my triumphant return (with really old writing)

This is an old assignment, but I was re-reading it recently, and I remembered that I liked it, and that I liked writing, and that I should really be writing here more often, so to hopefully re-invigorate my own interest in this space, here's a quick copy and paste job.

Playing Around

To begin our semester, our class read an editorial by Phillip Pullman, called “Common sense has much to learn from moonshine: It’s time English teachers got back to basics – less grammar, more play,” which I will now admit to liking quite a bit. Not simply because I want to fool around in my future classroom and skip the tough lessons, but because the man has a point: “It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time.” Pullman argues that playfulness is a necessary element in any discovery, any time someone sets out to create meaning. The fact that we currently choose to emphasize hard work, high standards, and standardized knowledge in our schools seems to contradict what our greatest creative minds already know about learning and discovery. It is not only possible to have fun while learning and creating meaning at the same time, it is often the most productive method as well. Many writing teachers have (hopefully) already discovered that these two things – fun and meaning – complement each other very well. Isn’t it about time we taught our students this lesson, instead of keeping it to ourselves?

Much of the writing we currently expect our students to perform is terribly dull and uninspiring – science reports, compare/contrast essay, literary analyses, argumentative essays. Certain voices are valued while others are discouraged. (I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I will admit to personally cussing considerably more during my real-life arguments than I have in any of my argumentative essays to date – and having more fun while doing it.) Somewhere along the line a lot of us learned that composing is an uncomfortable process, best left to the famous, old white men and the angry, darker-skinned women who don’t like them. This has not done much good for our general attitudes and approaches to writing. I’m personally very concerned about getting my student’s interested in the process of writing, considering the likely attitudes they will enter my classroom with.

Yet how did this negative approach to writing happen given the expressive composition theory of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s? Revolutionary teaching was catching hold, and suddenly student writers were the stars! Everyone’s voice was important and belonged in the writing classroom. James Berlin, in his essay “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” describes the expressive ideology, “[Writing] is an art, a creative act in which the process – the discovery of the true self – is as important as the product – the self discovered and expressed” (27). This sounds like something students should like, right? This approach to writing is also meant to cover all instances of putting word to paper, “The most important measure of authenticity, of genuine self-discover and self-revelation, furthermore, is the presence of originality in expression; and this is the case whether the writer is creating poetry or writing a business report” (28). This approach sounds like it could be playful, fun, a positive happening in a student’s life. If we agree that we want our students excited about writing, why has expressive theory fallen out of fashion in contemporary composition theory? Was it, as Pullman loosely suggests, the grammarians that did us in? Or are there more sinister forces at work? What happened to our true voices, our personal-political revolution, our writing classrooms full of music and love?

Well, a lot of things. For one thing, people began realizing that there are more types of writing than the personal narrative, and expressive pedagogy over-emphasizes this genre. Writing teachers were encountering too many confessional essays, and too few academic ones. This approach also didn’t find favor with conservative forces, both inside and outside the university, who were more interested in issues such as “rigor” and final grades. If a teacher’s goal is to have her students realize their true selves, how can the teacher know when this occurs? Will the student have a certain, definable glow and demeanor that only professionals can recognize? Or is it all a bunch of hooey? These are some of the issues and questions I’ve been dealing with as a student in one of my own English classes this semester, which I will tell you about, here.

Inventing Good Work – Writing with Little Direction

My class is designed as a writer’s workshop in the expressive mode. In my class we are, rather ironically, required to sit in a circle every class hour; we are currently spending two days a week in peer response groups to work on our writing which responds to the prompt: “Write whatever you want, just as long as you write;” I received a hug from the teacher on the very first day, and most importantly, there are no wrong answers. There are no topics which are considered off limits in our writing. I have read peers’ stories concerning the struggles of being alcoholic, the joy of smoking pot with a little sister, wanting to cheat on your boyfriend, waking up drunk in a stranger’s front yard (oh wait, that one was mine), losing your boyfriend, looking for a boyfriend, looking for somewhere to belong, etc. Based on this sample of topics, full of drugs and cheap romance, it would appear our unofficial prompt is “college life.” These are our lives, what we should be writing about – or so we’re told. As a class we are strongly encouraged to take pleasure in our writing, but I’m still having a hard time with that. Because in actuality, if we’re expected to be developing any useful skills for writing within the academy, or in any context outside of our loving and accepting classroom, I would say that our teacher is doing us a great disservice, and I don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed.

For one, the looseness of the structure and open-ended nature of the class policies leads most students to simply taking advantage of the relative generosity when compared to the typical classroom setting, the phrase “taking advantage” being used in the negative sense. When I heard that there are no due dates, besides the end of the semester, I heard (as most students in the class have, judging by the recent flood of submissions) that I won’t be doing any real work until May. Because we spent an entire class period where the teacher was advocating against letter grades, I now have no real fear of my final grade falling below “passing.” I need only make a very minor effort and my 3 units will be secured. How could my professor fail me, knowing how crushed and demoralized that institutional reprimand might make feel? Basically I realize that this open-ended, supportive, and loving classroom is something of an anomaly compared to the worlds both inside and outside of the university. “I might as well take this class off so I can put my time and energy toward more demanding pursuits,” seems to be the prevailing attitude in the class.

Another concern is the effectiveness of the peer response in a class where we’re frequently reminded that everyone is a great writer. I’m reading other students’ prose, which can be terrific at times, terrible at others, but worst of all I’m receiving their non-expert, largely untrained feedback on my own work. From my peers I mainly hear “I really like this” or “this part is really funny” or “I think you need a dash here” or “yeah, it seems done to me.” I’ve occasionally taken to hiding noticeably terrible pieces of writing in my work in order to see what kind of response I will get to it. I rarely receive any, besides the expected encouragement. About half-way through the semester I had discovered which students in the class offered the most useful feedback, and I’ve since made it a point to work with them whenever possible, despite the professor’s constant urgings to always work with new people. Perhaps if we had done more in the class to cultivate a more productive climate of peer response – reading about response, modeling response, talking about response, etc. – then I might be more willing. But as it stands, with only one half of a class hour during the entire semester ever put toward defining effective peer response, I see little need to work with as many different untrained responders as possible. I also see little improvement in my writing.

Based on the unofficial prompt offered above (“college life”), you shouldn’t be surprised when I tell you that the majority of writing produced by students in this class is easily categorized as “non-academic.” These are not papers that we will be handing in to any of our other professors. I have yet to see a “works cited” page in this class, nor do I think one will ever be required. Often very little meaning is produced in our work, besides that most college students are eager to meet new people and frequently use controlled substances to facilitate that process. In short, we are learning very little about writing except that “writing is good!” which probably does not require an entire semester to cover.

But perhaps my greatest disappointment with the class lies in the fact that I’m a fraud, and my peers don’t seem to recognize it. The writing that I bring into class is often heavily influenced, if not entirely modeled after, the authors that I personally read and admire. The truth is that I have no real voice of my own, I’m only singing along. That short story playing with sentence structure and verb tense? I would never have though of it if it wasn’t for the David Foster Wallace story I was reading at the time. I can’t even bring myself to finish that piece about working as a porn clerk because the on-line author who inspired me to write it in the first place has already completed it much better than I ever could. My latest piece is simply an extension of a joke in Sam Lipsyte’s newest novel, completed in a voice borrowed from the work of another student in the class. I’ve learned the best way for me to work up the desire to write for this class is to go back and read my favorite authors and copy their style. So whenever I receive compliments from my peers I inevitably feel undeserving and end up telling them, “If you think this is good, you should really read the piece that inspired it.”

This is why I know me and David Bartholomae would be friends. He knows that, more than some people would like to admit, writing is an act of imitation. In his essay “Inventing the University” he notices that, “[Students’] papers don’t begin with a moment of insight, a ‘by God’ moment that is outside of language. They begin with a moment of appropriation, a moment when they can offer up a sentence that is not theirs as though it were their own” (49). I admit to experiencing a certain thrill when reading that last sentence, the same thrill of opening the local paper to the article about you on page C7, the thrill of recognition. That’s me he’s talking about! If Bartholomae were in my peer response group, he would surely see me for the fraud I am. Despite being an extremely creative and original thinker in the field of composition studies, he even admits to his own need to imitate; “(I can remember when, as a graduate student, I would begin papers by sitting down to write literally in the voice – with the syntax and key words – of the strongest teacher I had met) (49). Bartholomae recognizes that imitation is both necessary and productive. And despite what the teacher of the class discussed here may tell us, most other professors will expect a certain voice in their students’ writing, an academic, discursively defined voice.

One thing my loving, and accepting English professor and David Bartholomae will agree on is that to teach writing is to teach power, though Bartholomae sees that not all writing has equal power. Bartholomae argues that if a teacher isn’t teaching students how to adopt an academic voice – say, teaching them instead to write about their own lives in whatever genre they deem most appropriate, whatever voice feels “truest” to them – that teacher is, willfully or not, disabling the student. That teacher is not giving the student the skills that the university – the professors and seats of power – will expect of them. Whether the writing teacher sees the skill of being able to use an academic voice as important to the development of “self” or not, the skill will still be expected of prospective students. Bartholomae tells us that there is, in fact, a necessary loss of one’s “true voice” as one enters academic discourse; “To speak with authority [the students] have to speak not only in another’s voice but through another’s code; and they not only have to do this, they have to speak in the voice and through the codes of those of us with power and wisdom” (58). Perhaps writing a poem about my frustration at failing the GWPE and failing to earn my degree will help me feel better about it, but it won’t help me pass the damn test. What will help me is learning and adopting the powerful voices in academic circles, and being able to employ them on my own. I agree with my current English professor that forcing this voice upon myself may have a painful, uncomfortable, and limiting effect on my writing, but I don’t see any way to get around it.

My Girlfriend Hated Writing, So I Dumped Her

As I’m walking to school my ex-girlfriend comes up behind me. There is enough space between our previous relationship and now that we can politely speak with each other, and enough shared history between us that we both feel somewhat obliged to do so. One typically safe topic of conversation for two students to share is their current class workload, and thus our polite conversation begins.

She asks me what I’m working on. I reply, “A ten to twenty page paper, due in an extremely short amount of time.”

“God, I’m glad I’m not an English major,” she says, recalling our disagreements regarding our choice of majors, an embarrassingly sore spot in our youthful relationship.

“Yeah, God forbid you might have to do any actual work.”

If my readers think that I will pass up an easy opportunity to poke fun at the Women’s Studies department simply for the sake of politeness toward a previously loved-one, I regret to inform that they have given me too much credit. Need I also point out that, predictably, she didn’t find too much humor in this jab at her politically-leaning major?

“No, it’s just that I hate writing.”

In this response, there is no sarcasm or humor, no petty back-biting. (Point to her, for maintaining class. Dammit.) She hates writing. If she were to compose anything while we lived together, I was more or less required to leave the room. I might be simply sitting on the couch, nose buried in a book for a class of my own, but I was constantly accused of looking at the screen and judging her writing, until I finally learned the best thing to do is position myself at such a distance from the computer that viewing any component of it would be physically impossible.

“You’re looking! Don’t look!” She would always say.

“I’m not! I’m in the damn kitchen! Who cares, anyway? Somebody’s going to have to read it at some point if you want a grade!”

It is around this time, readers, that I began developing a true appreciation (and deep confusion) regarding the seemingly irrational and invincible mental blocks created by unconfident writers, an obstacle that I would certainly one day face should my composition teaching career progress as planned.

“You realize that I, should I read your paper, won’t simply tear it to shreds. I realize that’s unproductive. One of the best revision strategies is to have someone else read it. I do it all the time in my English classes. This means your writing would get better if you just let me read it, and maybe we wouldn’t be having this discussion every time you sat down at the keyboard with me in the same room.”
Was it this supportive attitude or the clever women’s studies jokes that finally drove the spike between us? I will not say, but instead let my readers decide for themselves. (Or possibly it is a heretofore unmentioned third element, much too dangerous to mention in these pages? The intrigue deepens!)

But the one thing that we can know for certain from this scene is that some people, at the very least my ex-girlfriend, find composing a very painful act. (I can tell you, my fellow netizen, that this work itself, the one you are reading right now, was not born with any ease or grace or welcoming parental love, and not simply because I am talking about my ex.) This seems exactly the phenomena that T.R. Johnson is attempting to describe during his extended composing-as-masochism metaphor in his excellent essay “School Sucks.” He puts it much more succinctly and clearly than me, in my story about my ex, when he says, “[…] the writing that people do in school is very rarely pleasurable and, much more often, causes pain” (641). He sums up many of my own feelings when he frankly admits, “[…] the only pleasure that [students] know is when they can breath a sigh of relief and feel ‘glad to have it over with’” (642). Where does the students’ uneasiness come from? What creates this masochistic drive among us to continue composing, only look forward to that point of completion, despite our reluctance to undertake the project in the first place?

It is exactly the academy itself, argues Johnson, encouraging us to participate while reminding us that they are the ones in control. It is exactly the assigned task of “inventing the university” without any real guidance from our mentors, and the accompanying strong possibility of rejection from the university, that lingers in our minds as we struggle to compose. I admit that I like Johnson for his ability to sympathize with me, the frustrated student: “[The students] must strive to submit to a body of rules and conventions that they can only dimly perceive or understand, and they know that they are likely to fail and provoke the censure of that body, an experience that will be embarrassing and painful” (643). When given little guidance on the nature of academic discourse – encouraged to write instead about sex, drugs, rock and roll, etc. in the genre of their choosing – the students can easily feel overwhelmed. Writing inside the university becomes inscribed as a painful process, and people like my ex-girlfriend will go to great lengths to avoid it. When finally required, they will fight through it in privacy and silence, desperately struggling to finally “have it over with.” This approach to writing, all theories agree, is not ideal.

Although Johnson does not presume to know the solution to the problem, he does offer some ideas for us to work with. He encourages us to promote “nonsense” in classroom activities, a feeling of play and renegade dialogue within the academy, showing the students that meaning is not absolute and creating it can even be fun. (Perhaps he and Pullman should be friends.) “Instead of organizing ourselves around a central, transcendent ideal of ‘academic discourse’ as that which names, masters, and controls reality, we need to sensitize ourselves and our students to the openings, cracks, and fissures that occur in every discursive act, the holes in our flags through which the play, laughter, and general slippage of meaning flows” (638). As my narrative scene above illustrates, “play” can be a terribly liberating act in the process of composing. Previous to typing out the scene above, I had locked myself in my room for hours, pouring over previous class readings and scribbled, often incomplete notes, trying desperately to begin this very paper. My ideas were dammed up behind an internal sense of impending failure, uncertain where to place themselves on the page. Not until I allowed myself to play with that personal scene of a few days past, an awkward meeting on the walk to school, was I able to begin composing.

Yet I still remain extremely reluctant to allow myself to play in this essay. What will the academy think? Surely my professors don’t care about awkward encounters with my ex-girlfriend. They have more important things to deal with, like generating another brilliant idea I could never think of, or writing – finally – an exam so tricky that even Jesus would fail. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps my playfulness does belong here. (I really hope it does, because I’m rather committed at this point.) I have Phillip Pullman’s eloquent arguments on my side, and he seems like a smart enough guy. The truth is that I am consciously imitating the voice of certain writers and thinkers that I admire, a voice that allows for play and humor, while actively engaging in the creation of meaning at the same time. I agree with Pullman and Johnson that fun, play, laughter, and the “general slippage of meaning” are showing up absent to most composition classrooms, and I will now force them back in, unwelcome, if I must.

As a prospective teacher I hope to help redress the composing-as-pain model with my students, but not simply by placing my students in a circle, removing deadlines, and giving them hugs. Instead, I intend to be honest with them – writing will hopefully be fun, writing can unfortunately be painful, writing is a recursive process, creativity is good, imitation can also be good, the Clippers will always be a bad basketball team, and we will all die alone. (Okay, I might leave that last one off). Perhaps more importantly, I intend to have my prospective students read articles and essays that are not only actively engaged in the creation of meaning, arguing important ideas and making intelligent points, but articles that have fun while doing it. If I expect this somewhat rare type of writing from my students, this playful yet academic voice, I had better provide some examples.

Reading is Fun, Why Isn’t Writing?!

I once had an acquaintance at San Francisco State University who frequently advocated for increased use of the exclamation point. He saw that this symbol of excitement and strong emotion was noticeably absent in most academic writing, and he made it a point to include at least one “!” in every college essay. He said there should be an unspoken rule that anyone who used an exclamation point in a college essay should be given an automatic A, because unlike most students with their predictable periods, somewhat erratic commas, and occasional semicolons, the “!” student cared. Then in the Spring semester he convinced a large number of his friends that he had gotten married, strung them along for a month or two, complete with wedding band and lengthy heart-to-hearts, before revealing the hoax on April Fool’s Day. In my opinion, he was a brilliant man.

The point being that, for the title alone, I am a fan of “Protesting All Fiction Writers!” by Tom Bissell, an essay from the fourth issue of The Believer, a hip, young literary / culture review publishing out of San Francisco. The subtitle of this piece gives tells us what the essay will cover: “The Underground Literary Alliance believes literature today is ‘out of touch with reality’ and the publishing industry corrupt. Are they prescient revolutionaries or scary stalkers?” Not only is this a smart essay written by a smart man for a smart audience, it’s also terribly funny. I laughed out loud on numerous occasions. I found another Tom Bissell in the back issue I then decided to purchase, “Nazis, Nuremberg, and Gold-Digging Women.” This one covered reality television shows such as Joe Millionaire, the Bachelor, et al., but tied this in to our cultural treatment of the Holocaust and WWII in general. Again, I laughed. I will now admit that Mr. Bissell is a prominent figure in the Group of Certain Writers and Thinkers I Admire.

Because Tom Bissell quoted David Foster Wallace in his reality television / holocaust piece, I decided to read the entire essay. I found the essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace, titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Not only was I impressed by the arguments contained in the writing, I laughed an awful lot. I hastily added Wallace into the Certain Group I Admire. This experience repeated itself. The more I followed up on the contributors to the magazine, or the authors being discussed, the more I realized that there were lots of people writing like this – like it was important, like it was fun. I was excited to read again. Oddly enough, I also found myself excited to write again.

Finally I was encountering a writing voice that allowed for personal expression, humor, and big ideas, instead of the typically objective and detached academic observer. For me, this was successful writing that I could now imitate. I think this feeling of mine is what Juanita Rodgers Comfort is getting at in her (unfunny, but still good) essay “Becoming a Writerly Self” when she says, “The most successful student writers in my experience learn how to move beyond merely imitating the prose styles and interpretive schemes of disciplinary discourses. They animate those discourses by inventing complex and versatile writerly selves who are able to place their extra-academic worlds into a carefully constructed relationship with those discourse communities” (524). She is arguing for an inclusion of the self as a necessary component of good writing. Not just good creative writing, but academic writing as well. I agree, although I would also add that if I am playful and like making jokes, that belongs in the academy, too. It is inconsistent with our typical images of school to imagine our teachers laughing and having fun – like, ever – and that disappoints me.

I disagree with Comfort when claims that she doesn’t want her students “imitating the prose styles and interpretive schemes of disciplinary discourses.” What I think she means is that she doesn’t want them imitating the traditional prose styles and interpretive schemes. Instead, she wants them to look at non-traditional voices, those of the black feminist authors she admires, in order to begin to understand and appreciate new approaches to academic subjects. “My [black feminist] essayist course afforded my students a measure of comfort and a greater sense of strategy in developing their own ideas, which I think can be transferred effectively to the undergraduate writing classroom” (536). In her opinion, not only will the students in her specifically designed course benefit from reading these authors, but students across the curriculum. This claim I heartily agree with.

So Ms. Comfort suggests that studying black feminist essays will help students understand how to negotiate “the writerly self” in academic discourses. I would suggest that studying writers who allow themselves to play around and have fun, while still actively creating meaning, will also help our students. I know that it has greatly helped me. I hope to laugh a lot in my future classroom, and talk about myself. Hopefully my students will see, through our reading and discussions, that intelligent writing can be fun to read, as well as write, and that their voices do belong in the academic discourse. A student can – no, should – attempt to include stories about a previous relationships while discussing an academic topic. A student shouldn’t be afraid to exclaim! something in their writing. A student should know that if other writers can do it, so can they. A student should know that Phillip Pullman has something when he says, “[…] the only reason for writing is to produce something true and beautiful.” And that it can really help to play around when trying to do that.