Results tagged “fiction” from PEDABLOGUE

As a creativity challenge, I recently signed up for THE FICTION PROJECT, sponsored by The Art House Co-op. Registrants (before Feb) will be mailed a Moleskine sketchbook in which to tell and show a story using words and art, based on a surprise random theme. Most participants scan and share their work-in-progress, with commenting available much like a weblog. The deadline is in April, when sketchbooks are returned to be put on permanent display in the Brooklyn Art Library.

The length of the experience nicely fits into a college semester-length calendar for the coming Spring, so I thought I would recommend it to others who are considering a creative class project for their art or writing courses. The "rules" are flexible enough to allow collaborative creations for the class as a whole, or to allow individual entries. The site offers an educational discount for groups over 10.

Visit my profile and feel free to friend me if you sign up. I don't know what I'll be doing for this project, or if I'll even succeed, but I know it will be very weird.

Thanks to the twitterverse, I was turned on to this video by author John Irving when asked about the future of the book:

The anxieties presently circulating about the marketplace for fiction certainly are causing a lot of changes in the publishing industry lately. In October, price wars among booksellers splashed on the headlines, causing many -- including the New York Times -- to worry about the economics of publishing and the resultant devaluation of the printed book itself. Some speculate that this is all due to the mainstream attention and interest that ebook hardware is finally getting, especially the Amazon Kindle.

Updike speaks to the impact of all this on young writers. I am starting to wonder how the role of creative writing programs and the teaching of creative writing professors will change as a result, since young writers are who we serve. Here are my thoughts -- a rapid fire of brainstorming, more than fully-composed thoughts -- about what, perhaps, creative writing teachers should be considering.

For one thing, we should neither give up on the book, nor hide from the realities of the trade by squatting behind a library shelf or the literary canon. We need to be engaged with the present AND the past, with a toe dipped into the future of our students, as well.

We should adapt to paradigm shifts not by teaching to the marketplace but by teaching to the long-view and by persistently putting publishing into historical context. Students need to be aware of current industry realities, and we need to be engaged in it to understand it completely as teachers. But there is wisdom in our experience and we need to share that experience, in order for students to recognize that publishing as an ever-changing process, and is never "stable" in any fixed way. It has always been historically-contingent, and always been in a state of flux across time. The "book" has always been an artifact of the marketplace of ideas -- a trace artifact of a cultural movement always in-process. This is as true of business trends as it is of artistic movements, and often one change is simply responding and/or adapting to the other.

We should discuss electronic publishing not as the "new" or the "best" but simply one medium for messaging which is as equally valid for expression as any other. When it comes to publishing contracts, ebooks are just one license among many that a writer can act on, and while one license may be more economically viable at any given time than another, all are equally legitimate ways to transfer intellectual property to an audience.

We should inform students about intellectual property law, and advise them to protect their property -- or to know what rights they're donating to the public domain when they unleash it free online or in free ebook giveaways.

We should encourage experimentation with format just as we encourage experimentation with the blank page to poets.

Too often writers glom on to one format or medium or genre and fixate on it (usually because they derived some success within it) -- and this includes everything from the Kindle of today to the illustrated manuscript in days of old. We need to engage new technologies while also understanding the book as a technology itself. But more than that, the key point for new writers to understand -- after they've learned the art of writing and become interested in pre-professional, career trajectories -- is that the products of their imagination and craftsmanship are also ultimately social texts once they become published. Writing, when all is said and done (and revised and marketed) is a form of property that can be traded, and graduates of writing programs rarely learn enough about this stage of the process.

Publishing needs to be considered a stage of the writing process. It is the end stage, but not necessarily the terminus of the process. Books get printed, but the life of the book does not end when the ink dries. There are dialogues that open up (such as in reviews) and books are often updated and revised, serialized and sequelized...and one book experience always informs the next book experience, for writers who survive it.

It is good to teach students "the book life." To think of writing as a way of life in a culture that is not inherently friendly to that way of living. Texts like Jeff Vandermeer's recent title, Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer are movements in the right direction. Courses like our own "Publication Workshop" at Seton Hill U, are others.

Sharing the end results of work produced in a classroom -- in end-of-term class readings, in class-generated anthologies, in online literary magazines -- are all forms of publication. Many teachers neglect to exploit this as an arena for learning the way. Because it's the messiest part of the process, and the part where "rejection" (beyond grading systems) looms. Bridging the conventional forms of classroom publishing (such as a reading of revised work to the classroom at the end of the term) with emergent formats (such as video recordings to be uploaded for public comments from youtube) will engage writing students with the marketplace of ideas today.

In addition to the "book life" and being aware of the status and reality of the economy of writing, there is also something simply called the "reader's life." We should remain role models for engaged readers as much as writers, with an interest in the output of the publishing world. We should advise students to take literature courses and spend time in the library. We should buy books, and practice what we preach by investing in the world that invests in us as authors. We should share and explore new technologies and trends in publishing and talk about these formats with our students. We should show that we are readers as much as writers -- we are bookish. Students need to see us reading, hear us reciting published works, spot us in the faculty break room reading a kindle, recognize us in the audience at a public poetry reading, see us browsing the shelves at the local Barnes and Noble, sit across from us at a table in the library. When they do so, they will see themselves reflected in the world of books as a real, lived experience.

Last week I bought a Kindle. I carried my ebook device around all week not to show off some new gaget, but to say Look...this might be what our future looks like. I'm interested in where this is heading...are you? I opened up a dialogue with readers on my horror writing weblog, about the ebook watershed. I uploaded documents for a Dean's Council meeting to my Kindle and brought it to the meeting instead of printing them out or using a laptop. I showed my Kindle to almost every student who came to my office for advising this past week, for both the "wow" factor and to say "hey, you might be getting your textbooks this way someday." Down the hall, my colleague ordered a Kindle DX for his journalism courses, and posted an interesting blog about the kindle's impact on academics. Teachers and writers open up conversations about books; books are portals into conversations about culture. Writers shouldn't be worried, but engaged and thoughtful; we need to be steeled up against the fluctuations inherent to the industry, but also willing and able to transcend it. That's the skill of the creative writer -- telling a good story transcends the medium and the economics of the exchange. But we also have to be creative in finding ways for getting our stories heard.

And we need to keep publishing our own writing, creative or not, as well. That's the only way to truly learn what it's like out there. To accumulate knowledge of the book world and bring it back to our classrooms, whether explicitly or obliquely. The skills and knowledge that we've always taught will never go out of fashion, but we need to recognize what is at stake in our students' lives when changes are on the horizon.

It seems almost criminal to advise a student to become a novelist without also arming them with some sort of knowledge and wisdom about the marketplace for fiction. The power of an educated writer is not simply to write well, but to join a community of like-minded thinkers and to participate smartly in the world in which they hope to operate, economically as well as discursively. We can react to changes in the industry with optimism or skepticism, but we should never abandon the one certain thing we have to give writers of the future: hope, balanced by wisdom and intelligence.

National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) launched today, sending millions of people "with a book in them" to the keyboard in an attempt to churn out a rough novel-length manuscript (minimum of 50,000 words to 'count') by the end of November. People engaged in this activity all bond on the nano website, encouraging each other and sharing tips, posting and boasting their latest word counts all the way to the end.

I've never done it, but I've always been intrigued by this collective endeavor of binge writing. I've signed up on the site and lurked, just to see what people are up to. It appeals to me, as a writer who works in manic, highly-caffeinated spurts, and as a teacher who believes in the collaborative learning inherent to a writer's workshop community. A number of our more productive Writing Popular Fiction students and even some faculty dare to "nano"...it's awfully difficult for a full-time faculty member to take on such an enormous task during the endgame of a Fall semester, when term papers come pouring in and advising for the next term is afoot, but it can be done.

Maybe college profs need a NaSchoWriMo for writing scholarship? Now is the perfect time to get to work on those conference papers you want to present next Spring, after all.

In any case, I noticed that teachers are actually beginning to use NaNoWriMo in the classroom, and that the site has a Young Writers Program that fosters an educational mission. The site includes some GREAT novel writing workbooks for young adults -- and the program can even lend out NEO word processing hardware to students in need.

It's a great idea. And it can be used creatively. From a class-collaborated story to simply a study of the novel itself, teachers are tapping into NaNoWriMo as a form of learning that reaches outside of the walls of the classroom and participates in the "outside world" even as it focuses the attention needed for cultivating the intimate and interior setting of the imagination.

Daniel Moulthrop shares his experience "Teaching NaNoWriMo" in a google doc, suggesting that the main benefit is "a month of unbridled creativity vs. school as we know it" which leads to increased writing fluency and -- after the initial hurdle of starting to climb what seems to be a very high mountain -- a reduction of fear about writing.

To any teachers out there doing this: GOOD LUCK!

I don't have much to offer, but over on my horror writing website, I have a section called "Instigation" that offers "twisted prompts" for creative writers that you can crib from to get your students working on a dastardly plot point.

You also might get your class involved in twitter.com for this project. There's a lot of activity on that site -- just search for the #nano hashtag or "follow" NaNoWriMo.

My quest for finding good books on creative writing pedagogy continues. A week or two ago, I decided to drop a chunk of my paycheck on titles I found on the cheap at half.com, and I've begun reading them with great abandon, as I prepare to teach a new online class on the teaching of writing for graduate students in our MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

This weekend I've been reading the late Wendy Bishop's book, Released Into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing (NCTE, 1990) -- a book that is, astonishingly, available digitally via ERIC, the wonderful Education Resources Information Center. Though a bit dated by this point in time, Bishop's text remains a quite solid study of the different ways that creative writing can be taught well in the undergraduate curriculum, arguing for a transactional and reflective approach that addresses where students really are, and how students really think, striking a pitch-perfect balance between praxis and theory.

While the classroom activities and approaches in the book are not necessarily new to me, what I'm enjoying most about reading this book is the way it articulates how the assumptions of graduate programs in creative writing don't always translate well into the teaching of undergraduate programs in the same field. This is helping me rethink my own assumptions, as someone who often teaches similar material in both venues...and as I read it, I'm recalling just how often I have drawn upon my teaching of composition in the creative writing classroom, and vice-versa. I recommend all writing teachers take a look, if only for inspiration.

The title comes from a passage by Adrienne Rich (from her classic, On Lies, Secrets and Silence), which I like so much I wanted to post it here so I can return to it again later:

At the bedrock level of my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering; and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means of changing reality. What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it.... -- Adrienne Rich (emphasis added)

Empowerment. Social justice. Transformation. Discovery. It's all encapsulated here, in this brief passage about teaching and writing.

On the topic of the cross-overs between composition and creative writing pedagogy, I'm eager to study another book that I've ordered: (Re)Writing Craft by Timothy Mayers. I think it will prove quite useful to us at SHU, since we are presently considering "(re)writing" our undergraduate curriculum a little bit in the year ahead.

This week I'll be teaching in our weeklong, intensive graduate creative writing workshops for the MA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill U. It's always a great experience, and I particularly enjoy getting to teach and work with students and colleagues in my favorite literary genre: horror. Indeed, I'm rather fortunate to be able to do this, since the majority of creative writing programs in this country not only eschew genre labels, but also would likely eschew horror even if they didn't. Genre, most assume, is too formulaic, too emotional, too popular (and therefore too oriented to the lowest common denominator).

Obviously, such hierarchical distinctions are usually an expression of "highbrow" class politics, or a culture which reifies the individual over the collective in the creative arts -- but I won't repeat the lessons of cultural studies here right now. Instead, I've been thinking a lot lately about how genre fiction -- and particularly horror fiction, as I recently argued in a pedagogical essay on "Horror and Responsibilities of the Liberal Educator" -- may actually be more "educational" than many literary academics realize.

Often "literary" fiction and canonical literature is considered of higher educational value because it has historical lessons to teach us about culture, or because it addresses universal issues pertinent to mankind. But this is no less true of genre fiction (and many genre stories are in the canon, actually). Genre fiction is castigated because it focuses more often on emotional payoffs than intellectual ones, but this is not all that genre fiction seeks. Horror stories, for instance, are often "cautionary" in nature, and therefore teach lessons. Readers of romances and children's fiction often turn to these books for models of behavior in human relationships. Science fiction rewards knowledge of the sciences and often teaches readers about emergent research; mystery, likewise, teaches readers about criminalistics and is predicated on the notion that reader and detective alike will be engage fully in critical thinking as crimes are solved.

Thus, I'm mulling over the notion that the writers who create these stories have to be "teacherly" in their approach to the reader, to some degree. I've often heard the notion that the bestsellers of any given period not only catch the interest of the masses, but often teach readers something new -- this draw to discover and learn is a large part of popular genre fiction. It assuages curiosity about "what everyone is talking about." Yet at the same time, writers who seek to educate (usually) cannot be didactic or preachy or dogmatic about some ideological belief. As with "literary" fiction, good authors of popular fiction should raise issues of import (and often they pull these issues from the headlines, which ties them to time at the cost of being 'timeless') while keeping their own biases out of the story and lead readers to think critically about these issues on their own. The characters in a story often are models for such ways of thinking.

For the writers, however, their models are often each other. They read each others' books, or find each other at conventions, or -- for the dedicated -- encounter each other in workshops like the program we host at SHU, or the less-academic-but-more-deeply-focused-on-genre groups like Odyssey, Clarion, Borderlands Boot Camp, Alpha, and the various workshops held in meeting rooms at genre conventions. I've taught at these, and they are not nearly as "amateur" or "commercial" as one might assume. Fan and genre communities are perhaps more critical and knowledgeable about their own genre than anyone else, as the work of Henry Jenkins and others have taught us.

I have the good fortune to appear in a new instructional book for writers in the horror genre, The Writer's Workshop of Horror (ed. Michael Knost, Woodland Press, Aug 2009). Like the Horror Writer's Association guidebook, On Writing Horror, this is an example of how the creative community of genre authors "teaches" within that community. What I like about these books is that they are not just written by a single author, but a gathering together of multiple views and voices in anthology form.

For those reading this who might have the opportunity to teach horror writing, and are looking for resources, you can order The Writer's Workshop of Horror early from Woodland Press; it will be out in August, just in time for school.

I'll end with a small excerpt from my contribution, called "Stripping Away the Mask: Scene and Structure in Horror Fiction," which deals with issues regarding the pleasures of the taboo in horror, and how these are embedded into the structure (not necessarily the content) of horror narratives:

...horror is a striptease of suspense. It is an inherently exhibitionist genre, as much as it is the genre of fear. And this may very well be why horror gets a bum rap from the literati: horror can make a reader feel dirty, because it refuses to obey the inner censor that tells us that such-and-such is morally wrong, that such-and-such is ugly or grotesque, that such-and-such is perverse or unhealthy, that such-and-such is unreasonable or irrational, that such-and-such is dangerous or inhumane. Horror writers seek truth in the darkness. They remove the mask, to peer unabashedly at what it hides, horrendous warts and all....

If you wish to write horror stories, it is imperative that you understand this aesthetic. There are no "rules," really, because readers only expect the unexpected when they pick up a work of horror. In place of rules, we just have a worldview that says: "Readers peek between their fingers. I refuse to look away." We remove the mask.

I got the idea for this essay from the late author Robert Bloch, who defined horror in passing during an interview once as "the removal of masks."

Is this not also the mission of liberal education?

Public Service ALERT:

The following search on our campus -- for a published mystery author qualified to teach creative writing -- has been extended, and will continue until filled. Candidates interested in this position should apply immediately, as we will be considering applicants over the summer. Please pass along or post this information as you see fit:

Assistant Professor of English

Application Due: Open Until Filled
Type: Full Time
Tenure-track, starting January 2010.

Seton Hill University seeks published novelist of popular fiction (preferably mystery/suspense), to teach and to mentor novel-length theses in the graduate low-residency Writing Popular Fiction program (half-load), and to teach undergraduate courses in creative writing and first-year composition. Background in journalism, publishing, and/or editing a plus. Teaching experience at graduate level desirable. MFA required (Ph.D preferred). 4/4 course load.

Seton Hill University is a Catholic, liberal arts University, serving undergraduate, adult and graduate students. Seton Hill is located 35 miles east of Pittsburgh. Visit setonhill.edu for more information.

Send a letter, C.V., official transcripts, statement of teaching philosophy, sample publications, and three letters of reference to Michael Arnzen, Ph.D., Seton Hill University, Greensburg, PA 15601. The review process will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. Seton Hill is committed to a diverse faculty; women and persons of color are encouraged to apply. AA/EOF.

***
Feel free to e-mail me with questions.

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction -- "The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" -- just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. Here's the abstract:

"The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" by Michael A. Arnzen

Abstract:

Building on the foundational concepts of transformative learning theory, I argue that horror fiction strongly encourages perspective transformation by challenging student assumptions about both genre writing and educational experience. I informally describe a specific creative writing class period focusing on the motif of the scream in diverse horror texts, and I illustrate how students learn to transform what they already bring to the classroom by employing a variety of particular in-class writing exercises and literary discussions. Among these, transformative writing exercises—such as the revision of an existing text by Stephen King—are highlighted as instructional techniques. As cautionary literature, horror especially dramatizes strategies of fight versus flight. I reveal how students can learn by transforming their knowledge through disorientation that is particular to reading and writing in the horror genre.

I started thinking about the ideas in this article after writing a blog entry back in 2005 called "Shifting the Paradigm: Transformative Learning Theory" -- a response to an essay I read by Kelly McGonigal called "Teaching for Transformation."

McGonigal's article got me to rethink the role of the reflective essay assignments in my classes, and I soon found myself in the library, catching up on transformative learning theory by reading the works of Jack Mezirow and others who seek to change the worldviews of adult learners. The key role of the "activating event" in transformation got me thinking about how "cautionary" tales and other works in the horror genre often trigger anticipatory thinking that requires a revision of what one initially assumed to be true. After applying these lessons to a course I taught in horror fiction writing last year, I captured some of these ideas in a conference paper in March 2008 at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts...an early draft of this now-published version. I invite comments here or at the journal, which includes a number of good articles on fan studies and popular culture.

I tried something new in my introductory-level fiction writing course this term: using a page of graphic fiction to show students how structure and the other elements of fiction (character, setting, viewpoint, etc.) work in tandem to make a story. I think it worked well, so I'm sharing the exercise here.

The idea was actually derived by the work itself (and I wouldn't be surprised if others have used the source material in the same way): 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, by artist Matt Madden (who maintains a related weblog, as well). The goal of Madden's 99 Ways, which was inspired by French writer Raymond Queneau's prose experiment, Exercises in Style, was to provide "as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story."

This is the template he provides on page one, which is followed by 98 graphic variations of the same sequence:

Madden calls this a "non-story" but it does have all the elements of a story, and these elements come to light when he draws and presents variations on the template: for example, one page (called "Subjective") has identical frames drawn from the point-of-view of the male character as he makes his way to the fridge; another (called "Upstairs"), depicts the same event in time, but shifts the viewpoint to the character above the spiral staircase who is responsible for calling down about the time. Many of the variations are radical and eye-poppingly ingenious, like the "Underground Comic" and the "Map" versions of the same template.

On the first day of class, I used this book in class by showing students a variety of these variations using the document/overhead projector, and simply asking them what exactly made each page different and unique. It allowed me to briefly touch on core elements of the craft, like character (in one variation, everything is the same except for the man, who is drawn like a cartoon skunk), viewpoint (there's a lot of these in the book, including a monologue where the male character sits behind a desk and talks about what we see in the template), setting (a la "upstairs"), and conflict. The point that I think was successfully made in class was that every single choice a writer makes can radically change the story as a whole, and that a virtual infinity of choices are available to the writer, constrained only by a core structure of sequence that readers need to make sense of a series of events.

What perhaps was most difficult to show here was the "plot" of the template. While I did ask the class "What's the conflict here? What is the core problem, or struggle that the character goes through?" they were slow to respond. They deduced that the man was hungry and needed something from the fridge, but was frustratingly interrupted on his way. I asked them about that interruption: "We don't see who the source of the voice is... is it a live-in lover? A housewife? Who?" They seemed to agree it was his significant other. But then I asked them if it might very well be God. This question -- while perhaps stretching into absurdity -- allowed me to suggest that this story might be saying something universally human and profound, or epiphanic, even if that "theme" wasn't on the surface at all.

But all of this was a precursor to an actual writing assignment, which was really my intention. I asked students to take Madden's template (I photocopied it for educational use) and write a short-short story of significance based on it. I did NOT give them any more specifics than that, and a few students sent me curious e-mails about how far they could change things. I told them their imaginations were the only limit, but that any reader in class ought to be able to tell that this was a variation that might have "fit" in the same book as the one I showed them in class.

The following class period I asked a few students to share some of their stories orally with the class as a whole. A lot of fun was had. I noticed that many of them added something new on to the end of the comic strip, as if it were all a precursor to something else, or as if "revision" only meant "adding." But it was a fruitful and productive exercise, I think, and I think most creative writing exercises try to do something similar: to posit a prompt or template idea that students later can share, to reveal the variety of choices (stylistic and beyond) which reveal the variety of choices that are available to a writer, and the repetition-with-a-difference that compels our fascination with storytelling.

Writing about this reminds me of other classes I've taught that have used comix in similar ways. It's been a long time since I've done so, but I recall once using a Garfield comic strip in my basic writing course. I photocopied a 3 panel strip of Garfield doing a monologue while looking at -- and then away -- from a sunflower in a pot. I don't even remember what wry commentary Garfield was making -- all that mattered to me was the structure. I blotted out all the words in the thought balloons and then photocopied (and enlarged) the strip before distributing the strip to students. I asked them to "fill in the blanks" of the thought balloons with the main ideas of their paragraphs. I was trying to illustrate the way that paragraphs don't simply chain together a list, but move a thesis through a process of thought that changes as the paper progresses. I'm not sure how successful that was, but I remember that the students enjoyed working with the handout and were excited to share the results in small groups.

I hope to look into Raymond Queneau's work for more ideas. But at this point I am convinced that making structure visual is always a good idea. This is why we diagram sentences and outline essays and use organizational charts. The structures of graphic fiction can make this process both entertaining and educational, while appealing to visual learners. I intend to keep looking for more ways to integrate such matters into the classroom. Your own experiences are welcome -- leave a comment.

Last week in my Horror Writing course (one of my favorite Topics in Creative Writing classes to teach), we looked at the role of the "scream" in horror. I decided this would be a great way to put the "Friday Shout-Out" exercise -- an idea culled from Coyotebanjo's music teaching weblog and discussed here at Pedablogue in February -- to the test.

Essentially, I began class by calling roll with the requirement that the student had to scream "Here!" to be marked as present. The first few names called were timid in their replies -- they kept looking at the door as if expecting an angry dean or concerned prof to show up at our doorstep. So I shouted at them: "Come on! Belt it out!" showing them that if it was okay for me to cry out, it was okay for them. After a few risky shouts, rewarded by laughter and my own shouts in reply, their cries became louder and louder. "That's more like it! Come on, make my blood-curdle! This is a horror class!" The barks of "Here!" and "Present!" became as thunderous as a Marine's drill team, as shrill and glass-shattering as an audition session for a horror movie 'scream queen.'

It was a lot of fun, and though I did risk annoying some classrooms down the hall (our room is relatively isolated, off in a corner past a stairwell) I could tell it gave the students a sort of purging relief (it had been a deadline day, after all). I dare say that the loudest and best screamer in the class was one of the most quiet students in the class, usually -- she erupted with a cry of the banshee that visibly surprised everyone to great glee.

Mission accomplished.

I feel such expressions can be helpful in teaching "artistic" expression, once the aura of permissibility has been opened up. And because the course was in horror fiction writing, it had relevance. We openly discussed why screams are so prevalent in horror films, and whether or not they generate fear or simply signify it. We discussed how they operate symbolically. We looked into the strategy of representing screams in fiction, noting that people rarely, if ever, actually scream while reading a book. We looked at a story we had read in Stephen King's Night Shift (a text I have taught before to great success) called "The Man Who Loved Flowers," which features a passage regarding the screams that the titular lover tries to quell with his hammer. And near the end of the hour, I read an entire article aloud to the class called "Screams from Somewhere Else" by Roger Rosenblatt -- an eloquent short essay that addresses the primal relevance of the scream in today's modern world:

Civilization is tested by its screams. One has the choice to hear or not to hear; to detect location or not to detect location; to discover cause; to help or not to help. Along the many lines of choice, excuses and mistakes are possible, even reasonable. One is left with oneself and the screams, like two opponents.

I could tell just from their rapt attention that the students were fascinated by the ideas this was raising. I let them absorb the ideas in silence for a moment. Then I asked them to write a fictional scene in which a character is walking at night, and overhears a scream from a dark alleyway nearby. ("What happens next? Go.") It was very productive.

This is but one example, I think, of how it can be beneficial to introduce a little Dionysian fun into the otherwise Appolonian hallways of academe. I'll continue to discuss activities in my horror writing class in the future.

Related reading...

• Teacher's Guide to Stephen King's NIGHT SHIFT


• "Scream Musings": a series of aphorisms I wrote in the premiere issue of my newsletter, The Goreletter.


• Things that Make Us Want to Scream: a kindergarten art project using Edward Munch's famous painting (not just for kids!)


• Flash forward to: The Munch Pinata!

[UPDATE Sept. 2008: This class was featured in my article, "The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" published this month in the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures.]

In this entry, I continue and conclude my discussion of Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone (New York: Routledge, 1981) and its implications for educators.

For my earlier discussions of Chapter I visit here and here.

In the second chapter of Impro, Johnstone focuses on the importance of pecking order and the unconscious politics of everyday life. Johnstone coaches improvisational actors to be spontaneous and creative by getting them to observe, intuit, and relate the underlying power struggle inherent to everyday social interactions. He calls this a "status transaction" and treats it as the key to performance, even when there is no script or when the actors are put into a vague or pointless situation. The unspoken hierarchy in place in any human relationship is central to this notion. If one actor can play "low status" and another "high status" (or vice versa) then they play off each other in maintaining their status or squabbling unconsciously for more or less power -- and this works best when the gap between the players' status is minimal (as in a conversation between friends), rather than obvious (as in hero-villain archetypes, like Darth Vader vs. Obi-Wan), because status transactions are a matter of performance rather than content -- they are what happens between the lines in a script. When played in this way, conflict transpires on an almost invisible plane which the audience will unconsciously pick up: the most mundane gestures and casual behaviors -- where to sit, who speaks first, what the choice for dinner will be, etc. -- become sites of struggle in virtually imperceptible ways. Every sound and posture implies a status, and recognizing this leads to a change in one's worldview. "Normally we are 'forbidden' to see status transactions except when there's a conflict," Johnstone writes (33). "In reality status transactions continue all the time. In the park we'll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not." A great deal of the comedy or tension from a play derives from the tiny ways that people vie for power by trying to raise their own status or lower the status of others in an implicit rather than explicit way.

At one point in this chapter, Johnstone divides teachers into three types of "players" in everyday status games: low-status players who he characterizes as incompetent teachers who "twitch" and "[turn] red at the slightest annoyance...seem[ing] like an intruder in the classroom"; compulsively high-status players who "fill [students] with terror" because they "exert a ruthless discipline" and "status experts" who can raise and lower their status skillfully and in a cooperative way (35). Status experts are teachers who can "play along" with students, even when they misbehave -- they are skilled at spontaneity. Johnstone writes: "The pleasure attached to misbehaving comes partly from the status changes you make in your teacher. All those jokes on teacher are to make him drop in status. The [status expert] teacher could cope easily with any situation by changing his status first" (36). One of the reasons for this is that the status expert has spent a great deal of time observing status exchanges in everyday life and recognizes that there's no such thing as a neutral position in any relationship. Breaking eye contact, keeping one's head still, a nervous chuckle, a flap of the hand -- all of these non-verbal gestures, even, are expressions of status wishes and status disavowals.

All the world's indeed a stage, and Impro takes this metaphor quite literally. Johnstone may be guilty of essentializing, but his theories are founded in psychoanalytic literature that suggests that people naturally incline toward a dominant or submissive personality type...and he reveals how these traits often unconsciously motivate teachers. But status, for Johnstone, is something one does, not something one has. It is performed, he implies, as a defense mechanism -- not necessarily to exercise power over others. Overly dominating teachers operate out of a fear that they'll lose their high-status position in the classroom, and orchestrate the environment so that they'll retain it. Submissive teachers will disavow the very power and discipline that an educational environment might require; having the authority of the teacher puts them in a position they are uncomfortable in. Fear, in both cases, has taken control and has hampered the spotanaeity that brings the human relations in a classroom to life. By thinking of teaching as live performance, and the classroom a theatrical sort of space where status "seesaws" up and down, a teacher can become a "status expert" of sorts, getting students to think creatively.

A great deal of this chapter and the chapters that follow focuses on specific techniques Johnstone uses to coach actors to play status roles in impromptu performances in preparation for the stage. I don't teach drama courses or direct in theater, but I see the pertinence of his methods to the practice and teaching of writing and hope to borrow from some of his techniques in order to prompt students (and myself) to approach a topic more creatively. Johnstone talks about actors who have the equivalent of "writer's block": students who try too hard to "get it right" or who hold too closely to the script and therefore perform two-dimensionally or even lock up completely. By getting the actors to emphasize the underlying status transactions between characters in dialogue, Johnstone helps them to find the character's motives or to play the part more dramatically (or comically). This focus on status games offers writers a way of getting into not only conflict and drama, but also -- in fiction writing -- dialogue, which is often flat and boring when unmotivated by characters who are functioning as puppets for the plot...but if I can get students to treat their dialogue as a sort of "status transaction" then I know they will write more interesting verbal exchanges and perhaps even extend the psychological depth of their characters. Indeed, one of the mantras of teaching plot is that "a character must change" by the end of the story, and getting students to see that change as an alteration of status might be useful. Or in my literature courses, I might be able to get students to "read" for status transactions in the text (much the way a Marxist might find class struggle in a conversation between the king and the fool in a Shakespeare play) -- and to understand how such transactions produce the comic or tragic mode of the piece. (Johnstone, for example, reports that teaching status transactions is the only way to make sense of the comedy in Beckett's Waiting for Godot -- and I think it could explain a lot of other texts that have confounded my students). And, of course, when I ask writers to deliver their work orally and think on their feet in a Q&A with the class, I might draw on the ideas in Impro to stimulate them.

But even just student discussions of a reading in the classroom are a performance where status is exchanged. I think the strategies in Impro can be creatively retooled for any classroom situation so that the "rules of the game" that students always play can be altered. Johnstone has acting students play out a "Master-Servant" game, for example, with a direction to actors to play a sort of role reversal, where the actors play the King low status and the Fool high...and it produces great comedy (63). Likewise, a teacher could invent a game in class that substitutes the teacher for the master and the student for the servant, and swap roles. Or have students role play teacher and student in skits or creative writing exercises pertinent to the class topic.

When Johnstone writes of the "status resistances" his students have (say, when a person who is naturally inclined toward "low status" is asked to play the king in a play, and delivers the lines without authority), I'm reminded of the students who resist to "play along" with creative exercises I might assign in the classroom, or who are inexplicably rigid or shy. There may be strategies I can borrow from Impro that can help me to get these students to loosen up and participate in the game of learning. Johnstone offers several types of exercises that explicitly engage in raising the consciousness of status transactions (trading insults, playing master-servant, and clowning around non-verbally). I think any creative-centered course could benefit from having students play these games, because, at root, Johnstone weans students out of their comfort zones by nudging them into playing status levels they're not used to. Shy or apathetic students might be trying to protect their submissive, "low-status" position, but even students who are very vocal (or even monopolizing class discussions) can be seen as vying for dominating "high-status" -- whether by affiliating with the teacher (like the students who always raise their hands, who always agree, or who always "show off" that they possess all the right answers) or by directly conflicting with the teacher (the class clowns, the over-argumentative skeptics, the perpetual scoffers). The "status expert" teacher can marshal improvisational exercises and simulations that diffuse these overt conflicts and change the rules a bit so that students are nudged out of their comfort zone and habitual "coping strategies" by being required to play different roles in a game where the rules can shift spontaneously.

This is, in a sense, what happens when a teacher moves away from a "teacher-centered" classroom and adopts a "student-centered" ideal. Such a movement does not just mean facilitating open discussions instead of preparing lectures -- it essentially requires an abdication of the need for "high status," and I think it's safe to say that both teachers and students are psychologically uncomfortable with this shift in authority, and instructors will unconsciously struggle to retain their centrality without realizing it. They over-prepare and overlord, even when they're not lecturing. They send mixed signals that say "you are your own instructor, and can learn from one another" verbally while non-verbally giving off subliminal cues that suggest they're really not through unconscious gestures or games with eye contact. And their classes -- if not their inner lives -- suffer because of it. If Johnstone is right, then to be a talented teacher might very well mean being an expert in terms of the status games of everyday life, as much as it means having expertise in the class content -- or even in pedagogy. Of course, these things are difficult for administrators and advisors to evaluate, and perhaps impossible to self-evaluate, but I think a teacher who is consciously applying Johnstone's techniques will be more engaged and likely see the results in their students' willingness to "play along" with the game of learning.

In the next chapter, "Spontaneity," Johnstone will elaborate on techniques for getting people to think more creatively on their feet.

***
RELATED READING: See The Improv Wiki for an overview on status. The article, "Acting in Character" (.pdf file) by Barbara Hayes-Roth, Robert van Gent, and Daniel Huber makes extensive reference to Johnstone's chaper on status and personality traits in relation to acting.

Although Johnstone doesn't seem to deal directly with them, theories of the politics of everyday life in cultural studies literature often point back to Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life and Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. For future study, I note two recent books of interest that develop scholarship in this area: Ben Highmore's Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction and Roger Abrahams' Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices.

We're approaching "dead week" at SHU, and in my fiction writing course students are doing end-of-term readings, where everyone gets their "fifteen minutes of fame" by presenting selections from their term's work out loud before an audience. It's graded lightly, but sharing is its own reward and it's a great way for the students to both express themselves with pride and look back selectively on what they've learned.

One student read a humorous piece from his journal that cracked up the class: "A Letter to Dr. Arnzen About His Beard" in which the narrator thanks the teacher profusely for all the knowledge he's gleaned in the course but begs for the teacher to explain why he grows such a wild and hairy beard. I can't quote it directly from memory, but I remember a line about how the sideburns seem strangely detached from the ears, like I wear an organically false beard or something bizarre like that. I don't remember the words exactly, because I was laughing pretty loudly at the time. It was a riot, and as he read the piece, students kept turning around in their chairs to look at me -- "Are you gonna let him get away with that?" they indicated with wide eyes and arched brows.

Of course, I just laughed along. It was a pretty funny piece, actually. And creative. And gutsy. A result of exactly what I want students to do -- to take artistic risks.

His piece was actually borne from an light in-class activity I invented called "Literary Truth or Dare." I created this exercise for a memoir writing course I taught a few years ago, and it worked so well I broke it out for fiction writing this term, as well. The students have a ball with it, because they're prompting each other to write some of their most creative work in the class, and it almost always generates humorous results. At first I worried that this might get out of hand, but the students generally stay within the bounds of decorum (perhaps because I ask them to "do unto others"). It goes a little something like this:

Bring a large stack of index cards to class and distribute six cards per student. Each student then must write down three "truth questions" (like those from The Book of Questions) and three "dares" (wild, taboo-challenging behaviors), just like they might actually do in a real game of Truth or Dare. I ask them to apply as much creativity to these things as possible, while still keeping their questions and challenges legal and do-able. So people turn in Truth cards that say "Have you ever thought about seriously killing someone? Who is it, and how would you do it?" or "What's the worst thing that ever happened to you on a date?" Dare questions might read "Eat something from the trashcan" or "Run naked through the campus chapel."

I collect all the cards (in separate piles) and then shuffle them. If there's time, I'll read a large sampling from the cards out loud to the whole class, and they love hearing the wild -- and sometimes embarassing things that people come up with. (Reading aloud first gives me a way to censor anything I don't think really belongs in a classroom, or something that might make someone very uncomfortable -- anything too sexual or too violent -- as well.). Then I deal the cards back to the students, asking them "Truth or Dare?" and giving them the requested card (optionally, I give them back three of each and let them pick on their own based on the random choices they've received). Then they must either write an honest short personal memoir that answers the "truth" question or else creatively write a scene where a character performs whatever the "dare" dared them to do. The former requires recalling the memory in rich imagery; the latter requires conjuring up a premise that would logically justify such an action (I typically say it >can't< be a "dare" per se, in the scene/story they produce).

Not to be creatively outdone by the questions, they dive into this assignment with much relish. And they love reading the results aloud.

Hence, the truth question: "What do you really think of Dr. Arnzen's beard?"

Hilarious.

Just some thoughts I had after a full day of teaching yesterday....

Let the Cat Out of the Bag

Because it is the nature of our jobs to preplan, we often "hold back" material that we've planned for later in the hour or later in the term or later in the student's curriculum. But "holding back" knowledge can sometimes stifle the natural flow of the class. If the students are pressing forward, show your cards and then keep moving forward. The class will go further than it would have if you stuck to your plan.

I taught plot structure a day early in my fiction writing class because I discovered that they were already asking questions about it and some of the students had already done the reading in advance. So I taught next week's lesson a week ahead of plan. Sure, I'll have to come up with something new for next week, but that means I've actually got an opportunity, now to go deeper into analyzing examples and giving students more time for in class writing. And I bet their writing will be better for it, because now they have more knowledge about what they're actually doing.

The Ear Forgives

I borrow this phrase from Chuck Rainey, who mentioned it on his video tutorial for playing the bass guitar. "The ear forgives." What Rainey means is that you can make mistakes when you're playing and the audience probably won't hear them...or if they do, they'll pardon you for it because all the other notes are right and they just want to dance or jam or whatever. Same goes for flubs in the classroom. If you say something erroneous or illogical, don't freeze or over correct Just keep teaching. Naturally you want to correct errors so that the student isn't miseducated. But if you say something you didn't want to, don't worry: the student ear will forgive.

Teaching can sometimes be like improvisational jazz. The students are like the other players in the band, who you have to be in tune with and who's music you can often "play off" and play a solo (e.g. lecture). The content sets the key; the student involvement beats the tempo. But when you're playing your solo, the fingers might slip, the horn might squawk, the amp might wail with feedback. No bother: the ear forgives.

Our Winter term has officially begun and I've distributed the syllabi and led the opening discussions for all my courses this semester. The first day a new class meets is always a thrill for me -- I love the "tabula rasa" feeling of the class, even when I have a roomful of familiar faces.

In my fiction writing class, I used a technique I invented that you might consider using in any class as an icebreaker. I asked students to list items they have in their (dorm) rooms that no one would suspect. Then they swapped lists with another person at their table and I asked everyone to engage in a piece of creative writing using a first sentence that begins "Secretly, I collect...." Then I had every student stand up and introduce themselves to the class by either sharing something weird that they have in their rooms, or reading their fictional piece as if they were that secret collector. This generated a lot of laughter and good cheer.

Here's a collection of teaching tips for the first day of classes brought to us by Honolulu Community College (check their reference lists for more good sources, too). The Pig Personality Profile is frivolous fun, but probably a good icebreaker and something I might even use when I teach Memoir Writing again in 2005-6. I especially liked reviewing Joyce T. Povlacs' 101 Things You Can Do the First Three Weeks of Class. If your term is just getting started too, you might want to review this list.

Here's a carefully worded google search that results in a great sampler of more on this topic.

Of course, the first few weeks of class are always fun until "the honeymoon is over" and students start getting their grades. Attitudes shift and some become disenchanted. They enjoy the class antics, but begin to get hostile about homework. I bet the students who start to become disenchanted with a class don't realize that no matter what time of the year it is, the teacher is usually just as optimistic and hopeful as they are on the first day...that every day is a first day, of sorts...and that the teacher hopes the student will do better and better over time. That sounds cheesy, I know, but it's true -- you've got to be an undying optimist to be a teacher. What's hard to manage is the feeling of some students that grades "put them in their place" -- as if they were categorized fixed into a static "place" they can't get out of. Although I'm probably an undying optimist to the point of absurdity on this score, I want to try harder this term to help liberate and uplift my students to do better and improve. How can I keep their first day excitement going all term? Of course, they have to meet me halfway and help themselves. When that happens, it can be magic. The joy of teaching is often seeing a student self-actualize and take charge of their learning in this way. Sure, it's a cliche, but you feel like a parent who's been pushing a kid on their training wheels for weeks, and then finally the kid is on two wheels, peddling madly down the hill, balancing and zooming all on their own....smiling wildly in the wind.

Hmm...I'm slipping into romanticizing the profession. I must still be buzzing with the first day excitement and eager to see if it's still holding up the next time class meets.

This year is the first time in years that I have not had a freshman composition class on my teaching load, as part of a one-time development and renewal release from the class. As a writer and an English professor, naturally this is a course I enjoy and would dare say I'm good at teaching (since I've been doing it almost annually since 1992!). But after over ten years of teaching basic writing skills, it's actually a very welcome -- and renewing -- release, as I'm freed up to teach other courses in my specialization instead. We've just wrapped up Final's Week as Seton Hill U, and I've really had a dream term: a course in Poetry Writing and a course in the Art of Film. Next term it's Fiction Writing, Literary Criticism, and a new course I'm designing as a "Publication Workshop." All of these subjects are dear to me and it should go without saying that though the workload is as high as ever, I'm a very happy teacher this year.

But I keep thinking about freshman comp. It's hard not to, when I see my colleagues, literally, hunched behind their desks surrounded by portfolios of writing or pushing a shopping cart filled with binders down the hallway like a sooty worker heading back into the mineshaft. But I've also been rethinking my composition course design for the past few weeks, looking over the textbook (which is going into a new edition) and even attending faculty meetings about the course that I am not required to attend.

I must be crazy, right?

Well, only a little bit. Freshman comp is, like it or not, a crucial component of who I am and what I do. I kind of miss my role as usher as students trasition from high school into adult education. I miss opening new eyes before they get exhausted and jaded by their college experience. And now, when teaching upperclass students who still don't know how to write a thesis statement, it makes me want to teach them how to do so all the more.

Besides, at Seton Hill full time English faculty do not have the luxury of only teaching upper division courses in the major -- all of us, virtually, teach the freshman "Seminar in Thinking and Writing." (And our school is REALLY in the minority in this regard. One source reports that only 7% of the freshman composition courses in this country are taught by full time faculty!) Although I sometimes wonder whether my PhD could be put to better use by teaching the more advanced courses, our students and our relatively small campus -- and ultimately, all of our upper division courses -- are probably better off for having full time faculty with an investment in the college teaching the new freshman how to not only write but how to become a college-minded scholar.

I've got all sorts of new ideas now for when I approach the seminar again. But one thing I think I can do -- as a media scholar -- is make better use of video media in the course. One element of the course I'm considering altering is the way I have students give oral reports. Our Freshman Seminar is a two-term sequence and usually I videotape a formal "presentation of your research" speech the students give to the class in the fall and a less formal "storytelling with a theme" presentation they give in the spring...and then they write a comparison contrast paper on the two taped speeches, among other things. But as I perused an article by S. Alan Silliker in the Journal of Excellence in Teaching this morning, I read of an interesting experiment a teacher tried in having students videotape their speeches OUTSIDE of class in small groups and then later playing the tape to the class as a whole. This seemed to generate positive energy among the students and decreased the fear of public speaking that some have. I think I might try to integrate this technique next year, when I return to the composition fold, while at the same time continuing to have students get acclimated to speaking to a "crowd" through traditional means. I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this technique before...I usually pride myself on creatively approaching the class (you have to be creative if you don't want to bore yourself to tears teaching the same principle material year after year). So I think this "release" from teaching the freshman seminar has benefited me in this manner, in addition to battling teacher burnout. I can only imagine what a sabbatical would do! ;-)

Our campus technology committee has discussed -- only in theory so far -- the possibile integration of laptops in the classroom at Seton Hill. In my research for this I found something that surprised me: Stephen King, advocating for them, and volunteering to do distance learning to teach a middle school class.

Apparently, today news reports are saying that King recently had to back out. But I hope he decides to return to this idea. King, who was struggling to make a living as a teacher before he sold his first book, CARRIE, seems to realize that literacy is the key to the future of publishing, whether online or off. And he's a strong advocate for education. I think a lot of people don't realize how much he "pays it forward" or gives back to the community like this. He's opened up a library in Bangor, Maine. He's written books about how to write (like On Writing) and how to understand the genre (like Dance Macabre). King is a teacher as much as he's the bestselling author of all time. He's a great role model for literacy. And I admire that.

Conversely, I count myself among the growing number of teachers across the country who have taught Stephen King. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to realize that if you choose a popular author to teach in an English course, you increase the likelihood of getting students interested in reading. My experiences teaching Night Shift (in a "horror fiction writing" course), Misery (in a graduate level seminar), and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (in a seminar on childhood in literature) were all VERY successful. In fact, the Misery seminar stemmed largely from my dissertation scholarship and working on Tom Gordon with students helped me generate an article for the NY Review of Science Fiction a year or two ago. King plays a large role in what I do as a teacher and a scholar and a writer!

It's no secret that King seems to have some reservations about his own relation to the canon of literature, but I think this anxiety comes with the realization of how powerful he really is, and how influential he is over young readers. He's written about schools quite a bit (think of his novella "Apt Pupil" which is about education in a way, or that infamous "Rage" story his Bachman persona wrote that presaged Columbine). He seems very tuned in to the adolescent mind and is very savvy about teaching things to his audience whether it be directly or indirectly.

Do a google search for "Stephen King Lesson Plan" and you'll find lots of resources for teaching King. An outline from the state of Michigan on teaching horror fiction to high schoolers is particularly impressive.