writing – patricia a. matthew

The Cat Tweeted Back

I’m not interested in cruises.

One of my versions of hell is being stuck with 4,000 people listening to muzak versions of Adele (or just Adele, if I’m being honest). The buffet culture doesn’t interest me, and being near large bodies of water gives me an oddly unmoored feeling, one of physical and emotional dizziness. I also love the time between Christmas and the new semester. I have since grad school when I discovered that it’s a good time to get a lot of work done. I have a whole stay-in-the-house winter wardrobe that’s quite lovely and nicely coordinated. So cruises. No. Cruises during winter break. No, no, no. The thing is I adore my father, and as we have grieved the loss of my mother these last months I could see that going on cruises not only makes him happy but also actually changes him physically. He walks more and more briskly when he returns from one, he smiles more. He wears the Batman shirt I bought him (and my mom and myself) one Christmas. So he asked me to go with him on a cruise. And I said yes.

Here’s the thing. We didn’t think it would actually happen.

We both set a lot of rules for it. We could only go when I was not teaching. He likes to go in April (when I am teaching). He would only go some other time of year if the cruise was to the Panama Canal. He knew it would never happen because of things like weather and schedules and when boats actually go to the Panama Canal. I was secretly relieved. To say yes something I didn’t particularly want to do and then to not have to do it. WINNING!

I went on a cruise.

During what would normally be my winter break, I packed up summer clothes, formal evening wear, and a really good pair of flip flops and got on a boat the size of Staten Island. Thankfully, Bill Matthew travels in style. He promised me a life of ease with very few decisions to make. “You won’t have to make you bed” (it’s sweet how he thinks I do that at home). “You can send your laundry out” (oh yeah). “You won’t have to cook or wash dishes” (sold!). “They’ll make eggs just the way you like” (that’s harder than you’d think). And, finally, “the juice is really freshly squeezed.” We had a spacious suite with a balcony large enough for deck chairs and a table for two. We could bypass most lines, and, most important to me, we could eat in dining rooms with table service the way god intended.

My dad understands what my writing work means to me. Whereas well-meaning friends kind of cringed when I said I was taking work with me on vacation, he understood. He even told me the best place to have a quiet breakfast, so I could write in the mornings. So I did. I also opted out of spending a small fortune for very slow, spotty internet and disconnected from social media.

My brain really, really needed that kind of break.

Listen, I respect people who take social media breaks. I get that. That’s not me. I enjoy the companionship of the chatter in the background as I write. I use Twitter breaks as my treat for a good work session, and tweeting helps me from killing people in the real world. A day or so each week I take a breather, but I rarely feel the need to take an actual break.

But, after such a busy fall where I talked more some weeks than I do all year, and where I found myself with the enviable but daunting challenge of talking to multiple editors and publishers about what I want to write next, I found myself being way too performative on Twitter, too aware that people were paying attention to me. I know that for some people that’s the whole point—to make a splash, be a presence, have a brand. I may or may not have those things, but to the degree that I do, they are a byproduct of my time on social media, not the goal.

I read once how Colson Whitehead thinks about Twitter: “I had a cat, the cat died, and now the stuff I used to say to the cat all day, I tweet.” I liked analogy so much that I too tweeted like I was talking to Whitehead’s dead cat.

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Then the cat tweeted back.

It was cool and interesting at first, and then a bit unnerving, and then somewhere around November it started distracting me. I was too self-conscious on Twitter, felt I was trying too hard, and was seeking something (I’ve not bothered thinking how to name it) that messed with my brain’s writing rhythms.

I’ve come to know my brain works quite well, how it works at different times of day, what it really needs to produce, the importance of leaving it alone, trusting it to do its job while I do other things. I’ve compared it to a toddler—not just to be funny but because I can tell that sometimes “writer’s block” is really my brain wanting something it can’t articulate. I joked on Twitter about a frustrating morning where every medium I normally use to write (pencil and legal pad, lap top, large sticky notes) didn’t work until I figured out that this brain of my mine simply wanted a blank piece of paper. As soon as I gave it one, it got to work giving me new topics and questions for the abolitionist book. I had to draw my way to a new vision for the book. These days it works spatially and orally rather than through prose. That’s weird for me, but I’m going with it.

And it works best when it feels like no one is actually paying attention to it. That’s the thing I didn’t really understand before this break. When the cat talked back, I developed a sense of an “audience” and ideas about expectations (real or imagined, I don’t know). I started fretting about who might be reading my writing. I convinced myself no one was reading the blog, most people ignore my tweets, and that I was in a little corner just doing my thing, even with evidence that this is not quite true.

Especially about Twitter.

I am a pretty performative person, and social media rewards that. Plus I’ve been excited and felt honor bound to broadcast every little thing about Written/Unwritten because the contributors deserve attention and praise. They trusted me with their stories, put up with my revision requests, held tight to what they wanted to say and HOW they wanted to say it when I lost track of their agency, and when I was afraid the book would feel passé, one of them would invariably drop a note telling me to keep at it. I have gotten so much attention and praise because of the book, and it has given me a platform to say things to people who have the power to change how institutions work, but my chatter about it is more about making sure it does work for everyone, that it is useful, that the contributors’ time was well spent.

Beyond that goal, Twitter and my blogging are really just for me, for my own amusement and reflection. For me and an imaginary cat. I’ve been happy to do it in front of people (and I obviously want people to see what’s going on in my head and to read), but I found myself thinking too much about what other people might want to see and read. Was I saying something “new” and did it all really matter? My brain didn’t like that one bit, and writing that should have come easily wasn’t.

Worse, I couldn’t tell what was SUPPOSED to be hard (planning a new book), so I decided to disconnect bit by bit. I disconnected just enough to remember the real reason I blog is so that I don’t talk my friends to death, to think through how I am feeling about all kinds of things including my writing, and to keep my writing brain limber during reading and research phases. And I disconnected just enough to remember that Twitter only works for me to the degree that it keeps me company during the day.

It was a good break. Being in the middle of the ocean helped a lot. I worked on a few short things I’ll be sending out soon, I reread McPhee’s Draft No 4. I bought copies for Tressie and me and read it quickly in October, but reading it again, I’m reminded a bit of this post I wrote about how much I liked the the structure of The Skies Belongs to Me. I daydreamed about my Frankenstein class. I wrote in the mornings like I like to do. Very nice people brought me eggs cooked properly.

Don’t fret, dear reader/cat, I did plenty of nothing. I read trashy novels and realized that everything I know about regency culture I learned from narratives that include a lot of bosoms heaving above corsets and other throbbing bits. I read a very respectable novel I’m happy not to have a single opinion about. I spent more than an hour dressing for dinner every single night, twice in dresses I’ll happily put back in garment bags. I had massages (more than one). After trying to convince my dad I was hearing dinosaurs in Panama, we worked out a which crisis James Bond would solve while we went through the Panama Canal, and then, I kid you not, sat down to dinner with a man who looked so much like Gold Finger that I hummed the theme song at my dad all evening. I saw dolphins in the wild and flying fish. God bless this cruise for serving a proper tea every afternoon. I spent a lot of time on the balcony by myself, staring at the water and dealing with feeling unmoored.

I returned to a lot of emails including queries about what I want to write next. That feels good. In the midst of what I now recognize is a transition to a different relationship to what I write and for whom, kind and wise people have been helping see what’s possible. I’m feeling very lucky and grateful these days. Publishers and editors want to read what I have to say. What a great way to enter 2018.

So I’m back and am going to keep writing, blogging, and Tweeting like the cat isn’t actually paying attention to me.

Writing How I Know

I’ve been thinking a lot about Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns fret not” for the last three weeks, usually around 4:30 in the morning (4:38 to be exact). I’ve especially been thinking about “the weight of too much liberty” moment near the end of the poem. I’ve been thinking about weight and liberty in my writing lately—what it means to choose a specific kind of book project and what it could mean to let that go.

This moment is an interesting/unnerving chapter for me. It’s interesting (and exciting) because Written/Unwritten is taking me to places and into conversations that feel so meaningful to the work faculty of color want to do. I really couldn’t have asked for a better first year with it, and I think it will continue to do good working going forward. I know people will want to talk about it more, and I’ve figured out a good way for those conversations to be useful for faculty of color and people who really want to be their allies. But it’s also been unnerving. I’ve felt this (mostly) internal pressure to make sure it doesn’t eclipse my British lit. work. I love nineteenth-century literature, and writing a book about it actually feels quite timely to me as I see the U.S. in a very particular cultural crisis, especially as I follow the tensions between black women and white women who claim to be their allies. It feels to me that the tensions of women’s studies feminism has spilled into national discourse and debates at the same time that black artists are using the tropes unique to eighteenth and nineteenth-century culture to push back against racist structures.

It will sound impossibly earnest and quite yawpish (in the “Dead Poet’s Society” sense of the word), but I feel I MUST write this book, and I can’t wait to write it. I had a conversation about it a few weeks ago, and in the notes I took to prepare for the meeting the first thing I wrote was “I want to write a book that everyone wants to read.” I’ve never felt that way before. I didn’t even feel that way about Written/Unwritten. I did that book for black women and other faculty of color (not a strategy I’d recommend, by the way), and it’s been because of the grace and openness of a lot of people who saw a broader community for it that it’s being read so much beyond the original audience I imagined.

I feel this book differently and babble about it (that’s the only word for it) to my friends and colleagues when it comes to mind (pretty much all the time). When there’s no one else around, I talk to myself.

Then, in the middle of a long week in Texas, I had an invitation to write for a publication I admire and longingly read. I’d given a talk in Denton Wednesday and was sitting in a hotel room in El Paso on Thursday, putting the finishing touches on a conference paper while trying to revise the book proposal, when the invitation showed up. I knew pretty instantly what I wanted to write about but also was sad to realize I will always have to choose between two modes and, as I’ve come to understand, two audiences. The invitation didn’t come from an academic journal, and so I was almost tempted to put it on the back burner. Almost. I decided to fold it into my writing schedule even as it meant I was keeping up this tug-of-war about my voice and some “audience.”

This has me thinking more carefully about the discipline of writing and how academic writing disciplines me. By this I don’t mean the intellectual back -and-forth between peers asking one another good, if sometimes tough, questions about the work we do; I am talking about the discipline that demands a certain performance of an argument.

So in the middle of this process, in this prison I’ve embraced, I’ve been waking up at 4:38 in the morning, wondering about how I write and for whom.

I am a (fairly) disciplined writer. I have also been (fairly) disciplined.

The proposal I ended up with was a disciplined one, but when I was asked if the book in the proposal was the book I really wanted to write I was stunned by the ferocity of my ”no!” And surprised by how little I’d understood my own ambitions for this book. If you’ve met me, you know that lack of confidence is not something I seem to struggle with, but if you know me you know I don’t always trust that what I want to say or write a) actually needs to be said or written and b) that I’m the person to say or write it. This can be a good thing if it keeps me from being strident or glib. But it was getting in the way of my vision for this book.

So I went back to the drawing board. I mean that almost literally. I got out a piece of white paper and drew boxes and then arrows and phrases and then pulled prose out of that. I’m still doing that. It’s been harder to restructure the book, but I think that’s mostly because I’m in such a hurry to write it. I’ve also learned that the Written/Unwritten work is so outward facing that I really need the kind of internal, more quiet work of this book—reading archival notes, thinking about images, figuring out the textual habits of abolitionist writers. After a public talk on Written/Unwritten I really just need to sit in a café with a pencil and paper and notes.

What I thought I needed to work out is what it means to write for my discipline, and then, as I was scratching out notes about why Austen may have been wise not to write more explicitly about the slave trade, that writing 101 command “write what you know” came to me, and I wrote a note to myself: “write how you know.” What I should have written is “write how YOU know.”

It’s a pretty terrifying thought. A whole book writing how I want to write sounds lovely. I’m not even sure what this means or if this is what we all do, and it just feels important to me because my second book will be my first in some key ways. So I don’t know.

I know it’s unnerving.

I am a (fairly) disciplined writer. I have also been (fairly) disciplined.

So we’ll see. I spent the better part of two days just staring at a book cover and jotting down what it shook loose in my brain. I’ll start reading again soon, but I’ve been seeing what comes to me unprompted by the discipline. I’m curious to know what I’ll pull out of these last years of reading, teaching, and talking about British abolitionist lit. I’ve already let go of the disciplinary boundaries of “R”omanticism because they’re not really useful for the trajectory of this book. And I’m less interested in the chapter structures I was raised to emulate. I’m curious to spend time this week looking at the discipline proposal I originally wrote to see what is packed in there that might be buried under the performance of my arguments. I found “brief solace” in this performance, in this discipline proposal, and it is written in a way that I write, but it’s not necessarily written how I write. That’s the turn I’m planning to make.

Protecting Writing Time

A new friend asked me this weekend how I keep myself motivated to write. I had some answers that weren’t particularly original. But one thing I advised didn’t really have anything to do with writing—that is, the act of getting words on the page and the work that surrounds writing. I told my new friend to skip a committee meeting that sounded like it wasn’t actually useful, didn’t really require her attendance, and, most importantly, was frustrating her.

It took me a long time to really understand that, for me at least, the work of writing is about how I manage my energy all the time, even when I’m not writing. My goal is to keep myself as calm and focused as possible so that when I sit down to try to concentrate a host of other things don’t pop up to distract me.

I learned this the hard way.

When I was trying to write for tenure (this is different than the writing I’ve done after tenure which has been to: save the world, rescue long-ignored writers, make people laugh, and save my friends from my long rambling theories), I developed a particularly bad habit. I would sit down to write and almost immediately start thinking about some intractable problem, often about some department nonsense or something in my personal life. These problems were real, and they were important, so I’d try to write something but they would be right there nagging at me until I would get so genuinely upset that there was no way I could write. It got so bad that thought of writing made me anxious because my writing sessions were not actually about writing.

I’m pretty sure this habit formed because I was afraid I didn’t have anything useful to offer with my writing. I was also fresh out of graduate school and didn’t really have a sense of how journal submission worked. I knew that you wrote a thing, you submitted it, someone might like it and another someone would not only NOT like it but make that clear in the cruelest way possible (“this person writes like a second-year graduate student”*), you rewrote it, and two years later it might get published.

Intractable problems that made me cry were so much more appealing.

They were the perfect way to avoid the thing I was afraid I couldn’t do. This is all clear now, but it wasn’t for a while. But I figured it out one day, and it has stayed with me for more than a decade. I remember sitting in the Starbucks in Upper Montclair, NJ and kind of feeling good about the writing for the day when this pattern started up again. I tried a few times to push the thoughts away, until I finally made a kind of weird pact with myself. I told myself that if I concentrated for just this small amount of time, I could fret about the intractable for the whole rest of the day. It worked.

The thing I hadn’t learned, especially about departmental problems, was how to keep them from feeling intractable in the first place. That’s a thing I’m still learning, but when I advised my new friend to avoid a meeting that I didn’t think was helping her and that even seemed to be taking away from her, my advice was based on my own experience as I’ve learned to be a lot more judicious about how I spend my time and more mindful about what I actually do in committee meetings. It’s not enough for me not to take on too much committee work, especially since I’m an associate professor who is expected to do this work.

I guess the best way to explain it is that I’ve come to understand that writing is central to how I see what I’m supposed to be doing right now. It is the most rewarding work I do, and so I’ve worked to build a life that makes it the easiest thing for me to do.

I have a ton of ideas and love brainstorming about how to fix problems, so committee meetings can be like catnip for me. I also have strong opinions and am kind of uptight, so committee meetings can also be draining. Then when I get home, the work of unwinding from meetings takes up a lot of time and energy. I replay things, seethe over bad behavior, fret about what’s next. That can bleed into my writing time.

So I cut back—not on my meetings so much but what I do in them. It’s tempting to think I can solve any problem (and maybe I can), but the humbling truth is that a lot of things run along just fine without my input. And if they don’t the sky won’t fall. Now my calculation is always (always, always, always) about figuring out how much time and energy a committee will take away from the writing I want to do. I carry a draft of whatever I’m working on with me into meetings (an actual print draft) to remind myself that while I have obligations to my colleagues and my department, those obligations end when they take away from the energy I need to write.

I spend my social time with people who are happily engaged with their writing, even if we moan, wrestle, and fret over it. One of my favorite memories from the summer was sitting in the park listening to music with friends and then finding myself talking about writing with a friend over dinner.

I don’t get into protracted email exchanges, and if I feel myself wanting to use email to snap at people who piss me off I close my computer and go for a walk. I figure I can either spend time trying to prove my point (like that ever happens in an email exchange) or I can go for a walk and see where things look the next day. I have a say-it-to-my-face rule for students who get upset about class or a grade. I apply that to myself.

There’s a saying that opinions are like assholes; everybody has one. I think rather highly of mine (my opinions, that is). As a result, I don’t share them so much and only when I think people will a) actually listen and b) they’ll do actual good. It was hard at first (I have A LOT of opinions), but I felt so much better after meetings that I had more energy to write.

Writing time is still the time when big things show up that might get in the way of the work. I’ve been grieving for the last year, and often the waves hit while I’m writing. I’ve learned to let them wash over me (I always have tissues with me) and then keep on writing. It is that central to the work I want and need to do.

*I was in my third year as an assistant professor.

On Writing What Needs to be Written

I was asked to write an essay for The Atlantic reflecting on Jane Austen’s bicentennial, and I was so glad to do it. I have a complicated relationship with Austen, but I’ve made my peace with it, primarily because I read her with such great students. So, I’m happy with her and about how she’s been celebrated. What I’ve not been so happy about is the trajectory of my research agenda. I started two book projects at once—a collection that turned out to be Written/Unwritten and a book on the history of the novel. Written/Unwritten found a publisher first, but it also felt more urgent. When I finished it, I planned to turn back to the book on the history of the novel, but that work felt perfunctory, like a performance of what I thought I should write back when I was a graduate school. I gave it a year, but I kept saying I was writing the book on the history of the novel but then giving conference papers on British abolitionist lit. My thought was that I’d write the book I was supposed to write and then write the book I wanted to write, one about abolitionist literature, genre, sugar, motherhood, amelioration, and sugar some more. I wanted to write about sugar bowls and gender and kept looking longingly at these tantalizing books on the subject.

“You have to write the book that wants to be written…”
–Madeline L’Engle

There’s no one thing to point to that ended up with me in an administrator’s office explaining that I wanted to use a research grant to look in different archives for different stories about England in the nineteenth century. Seeing my students ask more questions than I have answers for in my abolitionist literature class is part of the reason. I also know the energy it takes to get a book done, and it just didn’t seem like a good idea to take that on without totally invested in the project. It also feels like I can do more to make my research matter if I take up the questions I’ll explore in this book. They haven’t gone anywhere in centuries, and now seems like the right time when more and more people are seeing what a lot of black folks have always known about race, racism, and racial violence.

It’s scary. I was sitting in an archive in April, feeling slightly nauseous about the work ahead of me. And I don’t want to be a person who quits a project half way through. I’m trusting that what people who know me well say about me is true—I’m not quick but I am very persistent. I’m also trusting that I’m a clearer writer and thinker now than I was when I planned the other book.

Of course, the moment I started working on the book proposal, all of the research I’ve been doing was relevant to this project but in a new way. And at least one of those former book chapters is on its way to being transformed into a journal article—where I suspect it will actually have more impact. Somewhere between the conference-length essay and the 9,000-word chapter draft is a stunning, erudite consideration of Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Genre, and Byron. I’ll find it. People have been interested in seeing me write more things like this Emma piece in the Toast, and I’m working on that too. It’s hard in a different way, but it’s a good struggle, and I feel lucky to have people waiting to help me get it done.

This means I write more than I used to. I’ve spent most of the summer writing (that and walking off two years of stress and anxiety), reading, and putting together a research agenda that makes sense. I’m this close to finishing what will be first big journal article on British abolitionist lit, co-editing a cluster issue on abolitionist lit with Manu Chander (it’s gonna be GOOD), and balancing two different kinds of book proposals. So we’ll see. If you’re a praying person, pray for me. If you’re not and you see me in a café or bar writing, buy me a drink.

Afro-Pedagogy: Reading Abolition, Then and Now

I’m trying to take the best parts of my Jane Austen Seminar from last fall into this new school year.

I loved that class.

It saved me from slipping into a dangerous ennui that was mucking up the vibe in my classes. I took advantage of the structure and the topic, and it worked beautifully. It wasn’t perfect (that was never the goal), but it was pretty damn good.

Given the nature of a seminar (a small group of highly motivated students) and the subject (the Jane Austen canon is perfect for a semester course), I was able to ask students to do four things before the semester started:

Imagine their own assignments based on what they wanted to learn about Austen and the skills they wanted to work on over the course of the semester

Think about the kind of readings they wanted to do with the texts (mostly theory or mostly context essays)

Develop course policies (because I am tired of keeping track of the comings and goings of grown-ass people)

Daydream about the kind of “culminating” project they wanted to complete at the end of the semester.

My only rule was that they had to come up with the kind of work I could defend should somebody who thought the could have an opinion about my teaching ask us what we were doing while we ate cookies and talked about Austen on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We spent the first day of class brainstorming about the semester, and I asked them to submit work proposals and then met with them individually to make sure they had what they needed from me to work independently.

The students really surprised me.* They came up with ambitious projects (all of which required more research than I would have asked of them), they challenged themselves (I will love forever the incredibly shy student who said she wanted to work on speaking and public and designed two presentations on Austen in adaptation, including discussion questions that she distributed to the class before her presentation so they could have a productive conversation when she was done), and they were more creative than I could ever have imagined (for his final project, the musician in the course played music Austen’s characters would have heard on a keyboard he dragged to class while giving us a lecture on how music composition shifted in Austen’s time). One student wanted to learn how to write book reviews, and he did. It was pretty remarkable to see the transition, a process he reflected on in essays and conferences with me during the semester. Another student wanted to write about Austen the readers of her blog while another put herself in charge of being our guide to the customs of Austen’s readers. We had a student auditing the course who would write these pithy responses to our class discussions, and students shared resources they found on Blackboard.

*The class voted unanimously that i could talk about our work.

It was the best teaching experience of my 15+ years in higher education. I actually looked forward to reading student writing. I wanted to mark and comment on their work.

Let’s all just sit with that for a minute.

In lieu of a syllabus, I sent the class regular memos. There were students who wanted traditional instruction and more direction, and, of course, I was happy to provide that. Everyone got “grades” but more than that I wrote them letters about their work. Sometimes they wrote back. Students who were transferring in from community colleges were especially good about seeing me for help understanding the kind of analytical writing expected of them.

They kept me on my toes, challenging notions about Austen I hadn’t reconsidered in a long time, and asking for more time if they felt I was rushing them through a novel. Best of all, they supported one another in and out of class. They cheered one another on, gave advice and feedback for those who were writing in public, and took on extra-curricular projects together. When things got too stressful, we took a break so everyone could catch up on the readings. And they did.

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abolition lit art

I can’t replicate everything about that seminar, but for a class I’m teaching next semester called “Writing in the Major” I plan to take a similar approach by helping students design a series of assignments that feel interesting and meaningful to them. I don’t really know what the course is actually supposed to do, “Writing in the Major” means, but I’m using it as an opportunity to let students experiment with how to use the reading we do in class to focus on a modern political question. The class will focus on British abolitionist literature—primarily poems, novels, and essays published between 1789-1830—but I’m asking students to think of a policy or practice that has been abolished or one that they would like to see abolished and to start thinking of how writers shape and reflect those movements.

We’re forever telling students that being an English major means they can “do anything” and that literary study develops their “critical thinking skills” (I said this in a class a year or so ago and every single student groaned and/or rolled their eyes), so I want this class to be an experiment in what that means in real time.

My working theory is that the reason we so often hear politicians and other rhetorical beings claiming King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is because movements tend to follow similar patterns, and I’m going to work with my students to help them recognize those patterns. They want so much to “relate” to what we’re reading and this class seems like a good place to let them do that in some sustained and nuanced way. What I hope some of them will do is find literature that reflects and/or contributes to a modern political movement and then discuss their readings in a series of writing assignments we’ll develop together.

More than wanting them to complete a concrete set of tasks, I’d like them to think about the kind of reading and writing they might want to do beyond the classroom. I’m even toying with not requiring them to read everything on the reading calendar but to see the readings as an introduction to the kinds of writing that shapes a social movement. Maybe a student will read the poetry on the syllabus and then do a comparative study of poems written by GLBT writers seeking equal rights in the twenty-first century. Or a student will read about sugar in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and learn about what modern commodities we take for granted rely on slave labor. White women in the early nineteenth century co-opted the issue of slavery for their own political goals (I’m looking at you Wollstonecraft), and I suspect that my students will notice this pattern in modern political movements.

I’m lucky to work closely with faculty who can help me point students down most any path they want to follow. I suspect I’ll be asking my academic twitter community for help.

I’m not sure how this will work, but I’m trusting that my students will be curious enough to work out what they want to do with me as guide and coach. And I’m trusting that whatever my reputation for being “hard” and “intimidating,” students who have worked with me know I’m open to all reasonable revisions to the syllabus. They’ll ask me enough questions to work out the details. I’ll also have the option of traditional assignments, but I really want students to leave class with a reading list for the future.

Like most tenured faculty, my classes tend to be a mix of students who have taken other classes with me and those who probably just took my classes because they are required and/or fit in with their schedule. I know from experience that some of them will jump at the chance to play with what we’re doing in this class while others will feel anxious with the “weight of too much liberty.”

I’ve taught graduate seminars and as a sophomore survey on British abolitionist literature (and published on the topic), so I’m conversant enough in it to let the class experiment with how to use the texts I’ve selected for us. I want us to be all over the place and want to create a space where students are rewarded for reading outside of the classroom and connecting that to the larger questions we’ll consider over the course of the semester.

We’ll write quite a bit, but I don’t know how much grading I’ll do. Instead, I think I’ll consult with students on writing projects and then let them submit work when they feel it’s ready for me to grade. What I found in the Austen seminar and in the Intro to Theory course I teach is that my English majors respond best to short writing assignments that require them to focus tightly on an argument. Longer essays just invite plot summaries and vague prose. Most students hate those longer essays and will never write in that form again, so I’d rather help students figure out how writing fits into their lives and then work with them to do that writing critically, with great care.

Productive chaos in the classroom is my very favorite thing (that and eating excellent cookies with my students), so I’d like to develop an atmosphere while still leaving room for students who actually want and need structure. My Austen seminar made clear how much I can trust students to seek out the most from their course work with a lighter guiding hand, leaving me more time to work with students who need more attention and who are trying to find their way into literary analysis.

In my Romanticism course, I make my students slog through A Defence of Poetry. They kind of hate it, but we linger over this moment:

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.

With this class, we’ll try to figure out how those who trade in language changed the world in their time and ours.

Writing Retreat: Day the Second

This morning I wished I were a person practiced in the arts of yoga or Pilates. The sundeck seems the ideal place to stretch and meditate in the morning sun. I certainly have the yoga costume: yoga pants and a tank top (both in black). But, alas, I’m a pajamas-and-bowl-of Crispix-with-cranberries kind of girl, though I do enjoy starting the day doing stretches with my hand weights while watching “The West Wing” and reveling in the knowledge that Josh Lyman is really Rahm Emmanuel no matter what Lawrence O’Donnell says (the author is dead, indeed!).

Yoga or Crispix. It really doesn’t matter: I’m here to write, and it’s working. With no domestic duties beyond washing my cereal bowl (and to be honest, Karen did that for me), I happily walked the two minutes to a nifty café, Peaceable Market, run by a group of young, cool women. I spent the morning eating toast and reading Felicia Hemans’s poetry. I’ve taken a bit of a risk trying to work with Hemans in this way as I’m not as familiar with her as I am with Shelley, but a morning with her poetry makes me think my argument holds more than just water.

It’s a great little café—hardwood floors, lots of natural light, generous portions of peanut butter for my toast, and a view of the harbor from my window.

But there’s something here I hadn’t counted on. Men. Lots of them. Most of them H.O.T.

Maybe it’s because it’s spring, but I’m finding the Men of Newport very distracting. Anyone who knows me would explain that my “type” tends towards effete metrosexuals with hands made for playing piano. I tend to like handsome men over homely ones, but wit and creativity are more appealing than many other qualities and can turn an Urkel into a Chiwetel Ejiofor. I also have a thing for nerdy academic types, though six years as a professor has all but cured me of this unfortunate ailment (male academics are so much sexier from a distance than they are up close and personal). These guys are not at all my type, so it’s surprising that they have me looking up from my Hemans all too often. They ooze a kind of ease that I usually am not attracted to. Perhaps it’s all in the packaging. They all look like prototypes for Ralph Lauren glossy ads but not in a pretty boy, airbrushed way. No way. These guys are the real thing. They all look so healthy, as if they really do spend their time working or playing on the boats in the harbor. They all have great hair, and they move with an appealing masculine grace, walking easily along the narrow sidewalks of Thames Street. Good lord, I sound like some twenty-first Danielle Steele.

When I call my mother to ask if she’d like a sweatshirt from this charming town, I tell her about the fact that I’m amongst these beautiful men and she replies, without missing a beat, “what are you wearing?” I don’t have the heart to tell her I have on sweatpants and a faded yellow hoodie. Poor woman just plunked down a chunk of cash to buy me a summer wardrobe fit for a modern-day, mocha-colored Holly Golightly, and I’m in sweat pants and a faded yellow hoodie. At least the sweat pants aren’t baggy and the hoodie shows that I have a waist.

In other news, I’ve forgotten my book weight and realized that I have a serious internet addiction.

My writing afternoon session was less productive than my morning of reading and note taking. But the day is not over yet. Perhaps after a walk with Sadie (Karen’s adorable pooch), I’ll write some more. Writing about poetry really does feel like trying to nail Jello to the wall.

A bit of poetry

I’ve started working on two big projects that I’ve been circling for way too long, a book about the academy and a study of the nineteenth-century novel and its connection to disease and healing. Every fear of writing I have hovers below the surface, causing (sometimes literally) my hands to shake as I take hold of pen and paper. The only thing for the fear of writing is to face it, so face it I do–mostly by fooling myself into the myth that I’m not actually writing. I tell myself that I’m just “jotting down” a few sentences. At other times, my friend Karen infuses me with her own intellectual fearlessness, and I find I’m drawn, almost against my will, to my desk.

When I get too scared, Lucille Clifton’s poetry pops into my head as an invitation and a scolding that if she, who had so much less than I do now, could find the courage to write (and to write poetry!) I can too. Here is the poem that came to me during one of my writing sessions today:

won’t you celebrate with me
by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

When I can see my writing as a celebration of the writers who live on the edge of Jane Austen’s shadow or the academy’s struggle with what is written and unwritten, then it’s not so scary…and is even a little exciting.