I'm back in Texas after a week in Boise. I made this trip to the Northwest mostly to celebrate my dad's 82nd birthday with my family, but I did some work while I was there as well--I met with a class of really wonderful students at Boise State University on Thursday and did a reading at BSU on Friday evening. I taught at the university for a few years in the mid-90's, and it was good to have a chance to reconnect with some of the people I knew back then.
I still call Boise my hometown, but I have a troubled relationship with the place. Partly, I think, this is because I lived in Boise mostly as a kid--so I go back to feeling like a kid every time I return, feeling trapped and discontent and vaguely furious all the time, exactly like a teenager. There's no reason for me to feel this way now, of course, but it's like an emotional reflex I can't prevent. I lived in Boise for only three years as an adult, those three years I taught at BSU.
This time, though, staying with my sister instead of in the house where I grew up, it was easier to be in Boise and still feel like myself. Just having my own car to drive seemed to make a huge difference. When I'm there with my own little family, my husband usually drives; it had never even occurred to me that being a passenger in a car in my hometown contributed to that feeling of being dropped back into childhood again. Just having some small measure of autonomy this time let me be in Boise and still feel like the generally well-adjusted adult I've been for more than twenty years now.
When I talked with my friend Karen's nonfiction writing class at BSU, one of the things we discussed is what constitutes an Idaho story. Does it have to include hunting and fishing, for instance? Part of my own Idaho story is having grown up as a non-hunter in a family of hunters, and becoming a vegetarian as the result of that. (Though I gave up vegetarianism when I moved to Texas, a.k.a. The Land of Meat.) Another part of my Idaho story is the class division I faced because I never learned how to ski. By the time I was in high school, all my friends had been skiing since they could walk; even if I'd had the money to buy or rent equipment and go skiing on the weekends, I wouldn't have been able to keep up with them. Whole layers of the social hierarchy in my high school just weren't accessible to me for that reason alone.
In my first novel, part of what makes it an Idaho story for me is one character's feeling of being trapped by the landscape of her life. The Boise where I grew up was very remote--it's not within easy driving distance of a major city, and in any case my family didn't travel for recreation. We drove to a campground, or we drove to a relative's house in the Midwest; it wouldn't have occurred to my parents that we might just go visit a city for the sake of seeing what it had to offer us. I always wanted to live somewhere other than Boise, because it seemed like Real Life must be happening somewhere else. I always wrote stories about people who lived elsewhere: Seattle, New Orleans, Chicago, Paris, all manner of places I knew absolutely nothing about. I had no idea how I'd manage to go to any of those places on my own, but I was intent on getting away.
When I drove across the country to start graduate school, I remember being shocked by how much space there was between Idaho and Kansas. Somehow, the "away" I'd imagined wasn't quite as far away as reality took me. I wound up in a strange state, in a strange town, on a strange campus with (it must be said) a strange roommate. But that's where I learned to see Boise as a place in its own right, a place with a very specific personality and character--a place worth writing about. When I left Idaho, for the first time I met people who were fascinated by the idea of a place they'd rarely even heard of. As my friend Steph puts it, "Before I met you, people from China were more real to me than people from Idaho."
These days, when I go back to Boise, it doesn't look a thing like the town I remember. It's much larger than the place where I grew up, much more urban, much more hip. And, truth be told, San Antonio feels like home now. I'm glad to be back.
But Boise is a place I love. Most importantly, Boise is a place.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Teaching the Gaps
I've been thinking about Carson McCullers ever since my last blog entry. Specifically, I've been thinking about the fact that no one reads McCullers anymore, as far as I can tell--she's rarely ever represented in the big anthologies of American literature, dozens of which are sent to my office every year. I find that very depressing, because I learned so much about writing with emotional accuracy from reading her work. At one point in my academic career, when I was contemplating a focus on literature instead of creative writing, I aspired to become the preeminent Carson McCullers scholar. Her work is pretty sentimental, I'll admit, but I think that's understandable when you consider how young she was when she died.
When I was in my first graduate program, working on my M.A., one of my professors visibily turned up his nose when I mentioned McCullers as a writer I admired. "I suppose she wrote some nice little stories," he said. The operative words in that sentence were nice and little. From this comment I was to understand that nothing she'd written really mattered that much--it wasn't innovative or groundbreaking or any of those other words that quickly become associated with writers like Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald, the men who were writing and publishing at about the same time McCullers was. The one story my professor did like was "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," probably McCullers' most famous story (and, ironically, my least favorite of her work.) But in retrospect, it's no surprise that my professor would have liked this one: the words of wisdom spoken at its pivotal moment come from an old man, not a young girl.
I didn't even realize how many "nice little stories" I'd missed out on in my academic studies until I got into my Ph.D. program and had to put together a reading list for my comprehensive exams. Then, suddenly, I saw the hundreds of women who'd just been left out of the anthologies my professors had selected for all the courses I'd taken. Those books left no way for me, the literary novice, to see all the gaps in their versions of American literary history--many of which are populated by women.
My response to that has been to teach the gaps whenever I teach a course in literature, especially an intro-level survey (which may well be the only literature course some college students take.) Working from the assumption that most of the teachers my students have encountered so far will have taught the Big Name Writers, I teach Sarah Orne Jewett instead of Mark Twain. Instead of Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry. The Street is nearly always the book my students list as their favorite among those we've read in that class. We do read male authors as well, if it's a general survey course, but we read selections by lesser-known writers, like Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson.
It probably comes as no surprise that some students object to this strategy. On my teaching evaluations, I get occasional comments like "We read all these weird authors I'd never even heard of before," and "I thought this was supposed to be American literature." I'm not shy about being a feminist, and I teach Women's Studies in addition to literature, so the fact that I teach a lot of literature written by women is nearly always seen as a political statement. Which it is, of course--but it's something I do in order to help my students see the gaps in their education, to see who's in those gaps and start thinking about why those writers might be there. Why did they get left behind or glossed over? What are they saying that's so dangerous and uncomfortable? My students laugh at the thought that The Awakening was considered scandalous in its own time, but that doesn't mean they're okay with Edna Pontellier, a mother who isn't completely devoted to motherhood. That idea is still uncomfortable, even now, a hundred years later.
Still, my students like to argue that "teaching the gaps" is unnecessary; discrimination is a thing of the past, they claim, and I'm just perpetuating it now by discriminating against white men. Whenever they make that argument, I tell them the story of when my daughter came home, just two years ago, with a list of 20 Famous Americans on whom she could choose to do a report for her history class. Of the 20 people on that list, 2 were women. So I explained to my daughter that I thought this was a ridiculous list, and I proposed a solution: I'd make up a new list, and my daughter could take it back to her teacher, and the teacher could choose any name she liked for my daughter's report. (I also told my daughter I'd be happy to write a note to her teacher explaining my problem with the assignment, so she didn't have to do that if it made her uncomfortable--but my daughter said she didn't mind talking to her teacher about it. That apple didn't fall far from the tree.)
Our list included 18 women and 2 men, the same proportions on the original list. When my daughter came home the next day, she said her teacher had indicated that any of the names on our list would be fine.
As long as there are lists of Famous Americans like that one coming home from school--and as long as there are anthologies that minimize or leave out Carson McCullers in favor of her male contemporaries--I'm going to keep teaching the gaps. It might not make me popular, but I'm hopeful it will lead some of my students to see how carefully their knowledge is constructed to avoid certain people and the difficult questions they dare to raise.
When I was in my first graduate program, working on my M.A., one of my professors visibily turned up his nose when I mentioned McCullers as a writer I admired. "I suppose she wrote some nice little stories," he said. The operative words in that sentence were nice and little. From this comment I was to understand that nothing she'd written really mattered that much--it wasn't innovative or groundbreaking or any of those other words that quickly become associated with writers like Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald, the men who were writing and publishing at about the same time McCullers was. The one story my professor did like was "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," probably McCullers' most famous story (and, ironically, my least favorite of her work.) But in retrospect, it's no surprise that my professor would have liked this one: the words of wisdom spoken at its pivotal moment come from an old man, not a young girl.
I didn't even realize how many "nice little stories" I'd missed out on in my academic studies until I got into my Ph.D. program and had to put together a reading list for my comprehensive exams. Then, suddenly, I saw the hundreds of women who'd just been left out of the anthologies my professors had selected for all the courses I'd taken. Those books left no way for me, the literary novice, to see all the gaps in their versions of American literary history--many of which are populated by women.
My response to that has been to teach the gaps whenever I teach a course in literature, especially an intro-level survey (which may well be the only literature course some college students take.) Working from the assumption that most of the teachers my students have encountered so far will have taught the Big Name Writers, I teach Sarah Orne Jewett instead of Mark Twain. Instead of Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry. The Street is nearly always the book my students list as their favorite among those we've read in that class. We do read male authors as well, if it's a general survey course, but we read selections by lesser-known writers, like Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson.
It probably comes as no surprise that some students object to this strategy. On my teaching evaluations, I get occasional comments like "We read all these weird authors I'd never even heard of before," and "I thought this was supposed to be American literature." I'm not shy about being a feminist, and I teach Women's Studies in addition to literature, so the fact that I teach a lot of literature written by women is nearly always seen as a political statement. Which it is, of course--but it's something I do in order to help my students see the gaps in their education, to see who's in those gaps and start thinking about why those writers might be there. Why did they get left behind or glossed over? What are they saying that's so dangerous and uncomfortable? My students laugh at the thought that The Awakening was considered scandalous in its own time, but that doesn't mean they're okay with Edna Pontellier, a mother who isn't completely devoted to motherhood. That idea is still uncomfortable, even now, a hundred years later.
Still, my students like to argue that "teaching the gaps" is unnecessary; discrimination is a thing of the past, they claim, and I'm just perpetuating it now by discriminating against white men. Whenever they make that argument, I tell them the story of when my daughter came home, just two years ago, with a list of 20 Famous Americans on whom she could choose to do a report for her history class. Of the 20 people on that list, 2 were women. So I explained to my daughter that I thought this was a ridiculous list, and I proposed a solution: I'd make up a new list, and my daughter could take it back to her teacher, and the teacher could choose any name she liked for my daughter's report. (I also told my daughter I'd be happy to write a note to her teacher explaining my problem with the assignment, so she didn't have to do that if it made her uncomfortable--but my daughter said she didn't mind talking to her teacher about it. That apple didn't fall far from the tree.)
Our list included 18 women and 2 men, the same proportions on the original list. When my daughter came home the next day, she said her teacher had indicated that any of the names on our list would be fine.
As long as there are lists of Famous Americans like that one coming home from school--and as long as there are anthologies that minimize or leave out Carson McCullers in favor of her male contemporaries--I'm going to keep teaching the gaps. It might not make me popular, but I'm hopeful it will lead some of my students to see how carefully their knowledge is constructed to avoid certain people and the difficult questions they dare to raise.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Small World
I discovered earlier this week that a woman I knew twenty years ago, a graduate of my M.A. program, is now a colleague of a woman I knew from my Ph.D. program. This knowledge arrives after learning that a friend from that same M.A. program is now a department chair at a university where a friend from my Ph.D. program is now a dean--and where yet another friend from that Ph.D. program is a brand new faculty member.
Whew! Don't worry if you can't follow the logistics--I still get confused about who's working where and doing what, exactly.
Ages ago, someone gave me this very good piece of advice: always remember that academia is a very small world, and that burning bridges is therefore a very bad idea, because it might limit options you can't imagine will matter to you at some point. None of us can envision how the various paths we've taken through our lives will cross in some far distant future, so our best bet is to maintain the integrity of each of those paths in case we need to traverse it again. When I was at Ragdale, for instance, I met a writer who'd had a bad experience with an editor I know well and for whom I have enormous respect; nothing I said was going to convince him that perhaps his experience had been an isolated incident. One experience with one person carries forward in ways we may never be aware of.
I've been thinking about this recently as I contemplate a story I just re-read last week, "The Sojourner," by Carson McCullers. I first read that story when I was a sophomore in college, taking my first required class for English majors, but I really couldn't remember much about it, other than the ending. I did remember it as a story that touched me deeply, though. It was one of those stories that made me think "If I can write something like this in my lifetime, I'll be happy." So I went back to read it again, to try to figure out why I still remember this story when, truth be told, I've forgotten so much of what I've read over the years.
It surprised me to discover that this is a very grown-up piece of fiction. The central character, John, lives abroad and has returned to the United States to attend his father's funeral. While he's in New York, the night before he's to return to Europe, he sees his ex-wife and feels compelled to get in touch with her again. She invites him to dinner that night. John knows his wife has remarried, but he's still rather stunned by the physical reality of her new husband and their two children. Coming face to face with them makes him realize that he really hasn't moved forward in his own life at all: he's still pretty much where he was right after their divorce, still single and self-absorbed and travelling through his life without caring too much about anything or anyone in particular.
Initially, I couldn't figure out what would have appealed to me about this story as a nineteen year old; as a middle aged woman, I identify with John's sense that time passes more quickly than we realize--that years fly past us and accumulate and suddenly we're the adults in the room, not the kids. But then I came across this line: "His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. He felt he could not bear much longer to stay in the family room." And suddenly, I remembered what it felt like to be young and single and to not know whether you'd ever be part of a family of your own, to feel like your life as a single person is somehow less meaningful than it will be when you're part of something larger than yourself.
I think that's why I identified with John as a college student, and felt such compassion for him at the end of the story, when he makes a desperate, futile attempt to connect with his girlfriend's son--a child he's had no time for previously, a child who knows John doesn't really care for him at all. At nineteen, I read this as a story about the difficulty of making connections with other people, no matter how badly we want to do that; now, I read this as a story about the profound implications of all the connections we make, given the small amount of time we have to make them.
I thought about this at Ragdale, too. As I read through the journal entries left behind by writers who'd stayed in the Blue Room, some of whom I know, I realized that our lives had intersected in a way I might never have known about. Knowing they'd been in that same room, sleeping in the same bed, provided me with a sense of community that made me feel right at home. Most of our connections are like that, I think: invisible, but no less important in the small world we share.
Whew! Don't worry if you can't follow the logistics--I still get confused about who's working where and doing what, exactly.
Ages ago, someone gave me this very good piece of advice: always remember that academia is a very small world, and that burning bridges is therefore a very bad idea, because it might limit options you can't imagine will matter to you at some point. None of us can envision how the various paths we've taken through our lives will cross in some far distant future, so our best bet is to maintain the integrity of each of those paths in case we need to traverse it again. When I was at Ragdale, for instance, I met a writer who'd had a bad experience with an editor I know well and for whom I have enormous respect; nothing I said was going to convince him that perhaps his experience had been an isolated incident. One experience with one person carries forward in ways we may never be aware of.
I've been thinking about this recently as I contemplate a story I just re-read last week, "The Sojourner," by Carson McCullers. I first read that story when I was a sophomore in college, taking my first required class for English majors, but I really couldn't remember much about it, other than the ending. I did remember it as a story that touched me deeply, though. It was one of those stories that made me think "If I can write something like this in my lifetime, I'll be happy." So I went back to read it again, to try to figure out why I still remember this story when, truth be told, I've forgotten so much of what I've read over the years.
It surprised me to discover that this is a very grown-up piece of fiction. The central character, John, lives abroad and has returned to the United States to attend his father's funeral. While he's in New York, the night before he's to return to Europe, he sees his ex-wife and feels compelled to get in touch with her again. She invites him to dinner that night. John knows his wife has remarried, but he's still rather stunned by the physical reality of her new husband and their two children. Coming face to face with them makes him realize that he really hasn't moved forward in his own life at all: he's still pretty much where he was right after their divorce, still single and self-absorbed and travelling through his life without caring too much about anything or anyone in particular.
Initially, I couldn't figure out what would have appealed to me about this story as a nineteen year old; as a middle aged woman, I identify with John's sense that time passes more quickly than we realize--that years fly past us and accumulate and suddenly we're the adults in the room, not the kids. But then I came across this line: "His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. He felt he could not bear much longer to stay in the family room." And suddenly, I remembered what it felt like to be young and single and to not know whether you'd ever be part of a family of your own, to feel like your life as a single person is somehow less meaningful than it will be when you're part of something larger than yourself.
I think that's why I identified with John as a college student, and felt such compassion for him at the end of the story, when he makes a desperate, futile attempt to connect with his girlfriend's son--a child he's had no time for previously, a child who knows John doesn't really care for him at all. At nineteen, I read this as a story about the difficulty of making connections with other people, no matter how badly we want to do that; now, I read this as a story about the profound implications of all the connections we make, given the small amount of time we have to make them.
I thought about this at Ragdale, too. As I read through the journal entries left behind by writers who'd stayed in the Blue Room, some of whom I know, I realized that our lives had intersected in a way I might never have known about. Knowing they'd been in that same room, sleeping in the same bed, provided me with a sense of community that made me feel right at home. Most of our connections are like that, I think: invisible, but no less important in the small world we share.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
The Basic Thing
When my son was little, he used to ask me a baffling question: "What's the basic thing about X?" (For X, substitute anything you can think of: cheeseburgers, The Flintstones, going to the movies. I got all those questions and many, many more.) It's a harder question than you might imagine. I didn't realize this at first--I thought, well, the basic thing about a cheeseburger is the burger. But without the cheese, of course, it's just a burger. So perhaps the basic thing is cheese. But no. A slice of cheese alone does not a cheeseburger make.
I started thinking about this yesterday, when I started to write an essay on character that I was asked to contribute to Center, the literary magazine published by the graduate writing program at the University Of Missouri. But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized how tricky it is to identify the basic thing about anything. For example, parenting.
Yesterday I was helping my son get ready for school when my husband pointed out that while I was away at Ragdale, our kids got themselves ready for school every single morning. I know they're completely capable of doing this--they're certainly old enough--but I've been in the habit of helping out since they were small people. So now I do it without even thinking about whether it's really necessary, or if it's of benefit to them.
My husband and I grew up in very different families. I had a hands-on stay at home mom and a working dad; my husband had two working parents and two much younger siblings that he was responsible for much of the time. I think he knew more about being a parent when he left home for college than I did when we had children of our own. Still, I have to question whether being a hands-off parent is the basic thing about good parenting. There were mornings while I was gone, I've heard, where my husband wound up driving the kids to school because they'd missed their bus. So what's more important: teaching them to take care of themselves, or teaching them that operating on a schedule is an important part of life? (I really don't want my kids to be like the students who wander into my classroom ten minutes late every day and fail to see why this is an issue.)
Ideally, of course, they'd learn both lessons. But if I have to choose between the two, I'm going to teach my kids that maintaining a schedule is a matter of respect. When my daughter called from the bus stop a few weeks ago to tell me she'd just realized that she forgot to put on makeup before she left the house, I told her she'd have to go to school as she was. I wouldn't agree to drive her to school after she'd come home and finished getting ready; that was something she had to learn to do in the time between waking up and leaving for the bus. When she did the same thing earlier this week, she didn't even bother to call home. She knew her main responsibility was getting herself to school on time, and that's what she did--even though it meant letting people see what she looks like without eyeliner.
Kids make mistakes, of course. When they miss the bus after school, very occasionally, I don't tell them to make the long walk home along a busy street; I go pick them up. But they're apologizing to me the minute they get in the car. They know they've messed up. They don't assume they're entitled to miss the bus once in awhile, that I should be available to pick them up. They respect the fact that I have a schedule, too, that I'm responsible for being other places and doing other things. But they also know that they will always come first, when they really need my help.
So maybe that's the basic thing about being a parent: making sure your children understand that they're always your first priority, that this is a privilege not all children share, and that they therefore shouldn't abuse that privilege arbitrarily. This is something we can help them understand by letting our kids know we have faith in their ability to be responsible for themselves--and providing backup when, inevitably, they fail. Or by making sure our kids show respect for others by being where they're supposed be, on time--and providing backup when, inevitably, they fall behind.
Well, look at that: providing backup. The basic thing.
I started thinking about this yesterday, when I started to write an essay on character that I was asked to contribute to Center, the literary magazine published by the graduate writing program at the University Of Missouri. But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized how tricky it is to identify the basic thing about anything. For example, parenting.
Yesterday I was helping my son get ready for school when my husband pointed out that while I was away at Ragdale, our kids got themselves ready for school every single morning. I know they're completely capable of doing this--they're certainly old enough--but I've been in the habit of helping out since they were small people. So now I do it without even thinking about whether it's really necessary, or if it's of benefit to them.
My husband and I grew up in very different families. I had a hands-on stay at home mom and a working dad; my husband had two working parents and two much younger siblings that he was responsible for much of the time. I think he knew more about being a parent when he left home for college than I did when we had children of our own. Still, I have to question whether being a hands-off parent is the basic thing about good parenting. There were mornings while I was gone, I've heard, where my husband wound up driving the kids to school because they'd missed their bus. So what's more important: teaching them to take care of themselves, or teaching them that operating on a schedule is an important part of life? (I really don't want my kids to be like the students who wander into my classroom ten minutes late every day and fail to see why this is an issue.)
Ideally, of course, they'd learn both lessons. But if I have to choose between the two, I'm going to teach my kids that maintaining a schedule is a matter of respect. When my daughter called from the bus stop a few weeks ago to tell me she'd just realized that she forgot to put on makeup before she left the house, I told her she'd have to go to school as she was. I wouldn't agree to drive her to school after she'd come home and finished getting ready; that was something she had to learn to do in the time between waking up and leaving for the bus. When she did the same thing earlier this week, she didn't even bother to call home. She knew her main responsibility was getting herself to school on time, and that's what she did--even though it meant letting people see what she looks like without eyeliner.
Kids make mistakes, of course. When they miss the bus after school, very occasionally, I don't tell them to make the long walk home along a busy street; I go pick them up. But they're apologizing to me the minute they get in the car. They know they've messed up. They don't assume they're entitled to miss the bus once in awhile, that I should be available to pick them up. They respect the fact that I have a schedule, too, that I'm responsible for being other places and doing other things. But they also know that they will always come first, when they really need my help.
So maybe that's the basic thing about being a parent: making sure your children understand that they're always your first priority, that this is a privilege not all children share, and that they therefore shouldn't abuse that privilege arbitrarily. This is something we can help them understand by letting our kids know we have faith in their ability to be responsible for themselves--and providing backup when, inevitably, they fail. Or by making sure our kids show respect for others by being where they're supposed be, on time--and providing backup when, inevitably, they fall behind.
Well, look at that: providing backup. The basic thing.
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