Monthly Archives: January 2017

Facts, Perspectives and Narratives

history, thinking out loud,

The story I want to tell may be offensive to some; even knowing that what I am going to describe still exists in our country can be upsetting. But I think we need to know how others think, how their facts blur into perspectives and then become narratives.

I wrote this in the short previous blog post about what keeps people from blogging. The question that was my challenge was “Should I Post This?” I decided to go ahead and tell the story.

I want to tell the story about alternative perspectives and where we find them. The story begins in a  bookstore in Virginia. The content in the store related to the American Civil War but from the perspective of the Southern confederacy, the Lost Cause. While many of the books have an historical perspective, celebrating Southern leaders and examining battles through a Confederate lens, others espouse political views around states’ rights and, more upsetting, segregationist racial attitudes. I went looking for the book store website, and it is connected to an unapologetic Confederate who quotes Benjamin Franklin on the homepage:

“Man will ultimately be governed by God or by tyrants.” – Ben Franklin

Even if they can’t agree what to call the war or specific battles, I believe these writers would agree with a set of facts about the American Civil War shared by historical and pro-Northern writers. There was a war from 1861 to 1865 fought by two groups of states of the confederation of states known as the United States of America. Some of the states interpreted the Constitution to say that they could leave; the other states interpreted it to say that they could not leave. That, along with ideas about states’ rights in general and slavery specifically led to a war.

From there, it starts to get blurry between facts and perspectives. Fact: As part of the war, General William Tecumseh Sherman invaded the South and wreaked destruction on the civilian population as part of his total war. Was he simply doing his job and practicing total war in order to help the North win? Or was he committing war crimes? Your answer to that question is going to determine your lens in examining other facts that might arise around the events of Sherman’s March to Atlanta and the Sea. They seem like facts because they confirm your world view.

I did buy a book in the store. It seemed to be a more unbiased story of one Virginia county before, during and after the war, focusing more on the lives of the civilian population, living in a county that saw four significant battles.

I feel like I took the coward’s way out. I should have purchased one of the more stridently Confederate books that condemned Lincoln as a tyrant and his troops as terrorists. It is, indeed, a point of view that is not taught in schools except perhaps when someone discusses the Southern perspectives. But I have a sense that these authors are not simply describing their point of view. They are using facts to create a narrative different from the one crafted by others. Facts and perspectives become one thing and trying to separate them with either logic or brute force is impossible.

Maybe I’m making too much of this experience but as I passed through the entryway of the book store and realized where I was, I had a sense of being part of a secret club. It was the same feeling I had when I visited the Jubal Early home place. A table there offered brochures for pro-Southern societies celebrating the Antebellum South and mourning the Lost Cause. Like Jubal Early, there are many who are unreconstructed Confederates, living in the modern world with a shared secret connection to the past.

Should I Post This?

blogging, Uncategorized

I have been blogging merrily along in the new year, having fun exploring and writing about poetry and community on both this and my book blog. Part of the reason I was able to post so often was because I cut myself some slack in terms of content. Like Tim Owens, I wasn’t worried about profundity, just publishing.

Then, I started to draft of a potentially more controversial post, and I got stuck. To George Couros’s list of overthinking questions, I would add, “Should I post this at all?”

The story I want to tell may be offensive to some; even just the knowledge that what I am going to describe still exists in our country could be upsetting. But I think we need to know how others think, how their facts blur into perspectives and then become narratives so we can examine our own processes and perhaps find empathy even in what might otherwise be offensive.

So, I answered the question with a yes and you can find the post here.

 

Reading Aloud

art, poetry, reading

Many of us probably remember round robin reading with a slight shudder of horror whether as students or teachers. I suppose at the time, it seemed the most efficient and effective way to hear every student, but it could be deadly for listeners and humiliating for readers. Is it still done?

A better way, I think, is to take a page from former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins who recommends giving students time to read over the material so they can prepare themselves and be able to read in a natural style. Collins is referring specifically to poetry but I think his suggestions can apply to any kind of recitation.  Collins’ tips are part of a program called Poetry 180 that asks teachers and schools to read aloud a poem every day of the school year:

The goal is to give students a chance to listen to a poem each day. The best time for the reading would be at the end of the daily announcements, whether they are delivered over a public address system, at an assembly in an auditorium or by teachers in their individual homerooms. The hope is that poetry will become a part of the daily life of students in addition to being a subject that is part of the school curriculum.

The site provides a helpful list of poems that seem to be mostly modern and contemporary poems from mostly North American writers. Collins cautions that this is not an exercise in interpretation. The goal is to hear a poem:

Unless students really want to discuss the poem, there is no need to do so. The most important thing is that the poems be read and listened to without any academic requirements.

I find this a fascinating bit of advice.Just listen and absorb. It is similar to  Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac without the extra interesting tidbits and Keillor’s drawl.

Reading aloud as performance or art has been a minor theme of the last two books I’ve read. In his Essays After Eighty, Donald Hall writes about doing poetry readings with some history of reading aloud along with warnings for readers. He describes the move from imagining the poem’s sound through the eyes to needing to say aloud the “mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants” (p. 41).

His descriptions of the great poets he heard read match quite nicely with Billy Collins’ tips for reading out loud:

Eliot was good, but most performances were insufferable–superb poems spoken as if they were lines from the telephone book. William Carlos Williams read too quickly in a high-pitched voice, but seemed to enjoy himself. Wallace Stevens appeared to loathe his beautiful work, making it flat and half audible…Marianne Moore’s tuneless drone as as eccentric as her imitable art. (p. 42)

Only Dylan Thomas seems to have met his expectations with his “rich and succulent Welsh organ” (p. 43).

As I read Hall’s essay about reading poetry, I was reminded of James Agee’s preface to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. “This text,” he writes, “was written with reading aloud in mind.” He seems to contradict himself and offer a reverse process to that described by Hall when he goes on to say,

That cannot be recommended: but it is suggested that the reader attend with his ear to what he takes off the page: for variations of tone, pace, shape, and dynamics are here particularly unavailable to the eye alone, and with their loss, a good deal of meaning escapes. (p. xi).

For Agee, sound adds meaning. As I wrote in the review on my book blog:

His prose tumbles along, piling up details and impressions, swirling the story into the midst. Sometimes, it made for daunting reading and I would look ahead for the next break. Other times, I found myself in the flow, not worried so much about exact meaning but absorbing impressions as I rode along the natural energy of the words.

I even read some of it aloud.

About that Face to Face Book Group: On Reading and Writing

blogging, reading, writing

I live on the edge of a very small town in Sussex County, Virginia. It is the home of those staples: peanuts and bacon. I moved here about five years ago and have spent most of that time working rather than getting involved in community life. This year, I decided I needed more non-work interaction in my life, so I joined the book group at my local library branch. I read A LOT so getting the homework done wasn’t going to be a problem. And the group meets one hour, once a month, five minutes from my house. (It’s actually close enough that even I could ride my bike and may do so in the spring.)

We met Tuesday and talked about We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. It is a story told from the perspective of mother and son, complicated by poverty and hope and love. We learn about what it is like to be undocumented but integrated in America. And, even more importantly, it reminds us of the terrible tragedy of the impact of zip code on education and thus opportunity. I can recommend it and you can read my full review at my book blog.

I’m really posting this blog to celebrate the book group and some ideas about writing: SO much fun to sit around a table with thoughtful people and just talk about a book for an hour. One woman provided several interpretations that had never occurred to me and expanded the possible understandings of the book. I haven’t dug this deep into a book for awhile.

As for writing…what struck me most out of the whole book was a comment from the author in the Q & A at the end. The interviewer asked her about writing her second novel, and she talked about the fear of disappointing her readers. This fear tainted her writing:

I was so worried about writing a “good” book that I ended up writing a carefully polished book with absolutely no heart.

She owes her freeing herself from that fear to a friend in her writers’ group who reminded her that she didn’t have anything to prove:

Somehow, those word set me free. I stopped trying to be good and just started to write–and the book improved dramatically from that moment on.

Two lessons leap out here for writing teachers, or indeed teachers anywhere: let them write (read/learn/share) without worrying about meeting a rubric or impressing someone else and give them community in which to do it. In my writing workshop, students produced fascinating pieces of writing when I gave them a chance to record their lives and stories. They wrote letters and stories and poems. And they wanted to read what their classmates wrote because they were so different.

I understand the concern with impressing people. The need to be profound. I wrote about it here and discovered Tim Owens shared a similar issue on his own blog.

I’m just decided that I am going to keep writing anyway.