot
out of a cannon. Horse on The Price Is Right.
Horse in a Whitesnake video. Horse
at Kennedy’s assassination. Horse in the Tet
Offensive. Horse at the Gap gawking at some
khaki pants. Horse in Julie Piepmeyer’s
bathroom. Horse being tossed out of an airplane
with a parachute strapped to its back, plummeting
toward Nebraska. Horse on Capitol Hill
(Yes, I’d like the floor to recognize
the distinguished horse from Arizona). Horse
on the subway. Horse authorizing a peace treaty
between the U.S. and Iraq. Horse
in the Evansville State Hospital. Horse caught up
in a White Hen robbery. Horse in the Kentucky
Derby. Horse staring at the merry-go-round
at King’s Island in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The list goes on and on. And so goes
the horse’s adventure, where one minute
it’s standing next to Pat Sajak and with a violent
flash like that of a murderous camera or the twirling
screen and music of a Batman episode
it’s standing in the middle of US-23
with a screaming motorist speeding toward it.
And this horse, whirling through dimension
after dimension, spiraling carmines, suicidal
jasmines, and mathematical theorems tornadoing
past it, being placed in situation
after situation—what had it learned
when all was said and done and it was back
at Tom Wallace’s farm? Nothing is better
than Rachel Wallace while they stand in the barn
in the middle of February and she draws pictures of it
to take to school tomorrow.

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“I Belong There” by Mahmoud Darwish

I Belong There
by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell

with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.

I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,

a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.

I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.

I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to

her mother.

And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.

To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a

single word: Home.

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“Miracle…half heard” Linda Gregg

Now I Understand
by Linda Gregg

Something was pouring out. Filling the field
and making it vacant. A wind blowing them
sideways as they moved forward. The crying
as before. Suddenly I understood why they left
the empty bowls on the table, in the empty hut
overlooking the sea. And knew the meaning
of the heron breaking branches, spreading
his wings in order to rise up out of the dark
woods into the night sky. I understood about
the lovers and the river in January.
Heard the crying out as a battlement,
of greatness, and then the dying began.
The height of passion. Saw the breaking
of the moon and the shattering of the sun.
Believed in the miracle because of the half heard
and the other half seen. How they ranged
and how they fed. Let loose their cries.
One could call it the agony in the garden,
or the paradise, depending on whether
the joy was at the beginning, or after.

I have failed so often. Jumped jobs. Left lovers. Abandoned them really. I have failed to reach students, to be there when friends needed me. I have failed my children at times, my extended family more often. Most often, I have failed myself.

My maternal grandmother–we called her Miss Pearl–new to this country as an infant, orphaned only months later, then orphaned yet again at ten by a step-mother she adored, left school after the eighth grade. The culture of Appalachia in the early twentieth century didn’t, as my grandmother often said, put much stock in education, particularly for females. Her future as she saw it was tied inextricably to a man, to marriage. So when, at thirteen, she met my grandfather, older by six years, she was lured away by not only his lanky Irish beauty, but by the security she imagined marriage to him would give her. That security was an illusion, or perhaps a sweet-brogue fantasy she wove about him herself. She survived his brutality, his alcoholism, his moving her and the brood of children she bore him, of which my mom was the second, throughout the Depression era from squat-house to squat-house. And in what can only be seen as incomparable strength, Miss Pearl not only raised those children, but graduated all of them from high school, there in those hollers where education mattered so little.

My mother followed that example with us, moving us to the coast, to a town that was home to a state university, formulating a plan to send us to college on her meager income before I even reached my sixth birthday. She scrimped and saved and planned as we grew, figuring that if we lived at home, and she worked the two jobs she had my whole life, she could make it. Sometimes at night, when I’d slip out to the bathroom, I’d see her there in the yellow light of our trailer, at the kitchen table, one of those barefoot poverty-thin children Miss Pearl miraculously got through high school, bills spread out on the speckled Formica before her, night after night, finagling our meager finances and drawing up an energy that still astounds me, all so that her children could go to college.

And I did. I started college at sixteen. And failed out a year later.

The eleven blocks of bars just off of campus combined in a dangerous way with my immaturity. I look back now, and am amazed at my stupidity. The rare chance she made for us, especially in the world in which we lived, to not only go to college, but to do so without loans, without debt. Man, did I blow it. Not that I needed to be in college then. I didn’t. What pains me is that I didn’t recognize her sacrifice.

Thus began the chase, a decade of shit jobs and what other people thought were good jobs, all of which I left when I became bored. Years of dubious pursuits and even more dubious marriages. But during these same years–and from those dubious marriages–came the single most important successes I’ll ever know: my children.

Until I found both my vocation and the maturity to pursue that vocation in my early thirties, I flung myself into the newest chase, the most recent man, grabbing at the corners of whatever dream I’d glimpsed that day. And truthfully, I don’t regret a second of it.

That’s not to say that I don’t wish that I had done some of it differently. I wince at the memory of times I could have done better by people I loved. Shudder at the knowledge that I’ve left behind people who truly loved me, but whom I knew, even from the start, I would leave. I carry the weight of any wound I’ve left on another human being, but even so, I doubt, if asked, that I’d say I’d have done it differently. I doubt, if given the chance to bend the corners of time and return, if I got the proverbial do-over, even knowing what I know now, that I’d do all that much differently.

Who I am now, an I with whom I have grown very comfortable, a middle-aged I who, frankly, I like now more than I’ve ever done in the past, this I is the fruit of those failures, constructed more of each lesson I learned than of any of my successes.

The wisdom and humor born of surviving failure, more importantly, learning from failure, I’ve come to see, though, is not something we can teach or give; it must be learned through that experience–no matter how many learn from my mistakes lectures we receive or give. Success, the wisdom to be successful, and at peace with who we are, I think, is inevitably bound to how we recover from when we fail. This seems like a no-brainer. For those of us who have survived it, perhaps.

But as a teacher, I’m reminded of this constantly, reminded of the naivete of the young, of the pain and difficulty and frustration that always accompanies the learning required to rise above our own failures, to find in us the grit and heart to stand again, to start over if needed, to put away the shame and take up instead perseverance. This semester I watched a student, one for whom I have great respect and affection, tumble his way toward this lesson. And my heart breaks for him.

But I believe he will rise and make a wiser self, the already-strong fabric of who he is made stronger for having stood up again, for understanding, choosing making the joy deeper, after the fall.

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“What you love is your fate” Frank Bidart

“It might be said that tolerance of hate speech (or tolerance of anything) makes us weak and feckless, as a nation. In fact it is our greatest tensile strength.” Liam Rector

“Unthinkable respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
Albert Einstein

then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

— from “Guilty of Dust” by Frank Bidart

______________________________________________________________________________

Feeling really happy, I wanted to share, so I texted the brother-man.

I bought the students a bullhorn.

A little while later, my phone played a riff of Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky,” —Good love is hard to find, you got lucky, babe–the signal that I was receiving a text-message. I flipped the phone open.

Is that in the job description?

I typed quickly, laughing, having one of those moments when I realize how much I love what I do.

It is the way I do it.

Next week, when we come back from Thanksgiving break, students from our Creative Writing program, along with the numerous others who have asked to join in, will stage an awareness demonstration concerning the Patriot Act.

They plan to burn it. Literally. All 4000 pages.

And while it burns, they plan to read excerpts from speeches by Voltaire, Patrick Henry, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others who have historically defended what should be our inviolable right to speak. Thus the bullhorn. These eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-year-olds have educated themselves on the details of the Patriot Act, several of them having read hundreds of pages on top of the reading they’re doing for classes. They have made signs, not with angry protest slogans, but with the actual wording of the Act itself, sections they find particularly dangerous, particularly frightening.

It all began with one kid. After the tragedy of the Virginia Tech shootings and the ensuing debate over freedom and vigilance in Creative Writing classes, a young man in my Intro to Fiction class came to my office. He stood in the door, eyes intense and we began a conversation that continues on the First Amendment. What it means for all of us as citizens. What it means particularly for writers.

He was livid at the idea that the tragic actions of one madman would become an instrument of further endangering our First Amendment rights. I asked him, “What do you think we can do about it?”

His eyes blazed as he said, “We have to make people understand. We have to make them aware.”

I hear all of the time how young people today are apathetic, spoiled, overprotected. For some, this is true. But the same adjectives could easily be applied to many of the so-called adults I know. And about those, both young and old, who seem so disconnected, disgruntled, disengaged, the idealist in me wants to believe that they simply haven’t found what they love, what in life constitutes a true passion.

For Stephen, our constitutional freedoms, protecting them, especially when it comes to our right to speak, to write, to think and to exchange ideas freely, are his passion. He holds your right to disagree with him, and to voice that disagreement publicly, sacred. And he’s willing to fight for your right, even if you’re not.

The young people I encounter, the students I meet in my classroom, are not slackers. They are uncertain, but the world into which they were born is more uncertain than ever. They are hesitant, at times, to do, but their helicopter parents have rendered them so, showing up to save the day at every turn, thus robbing them of the opportunities we had to learn by doing. To learn by failing.

Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

In order to have any enthusiasm, to discover what they love, what they’re passionate about, they have to try. And fail. And then try something else. We have to give them room, the same room we were given, the same access to what’s important to them, and allow them to choose what matters. Not what we think should matter.

Like it or not, we’re the authority now. And they’re gonna buck it. As they should. As we did.

So I hear the voices saying, but they don’t know what’s best. Neither did we. And while I’m not so sure I’d brag about the job we’re doing, we made our own choices, and our own mistakes. Until we figured out what was worth fighting for in our lives.

Every generation looks at the next with skepticism, thinking them too young to make sense of the world about them. But they have to–they’re who we’re leaving it to. We have to trust them. More. We have to celebrate them.

They are our legacy.

Some people may not like what my students will be doing next Wednesday. But they’re afraid, and they’re angry, and they’ve chosen to arm themselves with knowledge, and have decided as adults that this fight about the Patriot Act and the danger they see it to represent to our First Amendment rights matters, enough that they’re trying to do something about it.

And I’ll be there. I’ll be proud to be there. Proud to know them.

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“We are dreamt as soon as we speak.” Liam Rector

We are dreamt as soon as we speak.
There are songs that we seem to inherit
on this road that we seem to applaud.
You continue to be dreamt by harm
until the breath of choice turns
you (in all its syllables) somewhere far from habit.

From “Driving November” by Liam Rector

So I’ve slept the sweet exhausted sleep of reunion this past day, having spent since Wednesday in the finer than fine company of the brother-man scholar Greg and our new friend, the gifted writer Kent Haruf. If you haven’t read Plainsong, you must.

“I’ve always resisted that idea, you know, the notion you love of multiple selves,” I said to Greg as we made our way from the airport.

He nodded, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips, shifting in the seat beside me as we drove. I ignored the smile, knowing as I said it that he had already recognized, knew well, my resistance.

As a young child, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls, Nancy Drew, Mick Kelly and Jo March. I prowled the gravel lane and woods around the ten trailers in Shady Acres, trying unsuccessfully to cut squares of sod from the silky sand of eastern North Carolina, or spying on the neighbors from behind the dented beds of pick-up trucks, weaving mysteries about where they were going or what they were doing. The summer I was eight, Becky Coward and I spent the long hot of every summer day literally in the top of trees, in apartments we made by dragging books, toy telephones and tiny dishes up as we climbed, then balancing the various pieces of these lives we created in the crooks of branches around us. Up there, Becky, a year older than me and much more worldly I thought, was an actress, her voice high and dramatic as she fended off calls from agents and directors and the advances of handsome leading men. I furrowed my brow into what I thought was a pensive intelligent look and was a writer, like Jo, a journalist or novelist, famous and highly educated, completing my latest novel and delivering erudite speeches as I accepted awards. As the summer waned and we came down from the trees, I pinched my eyes closed at night in the bed I shared with my sister and became, for the short time before I fell asleep, every saint I read about in Catholic school, two more often than others: Margaret of Hungary for her selflessness in feeding the poor, and always, always, Joan of Arc. Later, during what I think of now as my biography phase, I was Abe Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, John Kennedy, and Martha Carrier, one of the women charged with witchcraft in Salem.

For most of the spring when I was eleven, I convinced myself that I was the reincarnation of Harry Houdini.

I’ve always thought of it all as reinvention, reconfiguring, a different, ever-changing permutation of one self, the loud, opinionated, ravenous, wild-haired self I got through some combination of genetics and raising, not the multiple selves about which the brother-man writes so eloquently. But either way, the magic of it seems to me to lie in the glorious power we have in the ability to choose. To often, I think, we consign ourselves to some predetermined idea that we think we’re supposed to fit, to the type of life we think we’re supposed to have, to the restricted arena of who others, benignly or not, tell us we are. Or can be.

Sometimes, the reinvention is thrust upon us, by others we choose to let into our lives, by circumstances we had no hand in making. Then we come to know the real remaking, when those others fail us, or fail to be the whom into which we made them, and such reinvention reveals us to ourselves as survivors, as rewriters, as dreamers of the divine, capable of strength and clarity that can only result in a better version of who we had thought we were. Sometimes, we choose these restrictions, these reinventions of the rules of self, ourselves, and for good reason. They give us time to think, to search and learn ourselves in quietude, time to learn to be still in the first place, so that we might listen to our greatest source of power, our own hearts.

The danger, I think, in the presupposed-ness of who we might be, created by others or ourselves, rests in our settling into these patterns of acceptance, perhaps from lack of awareness, perhaps from fear, but I think more often than not, from habit. It’s easier that way. The settling in keeps us from having to figure out the who of it all, protects us from the weight of the work involved in being accountable for those decisions, keeps us, perhaps, from being hurt from some other we might let near. We wrap the comfort of habit about us, grip it like a lifeline, and convince ourselves that we are safe. From failure. From rejection. From risk.

This, to me, renders the one self I fancy stagnant, deathly still. And as Blake said, “Expect poison from standing water.” Rather than discarding the old battered war-horse of the self that’s carried me now for forty-four years, I choose, going with my Irish tendency perhaps to bet on the same tired old pony, and turn yet again somewhere far from habit–toward the risk.

Risk, as the brother-man and I do agree, equals hope.

And with each reinvention of the continually re-inherited self, that’s what I am filled with–hope. I keep building on the me that has now been recycled again and again, as transformative and transformed and miraculous as physics tells us is energy. So I still tell myself stories of who I might be; sometimes it’s still Harry Houdini or Joan of Arc. More times, it’s just me, or more accurately, pieces of the me I’ve come to know, in my stories, in the voice of the cashiers and mamas and waitresses I write so often. My characters tumble again and again, then get back up, figuring out as they rise what they can take from the fall. And I’m right there with them.

But each time, whether I’ve been brought to my nonfictional knees by another or have landed on my ass through my own choices, I climb back to my feet hoping that each scar, each failure, each fall, represents a better me. The me I can dream as soon as I speak it, the me who will live fuller, strive harder, laugh louder, reach higher, and I believe, not only love again, but having done it and learned, the me who will love better than ever before.

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