how to tell a story

I am an awful storyteller. My cousin reminds me of this everytime I start to tell him a story. I fumble, forget the sequence of events or the punchline, and worst of all, I feel like I need to relay every detail of the episode. I'm plagued by an overactive conscious. I can't lie!

While reading King's On Writing this week, I kept coming back to the discussion we had at the beginning of a semester about truth in writing. As a kid, I was told over and over not to lie, the sentiment deeply ingrained in me. Now, as an adult, I can't lie even in certain kinds of writing like memoirs, which require the occasional betrayal of truth. In the beginning of the book, King confesses to the reader that his memory fails him, that he cannot remember certain details. In other momoirs I've read, the author doesn't admit to such faults but instead fills the gaps with half-truths or probabilities.

Perhaps, this is the key to good storytelling: knowing when and how to lie. Perhaps, this is what my storytelling is lacking. I focus too much on telling the event faithfully, as it happened. But, I guess, that's also the difference between a storyteller and a reporter. People's expectations for a storyteller and a reporter differ; from one they expect entertainment, from the other, the facts.

As I begin to think about my classes in the future, I think that it would be interesting to explore this issue of truth in writing further. In the meantime, though, I need to learn to lie.

losing my mind?

A friend of mine told me today that his "thing" this semester has been to forget to underline the titles of books in essays. I told him my "thing" this semester is to forget the rules for capitalization.

I've had to fill out several, and I mean several, applications and this capitalization thing is getting out of hand. For example, if I'm referring to the University of Iowa as "the university," do I need to capitalize it?

Who better to set me straight than A Pocket Style Manual?

Besides learning which univeristy the author cheers for (under common nouns the author writes "a good univeristy," cross from it, under proper nouns it says, "University of Wisconsin"), it seems to me that university did not need to be capitalized. Good thing, too! I already submitted those applications.

lightbulb!

I was thinking about grammar the other day, as I often do, of course, and it came to me: what if we teach grammar through the "one-sentence story" that was introduced to us a few weeks ago? I think that this could be considered a challenge to students instead of just an assignment. It might look something like this: learn out how to correctly construct a story in one sentence using semicolons and colons and other punctuation. One story, one sentence. Students would, like Tim Gunn says, "make it work." The students could learn grammar while also constructing a short, short story.

Anyways, I know this is short and sweet but it's been on my mind lately. What do you think?

ugh, grammar.

I had the opportunity to observe an "accelerated grammar" course last week. I introduced myself to the class and took a seat among the students. (And when I say that, I mean it quite literally: I re-learned the rules for direct and indirect pronouns with them.)

I couldn't believe how much the students knew about grammar already! I sat quietly and pretended to follow along as they correctly identified when to properly use the nomitive case. (What is the nomitive case?)The process was almost mathmatical: the subject does this verb and so one uses this pronoun to complete the sentence in this way. Whoever said there wasn't a "right" answer in English class obviously didn't learn grammar.

I left the class, eager to see my own students' costumes for Halloween, before I could ask the teacher the one question on my mind: is there a way to teach grammar without filling out worksheet after worksheet? I know that students need to practice the rules of grammar in order to get them down but is there another way? I imagine that this is much of what we will talk about in this week's class so I'll leave that question hanging in the air...

somewhere in between

Right now, I navigate a fine line between student and teacher. The Iowa River most nearly serves as that intellectual, authoritative line. I cross the river every afternoon and drive past the UIHC and Kinnick and make sure my speedometer falls to 25 before entering University Heights. Past Finkbine, I transform into something quite different, something quite adult. I enter the parking lot of the high school and drop my first name for a Ms. I am teacher.

The line becomes more distinct with the upcoming election on November 2nd. The student in me concerns herself with the 21 ordinance while the teacher side dismisses that, reading up on the candidates' positions on education.(Speaking of which, the rhetoric surrounding candidates' plans for education is interesting, eh?)

The student in me likes the same music and movies and social networks as her students while the teacher side tries to somehow stretch those four years that separate her students' age from her own into a seemily further divide to legitimatize her authority.

I look forward to the day when the two parts are less distinct, the dichotomy erased like chalk on a chalkboard. For now, I'll enjoy my position on both sides of the river, I'll enjoy the ride.

finally

I recently got the opportunity to just sit and write. While hopping between classrooms, experiencing different teaching strategies and personalities during my cooperating teacher's planning period, I stopped in on a creative writing course.

Now that I think about it, this teacher demonstrated several of Newkirk's ideas (yes, those have still been reverberating in my mind). He integrated the reading of poetry with the writing of it as well as gave the students, and myself, the time to write. Also, he didn't limit the students but he did give them a starting point: the first line of a poem of the students' choice. He told them just to write, not to critisize what spilled onto the page or erase every other word, but to let the images unfold on their own accord. Go with it. In this manner, he encouraged the lying down of arms with the inner-dialogue every writer typically battles with. Write now, revise later. I felt a weight lift off myself, as well. Just write.

I started with the first line of a Langston Hughes poem and kept my hand moving. What I ended up with surprised me, and so here it is, the product of a free write, unrevised, raw:

I, too, sing America
in my own way
my own time like
that kid on the tricycle
rides around, young
and red
red hair red freckles
yet

they did not originate
there, here
they immigrated like on
his arm to
his shoulder

they were always there
the freckles
but people,
people could not see them

until the sun
shone so bright so
cyclical in the
blue sky, white clouds
like his eyes bright
as round
and the wheels
round
and the sun hurt
his eyes

he blinked those
long eyelashes blonde
from the sun

people used to stop him
a child
and tell him how beautiful
how magnificant those
eyes
those
eyelashes


The poem is not finished, but it's a start.

Metacognition seems to me the key to being a teacher. A teacher is always in her head, thinking through how she works out a problem or navigates through a project or the steps she takes in starting a paper.

I have been in my head this week, especially when reading through Newkirk's Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. For the most part, I write to get it done. When I have to read something, like Newkirk's book, and then prepare a piece of writing, I think towards that: making notes in the margins, underlining, dog-earing. Yet, Newkirk does not think of this as pure reading, and it's not. I am not reading to learn, I am reading to write.

In a sense, how I read is a good thing, the perfect demonstration of the reading strategies I learned in elementary and middle and high school. (My English teachers would be proud.) But can I read in a different way? Sure, I do when I read for me, which I tend to do less and less of these days. (The only time I am jealous of my roommate's Business major, is when I see her lounging in one of our armchairs with a novel...one she doesn't have to read for class.)

Writing for me then becomes about time, about proving a point, about filling the page requirement. Of course, there are times when I allow the words to find their own way on the page but this does not happen frequently. There's no time.

I feel like in one way or another, I have worked through this problem again and again in class, on this blog, and in my memoir. But I feel that it's a very real concern. Essentially, what I've learned this week is to get students writing. I am excited to try some of Newkirk's exercises, or the ones he's borrowed from other educators: the one-sentence story, the multigenre paper, etc. I am excited because just like pure reading can get bogged down by the weight of the hero's journey, writing can get bogged down by structure. Reading strategies and paper structures should be taught, to be sure, but not exclusively. Pleasure--the pleasure of reading to read, writing to write--and thinking are not mutually exclusive.

just thinking...

I started Practicum this week. I am tired and over-caffeinated and busy, busy, busy, hopping from one thing to the next. And yet, I love it. My three hours in the classroom every afernoon brightens each day.

Placed in an ELL classroom, I am starting to understand the challeges that not only these students but the teacher faces. The students speak at least five different langauges amongst them, anything from Spanish to Albanian. Though they struggle with their speaking and reading of English, for the most part, they want to learn, to know this language and its idiosyncracies that we take for granted. They want to fit in.

After one week, I've found that I admire each student. The challenge is real: having a fairly simple conversation can become an elaborate game of charades. However, they try.

I'm looking forward for what the next seven weeks has in store for me.

recent findings

Where does my inspiration to write from? Where does any inspiration--to talk and to share and to analyze--come from, for that matter?

For me, inspiration to write comes from my recent findings: books, poems, magazines, movies, TV shows, songs. It's a line that stands out. A line I want to share with a friend or a sentence, piece of wisdom, I can't get out of my head. Like a gnat in a web, it sticks.

You know that moment when you hear a song or a line of lyric or instrumental portion of a song and it hits your heart and for a moment, your heart beats a little stronger because its understood, finally? I love that. When such a moment happens, I immediately text message or call my friend Rachel and say to her, "Rach, [fill in the space] is singing my life." Diana Ross, Coldplay, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, the Goo Goo Dolls, Hootie and the Blowfish, the Kooks, Kings of Leon, Led Zeppelin, Guster, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Nelly, Kayne West, Eve 6, Eric Hutchinson, Blues Traveler: they've all song my life to me, some more frequently than others. Their lyrics and tone of voice, their inflection and instrumental work inspire me. Their words reverberate inside my head. I quote them to friends.

This is where my inspiration comes from: more than anything else, music is my muse. I invoke it like Homer: "Sing to me, oh Muse..." I need music. I need those moments when an artist sings my life. I need those favorite moments in a song. I need those drums to come in during the instrumental part of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones. I need that pound of the drum like the pounding of my own heart or the pen in my hand or friends across the table from me.

It's most often the smallest findings, maybe the ones that only I notice, that spark inspiration. And then I share them.

"thought made visible"

Thought, in its very nature, is personal. More so, thought is, in many ways, who we are: what we do, what we decide, what we say and how we say it; all are rooted in thought. But thought makes its home in the mind, plants itself there.

This is fairly obvious, of course. But perhaps, less apparent is the idea that writing is "thought made visible." And perhaps, since thought is so personal and writing is making the personal, public, this makes us reluctant to share our writing. Perhaps, this is why when we write a draft to an essay or a rough sketch, first wisps of a poem, that we hold on to it, sensitive to the comments of others, to their scrutinizing eyes.Writing can therefore be the uprooting of those thoughts buried deep in the mind, and replanting them on the blank page. Writing exposes those inner desires, inner dialogues, opinions, to the world and its judgement.

Take this blog, for example. I always publish a post and then scan it, wondering is my grammar correct? did I write enough? or too much? I consider what you, the reader will think: will you agree?

Of course, writing does not need to be the violent image of uprooting involuntarily; it can be quite cathartic, as well. R.D. Walshe writes about "learning potentials" of writing: "writing as the great collector of ideas" and "writing as the great clarifier of thinking." The latter of the two describes my experience with journaling. Until I write, and see myself and my ideas on paper, they are oftentimes a bundle of thoughts in a knot in my head. Writing loosens the knot, until each idea or emotion is separated. Only then do I truly understand what I'm thinking or feeling, and only then can I begin to explain that to someone else.

Though it may be scary, and I believe we, as teachers need to be sensitive to that when workshopping in class or grading a paper, writing allows us to know ourselves more completely. And really, only then, begin to explain ourselves to others.

"the bigger the issue, the smaller you write"

When it comes to writing, trusting the reader is my biggest weakness. I want to explain and explain, and oh, did I mention this for the third time? Do you get it? Really? Okay. Let's move on.

I've taken a couple creative writing classes in high school and here, at the UI, the creative writing capital of the country, if not the world. I've sketched out characters and plots and settings on loose leaf papers that only get crumpled and dirty at the bottom of my backpack. Yet one common feature of all those lines of script, besides their destiny, is the markings in the margins, whisked across the page in red: "too repetitive" "trust your reader." Yet, I truly did not conceptualize this notion until Ralph Fletcher quoted his instructor Richard Price in his book What A Writer Needs, "The bigger the issue, the smaller you write" (49).

As it turns out, I need to let the details do the work; like an impressionist painting, the reader can create the full picture from the details. I will never forget my creative writing teacher's comments to a three-section poem I wrote a couple years ago. I repeated the metaphor one too many times in the first section, the rhyme was forced in the second section, but the third section had something quite unique: a secret. I ended the poem, mostly because I was tired of writing, with a thought I carried with me through Germany and into Austria. I hadn't intended to write the line, it merely found its way onto the page. Accident. However, my instructor read the line and in her response, told me "readers love those little glimpses into the writer's thoughts."

She's right. 

The secrets, the connections, the leaps across synapses is the joy of reading. Why would I want to deny my reader of that "aha!" moment?

Trust the reader: my new mantra as a writer.

hey there!

Okay, so I've tried to do this before. I used to be a consistant journaler, a consistant writer for that matter, but like with anything, once out of the habit, it's hard to get back in. For that reason, I am happy to be pretty much forced back into the habit. And here it is: my very own blog.

But, before I really get rolling with the words and paragraphs and posts, let me introduce myself a little bit. I come from the Des Moines area and as much as a place can help define a person, Des Moines is a part of me. A small city with one skyscraper, the city is just friendly, plain and simple. I also come from a close-knit family. Like Russell Baker's essay in Inventing the Truth, I come from a fairly large, but close, family. I wouldn't have it any other way though; these are the people, my aunts, uncles, cousins, and of course, parents and brothers, that shape me in every way, including my writing. More on that later, I am sure.

As far as me as a writer: I dabble. I used to journal all the time, pages upon pages of words, the occasional picture. To look at the pages of those high school days, one really can know how I felt about life, about friends, family, school and every other facet of a teenager's life, by the font that I used. I have complete pages of two words or a sentence that resonated with me at the time in big, bold letters. Angst, I know, but I was so passionate about words. Somewhere in college, amongst the piles of books and assigned essays, I stopped writing for myself. (Seriously though, I love buying books at the beginning of the semester and unloading the stack in front of my business and nursing friends; they're always impressed by the sheer amount of books I am required to read.)

In another course I took within the College of Education, we learned about different forms of literacy. Blog-writing seems to be a relatively new one, something that teachers are starting to use in their classrooms. I didn't know how I felt about using the blog as a means for students to journal and express themselves when we discussed the matter in class. I see this assignment for this class as a way to test out the assignment for myself. I figure that if I enjoy it, if I can use it as a stress-reliever or a way to improve my own writing or get to know my fellow classmates, then maybe I would want to incorporate it into my classroom in the future. This is an experiment of sorts.

To end this very first post, I will explain the title of my blog: what we imagine ourselves to be. Over the last two years, I have had the great pleasure of getting to know an incredible professor in the English department. At some point in every one of these courses, no matter the subject matter, she quoted Kurt Vonnegut who said, "We are what we imagine ourselves to be." This sentence worked its way into my mind and thus, into my daily life and, ultimately, my teaching philosophy. It stuck. Now it is the title of my blog, the perfect summary of how I wish to live my life: with the understanding that I can be who I want to be. If I wish to be smart or funny or enthusiastic or happy, I can create that if I imagine myself that way.

Growing up, my dad used to say the same thing to my brothers and I when we left for school in the mornings, backpacks loaded, blury-eyed: "make it a good day." He could have said, "have a good day" but instead, he said "make it a good day." His sentiment echoes Vonnegut's, we have the ability to be all the good we want to be, it is in our power to change our attitude, our habits (writing included), our days, and our lives...but only if we choose to.

"We are what we imagine ourselves to be."