The bard in Arkansas

It's not always appreciated but certainly true that writing--like other artistic endeavors--doesn't usually occur in a cultural vacuum.  The fine arts tend to flourish together--with a singular, unstoppable energy--in certain places and certain eras; feeding each other, challenging each other, and even collaborating with each other.  I feel like I am living through such a time right now in the place where I live and the university where I work.  When I first started teaching at UCA, the creative writers were a small band of spirited artists, eager to try out new courses, engage our students, and see how far this writing thing could go.  Several years later we had in place an undegraduate degree in creative writing--with an unprecedented variety of classes, I might add--and now we've added a masters degree.  Over the same period of time, our university's film program codified an undergraduate degree in digital film and then a MFA degree of the same.  Our music department, already exemplary when I arrived in central Arkansas, has only gotten bettter, regularly attracting world-class faculty and students from around the globe.  (Yes, to Arkansas!)  And the students in our studio art program have never failed to stun me with their semester end shows in the Baum Gallery, as fine a museum space as I have seen at any of the universities at which I've taught or been in a student.  Meanwhile, seven years ago, our theatre department presented an inspired idea to UCA's College of Fine Arts and Communication: to create a professional summer theater company dedicated to performing the works of Shakespeare.  Following the model of other summer Shakespeare companies, Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre would recruit from everywhere, combining actors with national stage and screen experience with experienced local performers.

Well, it worked.  The support was there; the enthusiasm was there; the artistic energy of this place and time was palpable.   Seven years later, AST--the only professional Shakespeare company in Arkansas-- has been an amazing success.  And by that I simply mean that they put on great performances.  I'll never forget their rendition of A Comedy of Errors from a few summers ago.  An early Shakespeare work, the play is considered one of the rougher and simpler in his oeuvre.  But the AST actors took on their roles with such energy, and the show was directed with such smarts and such whimsy, that it ranks as the best production of a Shakespeare comedy I have ever seen.  Anywhere.  No kidding, I was howling.  Last summer, AST did a haunting rendition of Richard III that surpassed a rendition I saw some years ago put on by the eminent Folger Shakespeare company of Washington, DC (and starring Stacy Keach, no less).  AST's show was better.   And it's not just Shakespeare they do.  Each years they take on one non-Shakespeare play and a children's play.  A couple years ago they did Dracula--the original Dracula--a production that featured an incredibly inventive, almost illusory, set; really smart staging; and some inspired performances.  The play was literally chilling.  I took my younger son to the show, and he decided to dress up as a vampire.  These days, post-Twilight, it's hard to see vampires as anything but foolish fun and games.  That's what my son expected.  But he spent most of the show with his head hidden behind his cape.  It was reminder to me how even in this era of Hollywood blockbuster special effects, live theatre can still be incredibly affecting.  (More affecting than Hollywood if you ask me.)

This season is off to a roaring start with Much Ado About Nothing and Oliver both currently running.  King Lear opens on Thursday, and I have my ticket.  Two years ago, AST tried a new innovation by taking one of their shows on the road and into the open air.  Thus, since 2011 Love's Labours Lost, Twelfth Night, and, this season, Much Ado have been performed on the lawn at Hendrix Village, next to Hendrix College in Conway.  Outdoors in summer is just such a natural setting for the bard.  Few people know it, but I grew up in the southern Maryland woods, part of a community of eccentric refugees who in the 1960s and 70s decided to escape Washington, DC and its suburbs and hole up in the country.  Back in the 1930s, the original eccentric, a woman named Alice Ferguson, built a small concrete stage in the woods on her property so that she and her Washingtonian friends who visited on the weekends could have a proper space to recite Shakespeare and perform skits.   By the time I lived in the area, Alice Ferguson had died, but a longer, deeper wooden stage had been built beside the original one.  And other members of the community had decided to carry on Alice Ferguson's ambition to perform works of the bard.  So it was on that wooden stage, in the heart of the humid, summer-heavy southern Maryland woods that I first experienced Shakespeare, both as a participant (they always needed kids to fill out the cast) and as an observer.  Thus, the smell of bug spray, the feeling of wooden benches and lawn chairs, the odor of relaxing evening heat, and the sounds of insects and light animals in the woods have always seemed to me like perfect accompaniment to Shakespeare.  (Midsummer Night's Dream was the perfect show for that space.)  When later I confronted Shakespeare in my high school English class it was okay--it's impossible not to like Shakespeare--but studying the plays felt entirely inorganic.  Something was missing.  How great that AST has brought back the excitement and enthusiasm and energy of seeing the bard performed outdoors.  Unfortunately, the reality of outdoor performances is that sometimes you get weather.  The other night, we caught exactly one half of Much Ado before lightning began to flash and rain to fall.   Such a shame for both the actors and the audience, both of which were just starting to really warm up and appreciate each other.

No rain, though, inside Reynolds Performance Hall at UCA for King Lear and for Oliver.  We hope to see both before our trip across the pond for the UK's Great Writing Conference.  (More thoughts on that next week.)  Meanwhile, Much Ado heads this weekend to the Argenta Arts District in North Little Rock, Arkansas.   If you are within earshot of this blog, or central Arkansas, come out and see AST.  You won't be disappointed!

Me and my writing machines, Part 2

(This is the continuation of a post about my history with writing machines.  Fiction writer and blogger Cathy Day has issued a challenge for any and all bloggers to document how the technology they use, and how they use the technology, has evolved.  You can check out her story here.  Meanwhile, you can check out the beginning of my story in my previous post.  After you finish this here Part 2, dear reader, why don't you write up your own history with writing machines?  But please do link to mine, if you don't mind.)

By the time I entered graduate school I was a proficient typist but hardly a fast one.  Suddenly, with my Mac's keyboard, I felt like I was zooming.   The idea that I could write faster than I could type was long gone.  It seemed crazy that I ever believed that.  Thing is, though, at George Mason I only used the computer for document creation.  There was no online culture in the late 80s/early 90s-- because there wasn't a world wide web yet.  It took me five years to earn my MFA; then I taught as an adjunct for two years.  Then, in 1993, newly married, I began a second graduate program, this one a Ph.D. program at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.   Of course I brought my Mac with me.  It was still going strong.  Before I left the DC area for Lafayette I ponied up for a personal laser printer.  A computer literate friend of mine sold me on the idea, saying they were the wave of the future.  It sounded like--and was--a much more elegant, even beautiful machine than the terrible dot matrix printers I was used to.  I was so ready to give them up that I essentially succumbed to an indulgence.  The printer looked something like the picture on the left.  I loved having the personal laser printer, but I eventually decided it was a mistake.  The machine was heavy for one; worse, the replacement cartridges were ridiculously expensive, equal to about 1/4 of the cost of the machine itself.

In our first semester at ULL, my wife, in a Research Methods class, learned about something called
e-mail, and her professor insisted the whole class sign up for it.  So I did too.  I sent a few experimental e-mails but didn't really use it much, not until later in our Louisiana stay.  Even then it wasn't something I felt compelled to check regularly.  While we were at ULL the internet started taking babysteps.  America Online and Prodigy got big, and the chat room culture started to develop.  I pretty much ignored all that.  I had classes to complete and stories to write.  (It was a Ph.D. in English, but one that included a large creative writing component.)  In my last year there, I also had an infant son.  If I ever went "online" (and I can't remember the mechanism exactly because when we first started at ULL not only did Google not exist but neither did its immediate predecessors, like Alta Vista) it was to look at the holdings of the LSU library and other libraries.  Meanwhile, I did eventually need to replace my original Mac with the newer, somewhat prettier Mac Classic.  I remember it looking like the one in the picture.  This was during Apple's dark years without Steve Jobs.  Rumors started that their products weren't as pristine as they used to be--and I knew people at ULL that wouldn't think of even going near a Mac--but I remained loyal, if only because all my word processing files were in a program that only worked on Macs.  If I switched to a PC, I could never again open up my files.  All those stories and papers would be lost!  Speaking of lost, I nearly lost my dissertation in 1997 shortly before I was supposed to turn it in.  The file I was using got corrupted and wouldn't open--a common problem back when everything we wrote was stored on 3.5 inch discs.  (A feature of both Macs and PCs back in the 80s and 90s.)  I held my breath and tried to open a backup file I had made (and which was probably stored on the same disc).  Yes!  It worked!  Now I could graduate!

We moved to Arkansas in 1997.  Within a couple years of our coming here, the internet was going gangbusters.  It's all you heard about.  And while I'd started using it for a lot more than checking library holdings, I still wasn't somebody who wanted to be on the computer all day.  If anything, this technological revolution was throwing me a nasty personal challenge.  I'd begun graduate school in a time when most people still didn't own a personal computer; I'd finished it in a time when the internet still didn't rule the world.  I was trying to jumpstart both my career as a teacher and my career as a writer, to say nothing of trying to be an active father--in other words, I had no free time--and suddenly technology I had no experience with was being used regularly in the classroom by several of my colleagues.  Despite the fact that I used a computer everyday, I felt like a Luddite.  I was done with my formal education, and now I had so much more to learn.  I did try; I really did.  I remember one long ago student complimenting me on how capable and willing I was with email.  Hah!  I was stupidly proud of the comment, but of course it seems like not too many years later when we started hearing that "email is for old people."

When I went from being a part time instructor to a full-time one at UCA, I received my own office and my own PC.  So now I worked on both kinds of personal computers, but sharing files was impossible.  Some things were Mac files--mostly my creative output--and some things were PC files: mostly work stuff.  Given how clearly dominant PCs were in both the business and publishing worlds, I realized I might be limiting myself by continuing to only generate short stories on my Mac, but that's what I did.  Meanwhile, about a year or so after they were introduced in 1998 I upgraded to one of the first generation iMacs.  As silly as they look now, those bright boxes with their handles on top were considered revolutionary at the time, and I loved mine.  Not only was it cute--an indigo colored computer!--but it was a workhouse.  The thing never died.  It barely hiccupped.  I wrote my first (never to be published, thank god) novel on it, and my followup (Burnt Norway),  along with an ungodly number of short stories and teacher material of all sorts.  Realizing 3.5 inch discs were both unreliable and on their way out, I started using an external CD-ROM drive and CD-RWs to store backup files of everything.  (My budget version iMac opened most CD-ROMS but not CD-RWs.)  I still have the CD-RWs around, although I never have need for them anymore.  The CD-ROM, you'll recall, was quickly outpaced by the jump drive and then, about two seconds later, by the emminently practical, and more powerful, portable hard drive.

After a while, though, I just could no longer get software to work on my beloved indigo blue iMac.  So about six years ago I upgraded once more to the latest iMac line: those with wide flat screens that sit atop a stem.  (An idea that supposedly came to Steve Jobs as he stared at sunflowers.)  It's a great machine.   I wrote my Van Gogh novel on it, along with the three (mostly top secret) other novels.  It works fantastically well, like Macs usually do; but the best part of all is that when I bought it I could also purchase Word for Mac.  Now I could work in Word regardless of what computer I was using.  This literally changed my life.  No more worries about how to convert when a journal insisted on Word documents (as most did).  No more emailing myself large blocks of text and then playing with them on my work computer.  No, everything was in Word from the get-go.  Things got even better when I signed up for Dropbox two years ago.  Now, I didn't even need a jump drive or portable hard drive to carry my files from computer to computer.  I could just store it to Dropbox and access it anywhere.  What an impossible luxury.  (By the way, the picture on the right shows my actual, lovely, dear current computer--my favorite writing machine of all time!)


My entry into social media and blogging are relatively new developments.  For years I'd heard that "you have to be on Facebook."   I resisted for the longest time but finally signed up a few years ago.  For the first year or so I was barely active at all on it.  Even now, I don't check it everyday.  I'm just not someone who thinks to run to Facebook as soon as something happens to me, even less so as it's happening to me.  Meanwhile, I started on Twitter only last March.  As someone who tends to write too long (sorry!) it's probably good for me that on Twitter you're limited to 140 characters.  I find Twitter interesting, but truth is I don't check it nearly as much as I should.  And I barely ever post.  It's like texting.  I can do it.  I just don't do it very much.  That will probably change, just like everything that's ever gone on between me and writing technology.  One exception to my late adaptor habits: For some reason when the iPads began appearing in 2010 I became very interested very quickly, despite the fact that owning an iPhone has never interested me.   The e-reader component interested me more than anything, along with being able to do things like watch Netflix.  So I eventually bought one.  It's a handy device.  I use it in a variety of ways--checking email, surfing the web, reading iBook files--and it's how I signed on to Twitter.  When I'm on the road, it's how I check on and post to Facebook.  But I don't really write with it.  Some people--some of my students I mean--can type using that tiny little iPad virtual keyboard.  I can't, even though otherwise I can and do type like a demon nowadays.  I've had so much practice.

My biggest online writing presence, something I started with my current iMac, is this blog.  I began it in 2009 during my sabbatical.  At the time I thought it might be interesting to share with the world what I was learning about Van Gogh and how I was using what I was learning in the novel about him I was writing.  Even from the start, however, I did not want the blog to be just about me or  my novel or Van Gogh.  I wanted to discuss historical fiction generally.  And I have, although I've wandered into other subjects from time to time: like what happens in my classes, and what's happening at my university, and what is my history with writing machines!  Finally, the real subject of my blog is writing.  Period.  And that makes sense.  It's what I know the most about.  I love blogging, but typical of me, by the time I started doing it some people began saying that blogs were passé.   Maybe they are.  Maybe Twitter is doing them in.  But as a long form writer, I can't stay away.

Me and my writing machines, Part 1

Cathy Day, through her Big Thing blog, has issued another challenge to the creative writing blogosphere: Give an account of your personal history with writing machines.  Click here to check out Cathy's very thorough, and thoroughly entertaining, history.  Here's mine.  The only writing machines I touched prior to high school were pencils and pens, which must mean that my teachers never required anything that wasn't handwritten, though I can barely recall.  It wasn't until my tenth grade year that I even took a keyboarding class, this at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland.  Except we didn't call it keyboarding then.  We called it typing.  Because that's what we did: on a collection of clunky old metal machines that were probably donated to the school by their previous users.  The course was "taught" by a chubby, prematurely balding Trinitarian brother with short, fading blonde hair and a rubicund face.   I say "taught" because what his teaching amounted to was mostly calling out sequences for us to pound out on those archaic devices.  (No he didn't blindfold us, but that probably would have been a good idea.)  Sometimes you really did have to pound, because the keys on old, non-electric typewriters got stuck pretty easily.  I suppose the teacher must have graded our work--since I did get a grade--but I can't remember that either.  As fusty and antiquated as a typing class sounds today, I was quite happy to take it, glad for the opportunity, and I can tell you my typing skills improved.  Or, rather, they came into existence for the first time.  This despite an accident that happened that semester as I tried to cut through a piece of frozen hamburger meat with an extremely sharp knife.  (It was such a stupid thing to do I'm not going to say anything more about it except the following.) Yes, I severed myself, nearly slicing my left pinkie to the bone.  (I still bear the scar.)  For weeks I had to keep the finger heavily bandaged and as a result, in typing class, I developed the habit of moving my left hand ring finger over to type As and Qs and Zs.  It's a habit I still have today and can't break.  Part of my permanent muscle memory.

As a result of this class I could begin typing my high school term papers, such as they were, and indeed I did whenever required to during my junior and senior years.  I can't remember much about the typewriter we kept around our house except that it was heavy, black, functional, and decidedly non-electric.  The summer before I left home for college--that is, the University of Virginia in 1979--I bought an electric portable typewriter.  I recall searching the classified ads in the Washington Post and seeing a notice placed by a woman in northern Virginia.  She turned out to be a friendly, cheerful, middle-aged lady with a trim helmet of short gray hair, a kind face, and small, smart glasses.  When I asked why she was getting rid of it, she explained that she was a freelance writer and needed to upgrade.  To what I can't recall, certainly not to a word processor since no one used them then.  So it must have been to a fancier, bigger electric model such as IBM was pumping out.  The machine she sold me--for something like twenty dollars--was a handsome sky blue thing, smart looking and quite compact, fitting easily into what I like to think of as a sleek, contemporary case, although to use that vocabulary today on something as clumsy as a typwriter sure sounds ludicrous.  (In my memory at least it looks a lot like the machine in the picture above.)  That typewriter saw me through all four years of college and several more after as I carried it from address to address to address to address through Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.  I typed dozens of short stories and poems on it as well as academic papers of all kinds.  I was thrilled that it could handle erasable ribbon, given the quantity of my mistakes; but I have to admit that it also frustrated me sometimes.  I remember one time having to manually yank the ribbon through the machine word by word as I typed because something was wrong with the mechanism.  (Black fingers, black fingers.)  I also remember one time during my last semester at UVA when I decided to just write my damn politcal theory term paper--in my small, cramped block print--because, although I was a semi-experienced typist by then, I still thought I could write faster than I could type.  (The TA who read my paper thoroughly enjoyed it except that about 2/3 of the way through he could no longer follow what I was saying, because my handwriting had degenerated so badly.  He apologetically gave me an A-, which was probably a lot better grade than I deserved.)

A few years after I graduated from UVA I started in the MFA program at George Mason University.  I still was working on that typewriter.  In the interim years, I had typed a variety of essays and stories and a lot of really bad poetry on that machine.  Also, of course, job applications, and, for a year and a half or so, a series of feature articles that I wrote on an occasional basis for a newspaper in southern Maryland.  When I started at George Mason most of the other students in my workshop courses were using typewriters too, but the few who typed their poems into computers produced work that looked awfully pretty on the printout.  I remember my poetry professor, Peter Klappert, warning one student not to let the stylish look of the computerized page fool her.  In other words, You're writing the same crap everyone else is, honey, and don't forget it.  (Actually, Peter would never say "honey" to anybody.  He probably wouldn't say "crap" either.  Maybe "garbage.")  I began to notice that the secretaries in the English Department office were typing into word processors instead of typewriters--this was brand new.  Meanwhile, my father, a chemist who had recently started working at a USDA lab in Beltsville, Maryland found himself surrounded by a gang of first generation Mac cultists.  They talked him into buying a Mac for his home office and then Dad, with the righteous dedication of a convert, started pressuring me to buy one.  Any other kind of computer besides a Mac was unthinkable!   In the winter of my third year at George Mason (academic year 1988-89), I gave in--rather willingly, I must say.  At that point the writing was on the wall, so to speak, for the old technology, and truth be told I was sick to death of typewriters.  With student loan money I bought myself a Mac (it pretty much looked liked the one in the picture) and never turned back.

Next post: The rest of the story: a life of both PCs and Apples as the latter gets simultaneously bigger and smaller.  I discover email (gasp), then the internet, then (much later) Facebook, then (only recently) Twitter.

Summer business

A draft schedule of the upcoming Great Writing conference appeared in my email inbox this past week, making the conference--which is not very far in the future--finally more real to me.   While none of the scheduled sessions have been assigned titles or rooms yet, I do know when my session will run (not the best slot, actually: last session of the conference, 2:30-4:00 on Sunday afternoon); and I'm assuming all the presenters in my session will read from their own creative writing, because that's what I'll be doing.  But with Great Writing it's hard to say.  Like the International Conference on the Short Story in English, Great Writing is unique in that it blends both academic papers and creative presentations on the same program.  Personally, I love that.  I think it not only makes the conference attractive to a wider spectrum of authors; but it lends balance, credibility, and a renewed vitality to both creative and academic pursuits.  Great Writing goes one step further by sometimes blending creative and academic presentations in the same session!  So hold on for further details about the conference as soon as I receive them.  As I've mentioned before, it will be held June 29 and 30 at Imperial College, London.

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Speaking of the International Conference on the Short Story in English, one aspect of my current early summer busyness is trying to imagine and codify a Study Abroad course for next summer.  The idea is to get UCA students over the pond to Europe so that they can participate at the end of their stay in the Short Story Conference, which in 2014 will be held in Vienna.  Due to various institutional delays at UCA, the whole process for submitting and reviewing Study Abroad proposals is seriously behind schedule, but I expect to be informed any day now that I need to get my proposal in ASAP.  So I am furiously researching things to do and places to stay in Vienna, Salzburg, and Prague.  It's exciting work actually, inventing a course--and student experiences--out of whole cloth.  What I will likely propose is a Topics in Creative Writing course called "Writing Europe in Fiction."  The students will read some European short story writers before we leave--mainly writers from west-central Europe (because that's where we will be headed)--and then spend three weeks actually abroad.  When we return the students will workshop fiction they wrote as a result of their trip abroad.  Our base in Europe will be Vienna, but I'm hoping for side trips to Melk, Salzburg, and Prague.  According to UCA Study Abroad guidelines, the person who proposes the course is supposed to come prepared with clear and specific information on airfares, train tickets, accomodations, museum fees, plans for the student's meals, etc., as well as lay out an academic schedule for the course.   So lately I've been tossing around different ideas for places to visit, juggling potential student nourishment and potential student interest with the realities of cost and the possibility of student exhaustion.  (Should we go see an opera in Vienna's reknowned and beautiful State Opera House?  Great idea!  Wait, it costs 164 euros for a single ticket?  How about the Vienna Mozart concert instead--only 89 euros.)  It's certainly a work-in-progress, with a lot of hard decisions left to be made.  In Salzburg there will be an opporutnity to take a Sound of Music tour or a trip to Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Bavaria.  We won't have time to do both, and the cost is similar.   While the Eagle's Nest has actual historical significance, I have a feeling the students would be more interested in a Sound of Music tour; plus it would let us explore more sites in Salzburg proper.  Of course, since the schedule is a work-in-progress, we might not end up doing either!

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Little followup to a news item from some weeks ago.  Versal magazine, based in Amsterdam, has just released its issue 11, and it's ready to order.  The issue features a chaper from my Van Gogh novel.  For the sake of the magazine, I called the chapter "The Dealer's Brother."  It depicts a Paris party that Van Gogh and various other eminences and wannabes attend.  It's told from the point of view of Suzanne Valadon, a postimpressionist painter who did a lot of modeling for other painters during her early days in Paris and who did in fact write about once seeing Van Gogh at a party.  I had great fun writing it, and I'm so happy Versal accepted it.   On Friday, they emailed me a list of interview questions.  The magazine runs a blog that features short interviews with some of its contributing writers.  My interview should be posted to the blog at some point in the next several weeks.  I must say, they sent a rather eclectic batch of questions.  Some were more typical ("What's your writing process?" "What are you working on now?") while others tried to put you on the spot ("What vegetable best represents you?" "What dirty little secret are you hiding?" "What's on your playlist?")  I answered as best I could, but I can only hope that I came across as interesting enough to make it worth their time.  You can read the interview when it's posted and let me know!

Now for all the reading

Whenever I tell people I'm teaching a novel writing class, the first question that inevitably comes up is, "Does this mean you have to read all your students' novels?"  Well, truth is, different teachers have different approaches to such a class, and so they each will have their own stories to tell--which is why I'm hoping that an AWP panel on this subject, one that has been proposed for the 2014 Seattle conference by fearless novel writing instructor Cathy Day, gets accepted--but the long and short of it is: Yes, that's exactly what it means.  For me, at least, this is what it means.  I don't think it's fair to ask a student to commit to such an ambitious project like finishing the complete a draft of a novel without also offering to read it and give her feedback.  After all, the students are making one heck of an investment of time and personal energy for your class; it's the least you can do for them.  Even if that means extending the spring semester into your summer.

Our spring semester has been over for three weeks, so lately I've been delving into the tall stack of my students's novels.  (Btw, I offered to let them post their novels to our class web site instead of actually giving me a paper copy, but nearly every single one of them preferred to just give me the paper copy.  One student, after she printed out her novel, felt strongly that the next time I teach the class I must insist on them printing out paper copies.  She said doing so was a powerful experience for her.  She hadn't quite understood her accomplishment until she saw how thick was her printed novel.)  As I've noted in the past, it was a mixed group of graduate students and undergrads in the class.  So far, I've read three of the graduate students' novels and four of the undergrads.  (Although two of those undergrad novels I had read mostly while the semester was on, because they were in a peer review group with me.)  As much as I love to read and do read it's a sad fact that I'm not a very fast reader.  This is a great quality to have when one reads poetry--you want to fully and slowly ingest a poem's images and its rhythms--but a bad quality for someone who needs to get through, and comment on, over a dozen books.  And hopefully before the summer is done!  To complicate matters even more, I have to get ready to teach a summer semester course--it begins one week from today--and I need to prepare a study abroad proposal for the summer of 2014.  The good news is that I'm finding, as I found the last time I taught the course, that reading my students' novels seems to go faster than reading other novels.  Of course, they are relatively short novels; but more importantly, I think it matters that I know all the authors and even the conditions under which the novels were written.  That ups the intrinsic interest and allows me to move faster.

So far, just like the last time I taught the course, the results are a fascinating mix.  First, the ranges of styles and subjects is perfectly intriguing.  So far I've encountered a near-future sci-fi story; a fantasy story; a highly literary murder/suspense story set in Little Rock; a coming of age novel about a group of college-aged guys in small town Pennsylvania; a YA novel that details a culture clash between a transgendered protagonist and the bible belt town he lives in; a story about a senior in high school who tries to find her bearings as she negotiates the infamous warfare of friendships and boyfriends; and a historical novel, set in 1930s Arkansas,  about the tragically bad choice one woman makes in husbands.  This kind of variety makes the reading burden much lighter,  and I know that the remaining novels I have yet to read are just as various.  The other thing I'm noting about the novels so far is their overall quality.  You'd think that having to write a draft of a novel in one semester would lead to some mighty bad prose as well as some ridiculous, untenable premises.  While I can't say my students' writing has been error free--this is to be expected in a first draft, after all--I've also encountered some passages of evocative description and many stretches of effective dialogue.  More to the point, except for maybe one of them, none of the books has collapsed under the impossibility of its hurriedly thrown together story.  All three of the novels from my graduate students are quite good and quite well-structured.  Amazingly well-structured, actually, given the furnace of activity in which they were composed, and given how busy the lives of those students are.  But my undergraduates' novels have also evidenced some inventive descriptions as well as very deft plotting.  Even in the one undergraduate novel that evidenced crippling structural issues I saw the author aptly play with situations so that the dramatic tension was usefully ramped up in key scenes, so that the protagonist found herself in hotter and hotter water.  That was very smart fiction writing--and, again, that's in the novel that I thought was the least successful of all I've read so far.

I'm just past the halfway mark with my students' novels, and so I can't yet offer any conclusive take.  But I can tell you that I'm honestly enjoying the experience of reading through them.  It doesn't feel like a burden as much as a chance to get know even better all these interesting people who filled up my classroom this spring.  To get to know them, that is, from the inside.  To get to know their imaginations.  I can also tell you that reading these books gives me hope for the future of novel writing.  One student who eventually soured on the course told me that he thought it was a terrible idea to insist on a draft in one semester; he said that any monkey could type out 55,000 words if  you let it type long enough.  (Yes, that's actually the metaphor he used.)  He was certain that my students' drafts would amount to nothing much better than monkey typing: long enough but artistically wtihout merit.  So far, that has definitively not been the case.  So far I can fairly say that I had some talented novelists in class this semester, people who understood how to form an affecting story over 55-60,000 words.  They are showing that to me every day I read, every page I turn.

Philbrick tells the stories of history

What writing historical fiction comes down to is making history into stories.  Some of those stories feature actual historical personages and events; some feature composites; some are drawn entirely with imaginary characters; many feature core interactions between the imaginary and the real.  But this is only one kind of storytelling that is drawn from, and dependent upon, history. As engaging as literary historical fiction is for me to read, I am equally drawn to the work of historians who are able not to make history into story but to tell the story of history.  Stephen Ambrose is one name that comes to mind.  Even better is David McCullough.  But there's no one more accomplished at this right now than Nathaniel Philbrick.  From his very first historical volume to his latest--the just-released Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution--Philbrick has interpreted the significant moments of American history fundamentally as stories to be told and understood.

If that sounds like mythmaking, trust me that Philbrick does anything but.  Because when I say he tells the story of history, I mean he tries his best to tell the true story--which is almost always more engaging than the myth.  Sometimes, in his mission to tell the truest story possible, Philbrick comes up against an impasse of data: stories, even stories from eyewitnesses, that contradict each other.  This occurs more than a few times in The Last Stand (2010), his volume on Custer and the Battle of The Little Bighorn.  Usually, Philbrick is able to sort through the clutter of exaggeration and personal bias in order to render to his readers a reasonable approximation of what probably happened.  Occasionally, the best he can do, the most honest thing he can do, is to simply bring the contradictory accounts to the reader's attention and admit that knowing the ultimate truth won't ever be possible.  But none of this ever gets in the way of his telling a great story.  Although he's an honest historian--quite a painstaking one, actually--Philbrick employs the moves that all great storytellers do: He develops his characters; he provides their back stories; he juxtaposes their points of view; he keeps you in suspense.  His books, nonfiction history though they are, have a clear narrative tone: that is, the tone of Philbrick's consciousness as he processes all that he knows and needs to tell you.  (He is not afraid to employ the first person.)  Finally, he shows readers how the current of events lead, as if inevitably, to the one crucial action that made history.  It might be the Battle of Bunker Hill; it might be the Battle of The Little Bighorn; it might be sinking of the whale ship Essex (the event that inspired Melville's Moby Dick); it might be the voyage of the Mayflower.  And as when I finish reading a great novel, when I reach the end of one of Philbrick's books I feel sad that I must leave these characters and that time that he has brought alive so well.


Philbrick was not trained as an historian but as a sailor and a student of literature.  (He was an All-American sailor at Brown and later earned a master's degree in American literature from Duke.)  Following his years of education, he did not start working as an academically based historian but as a journalist and freelance writer.  The grounding in journalism surely fed Philbrick's instinct for getting the facts straight (he is a dogged and impeccable researcher), and for cutting through and from disputing accounts to arrive at reasonable conclusions.  Likely it also fed his instinct debunking common public misunderstandings about the people and events that have helped forge America's identity.  Meanwhile, his training as a freelancer surely taught him a thing or two about storytelling, about wrapping up facts into a package that readers understand and are moved by.  I teach writing as my job full-time, and I read dozens of books a year, and I don't know if I can think of a cleaner, more seamless prose writer than Nathaniel Philbrick.  I can't think of a writer whose sentences do so much work and with such seemingly little effort, so little obvious dazzle.  I would announce Nathaniel Philbrick as one of America's most expert writers of creative nonfiction--his style is that good, his books are that winning--but I'm afraid that would make readers suspect the truth of his histories.  Fear not; if nothing else Philbrick writes fair and balanced histories.  He received the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his breakout volume, The Heart of the Sea (2000), and he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History for Mayflower (2006).  While I was writing my Nantucket-themed collection of short stories, I found his first historical book--Away Off-Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People--the single most reliable source for information about and descriptions of the island and its social strata in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  But Philbrick is not only devoted to facts.  He's even more devoted to telling stories.  I can't wait to get to his new book on Bunker Hill.  I know I'll learn a great deal about an event I thought I already well.  Most of all,  I know I'll get lost in it and regret leaving it when there are no more pages to turn.  

The students speak up

Over the last several days, I've been going over final folders turned in by my various creative writing classes at UCA.  The contents of the folders vary according to the class.  My novel writing students had to turn in reflective statements about the semester and about their peer review experiences.  It's been gratifying to see exactly how much the students got out of the semester, but also eye-opening to see what worked and what didn't (which varied from student to student of course); and thrilling to see some students offer really interesting ideas for future renditions of the class.  Not all the ideas are tenable, but many are intriguing.  One student suggested that instead of having two novels that the whole class reads, have one shared novel and then one novel that each peer review group picks--a book that models the kind of novels that group is working on.  That's a fantastic idea--and would have worked well with the peer group that student was in--but not every group included students who were writing the same kinds of novels.  A more workable version of this idea would be to have each student select a model novel for himself/herself and anayze that one.  Many students wanted more frequent contact with their peer groups, which I can certainly understand and may very well do next time, although I also think it's important too to have time away from those groups.  Many students also wished they could have had more contact with the novels of the students not in their peer groups.  But without instituting full class workshops I'm not sure how to put that into practice.  One student suggested switching up the peer groups in the middle of the semester, but I think it's crucial that your review group have followed your novel from the start.  Having to play catch up with a new group's novels might, I fear, overwhelm the students with work.

Almost every student complained about No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, our basic textbook.  Although it has some fine craft ideas embedded in it, it's essentially a motivational book.  While I think it's extremely entertaining, and it takes no time to read, some of the students didn't appreciate Baty's sense of humor; others they felt that what he was saying was too obvious.  One glaring issue with the book is that it's designed for people trying to complete NaNoWriMo, in which you draft a novel in a month; we were drafting a novel in a semester, so some of the urgency of his message didn't directly apply.  I guess I'll drop the book for next time, but I fear what will happen is that the students then will long for the kind of motivational speeches Baty can give, and in his rather unique style.   Most students really appeciated having so much writing time afforded in class each week; others felt that they didn't need it or want it.  (I have to say, though, that the differing opinions reflected how disciplined the students were or were not in making use of that time.)  One student thought we should read more novels; some thought two was plenty; some thought we should discuss the model novels differently (something I agree with and will have to change for next time); a couple thought we should not read any model novels at all.  Well, I can't accept that.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that if one gripes about having to read novels one should not be enrolled in a novel writing class.

Except for a single person, every student was seriously appreciative of the weekly word count deadlines and the fact that they were expected to finish a draft by the end of the semester.  Having taught this class another way--in which student started novels and workshopped chapters, but didn't even get halfway through--I can tell you I'm never doing it that way again.  Because 99% of them never worked a second more on their novels after the semester ended.  They never understood what it meant to follow a story all the way through.  That's a powerful experience; it's an educational experience.  One can learn some things from craft books; one can learn a great deal from reading other writers' novels.  But one learns the most about novel writing by actually writing a novel.  And then another one.  And then another one.  That's what my students have done, and I'm not denying them that experience the next time.  Here are some of their comments on what completing a full draft means:

What's important to accept is that I wrote over 55,000 words this semester. . .  Many of my friends are in shock and awe at what I've done.  Personally, I don't feel like I've actually done any work.  But I guess if you love what you're doing it doesn't really seem like labor.  Before this semester, I didn't truly define myself as a writer.  I was just a student doing writing assignments.  This class has made me realize that it's okay to be passionate about something, and it's okay to be confident in who you are.  I now say that I am a writer.  And I am damn good at what I do. --Colleen Hathaway, graduating senior

After printing out my novel, I'm honestly amazed.  I look at the huge stack of papers, and I can't believe that I wrote all of that--in a semester.  I keep showing all of my friends because I'm just so proud of myself.  Antoher thing that amazes me is how ready I am to write another novel.  During the process, I was quite honestly done with the whole novel writing idea.  I didn't want to do it again, and it seemed that my dreams of becoming an author were slowing being put on the backburner.  I can't explain it, but there's something so invigorating about actually finishing a draft.  Sure it needs work.  And sure, that work is going to take a while, but I'm just ready to feel that exhilaration again.-- Taylor Neal, graduating senior

I am grateful for many attributes of this class: that it was offered to the MFA students, that it was offered when it was, and this it was structured around a goal of completing a full draft of a novel.  I have started two other novels, but I have never gotten beyond 20 pages, so I thought of it as somehting I didn't know how to stick with.  This class changed how I think of myself and my abilities as a writer so much for the better, and for that I am so very grateful.--Stacey Margaret Jones, graduate student

Some changes are definitely in store for the next time I teach the course--assuming it's me that teaches it and not another professor--but the requirement to complete a draft is one thing I ain't changing!  Just like Taylor, I can't wait.