Word After Word

Who?

A master of “rigorous noticing.”

“It you don’t consent to understand a little, on its own terms, what you dislike, your love loses muscle tone.”

Schjeldahl is one of my favorite writers and I’m loving his new book immensely, Let’s See, the collection of his writing on art for the New Yorker.

Some of my students complain about having to write about other people’s work (published authors and peer authors). It’s always, always, always the case that the best writers in the class are the students who work hard on reading—noticing—and articulating what it is they think about the work.

There is never an exception. The noticers have the cerebral six packs

I’m teaching the May Term–best class ever. I’m using my textbook The Practice of Creative Writing and we are all working hard, so hard, writing much every day. The class meets for three hours a day, every day.

Yesterday, we were going to run over. We weren’t done but we had to be done; I pride myself on perfect landings–I’m saying my last sentence of the teaching day at exactly 3:59:30, every day.

“We can go over,” Charlie said. “We want to.”

I said No. We can’t! We have been here three hours.

“No we really want to stay.” I’m sure not everyone in the room felt this way, but enough of us did. Making this the high point of my life as a teacher. (This glorious event–staying after on purpose–was followed by gorgeous gifts and a heartfelt amazing tear-creating thank you letter from my stunning student of four years, Miss E, and hours of good craic, well, Wednesday sure was a good day.)

Here’s a funny thing, too, which relates to Ignoring/Distrusting Praise-Believing Criticism, which I wrote about earlier this month.  I read the email from the director about the Balcones Prize (”It goes to a book, not a person,” he said) I immediately forgot about it.

I went on to other things. Later in the day, I scanned over my inbox and there it was. How could I have forgotten this, not called him? How can I chew over the possibly minor Wrong Thing I said this morning and not remember this?

We’re insane.

I just want to be writing. All day. I want all day to write.

But I am teaching a class–we meet every day for three hours. Here’s the thing. This is the Best Class Ever. Amazing class. Usually, it takes five sessions for our in class work to kick in. This group? First time. They go so deep — so fast–their work is blowing me away. They are not afraid to go slow. This group has been around the block. They know fast. They appreciate slow. They seem, unlike any other class I’ve had, respectful of fear, not freaked out by it.

So, I’m happy I am teaching. Much happier than I thought it would be and it’s hard, harder than I thought it would be. I get up very early and get the writing done and wish I had four more hours to write.  I do not have time for free cell, email, my super long poetry bath, dog walking, very much yoga, or laundry, etc. I just have to get in there and get started. This is very refreshing. No time to be blocked.

If I didn’t have to be out of the studio at noon to go and to go see these Focused Darlings, my May students would I be working so concentratedly? I don’t think so! I think I would probably be less focused. Spongy. I am not sure. I wonder.

So, it’s ten hour days, intense focus. (The teaching is so much like writing, so much.) But it’s lucky work, great work, comfortable good work, work that means a lot to me. Both sides of it, the revising and the teaching.

I’m happy I have six great writers in my studio half the day. And I am exhausted and it’s only Day Two.

Now, I’m going to Pizza Hut to get Jacob some breadsticks. He’s exhausted too. He has three more days of high school. He says it went way too fast, so weirdly fast. He says he wishes he would have enjoyed his vacations more because he sees the road ahead–no long breaks. What would you have done on your vacations? I said. He wasn’t sure.

But something. He would have gotten more out of them. Of that he is certain.

“One should not pray or meditate with any thought of gain. Hold no expectations. Then the rewards will come. Praying for results brings no results. The true spirit appears only when there are no expectations to hamper it.”  Deng Ming-dao

This passage fits perfectly what I want to teach my students this term–today’s the first day of May term, creative writing class. I want to remember this lesson for my daily writing, too. Teaching and books prepare us for what we will experience when we write. But teaching is always a descriptions of what we will encounter. Not something we don’t know must know.

I love this paradox. It is in meditation and love and writing practice. “Sit down with no thought of results and you will go naturally and spontaneously” to good work, the right state of mind. We know what to expect, but we must not expect it!

I had a Cinco de Mayo party on my porch on Friday night, with tamales and tulips and good friends. And some new friends. One of whom, Andre, told me, inside when we ran into each other in the kitchen, he wants so much to start his graphic novel. “I have to get my courage up and just do it,” he said.

To which I said, quickly, without thinking, “Andre. You will not get the courage. You have to start it without the courage.” Bossy Heather. Hostess with platitudes! But I was in my pretty new flowered skirt which grazes the floor (a star chart prize, it’s true!), and my turquoise jewelry and I felt like the Fairy God Mother and Luke Skywalker combined.

And I keep thinking about what Andre — a superbly talented super genius–said. And what I said. And it’s true. You have to start (I know, this sounds like my least favorite platitude, feel the fear and do it anyway) your book (project, whatever it is.) You can’t wait to feel differently. That’s a different book. To write this one, you start now. Tonight.

And you do it every day.

 You don’t get the courage. You live with mind-numbing soul-killing self doubt and it crushes you. But you have that anyway! You write underneath all this, on the sly, trying not to think about it, never talking about it. Just do it! (That’s supposed to be funny.)

Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford
The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens
The Uncertain Certainty by Charles Simic
Telling Time by Nancy Willard
Grammars of Creation by George Steiner
Conversations before the End of Time by Suzi Gablik
The Gift by Lewis Hyde
The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport
Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard
Don’t Ask by Philip Levine
No More Second Hand Art by Peter London
The Demon and the Angel by Edward Hirsch
The Healing Art by Rafael Campo
Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr
Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland
The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life by Thomas Moore
Most anything by Parker Palmer

My dear colleague Jack Ridl is retiring. It’s a huge loss to our creative writing program, our students. This is one of his lists–a list of books creative writing students will love. A list of books that feed us, help us survive well.  Thank you, Jack. I’m missing you a lot.

I have my students make chapbooks of their work at the end of the semester, and they make a copy of their beautiful book for everyone in the class. I encourage them to get booky–I’ll write a blurb for anyone who asks (”it was luminous!” “Kruyf is Stephen King on Lorrie Moore!”). They make fake blurbs (”I couldn’t put it down. It was literally stuck to my hands…glued on! –Tom Stoppard on Isaac Droscha) and write dedications and this year Sarah1 did an index (boys on every page).

Marty’s acknowledgements caught my attention. In his thanks he writes to his parents, for telling him the way he wrote before this class is better, the best way, to keep writing the way he wants. To let nothing stop him from his dream. Marty, who was quite a bit older than the other students in the class, loved to write about interplanetary travel and science and helpful freaks. He had a lot of ideas.

At first, I was surprised, and then I felt bad. Had I failed Marty, trying to get him to examine why he chose adverbs, to consider other ways to see a thing than through abstraction or figurative langauge? Had he gone home to his family and told them this hideous class was breaking his soul?

Agh.

I’m not sure what we are supposed to do, really, in class. Most of the students, almost all, say at the end of the class they are thrilled that they write better, more easily, and they can’t believe how flat and plain and cliche their work from the early part of the term is. “I would never write that way now.”

I think part of my job is to figure out what each students wants, and help them to what they want to do. But when what they want to do (interplanetary travel) is so different from what I know how to do, what I value (travel in time, travel to the bad night that got worse, travel to the heart of hearts), what happens? Do we meet in the middle? Do I have to live with not being able to help? At all?

I wish Marty felt I was on his side. I wish he felt writing class held lessons that applied to him.  But maybe this thing he is doing is glorious and perfect, and his parents are protecting him from something he should be protected from. He makes these dreamy structures. I want to change them into something else. I wonder what he wanted from the class, how he wanted it to be, what he wants to learn.  I think he wants a space to write things how he wants to write them. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to make my class like that.

I wonder what my students think.

The posters are all over campus. It’s a boy-man in a jester suit, on bleachers, half-dancing, sort of frolicking. He looks sober. If insane is sober.

I get the point. The posters are supposed to help the students not drink too much.  But each time I see one I think this is like writing by hand! this is just like writing by hand! When I write by hand I feel like this bumbling joker. I feel hideous and slow and standout-ish, in a bad way. It’s horrible. It’s soo horrible. Writing by hand is dancing sober.

I told a friend of mine, a poet, a great poet, how my students write by hand. I was bragging. He gave me the blankest look. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “We all do it. Write by hand.” I was crowing. He stared and stared at me. It was as if I’d said “My students write using words, isn’t that so inventive and cool? Words!”

Poets. They are dancing sober all the time.  Thank god for poetry.

I’ve been talking a lot about how revising a manuscript is like dating, like relationship. How I have to go to the work in a good mood, in a friendly supportive mode. Just like I’d go to lunch with friends. I have to wait for the writing to ask me for advice, I can’t just roar in and force all these changes and focus on everything that is awful in the writing–the manuscript will fold under that pressure. It will run screaming in the other direction.

So my friend Elle,  who is also working on a book, said she read all this stuff I wrote about the relationship with revision and she has decided she is in a very dysfunctional marriage and she wants a divorce from her book. She says they are awful together. They are making each other miserable.  She says they do not enjoy each other’s company.

She’s funny. And she’s just carrying on.

I have friends who complain about their real human marriages too, but they love their spouses, very much, it’s just talk.

I told Elle how I read through my manuscript and wrote only praise to myself, made notes just on everything I liked. She thought this was the weirdest strangest thing she’d ever heard.

 It was very weird to do! I felt goofy and fake. It was hard!!

But I know having done this was the right way back into the revising. I know I am making better decisions (and having way more fun) staying focused on the strong parts. I’m working hard to trust this process of dating my book. I want to stay in love with it.

What I know so far is it’s important to ignore the flaws, just like in real relationship life. To work on it every day.  To surprise it with gifts (I have a new star chart!! I get prizes for ten days of writing. I can choose from an array!)  .  To listen to it. Really listen. Without judging. Without my own agenda.

Hemingway says: write the next true sentence. The next true thing. I’m off.

Writing by hand is, for me, the best way to tell the truth, to get it right. My school is in the middle of a responsible drinking campaign and the theme is “dare to dance sober.” That is exactly what it is like to write by hand.  It’s so naked and real and strange and wrong-feeling; no one else is doing it that way. It feels not how it’s done. But it is.

In my advanced fiction class, I have the students create a collection of linked stories, a chapbook. What works so well is they pick a set of relationships (see Chuck Close, below) and stay with them, and the work gets more focused and complex; each students’ stories fertilize each other.  I think peer feedback is more astute, too–we have more to say because we know the field the person is working, their town has meaning and resonance.

So it finally hit me today. The problem in my multi genre course: no towns. Each piece is a one-off. We’re not feeling the depth and coherence we would in a typical workshop. I hate how all-over-the-place it feels. Next time I teach multi genre, we will each pick a site, a zone, a place, like our hometown, or boys. And write the heck out of it, and into it. The chapbooks at the end of the semester will be amazing focused scrapbooks; the genres will change but there will be this wonderful grounding.  I can’t wait to try it.