Airship Ahoy! Student Teaching Dead Ahead!

Good news! The best of news, in fact.

I have received my student teaching placements for next semester! 

There are two of them, one in an area middle school and the other in a high school, and I am assured by people in the know that they are wonderful teachers who really know their business.

I was so overcome with joy at this prospect my productivity for the day imploded, and I ended up leaving my homework until my shift at work last night. Three hours of heavy productivity. It was great.

But after that I went home feeling a great deal like a failure. Here I am, a quarter of the way through senior year, practically swimming in homework and midterms, and all I want to do right now is work on a Halloween costume. Talk about trival.

Not just any Halloween costume, mind you. A steampunk airship officer, to be precise. I spent the better part of Wednesday Googling Do-It-Yourself steampunk accessories, including the obligatory round-rimmed goggles and making a shopping list for the local craft store, thrift shop, and bargain outlet. I realized I want to work on this, instead of writing the 5 mini-essays I have due next week, because I’m bored. A little burnt-out, too. I’m sick and tired of learning about how to teach kids, and it doesn’t help that in two of my classes we’re talking about exactly the same thing. I need a week, I think, to not do any schoolwork at all, and a week is a luxury I don’t have.

Steampunk is an interesting aesthetic. It tries to combine the power, creativity, and mechanical prowess that the Industrial era embodies while at the same time embracing the whimsy, romance and beauty of the Victorian age. Simultaneous creative periods, but very different ideas in terms of what form and function are. It’s like Gaskell’s North and South in a big way, the culture of the city meeting the machinery of the town. (Speaking of which, I got a massively awesome mashup idea involving Mr. Thornton and a bunch of robots that I think I might use for my final project in Contemporary Lit.)

Anyway, as I’m googling around I can’t help but be fascinated by what some of these people have built. These contraptions are beautiful – mahogany keyboards with repurposed typewriter keys, working blunderbuss guns that fire ping-pong balls. (That was another reason I was ashamed of myself – I’m not half that creative or talented to be in this genre) I realized that cosplay of any kind says something very interesting about our society in general. We have such creative, artisanal talent as human beings, and in our industrialized, buy-it-out-of-the-box world, that energy that in earlier periods would have been put to the purpose of making useful objects  is rerouted into making objects that could have been useful, but instead are used for this specialized kind of play. Steampunk’s fascinating to me because it tries to embody this past-present binary, the beauty of past design but also the desire to be futuristic and imaginative as well. (Also awesome - dieselpunk, the 'punk that started after WWI and the Age of Steam left off. Think Art Deco, Soviet Realism, film noir and really futuristic looking cars. Epic.)

I’ve realized, in between trying to finish the midterm exam due tonight and the final project due tomorrow, that this is an excellent conundrum for several reasons. First, I have to practice a good deal of self control in sticking to my time management options. Second, I’m realizing teachers cannot live on homework and grading alone. And third, if I’m getting burnt out thinking about the same thing all day and it’s only October, how must my students feel when they’re learning about five or six different subjects and they have to write a bunch of papers?

All of this is pointing me towards a conclusion we’ve discussed, both in Pedagogy and in Young Adult Lit-- students need to have a way to engage with the literature they’re reading beyond just writing about it. Involve an art project once in a while, something that uses a different part of the brain. This is why art and music and the humanities in schools is so very important! Kids need a creative break!

I know this teacher does, too.

Plagiarism (And Other Things In My Life I'm Not So Sure About)

Every time I wrote a paper for middle or high school, my teacher would remind me not to plagiarize. It's a staple for essay writing instruction -- Tell us where you got everything and don't copy anyone else's work word for word. If you don't, we'll come after you with a red pen and a vengeance.

Simple.

As a future writing teacher, it's important for me to remember this, and remember to teach it to my students. But what I've been having difficulty with lately is the idea that in order to teach someone about plagiarism, I have to plagiarize someone else's idea on how to teach.

Let me explain. In classes like my English Pedagogy we're given books written by prizewinning, veteran teachers that are full of strategies and observations on what works in the classroom and what doesn't. Our professor is filling us with tools from her own experience to help us when we get out into classrooms of our own. And this, to me, sounds an awful lot like plagiarizing, or copying off of someone else's paper on an exam. Aren't I supposed to just know all of this by myself? Aren't I supposed to be coming up with these mind-bogglingly good theories of pedagogy all on my own?

When we speak of sharing lesson plans or ideas on how to teach, isn't it technically intellectual plagiarism when I think Emily's lesson on how to wrap up a unit on critical theory lenses was so awesome I'd like to do exactly the same thing in my classroom because I thought it worked well? Are my roommate and I going to plagiarize each other when we discuss at the end of each school day and try to come up with a plan of attack for tomorrow using these textbooks and their ideas?

My good friend Ben recently linked me to the blog Teaching FTW, the one year labor of love of one Ross Trudeau, a teacher in a Boston charter school.  Trudeau describes a very prescriptive approach to his teacher training at said charter school, something that runs counter to most educator preparation programs in America today. I'll let Mr. Trudeau explain himself on this one:

"Program founder MG once likened traditional teacher prep to putting a pilot in a cockpit after teaching him about aerodynamics and meteorology... but not telling him what any of the buttons do. 'What? You crashed the plane into the mountain? It's cool! You get a whole new plane next September, and you probably learned SO much from that first plane crash! Go get 'em, tiger!'" -- Teaching FTW Feb 4 2010.

"This feels like the best way to learn how to teach. TELL me the moves. WATCH me practice them. CRITIQUE me on how good my presence is, or what my face looks like disciplining students, if my line of questioning is appropriate, yadda. It's like the total opposite of learning adolescent psychology and debating at length the place that ebonics has in a classroom. It's a common-friggin'-sense way to go about learning how to teach. " --Teaching FTW Jan 21, 2010

And while I am reading this blog, I am thinking several things. One: Ben was a genius to link me to this. Two: This is really funny. A little unreadable at times, but funny. Three: I wish my blog had 76 followers. Four: The prescriptive program sounds really awesome, but isn't that intellectual plagiarism too? Shouldn't you have to build your own classroom from scratch first and yes, crash a few planes? (I hate the idea of crashing a plane as much as anyone else, believe me, the idea that the parents of America will trust me with their children's futures is terrifying no matter how many people tell me I'll make a good teacher.)

I suppose at the bottom of this well of self doubt is the way I was taught to look at information and who it belongs to. I'm the girl who wouldn't ask a question in class unless I already knew the answer -- My idea about how knowledge should be handled is strange, to say the least. In my little world, this information on how a classroom works and how students work belongs to someone else. They did the research. They spent the time compiling it. If I were to use it in a paper, I would have to cite where it came from and I would have to paraphrase it. And yet here are all these people telling me that no, I should just use these ideas, lock, stock, and barrel, and maybe mix in a few of my own.

I think something's rotten in the state of educational training here, and I'm not sure if it's my training as a teacher, my own education prior to that, or something else entirely.

The Fairie Queen Joins Facebook

In contemporary lit on Monday we were discussing Twitterature, the phenomenon of taking large classic novels and whittling them down into twenty Tweet sized tidbits or less. You can read some examples and/or buy the book they inspired here. Being the strange internet dweller that I am, I brought up Sarah Schmelling's book Ophelia Joined The Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs On To Facebook and how this might be an expression of the same movement in literature, an effort to make these dated texts a little more modern.

So, in the continuing effort to offset the effects of the Mondaze, I'm sharing with all you English major types out there something that has brought me a great deal of joy over the past two days -- The Fairie Queen Joins Facebook. The idea is courtesy of Sarah Schmelling, the characters come by way of Edmund Spenser, and the humor is all mine.
 
---
Redcrosse has updated his contact info and changed his profile picture.

Redcrosse is now friends with Una and The Dwarf.
Redcrosse added "The Den of Error" to the Places I've been application.
Redcrosse sent Death to The Beast of Error. Die, Throw Obvious Religious Symbols and Papist texts, or send Death back?
Redcrosse hates small Errors. Hates them hates them hates them. The children of Error should DIE.

Archimago sent Redcrosse a friend request. Personal Message: "Hey, so I'm a lonely old dude out in the forest. We should be friends, yeah?"
Archimago and Redcrosse are now friends.
Archimago tagged Una in a picture.

Caption: Hey, Redcrosse, let's you and me hook up.

Redcrosse: ????!!!



Archimago tagged Una and Some Random Squire in a picture.

Una: That's not me!

Redcrosse: Una, how could you? I thought you were better than that!

Una: THAT'S NOT ME.





Redcrosse and Una are no longer friends.
Redcrosse is angry at Una. Stupid woman. Should have known she'd turn out bad.
The Dwarf wants to know where we got that squire. Something's not right here...

Duessa changed her profile picture and contact info.

Sansfoy invited Redcrosse to the event "Thinly Veiled Crusades Metaphor."
Redcrosse is attending this event.
Sansfoy is no longer online.

Fidessa* sent Redcrosse a friend request. Personal message: '"Oh, woe is me! You've won me from Sansfoy! Listen to my pitiful tale full of sorrow and woe!"
Redcrosse and Fidessa* are now friends.
Redcrosse is taking a break with Fidessa* and chilling out underneath this tree.
The Tree is Ow.
Redcrosse is OMG A TALKING TREE.
The Tree has shared his sad tale. Sympathize with, Listen carefully to, or Learn from the tree?
Redcrosse learned nothing from that story. Nothing nothing nothing.
The Dwarf thinks his master is an idiot. Possibly full of sound and fury. Possibly signifying nothing.
               Shakespeare: Hey, Eddie, don't steal my lines!
               Edmund Spenser: It's not me, it's the Dwarf.
               Redcrosse: I signify lots of things!
               The Dwarf: I'm not having this conversation anymore.

Una and The Lion are now freinds.
Redcrosse* sent Una a friend request.
Una and Redcrosse* are now friends.
Sansloy invited Redcrosse* to the event “Family Vengeance”
Redcrosse* changed his profile picture and contact info.
Sansloy wrote on Archimago’s wall: “Sorry about that, dude! Thought you were that Redcrosse fellow.”
The Lion is no longer online.

Una is very, very confused. And sad that she lost her Lion.
Two people like this.
Reader One: You’re tell me you’re confused – I was lost three cantos ago!
Reader Two: Seconded.

Redcrosse and Fidessa* added “The House of Pride” to the Places I’ve Been Application.
Redcrosse likes this Pride place. Although the queen isn’t very nice and didn’t give me any bling. I deserve bling. But I’m not proud, no, never.
The Dwarf could make a comment about the whole ‘pride’ thing and a certain crimson friend of his, but won’t.
Fidessa* sent Sansjoy a Token of Affection. Poke, Kiss, or Send a Token of Affection back?

Lucifera, Queen of the House of Pride, invited Redcrosse to the event “Death Match to Prove Your Worth”
Redcrosse, Fidessa* and Sansjoy are attending this event.
Sansjoy added Sansfoy and Sansloy as brothers using the Family Tree Application.
Sansjoy sent Redcrosse a private message. "My name is Sansloy. You killed my brother. Prepare to die."
Redcrosse sent Sansjoy a private message. "Yeah, whatever. (And what is up with your names???)"
Sansjoy sent Redcrosse a Fatal Blow. Die, Surrender, or Send a Fatal Blow back?
Fidessa* wrote on Sansjoy’s wall “Take the shield and me, too!”
       Redcrosse: Okay!
Fidessa* is Oh crap.
Redcrosse sent Sansjoy a Fatal Blow. Die, Surrender, or Send a Fatal Blow back?
Fidessa* sent Sansjoy a Dark Cloud. Hide, Flee, or send a Dark Cloud back?
The Dwarf is wandering around the castl –oh lord, that’s scary.
The Dwarf has tagged Redcrosse in the album “This could be you”

Redcrosse: Okay, we’re leaving now.




Sansloy sent Una a friend request.
Sansloy sent Una a friend request.
Sansloy sent Una a friend request.

Una wrote on Sansloy’s wall: “Stop trying to friend me! You kidnapped me and tried to do a lot of other nasty things!”
The Satyrs wrote on Sansloy’s wall: “Leave the lady alone, or face us. Capiche?”
Una is now friends with The Saytrs.
Una is now friends with Saytrane.
Sansloy sent Saytrane A Challenge! Throw a Glove at, Charge, or Send a Challenge back!
Saytrane is locked in an epic battle and will be busy for the rest of the story.



The Giant Orgoglio wrote on Redcrosse’s wall. “Hi, I’m about to kill you now.”
Redcrosse is weak…so weak…
Fidessa* knows that her evil plan is working.
Fidessa* and Orgoglio are now friends.



The Dwarf met up with Una again today! Happy day!
Prince Arthur is now friends with Una and The Dwarf.
Una tagged Prince Arthur in a note “The Backstory we should have gotten at the beginning of the story”
             Prince Arthur: Gee, that’s really sad that your parents are being held captive in a tower by a dangerous dragon. Admire me for my shining prettiness!
              Una: Yeah, I was hoping you could help me with that dragon business.
              Prince Arthur: Sorry, busy being the personification of magnificence! But I will help you get Redcrosse back from the Giant and HE can do that whole dragon slaying thing.
              Una: *grumble*

Prince Arthur saved Redcrosse from certain death today. That’s right, I’m awesome like that.
Redcrosse and Arthur are now friends.
Fidessa* updated her contact info.
Duessa changed her profile picture.

Redcrosse is AGGHHH! RUN AWAY.
Redcrosse and Duessa are no longer friends.

Prince Arthur tagged Una and The Dwarf in a note “My completely useless backstory”
              Thomas Malory: Say, this is good stuff.
              Edmund Spenser: Really, you don’t say.
             Chretien De Troyes: If copyright infringement had been invented by now I would sue you both blind.

Redcrosse, and Una added “The cave of Despair” to the Places I’ve Been Application.
Redcrosse and Trevisan are now friends.
Redcrosse and Despair are now friends.
Una wrote on Redcrosse’s wall – “What the hell are you doing? Get out of the damn cave!”
Redcrosse doesn’t know what he would do without Una.

Despair is trying not to be online anymore.

Redcrosse and Una added “The House of Holiness” to the Places I‘ve Been application.
Redcrosse and Una are now friends with Charissa, Fidelia, Speranza, and Caelia.
Fidelia has tagged Redcrosse in a note “Thinly Veiled Protestant Bible Exegeses Allusion”
Speranza sent Redcrosse a Piece of Flair – “Here, have an anchor!”

Redcrosse is chilling out with Penanace, Remorse, and Repentance.
Una is going to save Redcrosse from himself. Again.
Redcrosse and The Holy Hermit of Contemplation are now friends.
The Holy Hermit wrote on Redcrosse’s wall “See, aren’t I much more fun than those Remorse fellows? And oh, BTW, here’s your backstory.”

Redcrosse has changed his profile picture and contact info.

Redcrosse is now Saint George.
Una invited Saint George to an event: Slay-A-Dragon-And-Save-The-Day!
Saint George will be attending this event.
Saint George exchanged blows with the Dragon!
Saint George is still fighting the dragon!
Saint George fell in a pool of water. Bollocks.
          Saint John: Nice baptism metaphor!
          Saint George: I wasn’t trying, but thanks!
          Saint George: Have anyone of you tried fighting a dragon while wet? Just wondering.

Saint George is really tired of this. Just make it stop already. We know it was epic.
Edmund Spenser: Yes, but this is the first epic written in English! It has to be REALLY epic!
Saint George: You sadist.

Saint George was welcomed into the garden of heavenly delights today. Oh, Una, you make me so happy.
         Reader One: Okay, I give up. No one cares about the rest of this story anyway.
        Edmund Spenser: *is hurt*
        William Shakespeare: See, this is why I have more friends than you do.
        Edmund Spenser: Shut up.

Saint George received a friend request from Saint David, Saint Patrick, Saint Margaret, Merry Olde England, and Moscow.
Saint George joined the group “Patron Saints” “The Heavenly Choirs” and “Why yes, I am that guy in the Icon.”
          Una likes this.

Edmund Spenser tagged Redcrosse in a note “Needed: cast of characters for medieval-styled epic.” Also in this note: Britomart, Guyon, Prince Arthur, Merlin, and a bunch of other people.
               Saint George: There is no way you are getting me to come back for another book, Spenser. We’re through.

Case of the Mondays

So, it seems like the world is out to get me and everyone I know today. Huge exams happened, people were violently ill, papers got handed back with horrible grades on them, hurt feelings came to the boiling point, expletives were exchanged in large quantities and my afternoon apple was full of mold and tasted like lemon scented cleaning solution. It was just a bad day to be here, in other words.

In the midst of all this Monday nastiness, I have managed to retain some shred of hope that the rest of this week will be better. And in honor of all my long-suffering freinds, who could all probably use a kind word and a glass of something stronger right now, I am re-posting a poem I wrote a little while ago on the subject of bad days. I hope it is a source of comfort to those of you who, like my freinds, have come down with a bad case of the Mondaze.

It Could Be Worse

The days for frowning are varied, I know,

when the rain won't stop and your car won't go

The days that poets never praise

are the days that require my special phrase

It's nothing fancy, just four little words

to remind me my troubles are far from absurd.

When your brow is furrowed, expression terse,

remember this -- It could be worse.

Oh, some will rant and some will curse

I say only "It could be worse!"

I could be sick, or stuck in bed!

I could be hurting -- I could be dead!

The sky could be falling, the grass could be blue,

I could be small bits in somebody's stew.

My life's going forward instead of reverse --

I can get past this; It could be worse.

We haven't hit bottom, the end's still in sight,

There will be a stop to this terrible blight.

I have people who love me, and people who care

(and people who don't want me ripping out hair!)

So when your day stinks, remember this verse,

and repeat after me -- "It could be worse!"

Hyper for Hypertext!

This week I took a break from my typical writing routine to try something different, something so groundbreaking and new that I had to explain to every single person I told this project about what it was, exactly, that I was writing. Short stories? Yes, everyone knows one or two of those. Fanfiction? Okay, it's sort of like a short story. But Hypertext? Hold the phone there, buddy; what on earth is a hypertext story?

Well, Imaginary Rhetorical Device Man, I'm glad you asked.
In the process of describing a hypertext story, I explained it as 'a series of photographs no one will ever see in the order they were taken'  'a story written on notecards you throw up in the air and read in a different order every time' and ' a labyrinth out in cyberspace'.  It's a series of events  -- things like text, pictures, music, videos -- strung together by hyperlinks. The idea is that the story is partially created by its author and partially created by its user. When we read a text, we bring our experiences to it and interpret the text through that experience. Hypertext stories bring this to the forefront -- our very experience of the text itself will be different than our freind's, and that is the first thing we will talk about when we discuss the story -- the experience.

I didn't write the story so much as I built it -- I created a map where I wanted all my links to go and then starting carving out bits of trail where someone could stop, take a breather, admire the flowers. Some are paths that lead to more paths and some are paths that lead to dead ends you have to back-button out of.  There's music, some quotes, some pictures. It's not just a story, as I've said it's a stereophonic, mulitmedia event. (Much like this blog!) And not a purely textual event, as I've just described.

You can read the whole thing (or parts of the whole thing) here at Past Lives: A Hypertext Story

Graphic Novels -- Great Books?

Mmm, canon. A big word with a lot of punch. Add another letter and it will shoot you. Leave it as it is and it'll fill your English classes with misery.

The idea of "The Canon" has come up in classes twice in the past week. In Pedagogy, we're discussing what parts of the Western Canon  we should keep and which books we'd pitch. (The Scarlet Letter, unsurprisingly, was binned without question. Somewhere millions of high school students should be rejoicing.) And in Contempory Lit we were discussing graphic novels and whether any of them should be considered for entry into the sainted halls of canonical literature.

Like Sister Mara always does, after we'd considered if Persepolis (our graphic selection for the semester) could potentially be a canonical choice someday, she asked us if we could consider using a graphic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice instead of having students muddle through Austen's volumious prose in the original.

In my mind, this is a great question becuase it makes us consider two things --
1.Why are we having the kids read this book in the first place? Is it the complexity of the language or the plot or the themes expressed throughout the book or is it simply because we read it and gosh darnit, someone else should, too?
2.What do you add or subtract from the book when it becomes a graphic novel?

Thankfully, Pedagogy has already answered question one for me.  We continue to read the Canon because we want to challenge students with the language, there are supposedly universal themes we can find in classic novels, they discuss Big Ideas and by being 'foreign' to our students, they allow us a space to teach them how it is we're supposed to read, not just taking in the words but finding the meaning behind them.

Question Two has also already been discussed, this time in Contemporary Lit. When we read a graphic novel, we need to take on a new way to read, using the pictures in tandem with the text. When Pride and Predjudice (or any other canon book) becomes a graphic novel, it loses some of the language and complexity that English teachers love so much but adds images so that visual learners might be able to connect to the text more. To me it seems like the same process that occurs when a book becomes a movie -- the themes and big ideas should still be there, but in an abbreviated version. In the movie there is less room for the storytext, or plot events; in the graphic novel there is less room for the storytelling text. What we loose in storytelling text, however, we gain back in relevance for our students. Maybe Pride and Prejudice doesn't seem like such an old and out of date story when Eliza Bennet has a face we can see.

I have a different perspective on Canon entirely: for me, the word means what my English teacher mind needs it to mean, the accepted cultural representations of the Western world. But it also means what fanfiction makes it mean -- the world according to a specific author. In fanfiction, every text can be a source of 'canon'. To be canonical does not mean that it belongs to an elite group but rather that it follows the rules well. This, I think, is interesting -- in subverting the world of print literature and copyright, we've taken a word that meant something very insular and turned it on its ear to make it mean something inclusive.

I think if we as English teachers take the fanfiction definition of canon as our guidepost when we're choosing novels our classes might not be so universally disliked. Fanfictioneers choose their canons because they find them (or can make them) relevant to their lives. If we can do the same in English Class, using both the Canon with a capital C and the rest of the literature out there, we might get more kids on the reading wagon.

And who knows -- maybe they'll like the graphic version of "War and Peace" so much they'll be tempted to try the original...

A House Full Of Books

A big part of teacher education at Saint Ben's is the idea of the reflective teacher, one who examines her own experiences in the classroom as a teacher and as a student and determines what it is that worked and didn't work. So it happens that my assignment for Pedagogy this week is an autobiography of myself as a reader.
If any of you have been to my house, you will know immediately the wall to which I am referring in the introduction. As it was in my youth, it is full of books that have always dared me to build my own library.


A House Full of Books

My earliest memory of reading does not actually involve reading at all. It involves books. A whole, wall-wide bookshelf's worth of books. They weren't even interesting looking books, either; Mostly they were religious texts and the remnants of my parents' personal college libraries. But the wall of books intrigued me, and when I was old enough to reach, I pulled down a volume whose title I recognized (the Complete Sherlock Holmes) and began reading it. A heavy task for a girl of twelve, and one that thoroughly confused me. But I'd made some assumption early on in childhood about reading and what it does for people -- I'd made the connection that if you read certain books, people give you a certain kind of power. It didn't matter that I hadn't understood most of Sherlock Holmes; merely by saying I had read it people gave me a look of almost awed appreciation. (I re-read Sherlock Holmes several summers ago: I still didn't understand it.) It's a lesson I've carried into adulthood. Have I read Moby Dick, Vanity Fair, War and Peace? Yup. Now, ask me if I enjoyed them. Whole different story there.

I mark time in my elementary school memories by the books we were reading. In first grade I realized what I didn't want to read -- the  PeeWee Scouts books by Judy Delton. In every book Molly came up with a stupid plan and got into a lot of trouble trying to implement it. And don't even start me on Henry and Mudge or Amber Brown. I hated reading about people getting into trouble in first grade. The idea confused and annoyed me. I wanted to read about successful people.

Second grade was Stone Fox -- I remember reading the book in one sitting and sitting down to sharing time realizing that everyone else had only read the first chapter. I began to hate reading for school. Everyone else read too slowly.  If I finished my book I could start another one, right? No, Mercury. We have to discuss this one first. (Insert annoyed sigh from one small second grader.)

Third grade was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I loved it, but we watched the BBC miniseries version and I remembered thinking "Man, I wish someone would make a better version of this." During my freshman year of college, Walden Media finally obliged me. Third Grade was also The Giver, and Fourth grade was Number the Stars and a confusing book called The Silver Crown, a text I went back to in middle school and still didn't understand.

But fifth grade...Fifth grade created a monster. In fifth grade we read the first Harry Potter book. And what's more, we read it aloud. (I'm twenty one years old and I still love reading Harry Potter out loud.) To get another chapter of Harry Potter was a privilege, a treasure, a new adventure before we had to leave Challenge class and go back to normal fifth grade stuff. Harry Potter was my hero, my savior...my friend. He fought dragons and his ugly cousin and had really cool friends that did really cool stuff. (I didn't start seeing myself as Hermione until middle school.) As Harry grew, I grew, too. His final book is being made into a movie and I'm graduating college this year. By the time he's done growing, so am I.

In sixth grade I remember being angry. This movie that had been adapted from some old fantasy book from way back when was stealing Harry's thunder. Budge up, Frodo Baggins, let the new kid through. In sixth grade I wanted nothing to do with Lord of the Rings. My friend (and sometime nemesis) Luke had already read Lord of the Rings and really enjoyed it. I didn't want to read it if Luke had. It wasn't until 8th grade that Tolkien caught up with me. Finally I gave the hobbit a chance...and fell in love again. Eighth grade I discovered that writing could have immensity, that stories didn't all have to take place here, with human concerns. I also read Dune that year and loved it, devouring the rest of Frank Herbert with the relish of a devoted biblogastronome.

A strong current throughout my childhood was the library. Every week during the summer, the worn maroon library bag was hauled across town to be filled with every kind of book you could imagine. As a kid I made a summer's study of every Cinderella adaptation I could find, or all the Irish myths in the children's section, or the entire works of Lloyd Alexander. Those were good summers. Filling the summer reading program timesheets was easy--  if you remembered to mark your hours down. It wasn't ever that I hadn't spent fourty to sixty hours reading that summer, because the chance was good that I had. I just didn't enjoy filling in the fifteen minute marks. Who sat down and read for fifteen minutes at a time? It didn't occur to me then, as it sometimes does not occur to me now, that most people take more than a day or two to read a book.

I took the library seriously because my mother took the library seriously. It was important to her that her children read, and at least with my sister and I, she succeeded. With my brothers it was a different story, but there are still some books that will tease them out of their computer chairs. Now that I'm old enough to drive I take our family minivan and the same maroon library bag across town to our newly remodeled library building, and sometimes, just for laughs, I'll descend down into the children's section and park myself in one of their big comfy chairs to treat myself to a picture book.

A lot of my memories of elementary and middle school reading have stuck with me as a reader because they highlight what and why I didn't like to read -- to answer questions on a test, to keep pace with the rest of the class, to address 'age appropriate' issues, or to inch through it a chapter at a time.  I had to read books deemed 'age appropriate' at a time when I was reading at an 8th grade level in a K-5 library and there weren't too many books to chose from with that wonderful little reader's rating in the front cover. And all this ties into the idea of CHOICE and SPEED. In my classroom, I will make every effort to make sure that there some choice involved in reading and the discussion of that reading. I'm going to work to find some system that works for slow readers and fast ones. I'm going to build a house full of books in my classroom, and I'm going to try my hardest to make sure that everyone finds one book that says "Wow, that character's my hero."

Hello, Universe Speaking

I love and hate going back to college. I love seeing everyone and having things to read and discuss with people and sharing everything you did over your summer. I hate remembering what it feels like to be overwhelmed. Two days of class and already I have a whole novel to read, 6 articles to digest and three chapters in a textbook to prepare for discussion.

A note -- that's only for one class. It's my night class and only meets on Thursdays, but still. This is a little excessive.

But there's another thing I like about back to school -- there's a strange way the Universe seems to speak to you in the people it throws across your path. In the library, for instance, this transfer student came into the stacks where I was looking for a book and very nicely asked if I could help her find a book. Your lucky day, I said. You picked the one person out here right now who works here!

The Universe must also be trying to tell me something through my homework -- in three of my classes I've been asked to write what amounts to a short summary of my reading life. Since I've only finished with the one due today (and I rather like it) I'm going to share it here. I was given on the title as a prompt; it is called "Of Books, Reading, and Me: a Personal Essay."



When my family re-painted my room several summers ago, my parents asked me (in between moving out every single piece of furniture I owned and painting my walls Sherwood Green) if there was anything I needed to add to my room before moving back in. My answer was simple -- a bigger bookshelf. Two little shelves would suffice no longer. Already shelved two books deep, my book collection was growing and there was no place for it to go except the floor, an idea my mother wasn't particularly keen on. So in the new, taller bookshelf came, quickly filled and just as quickly crowded.


I might be a child of the digital age, but I still haven't given up on the analog version of my favorite pastime. New books are added to the shelves all the time, and with far more reward than watching space on a hard drive slowly fill with files. A full hard drive is annoying -- a full bookshelf is an accomplishment, a challenge, even. When I open a physical book, I'm opening up the culmination of four thousand years of human story-telling and -sharing technology. When I read, I owe that experience to all the people who made books possible, the men who spent hours cutting type forms and the women who slaved over paper presses and mills and the printer's children, somewhere in time, who had to put away all the size ten font in those tiny type trays, and I owe it to them to respect the house for the story.


Maybe setting a little bit of type myself has made me more aware of the physical presence of the book. After spending six hours filling three by three inch pages with my own words, and another ten hours printing them, I have a great deal more respect for men like Ben Franklin, who spent their days setting tiny pieces of type for ideas that weren't even their own. The physical presence of a book will make or break my experience of it -- Over the past summer I gave up on what was probably a very engaging story because the type was too small and too closely set for me to read it easily.


But not all my books are on my shelf, and not all my reading is done 'the old fashioned way.' Some of the short stories I read will never find themselves inside a codex, or even on the shiny screen of an e-reader. Some of the news stories or observations on life are not on the path to becoming 'blooks', or books from blogs. And I like it that way. Just as there's something magically permanent about holding a book, there's something wonderfully transitive about reading and sharing thoughts online. Unlike a book, which requires resources and much physical space and contact to manufacture and share, the internet has created a space where stories of all kinds can be shared spur-of-the-moment, without the boundaries imposed by printing off the material to be shared. I might enjoy reading analog, but I enjoy writing digital. My blog broadcasts my thoughts on reading to the whole internet-using world twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It’s immediate, boots-on-the-ground writing; I can be as elegant or as mindless as I chose. Without a publisher to please or a specific public to satisfy, the entire world is open to my critique.

I’m a child of the Twilight generation. Not just because of Stephanie Meyer’s breakout bestseller, but because people my age are at a crossroads, not quite in the light of the vanishing Day of the Printed book nor fully immersed in the e-reader illuminated Night yet. Wherever it is I stand on the debate between whether the print book is dead or still very much living, at the point where books, reading, and my life converge there’s a single objective in mind – sharing a story in whatever way seems best. Sometimes that’s a book and sometimes that’s the internet and sometimes it’s the oldest story-sharing method of all – the human voice. When I sit down to read to my sister, it doesn’t matter to her whether I’m reading from a computer screen or a printed page; her only concern is that the story being told is a good one.

Quiet Time

I talk a lot on this blog about secular writing -- writing stories, writing songs, writing about my life. I'm going to take a break from that for a little while and talk about something I don't discuss a lot about: writing prayers, which I have been known to do from time to time. Oftentimes when I write a prayer I don't actually commit it to paper -- I just say whatever comes to mind about what I'm thankful for around a dinner table or with some friends. Yet this, too, is writing. Some of those have been pretty good, so I've starting writing prayers, on paper, for other things.

It's my first day back at campus, and lately I've been thinking a lot about the fantastic examples on how to live life that I see in the people around me. So I thought I'd write a prayer about it. A freind of mine, Cody, who is a great deal more religious than I am, told me that when writing a prayer one is actually praying it a number of times while one composes it, going over the words and the ideas one wants to put on paper.

As I sit here in my t-shirt from the Arboretum near my house, it's not hard to imagine me as a tree-hugger. I love trees, and I love being outdoors, and I love the image of the Tree of Life, as well as that line in John's gospel "I am the vine, and you are the branches; Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned." People are a lot like trees; we grow up, we reach out to people, we put down roots. When I first had the idea for this prayer, I only had the first line -- "You have set me, a tiny seedling, in the midst of a great forest."

As I finished writing this piece this morning, I was thinking a lot about the freshmen and women who are just starting their orientation process today at Saint Ben's and Saint John's. Really, this prayer is for them, the tiny seedlings who are being transplanted in this forest here in central Minnesota and the many other seedlings in other colleges all over the United States who are beginning classes this week, including my brother. I pray that they can grow tall where they are planted, just as I feel I have.


Great Creator God, Cultivator of the Universe,
you have set me, a tiny seedling, in the midst of a great forest.
Let me grow here, let me prosper;
Let me reach up my branches and feel the warmth of your sun, and the cooling comfort of your rain.
Let the great trees around me be my shelter and my guide;
Let me learn from their example, that I may grow tall here in your Garden of gardens.
When the wind blows, let me bend, but not break;
Where there is rottenness in other trees, let none break my branches or uproot me.
Let my roots grow deep, that none may move me from your holy ground.
May the others in my life use the gifts you have given me,
the shelter of my arms and the fruits of my soul and the shade of my spirit.
When I die, let me seep back into the soil
and enrich another.

Drawing From the Model

When Edith Wharton speaks of Ellen Olenska's unorthodox education in her novel "The Age of Innocence" she speaks of 'drawing from the model' as a thing 'never dreamed of before,' an element of Ellen's education that most of New York society can never condone. If we may take "drawing from the model' to mean that Ellen, like many aspiring artists, learned anatomy and muscleture from sketching both men and women in the nude, it's no small wonder the rest of 19th century New York found it so appalling.

Writers of fanfiction also draw from the model -- we take our source text and strip it bare to see how muscles move and bones work underneath the skin. We then take those basic anatomical ideas back to our own canvases and do something new with them.

For the next chapter of A Rose in the Briars, however, I'm finding that drawing from the model has become rather difficult. The scene is a simple one -- two characters are getting married. I need a marriage formula. Tolkien gives me little to go on here -- of the two marriages mentioned in his text, the first (Aragorn and Arwen's) is unspecific and the second (Sam and Rosie's) is unapplicable.

Having nothing in my original model, I turned to my friends at the Gwethil for some suggestions as to who I might get to officiate this important scene. Simon suggested no officiant, in the Pre- Council of Trent Christian tradition, and Robyn suggested having a justice or magistrate. Having no sourcebooks on early Catholic pontifical councils lying around my house, I took the opportunity to ask my grandparents, who know a great deal more about Catholic theology than I do. They, too, were stumped, but suggested instead the Jewish tradition instead.

It is much easier to find documents about the customs surrounding a Jewish wedding than it is to find those pertaining to marriage customs in 14th century Christian Europe. One of those elements common to both types of marriage is a marriage contract, in the Jewish tradition called a ketubah. It lists the date, who is marrying whom, what each party is bringing to the marriage in terms of material goods and what each party should expect of the other. I used a form similiar to the one found here.

Simple, right? A large part of my ceremony will now be the two parties reading and signing the contract to make it valid and sharing a cup of wine, found in both the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. Except, of course, that marriage contracts involve giving dowries and those usually involve currency, something ELSE Tolkien didn't include much of in Lord of the Rings. After searching "middle earth currency' and coming up with ONE quote on Gondorian currency from Tolkien's History of Middle Earth Volume 7 --

"Similarly farthing has been used for the four divisions of the Shire, because the Hobbit word tharni was an old word for 'quarter' seldom used in ordinary language, where the word for 'quarter' was tharantin 'fourth part'. In Gondor tharni was used for a silver coin, the fourth part of the castar (in Noldorin the canath or fourth part of the mirian). "

Ah, helpful. Currency conversions to more currencies I still don't know about, because Tolkien never discussed the buying power of the castar, only silver pennies. So I arbitrarily decided a Gondoran castar is equal to the late medieval ducat, and using some average dowry figures from the same period converted the whole mess to some numbers I could use.

If Eleanor of Montfort's dowry was 200 pounds a year in 1230, and she's about the same rank as Serawen, what would the same dowry be in Gondorian castari?

Well, Alex, one ducat is equal to 9 shillings 4 pence (according to Sir Robert Palgrave's The History of Politcal Economy, found on GoogleBooks) or 85 pence, and there are 240 pence in one pound (there being ten pence in a shilling and 12 shillings in a pound). If we multiply the number of pence in a pound by the number of pounds and then divide that by the number of pence in a ducat, we should come out with the number of ducats and therefore the number of castari needed to give Serawen a nice nest egg: roughly 565 castari.

Fhew!

And the moral of the story is this -- Not every canon is perfect. Not every model will give you a perfect idea of how the human body moves. Even Tolkien, who has more than nine volumes of supplemental material to his name, doesn't cover all his bases. Covering those bases is what writing fanfiction is all about.

I just wish sometimes I didn't have the compulsion to be so thorough.

Character Development

I don't enjoy summer vacation. All this unstructured time gives me the idea that I have nothing to do when, in reality, I have lots of things to do. Go get a haircut. Finish my student loans. Update my resume. Write blog posts. When you're scheduled you find time to do things becuase you know you won't have time later. When you're not scheduled, the famous phrase "Aw, I'll just do it later" becomes later and later and later until you find you've never gotten around to doing it at all.

One of those things for me, unfortunately, has been blog posts.

Melisa, one of my writing class students, wanted to know how to develop her characters better, and I didn't have anything to tell her. How do you teach character development? I've always been told I have well-developed characters, and I'm trying to figure out why that is. What makes someone two dimensional or three? Where does that leap come in?

Storm-brain over at the Veritas Writing site thinks well-developed characters come after filling out a worksheet of things like "Things this character has in their pockets" and "Foods this character will never eat" as well as more mundane questions they might ask you at the doctor's office like "Height" and "Mother's maiden name." Other writers agree with this technique, and I think to a certain extent it helps, but a well-developed character embodies all the things on the worksheet without having them mentioned in the story.

A common mistake that beginning writers make (and I've been there, I've done that, I'm guilty, too) is to create this elaborate mental picture and then share the entire thing with the reader in the first several pages of the story. The reader doesn't care that your leading lady is exactly 145 pounds and her eyes are really cerulean instead of just blue -- they care about her thoughts, her emotions, what she's going to contribute to the story.

In the first few pages of the Rose rewrite, which I'm going to use as an example here because it's recent and people seem to generally like Rhoswen, the reader learns several things about my main character, Rhoswen of Anfalas. They learn she has dark hair, that she's good-natured and kind, that she is tallish (taller than her maidservant, anyway), that she is going to be married to someone she has never met and she's sad about it not because she's afraid of marriage but because she doesn't look forward to leaving her home. We don't know that she's a gardener, that she enjoys playing the harp or that she has a fairly good singing voice because we don't need to know. Her skill with the harp doesn't come up until the fifth or sixth chapter becuase it didn't need to.

When characters are presented for judgement in front of the reader, they say "I did this." Well developed characters say "I did this because..." and give a reason. The reason is not always immediate -- it would have been really easy to write Rhoswen as a woman who was afraid of marriage. But the first reason she gives for being hesitant about leaving home is that she's going to be homesick. She's not afraid of marriage -- she's afraid of childbirth, because her own mother died in childbed. (A little hokey, I know, but my mother's afraid of heart disease because her mother died of heart disease -- it's kind of the same thing, right?)

Long story short, well developed characters have motivation. I have a theory that character motivation is directly linked to author motivation. Why YOU are writing this story will probably have a great effect on how much thought you give to why the characters are doing what they are doing. Oftentimes beginning writers simply want to be part of the story, and this is reflected in the characters they write. Why are you doing this? Because my creator wanted to. They don't have enough internal substance (all those little background details) to stand on their own when they stand before the Writing Gods and are asked to explain their existence.

So, Rhoswen, why are you caring for the wounded in Osgiliath even though it makes you a little uncomfortable?


Well, Reader, I'm doing it because it's something I'm good at and getting better at, because it's part of my duty as the future wife of the steward to care for the people, and because having a job leaves me less time to think about Boromir being gone. At least that last one's what I tell myself, but my freinds don't think it's working.

If you had asked the first incarnation of Rhoswen that question I don't know that she would have had an answer. Actually, the first incarnation of Rhoswen wasn't a healer or a gardener. She didn't have any hobbies. She was a showpiece.

Art imitates life -- My characters are sixty percent me and forty percent who I want to be. When I need to write that forty percent I study the people around me, what I like about them and dislike about them.

Writers need to distill, clarify and collect people as well as experiences, not only becuase it helps them describe things but also because it gives them an arsenal of feelings, emotions and settings with which to play. When I wrote the last chapter of A Rose in the Briars, a chapter that deals heavily with grief and funerals, I thought a lot about all the funerals I've been to and the emotions and actions of the other people that were there. I also used the ten-year old version of myself to write the ten-year old Miriel, who appears at her father's funeral trying desperately not to cry. The observation Rhoswen makes about her ("Why do children think they must take on the world?") was something that was said to me when I was ten and wondering why Slobadan Milosevic was such a terrible, terrible person and Yugoslavia was such a political mess.

Motivation is only one small part of character development -- Does anyone have anything they think I've missed?

The Writing Workshop -- A Reflection

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned – It’s been over two weeks since my last blog post. There’s really no excuse for it other than monumental laziness. In the middle of Midwestern July heat, one finds oneself content to merely sit and wallow and occasionally pick up a book.

Last Wednesday my writing class met for the last time with a grand total of ten participants. It’s been interesting to see who comes back and who doesn’t – throughout the course of the four weeks I had a grand total of twenty-two people  show up, with about four kids who showed up to every class (Melisa, Kahil, Hadiya, and Monica, you’re the best!) and seven or eight more who tried their darnest to make it to at least three because they’d forgotten week one or had to be on vacation. As my grandfather commented, it might have been wiser to charge something for the program because then people would have a reason to come – they’d be "invested" in it.

I didn’t feel right charging people to come hear me talk about writing – for starters, I don’t think what I had to say was anything worth charging for. I was sharing experience, not proven and published fact. If I had a New York Times Bestseller under my belt or a Booker Prize, then yes, I would start thinking about selling the secrets to my writing success. As it is, I was happy I wrote six pages of my fanfic yesterday. My writing is supposed to be non-profit to keep the copyright folks happy and I think that’s the way it’s going to stay.

Over four weeks I learned just as much from my kids as I hope they learned from me. They taught me that it’s unsafe for my voice to talk for an uninterrupted 45 minutes, that this is very boring for middle schoolers in particular anyway, and that one has to be very careful with the way one words one’s advertisements. (Some parents signed their kids up thinking it would be an ESSAY writing workshop, which makes sense, given that all the other teen programs at the library are geared towards school somehow.)

In their evaluations on Wednesday night, they reminded me of many other things as well. Kids need time to practice and share their ideas (“More sharing time, please!”). High schoolers have different writing needs than middle schoolers do (“Grammar wasn’t very helpful – more on character development?”) but everyone can use positive criticism (“Thanks for all the great feedback – really helped my confidence!”). I also learned, once again, that you cannot please everyone – I had high achieving students so elitist in their reading habits I’d never heard of anything they’d read and kids who hated to read whose parents had signed them up in the hopes that I would work some magic on their kids and open books for them. (Newsflash to parents – if your child is in middle school and hates to read, it may be that they have a problem a qualified reading instructor needs to sort out. Also, if they hate to read they will probably also hate to write)

If I do this writing workshop again, I’ll be more selective on age – middle schoolers in one section, high schoolers in another. I’ll make the class longer (an hour and a half) and make sure I have enough handouts for everyone. I’ll request a better meeting space so everyone has a place to write and I'll come to class better prepared than I was this time. I’ll listen better. I’ll remember your names. I"ll always bring pens and paper. I’ll find more resources for different writing development topics like character development so that students with specific needs or wants will be able to get the help they want and deserve. I’ll make them read a little more and have discussions. I'll make your assignments easier and cleaner cut.

My students also told me something I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else – “You’d make a great middle school teacher!” Three or four of my students told me that, and that made me feel really good. Tomorrow I have to go in and take the Praxis, a big liscensure test that will measure whether I can, indeed, begin my student teaching in the spring. Let’s hope for the sake of future middle schoolers in Minnesota and elsewhere that I pass.

Why I am not enjoying “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia”

As part of the summer reading program at my local library, I have to read books from a number of different categories – a novel, a non-fiction book, a biography. I decided I’d choose for my biography the life of someone whose time period or lifestyle I’m interested in as a broader research topic. My first choice was William Marshall, but alas, the reknowned Plantagenet knight has few books and fewer biographies devoted to his life and times, a problem I think someone should solve very soon, because he’s a fascinating historical character. I didn’t have a second choice as I trolled the ‘Biography’ section of the library, and the books I was seeing on the shelves weren’t helping me either, because the library seems to have stopped buying biographies in the late eighties and nothing looks interesting when the dust cover is sun-faded and the books smell like they haven’t had a good airing in a while. If no one else has read them in a while, why should you, right?

Then it hit me – Showtime is doing a series on the Borgias soon, starring the always amazing Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, the patriarch of an eccentric family whose 15th century exploits would make most gossip magazines today kill for coverage of. I’ll read about the Borgias. Specifically, I’ll read about Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo’s illegitimate daughter and Renaissance bombshell who married three times, had a lot of affairs, and may or may not have poisoned a bunch of people, slept with her brother and organized an orgy at the Vatican.

This girl knew how to party, in other words. How bad can reading her biography be?

Lucrezia has three books on the shelf, none of them published before 1960. Wonderful. I pick the least moldy looking, “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia” by Maria Bellonci (published 1939, translated by Bernard and Barbara Wall, 1953) and check it out, my anticipation on slow simmer. Today I actually sit down to read said book, and about fifty pages in, I can take no more.

I’ve read fifty pages, and what I’ve gotten so far is not “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia”, but rather “The Times and Political Climate Surrounding Lucrezia Borgia, Who’s Really Just in the Title of this Book so Someone Who’s Interested in 15th Century Women Will Be Persuaded to Read About Italian Renaissance Politics.” Lucrezia’s come up ONCE in the first fifty pages of her biography, and in that one instance, she was getting married.

 Eeeeenteresting.

I take a moment to step back and consider why this is. Certainly one can make the argument that in order to understand Lucrezia’s life one has to understand the political circumstances of her father, Rodrigo, who, as I have already mentioned, was Pope Alexander VI. But to open a biography with the events that got her father elected as pope and not with, say, the birth of the title character, seems to me a bit dodgy.

Maybe there’s not enough research material on Lucrezia, and after Miss Bellonci picked her thesis topic figured this out and so padded it out with the available material on the men in Lucrezia’s life to make her three hundred page mark and appease her Ph.D. Thesis Examining Board, who wouldn’t have liked a biography on an Italian Renaissance wildwoman anyway. Too edgy. Not suitable reading material for the Misses Smith and Jones of the world who need good examples of pristine womanhood when they get home from their jobs as secretaries and elementary school teachers.

I’ve been reading Jill Ker Conway’s True North, the second of her three memoirs of her life as an Austrailian academic and a female trying to find a place in the post-secondary system. (For my review of her first memoir, The Road to Coorain, click here) Conway talks a lot about being taken seriously as a female academic interested in studying the contributions of women throughout history, and I wonder if that wasn’t the case with Miss Maria Bellonci circa 1939. It’s a man’s world in academia, and if she wants to write a book about one of history’s leading ladies, what she really has to write is a book about the men surrounding history’s leading ladies and keep her title character in the role she herself is supposed to be playing – a pretty face, a focal point at parties, but not the headliner or the leader of anything worth reading.

It struck me that history writing has changed a lot since this book was written – since women like Conway have worked their way up the ladder and worked to get Women’s Studies on the curriculum and allowed historians and economists and theologians to examine the part of history that can get ignored in history books. Nowadays, women like Antonia Frasier and Alison Weir can write biographies where their subjects can become the center and not the periphery of the world being described. I enjoy reading biographies like that, where I get just enough historical context to get me through the chapter and enough about the person I wanted to read about to sustain my attention.

Now come on, Amanda Foreman or one of you other great literary ladies, get on this Lucrezia Borgia issue and write me a biography I’m not going to have to kill myself reading.

(Interestingly, I read two articles on the “feminization of history” while writing this post – apparently a British historian named David Starkey got his undies in a bunch about a year ago over the fact that some people think the history of Europe wasn’t exclusively piloted by white males. You can read one response to his comments here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6035805.ece )

My Fiesty, Feministy Fourth

I am having a very strangely fiesty, feministy Fourth of July.

First, I was overcome with a sudden wave of anger when I walked into church this morning and hear the choir rehearsing “America.” I explain to my sister that I’m not sure why I’m angry but that it might have something to do with the imperialist, capitalist sentiment that seems to ooze from patriotic songs. We sing nothing but patriotic songs for the rest of the mass, except for The Prayer of Saint Francis and Let There Be Peace On Earth, which I think are very hypocritical for the day when we’re celebrating the proclaimation of the document that started us out on the path to being the world’s warmongers. Which, by the way, I think we should actually read on the Fourth, just like they used to do in the good old days.

Second, I keep seeing this headline on the CSM page -- Fourth of July: Female power triumphs at the movies

When I first read that, I thought “Oh, gee, what cool, feminist, uplifting-for-womenfolk film is coming out this weekend that is getting great reviews at the box office?”

Do you know what the story’s really about? The fact that New Moon is breaking box office records with a primarily female audience. Talk about misdirection on my part.

I finished reading all four books the other day and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. As so many other feminist bloggers have stated, Twilight is a harmful book for young women to read because among other things it glamorizes relationships with abusive characteristics, normalizes relationship violence in Native communities, glorifies a protagonist who thinks she doesn’t mean anything without a man in her life, and above all of this from my perspective, is just second-rate writing to begin with. Heck, it might even be third rate. Maybe my standards are too low. I only started enjoying myself halfway through New Moon when Bella becomes a vampire and actually starts, you know, enjoying her life, or un-life, or whatever you want to call it. Even then I still wasn’t enjoying it much – I rushed through the book in a day and a half and then refused to read anything else for a few days afterwards because I didn’t want to look at another book for fear it’d be just as bad.

Here’s what scares me about the mix of supposed 'female power' and Twilight -- Twilight doesn’t promote female power, it dampens it considerably( for all the reasons listed above and more.) And that women are getting together (in droves, apparently) to share this story instead of another story about the power of female bonding, about healthy love, about…anything else, really, is quite frightening.

I skipped the usual Fourth festivities – My dad and brothers went to go partake in RibFest and the manly activity of eating large hunks of meat (my brother seems to be under the delusion that if he eats a vegetarian meal, he’ll lose face or something) and no one in my house felt like going to the parade or the fireworks. So I went for a four mile bike ride with my mom. And we had fun.

Book Recommendation: The Road from Coorain

I just finished reading Jill Ker Conway’s The Road From Coorain, her memoir about growing up in the Australian Outback in the 1930s and 40s, and realized there’s nothing better in my life at the moment to write about, so I’m furnishing you with a book review.

I didn’t realize this until after I finished the book and read the back cover, but the author was at one point in time the president of Smith College and an accomplished women’s historian, which should have been a huge clue that I’d enjoy this book. As it happens, I checked it out because the cover looked interesting, I’m in love with the idea of the Australian out country, and I was also checking out Eclipse and Breaking Dawn and wanted something a little more intellectual looking in my pile at the check-out line. (I live in fear that the librarians will judge me by what I’m checking out – It’s why I’ve never gotten around to just sitting down for a week during the summer with a heap of trashy romance novels.)

One of the first things I thought after finishing the first page of this wonderful little book is “God, this woman can write. This prose is mind-bendingly brilliant.” And it only got better as I zoomed through the rest of the book. Conway’s descriptions of the back country where she spent her childhood, working and helping her father on their sheep farm, drew me into a landscape I’ve only dreamt of through the poetry of Banjo Paterson. As I read on I couldn’t help feeling a sense of kinship and like-mindedness with Conway; One of the things that continually struck me as the narrative went on was the way she seemed to find the Divine in the harsh but somehow beautiful vistas of the desert around her. Raised by a devoutly anti-Catholic mother and a father who only dabbled in his faith, Conway stayed away from religion for most of her life, but despite this maintains a strong sense of the mightiness of nature and the serenity or intense strength one can find there.

As she moved away from the family farm and into the city, the author turned her insightful prose to examining her relationships, the people who enter her life and finally the academic life she’s easing into at the end of the memoir as a Master’s candidate in history at the University of Sydney. What really interested me towards the end of the book was the way she was drawn towards comparing the Australian Experience of settlement with the similiar American experience settling the West.

Anyway, it was a fantastic book, and I’d recommend it to everyone.

Good News!

This upcoming Wednesday is the first session of my writing class, and as before any endeavor like this, the kind where you set yourself up as the embodiment of all knowledge on a subject and other people have to accept that knowledge from you, I'm very afraid that I'm not credentialed enough to make an impression on these high school students.

Oh, did I mention? I have fourteen people signed up for my class! FOURTEEN! So that's exciting.

Anyway, returning to my lack of credentials. College degree? Working on it. Published? Only in school literary magazines. Nominated for any awards? Nothing anyone else has heard of.

I've only got small feathers in my hat, but even so, sometimes adding another feather helps, even if it's just another small one. Today I got the news that my Percy Jackson story A Goddess's Lament has been nominated for The Veritas Award in the General category.

Yeah, you read that right. I've now been nominated TWICE, once last voting cycle and once this voting cycle. I'm the first person up on that page.  See? Here I am!

Nifty, huh? Here's what my 'anonymous nominator' had to say about why my story deserved to be nominated.

It has this nostalgic reminiscing tone that adds a special feel to the story, and unlike many PJO fanfics, their is no character-bashing or anything like that. The words flow smoothly, and Amphitrite is a very realistic character.

My last nomination said "It puts characters in a new perspective and also shines a light on Amphitrite." Two different nominations with a bit of different reasoning behind them! Excellent!

So just when I was afraid I couldn't write, someone comes along and reassures me that they think I can. It's a good day to be me.


(Oh, and if you want, you can vote for the story by visiting http://fanmortals.webs.com/general.htm after the fall equinox. Or you could just go to fanfiction.net and review it -- I accept anonymous reviews as well as those from people with ff.net accounts)

The Mind in Summer, Idling Along

Having just recently discovered the simultaneous joy and curse that is social gaming on FaceBook (Hello, FrontierVille!) I am ashamed to admit that I haven't had a lot to write about this past week. I also just completed my first week of work, and as kindergarteners are not the most literate of audiences, the most word-based thing I've done in the past week and a half is read a few books (none of them knock-out-of-the-park brilliant) and emcee my library's Poetry Slam, which turned out be a resounding failure because a) someone is telling today's youth that poetry isn't cool and b) the Slam was at 3pm on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless, the three kids that did show up had a great time reading stuff out of books and I think good fun was had by all.

Since feeding my pigs and harvesting my apple trees has been taking up most of my idle time, I haven't been paying very close attention to my feed reader, which I've set to alert me every time FF.net gets a new submission in about ten different categories, among other things. Many of these posts are coming from the Percy Jackson section, and I think that's another reason why I'm breezing through and skipping over a lot of them. There's nothing there that really stands out, nothing that I want to read. I'm also getting a lot of posts from Flamespots, which I've also added to the feedreader just to see how much lag time there is between the story getting posted and someone putting it up as flamable. It's also interesting because occasionally the Flamespots posters will add comments that they've gotten back from the authors, and those are ALWAYS worth a read.

Reading these replies, you get the sense that there seems to be an idea of entitlement in the writing world -- I wrote it, I worked on it, it must therefore be good, and if you don't agree with me, I  have the right and possibly the duty to shout at you. I know this exists because I feel it sometimes. No one is entitled to be recognized as good -- you have to earn that right, through practice, through revision, and through listening to critique. But everyone is entitled to know what they did right and wrong, and it is a duty of owning that right that you must listen to all your supporters and detractors with good grace, and not shout back in your author's comments.

I actually got talking with the three teens at the poetry slam about online reviews, and their response was clear -- everyone needs to get bad reviews once in a while. But one of the teens said something very interesting on the subject of non-complimentary reviews -- "Everyone needs constructive criticism."

Very true, everyone does need concrit. Concrit is what makes the writing world go round. I endeavored to explain to him that in the online writing world there is such a thing as a non-complimentary review that offers very little basis for improvement, which shocked him and my other two audience members (I was at this point doing a little lecture/Q&A on fanfiction).

Does such a thing exist in the face-to-face world? Is it easier to deal with there? Or are the social situations in which writing is shared so exclusive (or so friend- or kinship based) that baseless criticism is seldom found there?

Summer Reading

Ah, the glorious month of June. Home to the beginning of summer, the anniversary of D-Day, the Glorious First of June and at my local library the beginning of Summer Reading Programs. This year's theme, rather lamely, is BANK ON YOUR LIBRARY, just to hammer home to the rest of the community who hasn't heard about their budget troubles. I think it needs to be given a rest, but hey, I go to the library at least once a week, so maybe it just seems like overkill to me.

Anyway, I've made several goals for this summer -- one of them is to finish summer reading, another is to learn how to roll sushi, and the third is to read the last three Stephanie Meyer books. So, yesterday, with great trepidation, I spent a good five minutes in front of the bookshelf at the library contemplating why it was again I wanted to bring these books home. My sister walks up, looks from me to the bookshelf and back again, and says "No. Don't do it."

Not even kidding. That's my sister -- always looking out for me and my continued mental stability. I respond "Well, I know they're terrible...but if I read it then I'll have something to write a blog post about!"

I could just feel the awful leaking out of the book as I went to go check it out.  I'd make a big deal of blogging how bad it is, but someone else is doing that -- if you haven't already heard about it, go check out Alex Reads Twilight, an absolutely hilarious series of YouTube videos done by Alex Day where he reads Twilight and makes fun of how bad it is. (The rate of posts on this subject on his YouTube Channel is a testament to just how difficult Twilight is to get through when you don't want to read it.)

Maybe the little sister and I will watch the Twilight movies and make fun of them while we're at it. Dunno if that will happen, though... To give you some idea of the movies we enjoy, right now we're in the middle of a cracking PBS series called Colonial House. It's reality TV as only PBS and your history teacher can provide, and it's wonderful!

New Moon is sitting next to me as I write this blog post, so obviously it did make it home, but I realized something about reading and books when I put my library books away.

If you need to rationalize why you're getting the book, chances are it's not a good choice for you at the moment.

Beyond the Law -- A Review of Robin Hood.

Being the rabid Ridley Scott fan that I am, last week I went to go see his new movie, Robin Hood, at the theatre. (Being the cheapskate that I am, I went in the morning and paid four dollars less than going at night, because really, ten dollars to see a movie is ridiculous.)

Robin Hood isn't Kingdom of Heaven, let's start with that. I know a lot of reviewers, myself included, went in thinking it would be much of the same material, and it wasn't...to a point. Robin Hood takes place about nine years after the events in KoH, close to the end of Richard's wars in France, which come to an unforeseen halt when Richard dies. The main character, Robin Longstride, is an average man in the ranks of Richard's army, pulled to the king's attention when Richard, on a whim, goes through the camp looking for 'an honest man.' Scott set out to retell Robin Hood, and in that he succeeded, but while he was doing it he took a lot of the fun out of the Robin Hood story and inserted a lot of politics.

I think the big draw of Robin Hood is that he's a man that exists outside of political interests, or if he is involved, his intentions are always very clear -- he's King Richard's man, he supports Richard's causes, and he supports the people. Simple and easy to remember. Scott's Hood should be simple, but instead comes off as much more complicated and politically embroiled than a character who up until a half hour into the movie was just a common archer. He expresses himself much better than a commonborn would have. That's kind of a theme in Scott's movies, but Balian somehow got away with it in KoH. On Robin, the high-handed speeches just sound dull.

What's interesting to me about this movie is the extremely mixed response it got throughout the reviewing world. Most people disliked it, and I can see why. Two sources that liked it a little more than the rest, however, interested me. Feministing.com's regular contributor Anna Marie reviewed it with evident enthusiasm, reporting that she loved the strong female lead offered by Cate Blanchett (appropriate sentiments for a feminist blog) and the revolutionary aspects of the idea that you didn't have to be a noble to speak up an affect change in a society.

The other interesting review is from the National Catholic Register, which is the only weekly paper my house now recieves. Thier film critic, Steven Greydanus, the writer of The Decent Films Guide said it was "more watchable in most respects" than Kingdom of Heaven (a statement I'd like to vehemently disagree with) and judged that "the moral issues [were] less muddled, the hero more compelling, the heroine more relevant, and the romance at least relatable, if not especially engaging."

I've read Greydanus' review at least three times now and I still can't decide if the man liked the movie or not -- halfway through the article he lashes out at Scott's conception of the medieval world,  saying that "I'm sick of this...grim joyless faux realist medieval world with its constant brutality, hypocrisy and debauchery" but adding at the end that the movie should get some points for portraying its main character as a man capable of piety. I agree that the medieval world does get a bum rap in Hollywood, but after that he kind of lost me with his more compelling hero/ relevant heroine argument.

As much as I love Blanchett and the idea of a feminist Marian, that was one of the elements in the movie that didn't sit well with me. Both critics bring it up as something to be praised in Scott's epic, and I'm going to have to disagree. Kingdom of Heaven had a strong female lead in Princess Sybilla, a woman who was interesting because she was hard to understand at times and remarkably transparent in others. Sybilla made sense in the context of her story -- for part of her life she had been a political pawn and needed to continue being a political pawn (something that went against her personality) if she wanted to see her kingdom survive. Marion, on the other hand, makes less sense. Even if her husband had been gone with Richard for ten years, the idea that she would have become this Amazonian leadership lady in that time didn't seem possible in England circa 1200. Is she more relatable? Yes, more people could probably relate to Marion than they could to Sybilla. That doesn't necessarily mean she belonged in the story. A woman taking up a sword at the end of the film? It doesn't even begin to make sense. The feminist element in Robin Hood contributes just as much to the revisionist view of history that Greydanus (rightfully) accuses Scott of as any of the other wildly inaccurate historical elements in the film.

As I tried to figure out how to write this post, I attempted to find some lesson I could take away from the different ways these different people reviewed this film. Anna watched it as a feminist and found something she liked -- Steven watched it as a Catholic and found it lacking. As for myself, watching the film as both a Catholic and a self-identified feminist as well as a lot of other things, I found my lens as an amateur historian taking more and more of my attention away from the others.

I won't claim that I took note of all the inaccuracies in Robin Hood, and I'll certainly admit to ignoring some of the revisionist elements in Kingdom of Heaven. But both movies inspired me to do more research on the period in question -- I have four books from the library on William Marshall (a small character in Robin Hood) and a growing collection of literature on what life was like in Europe and the Latin East in the 1100s. To me, the idea that a piece of media can be a gateway into a wider world of fact-checking and research is a valuable one, and one that is helping me find the joyful Middle Ages behind Hollywood's "faux-realist medieval world", the real links of mutual respect between the Muslim world and the Christian one, and the real proto-feminist figures in the medieval history, women like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegarden of Bingen and Queen Melisande of Jerusalem.

Overall, I'd recommend avoiding the admission price (however low) at the theater and waiting for the DVD of Robin Hood if you were thinking of going to see it. In the meantime, you'd be welcome to join me in reading "Warriors of God" by James Reston or "Four Queens" by Nancy Goldstone for a more historical look at the the Crusades or women in the middle ages.

And if you must have your ridiculous but fantastic crusades, there's always the other Scott named Walter.

New Books, Author Talks, and Fanfic

Let me begin this post by saying that I never buy new books, and when I do, I buy paperbacks. I'm a poor college student and both space and hardcovers are expensive. So when I shell out twenty-six dollars to get a hardcover copy of Rick Riordan's book signed by him (in person!!), it's kind of a big deal for a lot of reasons. I was just as excited as all the ten year olds I was sharing the theatre with, and they were really excited. I got there a half-hour early (the doors opened an hour early) and sat reading my new book against the background of the musical gymnastics of the Tivoli Theater organist and the excited murmurings of the nearly 800 people who'd come to listen to what Mr. Riordan had to say. ( I also observed that I was probably the only college student in the audience, so I don't know what that says about me... or about my fellow college students, for that matter.)

I'm fortunate enough to live in a heavily suburban area with at least one indie bookstore, Anderson's Bookshop, within reach. They're wonderful people there, and they really love what they do. They also bring A LOT of authors to come and sign books, and I got lucky -- Rick Riordan was one of them. So I paid my money and bought my book and went to go hear him speak.  I guessed from his blog that he's a really laid-back, cool kind of guy, and seeing him in person confirmed that for me. (Truth be told, I wouldn't have minded having this guy for a middle school language arts teacher; the teaching profession has lost a special one there.) He basically book-talked his new book, The Red Pyramid, which I thought was funny, since these kids have already both bought it and dragged their parents out on a school night to let them hear the author speak. They're not the ones that need the book 'sold' to them on why it's a good read. But it was good to hear a well-done book talk.

After his prepared remarks, he took a few questions from the audience, most of which I took notes on if I didn't know the answer already. (Ten-year olds ask some really obvious questions sometimes.)

He says he was inspired to write about Ancient Egypt because that was always popular with his students while he was teaching. "Maybe it's the mummies, maybe it's the pyramids -- I don't know exactly why." It takes him about a year to write a whole story, but he's trying to shorten that to six months now that he's writing both the next two books in the Kane Chronicles and the new Camp Half-Blood Series Heroes of Olympus. The title is always the last thing he writes  and the he really made my day by reaffirming something I'm going to share with my writing campers at the end of June.

He said that if there was one thing that he'd recommend to new writers it would be to outline everything that's going to happen in the book before you start writing. That way, he explains, you'll never be stuck on where the story will go next. He talked about how he started writing when he was twelve and there are a lot of stories he never finished, but that's because you're just practicing and you're learning how to write.

A real life example of prewriting! Fantastic! I was really excited for that.

Anyway, I've had a post-it note with a question for Riordan all ready and waiting on my desk since I found out he was speaking at Anderson's -- it was a good question, too, I think. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to ask it to the big group because I think there was a little ageism going on with the microphone lady, but I guess that's what I get for being a college student going to a young adult book signing. The question was this:

Mr. Riordan, on your blog you've made several posts about YouTube videos of tapes of Carter and Sadie Kane that fans have made themselves from the audio clip posted on your website and you say that 'it all must mean something.' I was wondering if you could expand on what you meant by that and what you think of other fan-produced works like fanart and fanfiction based on your work?

Needless to say, I didn't have time to ask all of this in the signing line, so I clipped it down to a very simplistic version of my original question.

Scene.

Me: Mr. Riordan, I have a question. What do you think of fanfiction? [had to add the 'question' marker since I obviously looked old enough not to be the one getting the book signed for myself]

RR: *slightly stressed face, appropriate for a man who's had to sign several hundred books in the space of two hours* Well, you know I can't read any of it, for reasons of copyright and all that, but I don't...I mean...I... I don't like it. It's like someone else trying on your clothes. *gestures with hands as if indicating he is trying to get something slimy and disgusting off them.*

Me: Trying on your clothes. That's a good one. Thanks! *moves along in line and writes this down in notebook*

End Scene.

And it was a good one. In fact, it was a great metaphor. Writing fanfiction and using someone else's characters is exactly like trying on someone else's clothes. I don't think he'd ever gotten that question before (His lack of an immediate answer would seem to suggest this) and I'm glad I asked it for that reason. There are a dozen better ways I might have asked it, whether he was impressed or flattered that children love his characters so much that they want to write adventures of their own for him, but I didn't, and I think that means I got an honest answer.

Does this mean I'm going to take down my PJO fic because I have it from the author himself that he disapproves? Nope. The way I figure, my one lonely PJO fic uses a character Riordan himself used for about a paragraph, and my story uses characters exclusive to PJO for a small fraction of the story. I think it's a fair exchange, more like borrowing a pair of socks from a friend after yours were soaked through than stealing a favorite t-shirt. You return the socks when you're done and thank him for the gesture.

I had a lot of time on the drive home to extend my metaphor, and this is what I came up with.

If writing fanfiction is like trying on someone else's clothes, then isn't writing fanfiction about a dead author's works something like second-hand clothes shopping?

Think about it. Jane Austen's dresses are having the ride of their life right now if that's the case.