Tag: Writing

Posted on

Five Takeaways from the 2019 SECCL

This past weekend, I attended the Southeast Renaissance Conference on Christianity and Literature. I heard some great papers (on Rebecca, on disenchantment, on Richard Wilbur’s poem “Lying” among others), saw my students and wife give fantastic papers, and talked with friends old and new. Here were my five takeaways.

  1. The conference presenters consisted of undergraduates, graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty: the entire academic gamut.
  2. Unlike any other conference I’ve been a part of, my deep respect for these scholars as fellow disciples has fed into my desire to hear their scholarship, no matter what they’re writing about. I haven’t read anything Chad Schrock, Carissa Turner Smith, or Luke Mills (to name just three frequent attendees) have written about the last three, and I’m always glad I get to hear them anyway.
  3. It’s better in community, i.e. when you go with your colleagues and students. I was the only attendee from my school at my first SECCL in 2013. This year, I presented alongside my wife and three students. It was the first time in awhile that SWU was represented at the conference, and I’m committed to our department being a consistent presence there.
  4. You learn to let conversation happen rather than force it. I found time for productive discussions with new acquaintances and time enough for deeper reflections with long-time friends. I was intentional about being in conversation but not overzealous in making conversations happen. I showed myself friendly and was rewarded with friendliness in return.
  5. Post-conference papers are even better. I didn’t get to hear the papers of two people I wanted to hear, so I asked them for copies. They obliged, and I had a wonderful morning reading them after the conference ended. I was able to send comments and ask questions with more acuity than if I had simply heard the papers. What a blessing.
Posted on

My 13 Week Journal Bootcamp: Some Takeaways

On Sunday, I finished up my first complete Best Self journal. The journal asks you to set three goals, then gives you tasks–including a space for daily accountability–as you endeavor to meet those goals over 13 weeks.

My wife gave me one of the journals for my birthday in 2018, but after three weeks, I stopped using it each day then lost the journal so there was no way for me to follow through on it. I came back to the idea of this journal at the end of January after starting the year being very intentional about praying and considering what I thought I wanted to accomplish this year. I knew the journal would be a great way to keep myself accountable, so I purchased a new one.

It was worth it.

Continue reading “My 13 Week Journal Bootcamp: Some Takeaways”
Posted on

Sentence By Sentence

I’m helping a student revise a paper for another course. Yesterday, we hashed out the paper’s main argument. Today, it was time to start revising.

I separated each of the paper’s paragraphs into a separate page, made the individual sentences in those paragraphs into bulleted lists, and worked through as many paragraphs as we could get through in two hours.

I had five takeaways.

  1. I was really impressed with the student’s willingness to engage in that intense kind of revision work for two hours.
  2. I need to do this kind of work (on a smaller scale) with as many of my students as possible. I may institute this as mandatory work for anyone who scores below a certain number on the first essay. It would get them in my office and give me a chance to show them what intense revision looks like.
  3. The revision happened as part of an actual conversation between the reader and writer. I asked for clarification, and the student asked me questions too. This is ideal.
  4. It can’t all be like this. The student came in with 3000+ words and something to say as well as the motivation to get the best possible score on the assignment.
  5. I think it is a way of helping the students learn because it shows that good writing is often collaborative.

Posted on

Close Reading the Beatles

As I wade through a pile of papers during finals week, I’m constantly in search of good body paragraphs built around close, insightful readings of the novel or play or poem under consideration.

When the pickings are slim, I gain sustenance from what I imagine is a typical source of comfort for literature professors, this paragraph from Rob Sheffield’s wonderful book Dreaming the Beatles where he details what Paul McCartney gets wrong in the song, “My Love.”

“My Love” is a fascinating disaster, if you happen to love Paul, because it’s a string of very un-Paul-like mistakes. He forgets all the Paul tricks he knows better than anyone else ever has. In fact, he goes so wrong here breaking his own rules, it’s an index of everything he usually gets right. His lifelong attention to pronouns fails him—this is a love ballad where the word “you” does not appear, nor do “she” or “her,” not even “we.” It’s all “I,” “me,” “my.” You can’t call this a rookie mistake since rookies know better, mostly because rookies are imitating Paul. So he wrote a love song and left out the woman; he also invited an orchestra, without giving them anything to play. He adds a colossally terrible guitar solo, when the track’s already way too long (four minutes, practically a minute per word). Not his own guitar solo: he lets a sideman barge in to make this butt-ugly (and no doubt sincerely self-expressive) noise. A ghastly sax solo would have made a certain sense, but this is a bluesy guitar solo, with no place in a lounge ballad like this.”

It begins with a nice debatable claim (i.e. “This song is a clunker, albeit one that clunks for intriguing reasons”), and follows it up with a brilliant analysis of the song’s pronouns. Of all the evidence Sheffield could give, I think his observation that “you” or “she” never appears in the song is so smart. He then develops this observation in a witty sentence: “he wrote a love song and left out the woman.” Sheffield never leaves a song half-analyzed, and in the remaining half of the song, he articulates what’s wrong with the song’s orchestration and guitar solo. It’s a new kind of evidence, and it receives its own development.

If Sheffield can muster up this kind of insight about a song just to show how poor it is, how much more should we be able to articulate the beauty of God’s truth both in our explication of scripture and in the books we’ve read that demand further unpacking.

Posted on

All Truth

On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”

It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.

If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.

The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:

  1. When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
  2. Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
  3. When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
  4. Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.

If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.

Posted on

Description and Practice

I’ve been playing pickup hoops this academic year, and it’s been a blast. A colleague in the English Department was the one who talked me into playing, and one of the most enjoyable parts of the Tues/Thurs games is our inevitable text exchange about our respective performances that day and the games’ other points of interest.

Confession: I haven’t picked up a ball outside of these Tues/Thurs games. I run during the week, so I show up ready to burn some calories and play as well as I can. Over the course of the year, I’ve gotten better but I still play more unevenly than I would have hoped.

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I find that I’m still replaying games in my head from the previous day, and as I ramp up to the noontime games the following day, I’m constantly thinking about how I can improve that day.

Today, I tell myself, I’m going to work on passing (no turnovers) or on help defense (rather than over-helping) or driving to the rim (instead of settling for jump shots).

I can describe those things to myself in my head all I want and even get feedback on them from my colleague, but the only way to improve is to actually play.

I’m encountering something similar in my writing courses this semester. I’ve given students the better part of a month to work on their final papers, projects that demand they choose their own novel and generate a research paper about them. I’ve given them lots of class time to work, and I’ve given them open-ended quizzes to keep them accountable.

At first, I asked for 150 words describing what they had done on their project since the last class. The point here was to have them summarize what they were reading, survey the criticism they had found in their initial research, and give them a space to ask questions about the direction their project was taking.

Now that we’re getting close to the end, however, I had them switch from description to writing that could actually end up in the paper. No more telling me about what they worked on. Instead, I want them to show me what that work has led to by writing a body paragraph as the day’s assignment. All of them struggle with this, but the practice is worth it because it forces them to apply the things they’re supposed to be working on outside of class. At some point, commentary and description are just ways of hiding. Just as my commitment to getting better at basketball will come down to whether or not I want to ever shoot outside of the two hours I play a week, so too will their commitment to improving their writing come down to their practicing output (i.e. actual body paragraphs) than recording input (i.e. a description of what they’ve done).

As I enter the summer, I will be thinking more about how to balance description and practice for my students so that they can apply what they’ve learned and then get some post-game commentary that helps them know how they can improve their performance. The answer is more practice, punctuated with helpful description.

Posted on

Writing to Remember

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

From Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness”

At the beginning of the semester, my ENGL comp students had to memorize a poem. While some struggled, all of them tried, and many of them recited their selected poems perfectly, everything from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”

Yesterday, we read the above lines from Billy Collins’s poem out loud, and I asked them to take 30 seconds and write down one line from the poem they had memorized in January. Only half of them could do it.

We did this exercise as a way to explain why I had given them a reflective essay for their final exam. For this exam, students have to reread something from one day of class earlier in the semester. Depending on the day, they could reread a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, an act from Macbeth, or some chapters from Mother Night. Their task is to then reflect on how the second time through compared with the first: whether or not what they got out of the reading changed (or didn’t) and how they altered their reading methods and to what effect.

I told them that given the fact that their memory could be spotty (as demonstrated by the fact that some of them had already forgotten a poem they had tried to memorize just ten weeks earlier), they should plan on writing about something they had already written a paper on. If they wrote their first paper on Lahiri’s story “The Third and Final Continent” they should think about rereading it. Why? They already have the paper as a testament to what they had gotten out of it the first time. It makes it a whole lot easier to tell how the second time through it had changed (or not changed) things.

The students are telling the story of their semester in this assignment, and it’s powerful to see them exercise their memories through their writing even as they use writing to jog their memories.

Yes, I hope they’ll see how they’ve grown as a reader and writer over the semester, but the other takeaway I hope they’ll get is that writing is a powerful way to remember. To use Billy Collins’s simile, writing is the phone service that allows you to get ahold of your memories when they’re in a Brazilian fishing village.

I’ve got a file in Dropbox with my daily prayers from every day since the end of 2016. It’s an amazing time machine, better even than a diary, because it reminds me of conversations with God: a whole heap of gratitudes, requests that have been answered for others as well as myself, and the scriptures that helped me hear God’s voice in response to my petitions. I never wrote the prayers down to have something to remind myself of that particular day’s events. I always did it to focus myself in the moment. But now that the past two years have gone by in a blur with significant changes in my personal and professional life, it’s amazing to have that repository available. I hope my students start building one like that too.

Posted on

Emotional Solidarity

Today, I spoke with a student who had just run four miles…as a warm-up. He’s a long-distance runner on the track team, and he had miles to go before he slept.

I like to run, but if I had just run four miles, that would be my workout for the day. His warm-up is my workout.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember what it’s feels like to do the work I ask students to do with the same kind of anxiety they feel about it. That’s because my warm-up is their workout.

I can write the 1000-1500 word papers I ask them to write without breaking a sweat. If they get a good 750 word paper, they feel gassed.

Today, I felt their pain.

I’m writing a book review, and it’s hard. I don’t want to do it because it feels like I might fail at it, like I can’t offer any sort of criticism, just a summary. So today has been a day where I’ve seen all my old strategies for procrastination creep in. It turns out, I’m really good at working hard at not working.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell my students this story. I’ll see if it resonates with them. They’ll want an answer about what I do. I’ll answer that:

  1. I pray and ask God for help. I admit I can’t do it on my own and ask for grace.
  2. I read book reviews of similar books and book reviews that I myself have written. I know I can do this. I’ve done it in the past.
  3. I listen to motivational speakers who can be the voice inside my head when I’m tired and am engaged in negative self-talk.
  4. I sit in a chair with the book and read and write for a specified set of time.

It used to be so much worse. God has given me ways of answering this anxiety. I can name it and respond accordingly.

Here’s the biggest difference. I’m not looking for the difficulty to go away. I’m figuring out what to do with it. I pray my students do too.

Posted on

Hammering Nails With a Violin

This week, I graded my freshmen’s analyses of short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.

Making my way through them, I felt two things: disappointment in the students’ readings and deep respect for Lahiri’s stories to withstand those poor readings and actually become deeper and more well-constructed than I had thought. I kept going back to the stories to see if they had the evidence that I felt was lacking in the students’ papers. Not only was the evidence there, it was always aesthetically handled. The stories were so much richer than the students were giving them credit for.

I thought of Zadie Smith’s line about reading as a way of playing a piece of music. You want your playing to match the beauty of the piece that’s been written. Here, to borrow a David Foster Wallace line, it appeared my students were being handed a piece fit for a Stradivarius and were using their glorious instrument to hammer nails.

True, violins can make nails go deeper into the surface you want them to go into…but it’s not efficient and it permanently damages the violin so that when you want to actually play music with it, you’re lost.

But in the midst of those feelings, I wondered about my own reading of scriptures. I believe that it’s true that God’s word always accomplishes its work, whether it brings us closer to God through the work of the Holy Spirit or confirms in our cold response to it just how much we need God. If I was honest about the way I read and used scripture on a day to day basis, I think I would be hammering away at nails with something far more valuable than a Stradivarius.

I pray for the wisdom to read God’s words well even more than I pray for my students to gain the ability to read a short story well. More than that, I pray for the power to live it out after reading it well.