A few notes on teaching intro to creative writing

This semester I'll be teaching an intro to creative writing class at NMSU. I am conscious of the possibility this will be the only class in writing I ever get to teach. I want to make it great. At the same time, I hope to experiment with approaches to CW pedagogy that I think will improve upon the standard strategies. I'll be posting here throughout the semester as I learn from the experience, sharing what I do with my students and how the semester progresses. (I think also that Tracy will share some of her thoughts, as she'll be teaching a fiction workshop this semester.) For now, here are a few of the premises I'm working from in planning the class:

1. Intro to CW should be more about ways of reading than ways of writing.

There are essentially two goals in an intro class: waking students up to the possibility that they might enjoy writing, and teaching them a critical vocabulary through which they might become better readers in their own lives and, potentially, in future (workshop-oriented) classes. It seems to me that the best way to accomplish both of these goals is to emphasize reading over writing. If they're going to be great writers, they'll need to be great readers first. And if they don't ultimately decide to go on writing, as most of them won't, they'll still benefit in the long term from skillful, broad, and deep reading. If they do go on to workshop, they'll need to be skillful readers to help each other. If they don't, it won't hurt any. And of course the main way to find out if you want to write is to see what other people are writing.

We will do writing prompts, but those will take up less time in class and out of class than our (considerable) course of readings.

2. Reading in an intro course is not about introducing students to canonical works, but giving them a broad survey of what's happening (and what's happened) in writing.

Lit classes should be concerned with reading "great works" of literature. In my experience, creative writing classes often find themselves in an awkward place between emphasizing what the instructor likes from the present and works that have generally been considered great in the past, without much concern for what students might actually want to write themselves. I've got a lot of ground to cover, as intro at NMSU requires three genres (in my case fiction, poetry, and plays) but the idea of my reading list is to survey a broad range of times, styles, and genres in writing, with some extra weight on currently working writers, in order to engage students in a literary conversation they will find not only engaging and accessible, but urgent and open to their contributions. Thus our first readings in fiction will be from The Things They Carried, but we will quickly move on to Daniel Wallace, Shirley Jackson, Brian Evenson, and eventually writers chosen from online magazines by the students themselves. We'll spend four weeks on Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai.

Poets will include Hart Crane, but also Saul Williams (including his rap) and Abraham Smith, whose book Whim Man Mammon will be our primary poetic text and first longform reading.

3. As that reading list may suggest, I think intro reading should be challenging.

There is a natural tendency to assume beginning students will be bored by or incapable of appreciating the writers we love most. I think this is a mistake, and I find it condescending. Students will be most engaged when their instructor is most engaged, and while it might be a mistake to start them off with Finnegan's Wake, ferinstance, I don't see a way to engage people in writing except to show them what they can accomplish. It's not that I need them to produce or aspire to a certain kind of art, but I do think you've got to show them greatness and complexity if you want them to think of writing and reading as something worth real time in their lives.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think reading on the next level should be more manageable -- when you want students to start mastering small bits of technique, you've got to break it down into more recognizable pieces. But intro is, as I see it, largely about provocation, about opening up, about imagining potential. If sometimes the students feel frightened by the work they read, or intimidated, that's all for the better; we should sometimes be scared of our own potential, because this is the only way to understand how much we really have.

4. I am not interested in promulgating a coherent theory of literature or writing.

In fact I aim to do something like the opposite. I'll write another post explaining this in more detail, but I don't find it useful when instructors attempt to create one unifying theory of art. I can come up with my own ideas about what writing is -- what I need from them is practical advice about how to do what I'm doing better, and also opportunities for doing other things. My idea is to focus on how writers create different pleasures in reading -- the pleasures of character, of structure, of language, of plot, and so on -- and how we can create and intensify those pleasures in our own work. Each discussion of each text will come from the open-ended question of what brings us pleasure in reading it -- not so much "what makes it work" as "what makes it great."

This will lead, I think, to an eclectic but powerful style of reading and thinking about writing. Students, rather than searching for a way to construct the ideal text, will be required to construct their ideal text. The question of how pleasures and intensity can be found in a work is, though not really a system for the production of any sort of art, my preferred framework for understanding all art. How can we be awesome? How can we be more awesome?

5. I'll do the work the students do, and they will see my work.

I think writing instructors derive a lot of authority from creating mystification around their own writing, and also often forget to foster a discourse that they themselves would find beneficial as students. They practice authoritarianism when they should be collaborators. As such I will do all the exercises I assign my students, and when they share their work, I will share mine. I'll talk about my writing with them. I'll share the frustrations and what I know about how to get past them. If they can imagine me as a perfect source of knowledge, I will be less useful to them. If they understand that there is no point of mastery, they will better understand the work of writing and reading, and they will learn more. I don't want my students to substitute my judgment for their own.

6. Students can fail this class.

While harsh grading for its own sake is a plague on the CW course on those rare occasions where it crops up, I do expect students to treat writing with the same respect they would treat biology, chemistry, or law, as a legitimate field of knowledge and expertise to be studied diligently. Students will be graded on reading, participation, and not success, but effort in their writing. Not everyone will get an A.

I will advise those who took the course in hopes of an easy A to withdraw.

How would you teach CW? How have you done it in the past? Have you had a particularly effective instructor?

Inception

I almost didn't blog about this because it seems like everybody is blogging about it, but hell, why not. It's fun to think about.

I'll do the stuff I can talk about without spoiling anything first and then I'll get into some more specific things below the fold.

I should say at the outset that I enjoyed the movie. I found it absorbing and engaging. The bit where the kid from 3rd Rock is scrabbling around on the walls is the tops. I especially liked when the movie would cut to him in the van on the next level up, muted smile like a baby, his arms sort of drifting up like one of those wacky wailing arm flailing inflatable tube men. Leo isn't distracting, and I like how weird his head shape is starting to look as he gets older. (Kind of like mine, come to think of it.) There are some pretty good shots. I wasn't sorry I spent the money or the time.

But it did, in part because of its strengths, help me figure out why I don't generally get along with big budget movies very well, and also big budget action in particular.

The thing about dreams is that they're repetitive. Some people have complained about the lack of sex in the film, and I'm somewhat sympathetic to that, though I would focus on the absence of shame and embarrassment -- probably not everybody dreams about sex as much as we do, you minx ya. But I'm absolutely willing to spend some time in a dream with somebody who is totally asexual and just really interested in architecture and guns, which is sort of how it works out in Inception. But because Christopher Nolan can essentially spend as much money as he wants he never has to repeat himself. As such, the film never develops a proper obsession. As such, it never really feels like a dream. All this cool stuff happens when Ellen Paige (Juno) is figuring out the rules of the dream world and you think, "Okay, sweet, these visual themes will define the movie," but generally it never comes up again.

It's little things. Why do we never see the same extra twice? I read somewhere the human mind has room for something like a hundred fifty people. We can care about, empathize, and generally keep up with about that amount of people. This may explain why I get antsy and clear my Facebook out every time it gets too far over a hundred. Anyway, I figure my dreams probably have like fifty faces in them on any one night at the most. We should be seeing the same people over and over in the movie, maybe with different hairstyles and big moles and missing limbs and stuff. And the same should be true of the sets -- they should all be built from the same seven elements, or whatever. One tube of toothpaste should keep showing up. One particular gun. One kind of tank with a really distinct shape or whatever.

And perhaps to the extent that you want your fiction to feel like a dream, this becomes a problem for high budget movies in general. When someone is doing something on a limited budget they have to use the same sets, they have to use the same props, they have to use extras from the same actor's family, over and over. There develops therefore a sort of vocabulary, and the placement of the different nouns and verbs of the film within different scenes and between scenes, and through them, takes on an emotional significance. When we watch a high budget film we are seeing the perfect, polished output of several hundred overlapping minds, and this can be a pleasant experience -- it's nice to boggle and goggle from time to time. But what I like better than this is the weird beauty that comes from limitation. The best part of Waiting for Godot, at least the production I've seen, is when they need the moon to rise and instead of building a moon and painting it and hanging it on a wire and pulley system and hiring a guy to operate the wire and pulley system and hoisting it up and then everybody in the audience says "Hey, the moon," they just turn on the spotlight, which they had lying around anyway, and make it climb the wall, which isn't usually where it belongs. And then the audience thinks, simultaneously, "That's a spotlight," and, "That's the moon." For me that moment is what art's about, most of the time. Inception never has to do that. Every time, they build the moon. Same for Lord of the Rings, which I enjoyed the first time but will never willingly sit through again. The King Kong remake works because the actors sort of play this role -- the special effects are as expensive as they need to be, but the actors' performances are sort of wonderfully rickety. Jack Black has to say that ridiculous line at the end and he has to sell it even though he isn't the right person and he can't possibly sell that godawful line, and that makes it pretty good.

There is, relatedly, such a thing as high budget fiction. Isn't there? This is fiction that has been polished to the extent that the mind can find no purchase; fiction that never uses the same word twice. Some readers delight in reading writers who always have just the right word, but I have an enduring affection for writers who often use the wrong word because it's closer at hand, or more beautiful than getting it right. When someone doesn't give himself all the time in the world to write a sentence, when he forces himself to use what's available to him then, he often gets the best, most surprising results. (This is not to say that I dislike revision -- only that I believe in revision that respects the original impulse, especially where it seems mystifying, embarrassing, or impolitic.) For a concrete example of this, look at (contributor) Blake Butler. If you've read a few things by Blake you have a working knowledge of his vocabulary. It changes from story to story of course but there are words you can count on. They show up again and again. They get better the more often he uses them. The repetition is what makes it. Or here is a quote about Peter Markus from a review by Paste Magazine:

Peter Markus is obsessed with a few words: brother, river, mud, lighthouse, fish, moon and star. From this sacred vocabulary springs a body of work—three books of stories and now a novel—that is sometimes confounding, often beautiful, starkly spare and totally unique. Bob, or Man on Boat is an authentically avant-garde work, refreshingly absent of any trace of pretension or irony. It is pure incantation and fable: prayer by any other name.

The story: A man named Bob sits on a boat, fishing. Another man, Bob’s son Bob, watches him and fishes, too. That’s about all that happens.

Like Gertrude Stein, Markus uses an elementary lexicon and recursive prose to make the mundane strange. 'Look at Bob’s hands. His knuckles are rivers. The skin on Bob’s hands, fish scale covered, they look like they’ve been dipped in stars.'

Some would call that repetition an error. Those people probably like high budget movies the best. But if you want a really beautiful and dreamlike experience -- if you, like Tracy and I, thought the biggest problem with Inception was that the seams needed to show, then you are my kind of reader. The cycle of perception and creation emphasized by Cobb within the film is not represented in the film. But the act of dreaming and perceiving one's own dream and continuing to dream is precisely the act of writing fiction.

I guess what I'm saying is the best way to watch Inception is to read a novel instead.

Relatedly, my problem with high budget action films: the guns only miss when the writer and director want them to. I watched this awful movie the other night where a guy sniped three dudes literally hundreds of yards away with one round each from a little uzi sort of machine gun. They were up on these big towers and it looked windy out, but he did it. Awful, awful film, but at least the rules were consistent: the main characters could shoot anything from anywhere. The rule in Inception is that the bullets miss until it's time to advance the story, at which point they hit. It's like the way that watching anime gets old when you figure out the hero will triumph over any + all obstacles when he really wants to. You stop caring about how he gets there. He'll do it, even if it makes no sense, unless the creators decide they don't want him to do it this time, in which case he won't. Internal logic is specifically forbidden. And this is, again, the problem of the high budget movie: since literally anything can happen next, for all it matters to the budget and the time and energy of the hundreds of worker bees on the product, it matters less and less what actually does happen. Some big budget movies can escape this problem (No Country for Old Men had as much money as it needed, but it followed its own rules to the end, and the same goes for Children of Men, which should be but never quite becomes a Rube Goldberg machine because you can tell how bad that guy's feet are hurting every step [main problem: he dies at thematically convenient/redemptive moment]). Batman: The Dark Knight becomes sort of like Metal Machine Music eventually because you realize Batman could be punching anyone at any time and Joker can plan anything ten years in advance. They needed rules.

Now for the spoilery bits. Yes, there's more.

Follow-up to Tracy's Post

This live feed of "Let Me Google That for You" searches is pretty incredible. Could inspire some amazing poetry.

Passive Aggressive Googling

Mike follows Shane Jones on Twitter. I don't because I have a thing about following too many famous people. Yet following famous people is pretty much what Twitter is about. You don't exactly get to see or talk to them, but, if they use Twitter right, you can find out that they are nostalgic for Queen or The Spice Girls or Coldplay, that they think timber wolves are the noblest animal, or that they hate the side braid. These are also things you'd probably learn about them if you were actual friends. It's highly similar to hanging around a person in real life, but they don't (usually) know you're doing it, and they don't have to hear back about it from you unless they want to.

Anyway, Shane Jones tweeted the following:

On train. Almost googled if I had soup in cabinet back home.

Mike was privy to this; I was not. Mike shared it with me. Now we both know. Mike has never done or considered this peculiar usage of Google.

I absolutely have.

Things to read

At Rick Magazine, Roxane Gay's Baby Arm.

I’m dating a guy who works as a merchandiser for a large department store and one of his duties includes designing window displays. He tells me this on our third date. We have already slept together, twice. I’m not a hard sell.  When he tells me about his job, we are at a sleazy bar, drinking beer from the tap in frosted mugs. I tap my foot against his. I say, “I’m ready to go back to your place whenever you are.” I am anxious about all the “getting to know you” conversation we are having. I’ve never enjoyed sitting through previews at movies. It always seems like such a waste of time. ... A couple months later, he comes over to my apartment in the middle of the night because we’ve long abandoned any pretense of a mutual interest in anything but dirty sex and he’s holding a fiberglass baby arm, painted the color of flesh. He hands it to me and says, “I thought you might like this,” and I take the baby arm and tell him if he’s not careful, I will fall in love and he says he would be fine with that. 

At Dark Sky, the first chapter of Shane Jones' Failure Six.

The messenger was given an address by way of pushed note under his wooden door.

The messenger had been dreaming of owls and capes. In his dream he saw a revolver go off inside the owl’s cape. The revolver made a coughing sound and the wounded owl opened his mouth and made a sound like paper being pushed across a floor.

The messenger woke, blew out the candle on his nightstand, and saw a white pamphlet inside a large sheet of brown paper on the floor.

The person outside the door had a dream the night before too. It was of rainbow colored blobs falling from a pea-green sky.

Antun was the messenger’s name. Two pastel blue-colored triangles were stuck on his face.

The message read:

Enclosed pamphlet, please find necessary information to relay to seamstress — Yours Truly.

Stick Pink

Our friend and fellow MFAer, Carrie Murphy, has been doing awesome things for a while now. But here is a link to a new awesome thing: Stick Pink, an e-chapbook from Gold Wake Press.

Petrosinella

If I were a woman with a beard, I would be the bearded woman.
I would wear charms tied to my beard all the time, even to bed.
Maybe unicorns.
Maybe a tiny teapot.

I have never listened to music while I shaved my legs.
I do have baby hairs on my knuckles but I don’t think I’m ape-like.
I am scared of cavemen so I never studied anthropology but
I once had sex with a hairy barrel while it rolled down a hill.

There's more, but this was enough to draw me in. I honestly love her poetry. Sometimes I feel bad about myself for not liking or reading more poetry, but then someone comes along who consistently seems to knock it out of the park and I wonder what's wrong with being picky after all. Maybe all the other poets just need to step up.

Anyway. She'll be mortified when and if she reads this, so check it out if you have a mind to.

Revising

I'm currently revising the novel that will be my MFA thesis. It's a bit of a monster -- 125,00ish words, some 400 pages. The longest I've written. It's very difficult to manage.

When I've got specific feedback for a book -- as I do for some portions of this one -- I like to read the work through these readers' eyes and imagine what led them to say what they said, and how I might alter the structure to please them better. I also tweak the sentences constantly.

When I don't have specific feedback for a section I prune a lot and change words and images, and prune more, and maybe add one sentence, but it's harder for me to perceive the work holistically enough to make larger structural revisions. I tend to write fairly complete drafts (in part because I fuss with them so much as I'm writing my "first" draft) so that explains this in part, as well. But it's frustrating! I want to transform my work. I want to take quantum leaps. Etc. But maybe that's something I do more in-between texts than within them. I'm not sure.

How do you revise? Does it feel good? I try not to feel anything about it.

Madeleine is Sleeping

Probably the only exciting thing about the New Yorker's 20 under 40 list was Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's inclusion. One can't help suspecting they were attracted to her largely for her more conventional work (the excellent but thoroughly mainstream-friendly Ms. Hempel Chronicles) but then I like that stuff too, so all's well.

We might also talk, with some frustration, about the use of our literary leadership of the "fairy tale" category to sanitize the strange things they like. Magical realism, fairy tale, fable, have all become styles in the Gucci sense; these are not, as constituted by our community, so much genres as a register. A little sweet, a little sour, full with empty menace, sentimentality masquerading as beauty, easy insights dressed up as wolves and little talking animals. I guess I'm saying I'm tired of these things. I am tired of the attempts to cordon everything strange and beautiful and exciting in a cutesy ghetto of toothless categories that cheerfully adjunct themselves to the self-consciously literary dreck that is supposed to be our primary fiction. I am tired of restraint -- or rather, I am tired of restraint that is masochistic rather than erotic, restraint that punishes writer and reader alike for their passions and hungers rather than indulging them in careful, quiet ways.

Part of what attracts me to Madeleine is Sleeping is the way in which it reveals the language we use to talk about story as largely meaningless. The story has been called a fairy tale. It has, I'm sure, been called magical realism. And while it may use some conventions of fairy tales, and elements of such, but to focus on this element is to obscure the whole: what people are really saying when they call this a fairy tale is that they don't understand its logic and they can't be bothered to try. Insofar as magical realism is concerned, give me a break -- there's nothing real here. The book is about a girl who, while sleeping, dreams of herself stroking off the village idiot, and, having told her parents what she's done, is punished gruesomely. This also really happens. She dreams of a very fat woman named Matilde, who one day grows wings, and thereafter studies her own droppings for signs of what is to come. (She is a woman of science.) This also really happens. What are the rules of her dreaming? Does she have two bodies out and about in the world? The answers are, as I understand them, that the rules are not for us to know, and that yes, she may sometimes have two bodies.

Blake Butler is our newest contributor

We're very excited to announce that Blake Butler will be contributing a fairly long, truly weird piece to our first issue. 

Many (most?) of you already know Blake's work, but for those who don't, he is the author of two books, Scorch Atlas (Featherproof) and Ever (Calamari). His novel There is No Year will be coming from Harper Perennial in April of next year. He is the mother of HTMLGiant, he is the father of Lamination Colony, he is the brother of No Colony, he is the blogger of his blog.

Here is his story "The Copy Family." Here is his story "The Gown from Mother's Stomach." There are links to many other stories at his blog.

Here he is reading from Ever.



Hope everyone is getting all revved up.

To Read: JMWW

Hey Mike,

I'll bite (and apparently I'll be the first, though I hope not the last)-- want something to read? Click and enjoy, without undue dilatoriness, new editor John Madera's impressively compiled Flash Fiction section of the Summer JMWW. Top to bottom, great. Alphabetically, then, if you need further convincing: Andrew Borgstrom, Kim Chinquee, Robert Coover (! an excerpt from Noir), Jeremy M. Davies (whose Rose Alley should long ago have joined the queue of my personal, offline reading list, and has, emphatically, done so now), Luca DiPierro, Brian Evenson, Lily Hoang (whose The Evolutionary Revolution I've only just started, but can already without reserve recommend), Tim Horvath, Joanna Howard, Jamie Iredell, Brian Kiteley, Norman Lock, Robert Lopez, Sean Lovelace, Stacy Muszynski, Ken Sparling, Terese Svoboda, and J.A. Tyler.

I might have linked the individual pieces, but the whole thing is fantastic. Read it all.

On Soliciting Women

We've noticed something, and we bet those of you in publishing have noticed it too. Though we actively solicit the work of women in putting together our journal, and not just here but at the other magazine we work at, Puerto del Sol, very few submissions seem to result from that solicitation. Most disturbing to me is that we often never even get a reply. This strikes me as something to open up conversation about, not just for our purposes as editors but for the further identification and promotion of excellent female writers.

This is a big issue for the publishing community to tackle, and it's an important one. A few months ago, at HTMLGiant, there was a heated argument over the publication and subsequent promotion of an all-male issue of a journal--not an issue that was meant to be all-male, or that was labeled as all-male; the explanation was that "it just happened." One of the main arguments that emerged was that, regardless of the stated intentions of beliefs of the editors, such an occurrence should alert people in publishing to the possibility of blind and buried inequities in their reading, solicitation, or submission processes. Once the issue was examined in more depth, though, in a series of conversations with a mixed panel of writers and publishers, the issue became reciprocal--not just an issue of editors seeking out women and minorities, but an issue of contacting and encouraging submissions from these diverse groups of people to begin with. Roxane Gay's comment really hit home for me:

You are absolutely correct that it is not hard to find female poets and writers who are doing fantastic work but as an editor of a magazine that has a reputation for being open to work from women and diverse populations, we still only receive about 30% of our submissions from women and we’ve received fewer than 20 submissions from writers of color, ever. This issue of gender equality and encouraging diversity is far more complex than knowing that these fantastic women writers or writers of color or queer writers are out there. The real problem is finding ways to connect with diverse writing communities and that’s something I’ve personally struggled with. We cannot publish that which is not submitted.

This is our experience as well--when we try to connect with these authors (generally by publicly available e-mail addresses) it seems that we get one of two responses. The first is "I don't have anything right now." The second is no response--a blank. I have never myself been solicited directly, so I can only imagine what my reaction would be. I think about the amount of work I have ready to submit or near ready, the kinds of work I have (genres, lengths, subject matter, etc.), and how I might interpret the request (depending on the journal, the editors' aesthetics, the wording used, and so on). This leads me to some potential theories, but really, I'm just asking questions. What happens when, as a writer, you receive a solicitation? How does the equation change, if at all, when you are a woman writer, a writer of color, a queer writer? I'll speak mainly of women for simplicity and directness, but the question, I hope, applies broadly.

Is there something in the interaction between publishers and authors that turns women off rather than energizing them to submit? Do editors, intentionally or unintentionally, make women writers feel as if they are being solicited mainly for their gender? By soliciting, do editors place added pressure on women to submit work before it's ready, to adhere to an aesthetic, to commit too much time to preparing an appropriate submission?

Do women spend more time on getting their work ready for submission than men, on average? Do women write as much, as often? Do women more often write "for" a publication specifically? Or more for themselves, disregarding particular editorial tastes or visions? (These sound like stupid questions, but I ask them honestly, given the number of times women have told me they simply have nothing available, whereas male writers will usually send something right away. I myself write slower and more, er, deliberately perhaps, than Mike. I edit much more slowly.)

Do personal time or priorities factor in--like the fact that women still, on average, spend more time on housework than men, or that they are still more often the ones to take point on caring for children? Do women writers put more energy and time into their non-writing careers than men--is it indicated to them that they must, in order to keep those jobs or make themselves valuable?

Is it actually that women are too visible in the writing community, too "desirable"--that they are tokenized? Or that the number of visible women is so small, comparatively, that the women who are solicited are in fact oversolicited?

Ultimately, I suppose my question is what we can do as editors to make the relationship a positive one, an encouraging one, as often as possible, and how we can behave in order to make it clear to more marginalized groups of writers that we are sincerely interested in their work, and that this is a place we'd like them to feel welcome.

And beyond us, if there's something larger, more sociological, that's discouraging certain groups of writers from writing as much, from writing as freely, or from submitting to publications at all, I think the literary community needs to work together to push the conversation, to repair attitudes and behaviors, so that we can really mean it when we say we have open submissions.

Uncharted 2 Reviewed

Should I mention at the outset that I know and am close with one of the guys who made this game? Is that what's called full disclosure? Doesn't the FCC have a rule about this? Well, whatever.

Uncharted 2 is the game I have spent the most time with other than Fallout 3 in recent memory. Fallout 3 is designed to be a time sink. You spend about half your time walking from place to place in a wasteland, listening to your radio, waiting for something interesting to happen. There are almost no "cinemas." You play a cipher whose appearance and decisions are entirely defined by the player (within a set, and indeed often limiting, range). You talk to people often. The shooting is not very good.

Uncharted 2 is pretty much the polar opposite of Fallout 3. It's long for a high budget action game, but not very. It's meant to be cinematic, which is to say that it imitates an action movie. You have a character named Nathan Drake, who is like Indiana Jones + Ryan Secrest. He runs around in gorgeous environments (easily the most attractive/impressive I've seen in a game yet) and climbs on things, shooting and occasionally punching guys. That's pretty much the game.