How Much Is Too Much?

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’ve been teaching for more than ten years, and I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two along the way.  But every so often, I’m brought back to a question I struggled with early in my teaching career:  What’s the most helpful way to comment on student work?

Specifically.   Constructively.  Right, but… how?  What balance of correction and affirmation, of criticism and encouragement?

Writer Deborah Bryan posted this week on her blog, The Monster In Your Closet, about a letter she’d written to her brother-in-law, accompanying her edits to his scholarship application essay.  The gist was that he was an amazing, generous person with much to offer and that, so far, his essay didn’t reveal that.

It got me thinking.  Especially since, this week, I’ve had one student write to me that he was feeling overwhelmed by the class, another with the news she’d been accepted to an MFA program, and a third submitting work showing many of the weaknesses of her first assignment, months ago.

Student #1 said that my comments had nothing to do with his trepidation, he was having a bad week.  I can’t take credit for #2’s acceptance.  But #3 gave me pause.  Her pages left me with a heavy feeling.  Hadn’t I already made the case for active verbs, for show-don’t-tell, for getting to the point?  Had this student even read my previous comments?  Had she even bothered reviewing her work before sending it in?  Careless first draft.

I didn’t write that.  If I worked with her face-to-face, I might have found a way to ask if she’d been rushed.  But in an online class, all I have to go by is the tenor of the emails, the work itself.  And that was all she had from me; I couldn’t qualify my criticism with a caring look.  And maybe I shouldn’t.

As a college freshman, I wrote an essay with what I thought was an insightful introduction making several good points.  I got the essay back with red pen scratched through the paragraph and, in the margin, the professor’s scrawled Get to the point.  The fact that, more than thirty years later, I recall the sinking feeling in my stomach speaks to the power of a red pen.  The comment stung, but it taught me something.

Yet now that I wield the pen—even online, blue—I rarely write something that direct. Perhaps I should.  I teach adults, after all.  Who wouldn’t prefer clear-cut directive to  lukewarm praise or  ambivalence  (I’m talking about voice here, not grammar; a dangling modifier is always wrong.)  If a student’s phrasing is weak, isn’t it my job to tell her so?  Your work suffers from… No, scratch that.  Weaknesses such as … Nope.  Your work would be stronger with …

I can’t know each of my students as well as Deborah Bryan knows her brother-in-law.  When I read their work, I can’t know what amazing aspects of themselves, what quirks and details they’ve left out.  I’m at a disadvantage, but I owe it to them, and to myself, whether online or in person, to dig beneath the surface of the work, to try to find what compelled the student to write a piece.  If I don’t want superficial work, I shouldn’t limit my comments to the surface.  Ideally, I’d be able to settle into each assignment, tune into the person behind the words, and find a way to honor that person.

Honoring someone calls for truth, of course.  And time and patience, which I don’t always have when I’m pushing through twenty papers.  And yet, isn’t that why I teach?  For the connection, the engagement, the excitement of finding—in someone’s words—a glint of something new and arresting, however awkwardly phrased.

On my floor is a pile of homework, collected at the end of last night’s class.  Typed and stapled, each assignment holds fresh promise of connection, of revelation.  This weekend, as I read through them, may I give back the same.

Next week:  Writing teachers weigh in on the topic of feedback.

 

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Friends Indeed

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I have a folder in my email inbox titled Friends.  I also have one for Teaching, with subfolders for different classes.  No doubt there’s a better way to organize (Friends from Way Back; Acquaintances I Rarely See; BFF) but I stick with the general.  Lately I’ve been consider a new category, somewhere between Teaching and Friends.

I taught Julie a year ago, and when the class was over, we started emailing—not that often, and usually on the topic of writing.  But the tone had changed, the balance of power shifted, so I thought of her in a new way. When she asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for grad school, I found my finger hesitating on the touch pad.  Where did I file her request?  And closing my note in which I said I’d be happy to recommend her, I hesitated at “Best, Lindsey.”  It sounded so cold, given her new status in my in-box.  And yet “Love” or “XOXO” seemed cloying, inappropriate.

This morning, an email came in from a current student.  No quandary there—clearly the  Teaching folder would do.  Her note was personal and revealing enough, and my reply (I hope) reassuring and supportive enough that “Best,” again, fell short.  This one got “Yours, Lindsey” – still professional, but warmer.  Even as I clicked Send, I knew that the next time I sent her an assignment or clarified a point of craft, we’d be back to “Best.”

Or would we?  Had her revelations opened up new terrain between us, terrain that could not now be disregarded?  Teaching writing –especially memoir writing—opens up all kinds of personal vs. professional quandaries, of course.  I’m used to them, and used to replying with a professional gloss. Thank you for writing so honestly, or You’ve done a good job showing the narrator’s pain and confusion.  But that doesn’t mean I’m always sure I’m handling it well.

When I taught high school, I had a student who handed in a piece about losing his virginity to an older woman, another who quoted Sharon Olds on oral sex, and a third who wrote about feeling suicidal.  Topics we may talk about with friends, but these kids were not my friends.  I was fond of them—well, not so fond of the Sharon Olds reader—and, in the case of the suicidal girl, obligated by law to report what she’d written.  No matter how honest their phrasing and vivid their imagery, Thank you did not seem the right response.

It’s different with adults, of course.  Or is it?  When does a student become a friend, and when should she?

Later this morning, I’ll get in the car and drive across the Bay Bridge to join three women for lunch.  Last time we got together, I was a month away from marriage and Brooke was about to have a baby.  Today, we’ll sit in the sun, pass Brooke’s baby back and forth, look at my wedding pictures, and laugh.  I first met these women in 2009, in the classroom.  They took three classes from me, and then some time passed, and two of them showed up at a talk I gave.  “Let’s get together,” Susan suggested, and it seemed like a great idea.  It was.  They’re former students, yes, but now their emails land solidly in the Friends folder.

A natural evolution.  I guess that’s the trick.  When I find myself saying, “God, I know just what you mean,” or “Tell me what’s going on with your husband’s job” rather than writing Convincing use of imagery or More detail here?  And by the time the wedding pictures come out and I’m Friending them on Facebook, “Teaching” has become merely a way of how we met.

 

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Tryouts

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’ve always loved the form of the personal essay.  As a teenager, I loved reading Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines, largely because of the personal essays in their pages by writers such as Mary Cantwell.  A Google search leads me to a blog called EAT, “a tribute to Mary Cantwell” by Julia Reed, which mentions Cantwell’s columns for Mademoiselle as being about the pleasures of meals taken alone or with family and friends—but that’s not how I remember them.  I wasn’t particularly interested in food in high school, when I consumed Cantwell’s essays, but I do recognize Reed’s appreciation of Cantwell’s style as that of “a memoirist at heart.”  Intimate but not raw; smart but not show-offy; and wonderfully able to transport a seventeen-year-old out of herself and into a wider world.  When I learned years later that Cantwell had lived in NYC’s West Village, I thought Aha, as though the geographical provenance of those articles had seeped between every word to breathe their bohemian allure of cobblestoned mews and charmingly non-grid streets to my suburban bedroom in bland California.  A romanticized notion, yes—but to someone who recalls walking home from the subway on an early fall evening as the sunset over the Hudson cast a honey light over the gray cobbles, not so far off the mark.

But I digress.  I didn’t start this post to wax nostalgic about the state of women’s magazines in the 1970s or reminisce about West Village sunsets, but to write about personal essays.  So maybe the previous paragraph isn’t so much of a digression after all.

As a college freshman, I took a yearlong Western Civ class that began (of course) with the Greeks and ended somewhere after Freud. Of all the sentences I read that year, here’s one that I recall verbatim: The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.

Michel de Montaigne wrote those words in the second half of the sixteenth century. He was the first to use the word “essay”—not for the five-paragraph structure of thesis, supporting evidence, conclusion that I’d churned out in high school, but for the kind of writing that made me run to the mailbox for my latest issue of Mademoiselle.  Montaigne wrote rambling explorations on such topics as friendship, anger, “some verses of Virgil,” and thumbs.  On anything, in other words.  He called them “essais” from the French verb essayer, to try.  Explorations, attempts. He digressed, he contradicted himself.  He engaged in rapt fascination with the human condition.

In my Creative Nonfiction classes at UC Berkeley Extension and through the Glen Online, I assign a textbook called Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, which explores the lyrical essay, the braided essay, the personal essay, the hermit-crab essay, the essay that weaves in reporting, the essay that plays with different points of view, etc.  The forms are myriad, which doesn’t mean that essays are loosy-goosy journal entries.  They are, however, plastic.  Moldable.  That’s where the “essayer” comes in, the trying-out, the shaping.  And when we read a good essay, we’re engaged in conversation with the mind doing the shaping.  Personal essays fascinate.

When I read Montaigne now, I’m not drawn as much to statements like “the surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness,” which have about them an air of pronouncement, a whiff of the pedantic, as to the way Montaigne punches holes in his own sureness, the way he contradicts himself happily, like Whitman three hundred years later.

All good writing takes us into a wider world, of course.  Personal essays are just one way of getting there.  At their best, they reach beyond their stated topic to embrace a wider scope.  They entertain, they shock, they educate (but do not lecture)—sometimes all at once.  Some are light, even frivolous; others, dead serious.  Best American Essays is a good annual source, and a predictable one.  At the back of each issue, a list of publications gives other venues.  Alas, you won’t find any in Mademoiselle these days, but there’s always Montaigne.  And somewhere, in some suburban bedroom, whether online or on Kindle or on a paper page, some bookish seventeen-year-old is reading one and thinking, I want to write like this.

Any personal essays you’ve read recently and liked (or not)?

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The Gift of the Tortilla

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

At writers’ group last week, I mentioned how hard it is to get back to work after breaking for lunch.  “Bring a snack in with you,” Monica said.  “Then you can keep going until two or three.”  She smiled:  “I eat a lot of nuts.”

That got me thinking.  Not so much about nuts, or how to stretch out the work day (which, incidentally, I’ve been successfully doing once a week since last month’s productive retreat), but about preferred writing snacks.  I don’t mean the sandwich or the heated-up risotto from last night’s dinner, but the snack, the treat, the bite or two that keeps us going.

I used to drive to Davis from San Francisco, across two bridges and over the hills into the flat Sacramento valley, and back again—a route that became stunningly, mind-achingly familiar.  I listened to a lot of NPR.  And I discovered tortillas.

Ever since I stood at my dad’s elbow while he kneaded bread, I’ve had a thing for dough.  Yes, dough.  Simple flour-and-water fed me in a basic way that not even chocolate does. Pies especially—those crusts!—are my favorite dessert. So, when I discovered Micaela’s flour tortillas, sold at a produce stand in Dixon, a few exits west of Davis, I got hooked by their dough-y consistency, their toothy heft.  I would buy a bag, rip into the plastic, tear off a piece to nibble on while driving.  Ever press homemade bread between your fingers?  Micaela’s tortillas are like that, and often still warm.

I kept packages in the freezer for when the craving hit.  And it often did while working, right in the middle of a tricky paragraph, say, or when a character just wouldn’t budge.  Monica’s right:  If I had my nuts at my side, I’d have had to stay put.  But instead, I’d get up and fetch a tortilla, heat it over a low flame, and eat it plain.  And that’s what I was doing one morning, looking out my window at Sutro tower, when I saw the Mexican restaurant of my home town, gone some forty years by now.  El Burro sat on Main Street, and Dad would park the station wagon in back, off Juanita Lane, so we always entered through the kitchen.  El Burro served up hot tortillas in red plastic baskets, but what stunned me that morning was a vision of the open back door.  Through it, in a kitchen now purely imagined, I saw happening in my mind’s eye, a scene.  Characters, action, dialogue, already underway, in medias res—the way characters and plot come to us when the writing’s going well.  But here’s the thing: I wasn’t writing.  I was chewing.

Fourteen-year-old Mollie lives in a farm town in central coastal California in the 1970s.  She’s clashing a lot with her mom, whose involvement in the United Farm Workers complicates Mollie’s standing with the cool kids, sons and daughters of the ranchers.  Rosa runs the Mexican restaurant that serves as local UFW headquarters.  On a winter night when the fog is thick and the back door open, Mollie will show up at the back door to hear the sound of wailing, to see Rosa drop the spoon she has been using to stir menudo and fall to her knees, to watch Rosa’s husband crouch beside his wife and press her dark head into his chest.

The vision came, intact, that morning as I chewed a flour tortilla.  It sits, still unwritten but there, in my mind.  What I’ll do with it, I don’t want to jinx by speculating.  I have a couple ideas.  Mollie narrated “Bees for Honey,” the first story I wrote as an adult and one of the stories collected in my first book. I know her world well, although I haven’t spent much time there lately.  First, I have to finish the novel I’m revising, the work that has nothing to do with Rosa or Mollie or the United Farm Workers.  But that kitchen scene sits in my mind like a deposit in the bank, an investment for down the line, and a reminder that, sometimes, taking a snack break pays off.  No match, of course, for the hard work of drafting and revision, for keeping your rear in the chair.  But every now and then, the right mixture of ingredients, bound and warmed and eaten while standing up, feeds us.

What writing snack has provided you with inspiration? Jogged your memory?  Indulged you?

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Sharing Our Work

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

The first time I showed someone a story I’d written, I thrust the pages at her and fled her office.  This was in 1992, another lifetime, when I’d come to realize that if I wanted to write someday, I’d better start writing.  The someone was an ideal early reader—intelligent, compassionate, wise.  She read the pages and thanked me, asked me about how it was to show them to her.  (Yes, she was my therapist, who not incidentally, helped me figure out that if I was ever going to write someday, I’d better start writing.)

Not all readers since have been so gentle.  Nor should they be.  When I show my manuscripts now, it’s criticism I want:  good criticism, based on craft and intuition and what readers want to know.  And yet, although I now hand out my work with more equanimity and distance, I still find myself thrown at times by the experience.  What is it that happens when we share our work?

In the years since I left the early version of what went on to become “Bees for Honey” in my therapist’s hands, I’ve gotten praise and big scrawled HUH??s in the margin.  I’ve found comments of “overwritten” and “we get it” next to descriptions and metaphors I lovingly massaged into shimmering prose.  (See?)  I’ve received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and I’ve had other reviewers refer to Mollie as “the male narrator” and “often tedious level of detail.” In years of grad-school and summer-conference workshops, public readings, and publication, I’ve developed an armor.

Ah, but note that word “armor.”  Think about what it implies.  Is it “armor” we need, or something else, something a little more porous?  But how porous, before we get diluted and washed away?

I know writers who love revision, who happily tear apart their own work to put it back together again.  I am not one of them.  I like the freedom of the blank page, the wide open plane of possibility, of not yet being wedded to one character’s motivation.  Once the gun’s on the wall, I have to figure out how to discharge it, and when someone makes a suggestion, I’m all too eager to take it—rather than figure out the best way (strike that: the inevitable way) on my own.

Our readers become a part of the dialogue, which can be exhilarating and affirming and confusing.  Their voices take part now in the chatter and what ifs, the try this, no, that, the trial and error.  We find ourselves thinking, What will Michael think of this?  Or, Here, this’ll make Annie happy.   

I’m better at keeping other voices at bay than I used to be, but I often feel uneasy the day after my work’s been discussed.  Slightly hesitant, unsure.  I tell myself the obvious (just as I advise my students when their work is discussed):  the writer makes the call.  One reader feels one way about your main character; another feels the exact opposite.  What do you do?  You listen to what you know.  And, along the way, a good reader will help you find what you know.

Over the years, I’ve disregarded plenty of comments without a second thought and taken many with eager gratitude.  But the ones that have stymied me are those that point to a weak spot.  I get so attached to a character, fully developed in my own mind, that I can’t see how he or she isn’t working on the page.  And when someone points it out, I panic.

Or at least react.  “I am Chris!” I cried out one night, after my writers’ group had been discussing how they didn’t yet understand Chris.  Was he a creep, or just eccentric?  A reprobate, or just pathetic?  He felt static.  Etc.

So yes, the armor.  But here’s where the porousness comes in.  I heard what they said about Chris’ his less-admirable character traits, traits by the way that I had intentionally put there.  I went back to the places on the page they’d pointed to, and I got to work.  Not to make him citizen of the year, or even less eccentric–but to help the reader get him, see him, know him.  I benefitted, and more to the point, so did Chris.

What about you?  How do you feel when you share your work?

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