It's late, so I'll let my hair down

Nobody ever does anything the easy way in my family. From the outside, you might think we lead a pretty semi-charmed kind of life, and in a way we do. We have a house, some cars and enough to eat. But what you see isn't always what you get. I always wanted to have extraordinary children. A mother should be careful what she wishes for, or at least look up the meaning of the word extraordinary. Strange, odd, bizarre, and unexpected are lurking in the definition of extraordinary along with amazing and astonishing. I forgot to read the small print in the dictionary is all, but by then it was too late. I have three extraordinary children.

The youngest, a girl, attends college in Chicago where she studies Nursing and goes to a Second City workshop on the weekends. It seems that the one Humanities class she took was Acting and she was noticed by her acting professor as having "talent and honesty." I knew all that teenage girl-drama would not go to waste. She and I get along most of the time--at least I get along with one of her personalities. She can be the most intellectual, compassionate companion one minute and an insufferable ball of emotion the next. My favorite quote from my daughter: "You don't know what it is to be a girl, Mom, you are cold like a man." (Hey guys, I feel your pain.)

My middle son is nicknamed The Closer. He is a no-bullshit guys' guy, Homecoming king, fraternity president. All his life he has taken on more and more responsibility in his never-ceasing quest to "clear the family name." (Wait for it.) He is a senior at Miami of Ohio University in the quaint little town of Oxford, Ohio. He has an beautiful girlfriend who wants to be an English teacher. (Oedipus, anyone?) He is currently searching for a job that will allow him to settle in a different town than his parents. My favorite quote, spoken after he enrolled at IPFW for a summer class: "My communications class is like the United Nations--let's face facts Mom, at Miami, everyone pretty much looks like me."

My oldest. His life will make a great play someday. Once a student in all of the "gifted" classes, his best friend destined to be the school valedictorian, he gave that path up in his pursuit of alternative methods of consciousness. He is "taking a break" from college as he tries to "figure things out" in that infamous institution--the School of Hard Knocks. Rehab in Minnesota led him to his current occupation as the sous chef at the Palomino Restaurant in Minneapolis. He sleeps on a futon in a house he shares with two ex-bicycle messengers and a very well-behaved pit bull named Teenie. My favorite quote (although picking a favorite is very elusive): "Mom, you were a nerd in high school, you don't know what it means to be popular."

The house is empty now except for my spouse of 27 years and two 1-year old Puggles. The kids are in three different states, but their spirits can be heard occasionally yelling down the hallways or laughing in the basement. People ask if my life is too quiet now, and I say quiet? "What is that--I see 125 teenagers every day." I know this isn't really delving into the "cracks" of my own life, but it might help to understand how I feel spread out--pulled into geographical areas that I don't occupy. I am haunted by words.

Our Third Place

I'm sure someone has already mentioned it, but this blog makes for a fine "third place" except for the fact that it is a little bit home and a little bit work (school). Hi Autumn, Jase, Houston, Cindy, Erin and all you other guys not sitting in the front row. How was your day. I got ANOTHER snow day Wednesday and besides snuggling in bed with my two puggles and doing a few errands, it was pretty non-descript. I did to out to eat with another teacher, as is our custom on all snow days (it helps to have a behemoth of a gas hog SUV that sits in the garage until such occasions.) As we entered Cosmo’s two things happened. The owner, a handsome Greek man, came over and greeted us with, “Hey you two, snow day again? How’ve you been?” Was this the neighborhood meeting place I forgot to mention? We always see friends and acquaintances here, and the wait staff and owner knows us…so? And then the usual scenario for me. No joke. At least once a month. Someone (a perfect stranger usually) comes over with, “You look familiar to me. Don’t I know you?” Now, I am WAY beyond the old bar pick-up stage, and these people seem to be truly querying about our “past” relationship. But we can never figure it out. I go through my name, occupation and as much personal history has I feel comfortable with but to no avail. I usually end with, “I have that kind of face. The Everyman face. Don’t worry, it happens all the time.” In fact, it is a family joke. People think they know me. I postulate that it is because I talk to anyone. I make eye contact and they assume I a friend. And maybe I am.

Other details for my first unfettered blog entry….details about me. I love movies. I love movie quotes and often find myself saying them when the occasion demands it. It is just too sad that most people don’t understand what I mean, or they think I am terribly clever as I quote some of the most famous lines written by professional screenwriters. This is a great time of the year for me. Besides all the extra time off, there are a couple of movie channels that show nothing but Academy Award nominees for the month and what more does a film lover need, but a cup of tea and a blanket on a snowy morning?

Not to say that I don’t read. I do. I read all the same stuff as you guys do. But about 16 years ago, some friends and I thought we weren’t reading enough, so we formed a book club. We read and discuss one book a month. The meetings are in each other’s homes and includes food and wine—but we still discuss the book. It is kind a faux paus to show up without finishing that month’s selection, and pretty embarrassing. These women are smart—a librarian, a school principal, a computer programmer, a few others and me. This month we are reading The Book Thief, a young adult book proposed by the librarian. It is pretty thick, and the big buzz book in the YA world. Narrated by Death. Try that on for size.

Until next week, have a good one.

A Rough Paper

Cindy Renshaw
Creativity and Community
Paper #1 Rough draft
February 14, 2007

Feeling Restless

If anyone has lived a life full dialectics it is I. I was once the eager young ninth-grader whose essay on Why We Celebrate Memorial Day was read over the public address system at Eastwood Junior High. That same year I started dissecting worms in Biology class and when portly Mrs. Winters came down the aisle and beamed, “Here’s my future microbiologist”, I never looked back. I became a person with one leg on dry land (science) and one leg in the water (writing) from that day forward. My love of writing was put in the closet as I pursued a career in Medical Technology, one that seemed to always have the safety of job availability. Writing couldn’t guarantee the rent money. I thank Nancy Welch for the amphibious metaphor, but I have been trying to cut off that scientific tail for years now—and it always seems to grow back (like all good amphibians) and my efforts at creativity often take a back seat to research of any kind.
Welch talks about getting into the “right position” when it comes to writing and again, I have been seeking that position for years. It seems that whenever that creative leg or side of me starts to regain life, I seem to take the “safe” road again. Not the “I want to be like the teacher” road that Welch talks about in her book, Getting Restless, but the safe road of academic writing. Even as I enter a second career in teaching English (don’t ask—that is an entirely too lengthy of a story) and I find myself feeling that old creative restlessness, it still is easier for me to write the structured research or argumentative paper. Although I have managed to inject some creativity into my academic papers, the thought of baring my soul, using the other side of my brain, of “revising my writing to better fit my life” is a still a frightening thought.
This seemingly schizophrenic division in my brain was tempered with Temple Grandin’s view that some sort of chaos or genetic propensity for madness is quite normal in creative individuals. I can see now that the slight manic-depressive characteristics that exist in my personality many be a way of my creative side trying to make itself heard. I have always called myself a “visual learner”. Perhaps I don’t see in pictures, as Grandin does, but I often find myself running the movie of my life as an “author of renown” inside my own head. Still the writing that I most likely will put on paper is the conventional, safe, research-driven essay.
The Summersfield chapter helped me to see that all is not lost. They note that “artificial limits create a crisis which rouses the brains resources and throw everything into top gear.” The constraints that I put on my writing can indeed be seen as “enabling.” For instance, I love to do research. I love learning. I can take this constraint of academia and make it work for my creativity. I found the Summersfields gave great examples of exercises to encourage constraints that would affect writing positively in my students and myself. Without my search for knowledge, I would never have found these exercises and perhaps not this Creativity class. I have tried some of these exercises in my own classes and doing so, I found that I was approaching the “right position” for myself as a writer.
This fall I went to a workshop at a recent English teacher’s meeting, I was taught some exercises to help writing students find their own voice. We were all asked to write a stereotype of ourselves and then encouraged to break it. Therein we would find our own voice—the place where our writing should emanate from. I never dreamed that this little exercise would make me think about writing again. My stereotype was, I am a middle-aged Midwestern woman and…. This is where I stumbled. I have a great stereotype breaker that would push me to write my own story in my own voice—it is a real contradiction, but I chose the safer example. I am a middle-aged Midwestern woman and I curse like a sailor. It gets a laugh from the group and I am safe from revising my story for now.
Reading Peter Elbow, I realize that I should not always try to maintain the safe and reconciling voice in my writing. He maintains that a person who can “live with contradictions and exploit it—who can use conflicting models—can simply think more.” I know I would like to be a person that thinks more. I want to be a writer who finds a “way to break out of the limitations in the system.” Elbow says that we should search for contradiction work to affirm both sides. When reading my writing “scene”, my audience will see that I don’t have to search far for a contradiction. I have attracted contradictions like a magnet attracts iron filings (forgive the science metaphor.)
Finally, I reread the chapters in Nancy Welch’s book and found them to be just the push that I might need to enter into a revision of my own. I do commiserate with many of the students she profiles in her book, as I have often felt a version of what they felt about their writing. When writing a research paper, it is easy to NOT TALK ABOUT YOURSELF. Maybe that’s the point—to avoid my “self”, my revisions. I have been like Lee, afraid to lay my story on the line for fear that it might reveal too much about myself. As an English Literature teacher, it has always been easier to talk about the literature and leave out my personal story. But Welch encourages me to use revision, or begin writing by seeking to “question, challenge, and transform, not flee a particular reality.” I will embrace her postulations now that revision, and writing, is not “predictable and begins with a sense of dissonance—and this dissonance may be the start of a productive struggle.”
So with the encouragement of Welch and Summersfield I will write my “correct position” scene. And Peter Elbow gives me a push by backing up those ideas of constraints and revisions with his notion of writing by embracing the dialectic in my mind. Even Lewis Thomas shines as an example of a biologist who is also a writer. I can be the next biologist who is a writer, like Barbara Kingsolver or Beverly Hume. I can embrace the contradiction of having one foot on land and the other in the sea.

Breaking Stereotypes

I used to love to meet my writer friends for coffee and discuss our latest bits and pieces of brilliance. It was a relief to leave the Petri dishes and the incubators behind for awhile. Now I go to English teacher conventions. Not that I mind, I am adept at learning and research. I like to spend the day searching in the library and come up for air to synthesize my latest research paper. Lately, I have found that I seem to be putting more of my voice into these essays with some creative additions of diction and humor. It is perfectly fine to start a paper on the human eye with a quote from Melville. But a small workshop on Helping Students to find their Voice was a wake-up call for me.
The room was filled with other English teachers—my own tribe. We were asked to write down a stereotype of ourselves. One that was or was not true---just a stereotype. I wrote, I am a middle-aged Midwestern teacher who loves to read. Then we were instructed to break that stereotype with three true statements. Statements that would contradict the stereotype and show our true voice as a writer. I wrote my three, but hastened to cover up my paper from prying eyes. The first two statements would get a laugh (my usual goal in a class) so when asked for volunteers, I raised my hand. I am a middle-aged Midwestern teacher who curses like a sailor. Some giggles. I am a middle-aged Midwestener who hates Christmas. Guffaws and nods of agreement. I was even stopped in the hall by a nice professor from England who remembered my confession and who concurred with “Why are you Yanks so obsessed with all the Christmas decorations and such?” We conversed awhile and then I walked on. What I held concealed in my briefcase was the true revision. The correct positon as a writer. I am a middle-aged Midwesterner and I am the mother of a heroin addict. Just where do I go from here?

Works Cited
Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Lewis, Thomas. The Lives of a Cell. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1974.

Summerfield, Geoffrey and Judith. Texts and Contexts. New York: Random
House, 1986.

Welch, Nancy. Getting Restless. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers,
1997.

Tuesdays are here again --Revisions and Welch

Nancy Welch must have minored in Psychology or Philosophy. I didn’t expect to see Freud quoted in a chapter about writing revision—but who knew? At first I found the entire chapter to be a mass of confusion, except for the charming anecdotes about Lee the marine/student. Then I started to let myself fall into it—you know—be the ball, Billy. I came to the conclusion that revision is not simply seen as “death-work” because students simply abhor revising their papers and would rather gouge out their eyes than do it. Revision is “death-work” because in doing extensive and deep work on one’s papers one is often trying to revise the moi or the sense of one’s self. I get it.

Now, I don’t think that we can delve deep into our own psyches while hammering out a research paper. That kind of paper usually calls for some kind of synthesis of an idea from the variety of arguments that one finds in the research. But I can see how revising something more personal—a memoir, a poem, or a short story does indeed often involve questioning the reality of my own life—to wonder if I am becoming “what I write” as Donald Murray says. Revising one’s work is indeed a revision of one’s life.

As a teacher, I am also conflicted when trying to “steer” a student to the correct form and organization of a written assignment. Often I can feel the hopefulness behind the words that they have written down and notice that they are counting on me to see what they wanted to say. Welch’s chapter three isn’t the first time I have heard that teaching writing might involve being trained to help with “writing problems” not “personal problems.” But, I have learned to adapt to the messy emotions of high school writers. I will never forget the time when a student asked if she could include some interview research in her paper on Adoption. Of course, I say, there is a way to cite an interview in our MLA handbook. Good, she replied, I’m meeting with my birth mother for the first time tonight and I wanted to use some of the meeting in my paper. I can’t control the emotions that come out of all the writing that I see, but I do try to help them say what they mean to say. I try to show them how to get to where they want to go.