Word After Word

I think the best book on how to teach writing is Abigail Thomas’ Safekeeping. Really, all one needs to know about teaching is in this book. A quote from page 8:

 ”She will have to tell her class. Make up an assignment.  Write two pages in which something valuable is given away on the street. What will they come up with, she wonders, wanting to know.”

Everything I want to steer towards and practice every day as at eacher is in these four sentences.  “She will have to tell her class.” How the teaching life has to have room for the real regular life, but not replace it. And not just talk about your own life in class, either. But just as the writer mines daily life for work, the teacher does too. “She will have to tell her class. Make up an assignment.” The best work we do in the classroom comes noticing how we learn a thing, how we see.

And this is what Thomas is so good at, her genius: wanting to know. This is the key: creating assignments and lessons and days and classrooms where we care so much, really wonder what will they come up with? 

When we’re teaching like this, it’s not draining at all. We never say, “I have a stack to grade, I’m swamped.” We’re not swamped. We are in it, together, noticing and hitting the ball back. It’s really essentially exactly like my best babysitting days (and how much I loved living in other people’s houses).  There weren’t any babies and there wasn’t any sitting–together we made these fabulous plays of all kinds and my role was just to make sure we were in on time.

Abigail Thomas writes in Safekeeping, about her own self teaching writing, “She is a writer and she teaches writing. Well, not teaches writing because you can’t do that, but you can certainly locate the interesting, you can go over the page with sand-papered fingertips and say, Here, what is really going on here, and if you’re lucky the writer blushes and says, Oh, I thought I could just skip over that part, which means you have discovered a gold mine, and you say, No, sorry, you’re going to have to write it.

You can point out the promising. You can encourage and allow and permit and make possible. She gives assignments so nobody has to face the blank page alone….

Nothing goes to waste.”

This is the way I want to teach this week.  This is a great teaching tuning fork passage.

What’s hard is there are so many writing students–there are too many. My fingertips are smooth from so much reading.  I have to keep them tuned, sandpapery. This requires more reading. My own writing. More baths.

Abigail Thomas teaching is like a great sofa teaching. I’m feeling like a fork. An aluminum fork teaching. I’m griping. I’m grating.  Why can’t they staple? why can’t they label?

I learned this word from Steve in New York: a city dweller who eats everything.

“You should never will a change in your work,” painter John Currin told Calvin Tomkins (New Yorker, Jan 28 2008). “You have to work an idea to death. I often find the best things happen when I’m near the end.”  Visual artists often take one thing and do it over and over and over–peaches, or woods, or faces, or nudes, or dogs on sofas. And when they’re really burnt out on the thing, it starts getting good. I have my classes write linked pieces for this reason–I believe getting to know a thing over time, working it and reworking it and pursuing it to the point of ridiculousness is how we learn how to see.

I love this article by Calvin Tomkins! I won’t copy it out here as I did with the Menand piece.

Highlights.

 Currin says: “I came to the conclusion that there is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.” He feels he does better work now that his life is happy and stable and filled with love. Artists don’t have to suffer, and maybe shouldn’t. (Students you know who you are!)

“It doesn’t look good now,” Currin says. “but a big part of painting is getting used to things not looking good while you work on them.” (This is my favorite art quote of the week; ED we must put it in the margins of 2e!)

Calvin Tomkins watches Currin paint, as he switches from one brush to a softer one. Currin narrates his process. “It starts to multiply, the grading of tones, until it becomes  thousands of tones…. some are accidental and some are intentional. It’s great when the accidental becomes indistinguishable from the intentional. That’s when it begins to seem like a living thing.”

Students: we can do this with pencil and paper and words, make these living things out a combination of accident and leaning-towards. Nothing is more exciting than this kind of making.

I urge my students to work by hand, to write slowly, long hand. I tell them: this is how we must work. I tell them I write everything by hand, and mostly, I do. But not always.

So, I showed parts of my memoir to friends and met them last week to see what they thought. I got a list of Favorite Sections and Places To Work. 100% of the Favorite Sections were written by hand. And every single one of the Places to Work? Composed on the computer.