To Teach, or Not to Teach

"Don't feel like you have to be in a rush to prove yourself now that you've graduated," my sister told me over the phone last night.

But I do feel like I need to start accumulating more publications, and fast. Not only so that I avoid the post-MFA writing slump, but also so that I can build my resume.

I've been applying to jobs in two specific areas: teaching and as an administrative assistant. My feelings on the perfect job are ambivalent. Part of me wants a job I can leave at the office, with steady hours that won't drain my writing brain so that I can come home to my own stories. The other part wants a job that I will be proud of, one that makes me feel like I'm making a difference, even if it leaves less time for my personal writing.

But in the midst of sending out my resume and CV, I'm trying to keep a handle on the difference between wanting to teach because it is something I enjoy and wanting to teach because it can make me feel like a writer even when I'm not publishing any stories.

My CV for teaching prominently features my short story publications. While I was at UAF, two of our professors held a workshop and shared their CVs with us. For a teaching resume/ CV, your creative writing publications become an important credential. I think this document has bled its way into my mind, tricking me into thinking that landing a teaching job will validate me as a writer.

So I am trying to remind myself: That is one thing, but this is another. It's a phrase from a clipping that I taped inside one of my notebooks years ago and just recently rediscovered:

How do you find a job that doesn't drain the essential energies that you bring to participate in the creative act? How do you maintain those energies when you're a mother? How do you maintain them when you're a father? I mean, this is always the question. No matter what we do or how we live. How do you nourish those energies and live in life? 

We have to make a living. We want to be in the world -- to be engaged with other people. One has to know one's own temperament. I think of someone like Liz Rosenberg, a strong poet, and it's impossible to imagine her not teaching. She is so gifted at it. And she seems to be able to write her wonderful poems, and her energy is unabated. But there are the great writers who couldn't teach. Bishop, famously, was a terrible teacher. I always want to say to the young writers I work with, you can be an artist without teaching. You are an artist. You don't need an academy to tell you what you are. Whitman didn't teach. Emily Dickinson didn't teach. John Keats didn't teach. Rilke didn't teach. Let's go on and on. Let's make a list of all the writers who we read who didn't teach. Teaching is great but let's not put the equal sign between them. That is one thing, but this is another. 

                           -- Marie Howe, The Writer's Chronicle, May/ Summer 2010. (9).


Last week my grandmother pulled out a family photograph. "She was a teacher, and so was she, and so was she," my grandmother said as her finger hovered over the faces of great aunts and cousins. My mother, also a teacher, stood beside me as I looked at all of the teachers in my family.

I'd always vowed not to teach. I was going to buck that family inheritance. But then I went to graduate school, and I had a teaching assistantship to pay my tuition and help me live. And I developed a teaching persona, a person more self-confident and commanding than my every day self, the introvert writer. I loved learning from my students, and seeing texts through their eyes. It was the most rewarding work I've ever done.

When I'm gone, and someone in my family is saying my name as they point out the faces in a photograph, I want them to call me a writer. But after that, I'd like to be called a teacher, too.

Encouragement List

It's important for writers to write and submit. The submitting part is especially important. L. Timmel Duchamp stressed this to us at Clarion West. At a certain point, you have to let go of a story and send it out. The submitting process is important not just in terms of your writing career, but psychologically, too.

When I'm not actively submitting, I don't feel like a writer. I start to feel as if my writing time is selfish, and that I should be spending that time cleaning house and whatnot.

Submitting makes me feel part of the writing world, and that my writing process is moving forward. I might be sitting still at my desk, but my stories are moving around. Someone's reading them besides me, and I'm going to get feedback on whether that story works or not - even if that feedback is just a form rejection letter.

A sampling from my rejectomancy box

After several years and many submissions, I thought I was immune to rejection depression. I decided to aim higher. I applied for some big opportunities that had the potential to change my life so that I could focus on writing full-time for a year or two: fellowships, grants, residencies.

I was rejected. And it stung worse than my first rejection letter.

So I opened up a Word document and wrote "Encouragement" in the header. I even used a swirly, crazy font that I would never use in a professional document. I gave myself full permission to do some ego-stoking for the space of one Word file.

My Encouragement List

What have I put in this document so far? Words from critique partners pointing out strengths in my writing. Nudges from professors to keep writing. Positive feedback from journals and contests, even when I was ultimately not accepted for publication.

I don't want to spend too much time telling myself I'm a good writer. I never want to get to the point where I think that my writing doesn't need any revision - that everything I write is perfect.

But to keep going, I need these words of encouragement to turn to when I feel like I'm a horrible writer. They're the food I'm squirreling away for winter days, the lean times between acceptances. Because I know that the most important part to becoming a good writer is to keep going. Not just writing, but finishing and ushering my stories out the door.

A Name Against the Nothing

Artax in the Swamp of Sadness, from The Neverending Story

A few times at Clarion West, on the Sunday evenings when we met our instructor for the week, we would be asked to go around the table and describe the kinds of stories we wrote.

Occasionally, I'd be asked the same question at the Friday night parties, and at other random moments, like when I went to the comic book store in search of a poster for my bare dorm room walls.

"You're a writer? Cool! What kind of stories do you write?"

I was supposed to know this, right? Or at least be figuring it out.

I started to have a bit of an identity crisis.

"Fantasy," I'd say. "But not like elves kind of fantasy. Other kind of fantasy."

Or I'd list my favorite authors. Kelly Link. Margo Lanagan. Elizabeth Hand. John Crowley.

But it didn't quite work. I needed a place on the grid, a way to plot myself among the writers I was learning from.

I needed a name.




On one of those Sunday evening roundtables, Alisa Alering gave a great description of her stories, which I now cannot remember word for word. But from her description, I embraced my own. I wrote stories where strange things happened to normal people.

This helped, but it wasn't until recently that I found a name that I am comfortable wearing.

During my thesis defense, my advisor referenced the term "slipstream" often. I had heard of slipstream before, but it wasn't something I had researched. So instead I talked about my stories moving back and forth between literary mainstream and science fiction. Sometimes I'd swing to one side, sometimes to the other. Overall, my stories were inching closer to some strange place in the middle. But the middle couldn't have a name, right? It wasn't really a place.

The middle turned out to not be a swamp of sadness. In fact, it's the place where most of my favorite authors hang out.

This is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. ~ Bruce Sterling

Having a term I can use to describe my writing gives me guideposts. I don't always have to stay on this path. Maybe ten years from now I'll laugh at the idea that I once identified with slipstream. But for now, it is a way to navigate. It's a name to fight against that terrible feeling of the Nothing closing in from all sides.

After searching for a long time, all it took was a great writing friend to help me find a name.

And, of course, a little luck.

The Story of the Story

I defended my thesis on Friday, and it went swimmingly. I now have an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (woot!), and just need to submit some paperwork in order to make it official.

The whole affair lasted about an hour: 45 minutes of questions, a few minutes for the committee to deliberate behind closed doors, and then a few minutes to tell me their verdict.

Over in an hour, and I've been stressing out about the thesis defense for years.

On Thursday night, I put out a request for advice from my MFA friends. It was amazing to hear from all of my great writer friends who've defended before me, now scattered across the world and doing great things.

One piece of advice, given by Greg, was extremely helpful:

Just tell stories.

I'd been thinking of the thesis defense as an interview, and that allowed fantasies of hardball questions to creep into my head.

But the defense was less like an interview with Piers Morgan and more like an author spotlight, like the kind Lightspeed Magazine does.

My committee wanted to know the story of the stories, where they started, the turning point in understanding a character, and my journey as a writer.

At AWP, Ashley Cowger told me that she felt like the thesis process prepared students for working with an editor, and I think she's totally right. My thesis advisor, Gerri Brightwell, was vital to the writing of my thesis. She asked me questions to make me dig deeper into my characters, to question whether a story needed to be told a certain way, to help me get a feeling for when a story was almost done.

If writing the thesis is an exercise in working with an editor, then defending the thesis is preparation for what will follow once your book is published. You need to be able to explain your story in terms of craft and journey. It's the second story that readers and writers love to hear, one that's been growing on its own during those late nights and early mornings when your eyes have been trained on the computer.

And I think it's important for writers to recognize and celebrate that the story of the writing matters, too.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, Winter of 2008

Resistance Manifesto

As I prepare for my thesis defense, I'm going back through my materials from the classes I took at UAF. In particular, I'm reading through my binder from Forms of Fiction, taught by the amazing David Crouse.

David assigned a writing project during this course that I particularly loved. We each had to write a resistance manifesto. In writing, you're defined not only by the writing styles and ideals that you embrace, but also by those that you reject.

I took Forms of Fiction in the spring of my first year as a graduate student. The first semester of grad school is hell. It's wonderful in many ways, too. But it is an overwhelming load of coursework, learning to teach, and trying to write. The first semester breaks you down and makes you realize that you're going to have to work at writing if you really want to write well.

Then after that first stretch, you begin to rebuild your writing self.

This exercise was very cathartic at that stage of my writing development, but I believe it can be useful anytime you're feeling lost in the crowd of writers. Define who you are, and who you are not as a writer, and keep steering by that star.

RESISTANCE MANIFESTO

I do not want to have my work described as "good writing." Fuck that.

I do not want to be any part of literary snobbery that denies entrance to form or genre.

I will not pass through the charnel houses just to be published.

I will not camouflage myself in the gristle and shards of "good writing" to earn any position or award.

Fuck that.

I resist the urge to retreat into the safe arms of academia and forgo the world of the real.

I resist the urge to forget my childhood, the Southern strangeness that is part of my story.

I defy the division of images and text.

Booyeah.

I support the proliferation of writing through public forms. I will write and share my writing through unfamiliar means.

Saddle-stiched. Hand threaded spine. A copy machine mage.

I will share my life with my family and friends through zines full of images and words.

I will write as well as I can, changing the lens until I get the correct prescription.

I will structure these lenses in thick black frames and blue striped socks.

I am not writing for an editor. I am not writing for a magazine.

I am not writing to be entombed in a print quarterly.

I am writing to be found on a bus seat, a chance library sale find, on a table in a cafe. 

I am writing for the girl in the closet who speaks to her sister through the walls while her parents rage outside.

I am writing for the boy with long hair who lives in a house full of doors that are always closed. 

Studying for the Thesis Defense

Every true work of art - and thus every attempt at art (since things meant to be similar must submit to one standard) - must be judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws. If it has no laws, or if its laws are incoherent, it fails - usually - on that basis. 

~ John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

I've got a little under two weeks until I defend my thesis, the last step I need to finish my MFA in Creative Writing.

The defenses are open to the public, but only the committee can ask the defender questions. Graduate students are encouraged to attend thesis defenses given by their classmates well before it is their turn to sit in the hot seat.

So how does one defend a creative thesis? Isn't it all subjective?

Yes. And no, not at all.

You have to write consciously. Lucking in to good characters and structure won't hold up over the course of a publication-length work. In the thesis defense, you have to describe the decisions you purposefully made as an author, whether you think they worked well or not, and how you learned from these choices.

The examiners also ask you to place your work in relation to the rest of the genre. Which authors are you learning from? Which writers do you reject?

And finally, how does your work intersect with the craft issues of your genre?

The books on my desk right now

To prepare myself to answer these questions, I'm reading over my stories, my revision notes, my notes from my graduate Forms of Fiction class, and a few craft books.

• The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as it Takes by Joan Silber
• An immensely helpful book that makes me want to experiment more with different forms of time in my short stories. 

• The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter
• The essay "Unheard Melodies" in this book completely changed the way that I approach writing dialogue. 

• The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner
• The first time I read this book, I thought it was hopelessly droll. But as I get better at writing, I begin to understand more and more of what he is saying, and can understand why it is a classic (and appears on my university's graduate comprehensive exam).

• Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter
• Another text that is on the graduate comprehensive exam list at UAF. There are so many amazing essays in this book. Here's a snippet from the first essay, "Dysfunctional Narratives":
• "Sometimes - if we are writers - we have to talk to our characters. We have to try to persuade them to do what they've only imagined doing. We have to nudge but not force them toward situations where they will get into interesting trouble, where they will make interesting mistakes that they may take responsibility for. When we allow our characters to make mistakes, we release them from the grip of our own authorial narcissism. That's wonderful for them, it's wonderful for us, but it's best of all for the story" (Baxter 12). 

• The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction by Robert Boswell
• The title essay of this book is wonderful:
• "I come to know my stories by writing my way into them" (Boswell 4). 

The English department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has guidelines posted as to how to prepare for the defense, and also this bit of encouragement:

Although the examination might seem intimidating, it should also be rewarding: this is your chance (perhaps one of the few you will ever have) to discuss your work with experts in the field who are familiar with your writing.

I'm nervous, of course, but also very excited. It's been a long journey to get to this point, and I'm glad I was able to get here with a set of stories that are the kind I would like to read.

100 Years of Von Braun

The US Space and Rocket Center has a travelling exhibit on Dr. Wernher von Braun open until May. I went with my father, hoping that this exhibit would be more museum-ish than my last visit. 

I started out with paying my respects to Miss Baker, the squirrel monkey who traveled to space. She's buried near the entrance to the Space Center. I remember when I was a kid, there were always bananas at her grave. There weren't any there this time, though. I suppose it is getting too hot and buggy here in Huntsville. 

Inside the Space Center kids ran around. It was the last day of Space Camp, and some kids were dropping some serious cash in the gift shop on t-shirts and little stuffed monkeys in space suits.  

I was a little bit worried about the exhibit when we walked in and this is the first thing we saw:

a "Rocketpedia" entry on von Braun. Coupled with the bicycle "believed" to have been used by von Braun's younger brother as he pedaled in search of Americans to surrender to at the end of World War II, I was worried the whole exhibit would be full of non-items. 

There was a cool documentary video playing in segments throughout the exhibit, so I was sure I'd know a lot more about von Braun by the time I reached the last display case. But I was worried that the inspiration level would be on par with bupkis. 

But around the corner the cool factor started climbing. Check out this group of badasses.

Wernher B. is the second from the right.

This is what gets me excited. Old ephemera. You can feel the past. 

WvB's calender for  July, 1969

Von Braun's calendar from 1969 was one of my favorite pieces on display. He drew through each day with a red pencil and a ruler after it was finished. Each line matched up precisely. 

Next was von Braun's desk. 

Von Braun's desk at the USSRC

There's his Hugo award in the foreground. If you look just behind it, you can see his daily to do list. He would write everything he had to do for the day on a sheet in his notebook. As he completed the tasks, he would fill in the bar that ran through the center (those are the red bars in the center of the pages). 

Von Braun also had a pretty awesome Moon globe on his desk. 

There were lots of photographs of von Braun - looking dashing, cutting ribbons, trying out spacesuits in submersion tanks, and walking on the Moon. 

There was also a section that had "the inspiration of the rocket scientist as a young man" as its theme, with lots of amazing retro art. 

And one of his journals, open to a sketch he made when he was 15 years old, of a manned rocketship.

At the end of the exhibit, there were three giant panels with a quote from von Braun:

My friends there was dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the Earth. There was dancing again when the first Americans landed on the Moon. I'd like to ask you, don't hang up your dancing slippers. 

I was rather sad when I read these words. It was only a few months ago that I attended a celebration at the Space & Rocket Center for 30 years of the space shuttle - and its end. 

Overall, I enjoyed and learned a lot from this exhibit. I hope the US Space & Rocket Center has more exhibits like this in the future, and less traveling shows like CSI and such. What would I like to see an in-depth presentation on next?

Space Lab!