Author: bripike

Teaching Lessons: Teaching World Lit to Fourteen Faces

This semester I am teaching a world literature class for our brand new honors program. I’ve taught the course face to face twice but this semester brings a new format to the table. The company that my community college is currently contracted with uses the concept of a flipped classroom where most of the work done online and supplemental instruction is done in once or twice a week synchronous sessions in Adobe Connect. I spent the last semester developing the course with a course designer which involved taking my course content and translating it into this new format.

This is brand new venture for me and I’ll be posting more about it as the course progresses. There are some positives and negatives about this new format but right now I’m just trying to take in the new experience and see what I can learn from it. I’m not convinced that this new format is the “wave of the future in education” but I think there are some valuable things that can be learned from using the technology for both students and professors, but I’ll be writing about those thoughts at a later date.
For now I’m still digesting meeting with students once a week in a session that essentially entails me talking to a screen of fourteen faces. Think the Brady Bunch screen and you begin to get the idea. This screen shot demonstrates what I see:

Every Wednesday afternoon I sit in my dining room and talk about world literature with my class of fourteen for about an hour and twenty minutes. It is a somewhat odd experience to be sitting in your house teaching a course, but so far I’ve enjoyed the experience. Granted, I’ve only met with my students for two sessions, but they seem comfortable with the technology and today’s discussion about Gilgamesh went much like discussions I’ve had in my traditional face to face classes. I am also lucky in the respect that many of these students took classes in this format last semester, so the technology is familiar to them at this point. 
What I like the most about this format and online education in general is that I have students who are taking this class in Fort Wayne, Muncie & Lafayette in addition to Indianapolis. They may not have access to the course otherwise, especially if it were in a face to face format because their campus may not have offered it or their schedules may not have permitted it even if it was offered. 
I still prefer teaching a face to face class, but I’m always open to trying something new and I think that this experience will ultimately be valuable. 

The Art of Losing…

I’ve been keeping journals since I was about eight or nine years old. When I was younger, through my teenage years, I was fairly consistent in starting a journal, writing in it until it was full and then moving onto the next set of empty pages. However, especially as I got older and my writing became a bit more focused and I started to mine it for poems, I started to keep better track of these little books full of scribbling. I didn’t seem to have trouble hanging onto them until fairly recently.

I wouldn’t say I’m a forgetful person and I don’t think I really fall into the “scatterbrain” category either. I’m relatively organized and I don’t lose things easily, but in the last couple of years I seem to be constantly losing journals. For example, a few semesters ago I started writing in a yellow, faux leather journal that my sister gave me for Christmas. I really liked the size of the journal, the bright yellow cover and the strip of leather on the front that buckled to keep the journal closed. I wrote in it all semester and then one day, I couldn’t find it. I tore my house apart. I looked in my office and in the lost and found at school. I couldn’t find it. I was annoyed. Mostly because I liked the journal and also, who knows what was in there that I could potentially have used for a poem or two?

Today I have the day off and I’ve finally had some time to sit and think about some ideas I had for poems over the holidays. However, when I went up to my office space to look for my writing journal, I couldn’t find it. I have looked all over my house and it doesn’t seem to be here. Now it is possible it’s at work, seeing as how I often take my journal to work if I have a spare moment or two and think of something I want to write down. However, if it doesn’t turn out to be in a desk drawer at school, well, I don’t have the first clue where it might be.

This idea of losing potential ideas for poems or even drafts of poems themselves, reminds me of a story I heard once when I was an undergraduate. A visiting writer came to campus to give a reading and I’m sorry to say, I can’t remember who it was but I do remember he was a fiction writer and he primarily wrote short stories. He was in his fifties and this was probably somewhere around 2000 or 2001. He was talking about how he used to only keep one type written copy of all his drafts/stories but one days his car was broken into and they took everything in it, including the folio that contained all of his work. After this incident, he started keeping multiple copies. He also started using a computer in addition to his type writer.

Of course anyone who uses computers and has suffered through the loss of a hard drive or external hard drive, knows that technology does not completely solve this “art of losing.” In fact, I suffered this exact problem a few months ago when our external hard drive failed and all my poetry was lost. Luckily, my husband who is a determined and brilliant soul, was able to recover the data, but now we both consistently use Dropbox.

While it is frustrating to lose these journals and the material that they hold, there is also something freeing about it. Also, while I seem to become slightly forgetful in the material sense, I’m still lucky to have a good memory, so if an idea or image or line for a poem is particularly interesting to me I am often able to circle back around to it at some point.

All this being said, I’m still going to be on the look out for that journal…

Poetry in Print & The Beginning of Spring

Three of my poems, “Song,” “Seed” and “Stargazer” appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Rust + Moth and now that issue is available in print.

My physical copies of New Plains Review & Grey Sparrow arrived this week.

After surviving the polar vortex, classes began this week with rain and milder temperatures. I met with my creative writing class yesterday and out of twenty-five enrolled students, twenty-two showed up. I am am still somewhat surprised by these numbers even though they been steadily rising for several semesters now. When I first started teach this class, I was lucky to have ten students enrolled.

I’m embarking on a few new teaching adventures this semester, including working with some new technology and teaching a new section of World Literature for our fledgling Honors College.

I took some time off of writing over the holidays, which isn’t abnormal. I still journal and write down ideas, but I didn’t have a chance to formally draft anything as we were traveling for much of our holiday. I am looking forward to sitting down to write some new poems and start revising some work from last fall.

Happy New Year!

The past few weeks I’ve been trekking around the northeast visiting family and friends for the holidays. It was fun but exhausting and I’m glad to be home. 

When I returned home I discovered that my two contributor copies of the New Plains Review arrived in the mail. My poem “Starling” appears in this issue and I’m thankful to be included in such a solid publication with so many great writers. 
2013 was a beautiful year and I’m grateful for all peaks and valleys and everything in between. 
It’s all I have to bring today

It’s all I have to bring today–
This, and my heart beside–
This, and my heart, and all the fields–
And all the meadows wide–
Be sure you count–should I forget
Some one the sum could tell–
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

~Emily Dickinson*

*Courtesy of The Academy of American Poets 


A Few Notes From Weeks Gone By

I learned this past week that two more of my poems, “Crossing Ompompanoosuc” & “The Pond” were accepted for publication by The Meadow for the 2014 summer edition.

The end of the semester is approaching quickly and crunch time is officially here. I have some posts marinating in my head, but have not had time to get them out into the blogosphere. Soon I’ll be back to a regular schedule.
In the meantime, my family is arriving from Pennsylvania and I am cooking Thanksgiving dinner.
Enjoy!

Pittsburgh: Poetry & Place

During a meeting of our student creative writing group today, I had the pleasure of rediscovering this poem:

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is a fat lady jabbering at the bus stop.
She mistakes me for someone who gives a damn,
For a native son of her gray industrial breast.
She blesses her Bucs, her Steelers,
Her father, God rest his soul, was a Hornets fan.
She mistakes me for someone who gives a damn,
Her blue scarf twisting like the broad
Monongahela,
Her blue face lined like a jitney’s street map.
I’d tell her I’m not from this place:
These severed tired neighborhoods,
These ruthless winter tantrums,
But her long winded stories numb me.
She is persistent as snow, as boot slush &
Thinsulate,
As buses rumbling like giant metallic caterpillars .
She lights a Marlboro and it means
Spring will burn quick and furious as a match,
Summer will blaze.
When she tells me No one is a stranger in
Pittsburgh,
do I believe her,
My frosty fairy foster-Mamma,
My stout rambling metaphor?

~Terrance Hayes

This poem was given out to the group by my colleague and fellow advisor, Emily Watson. The theme of her exercise was the idea of place and how it could work in creative writing. She encouraged the group to write either replacement poems or just to write about places they knew or had strong connections to. She also included “A Primer” by Bob Hicok and Three Yards by Michael Dorris. It was a really great exercise and I think I’m going to steal it to use later in my creative writing class.

I love “Pittsburgh” because I’ve spent a lot of time in that city and I think the poem captures the complexity of the place. My husband’s hometown, I admittedly had complicated feelings about it. It’s impossible to drive in. On certain days, in a certain light it still looks like a steel town. A bit dingy. A bit dirty. The houses are carved out of the hillsides and look like the might fall into the river at any minute. At the same time, the grace of the bridges arching over the water of the rivers and the view of the city from the top of Mt. Washington are beautiful. You can’t beat a sandwich from Primanti Brothers and I like the hills.

My biggest personal struggle with Pittsburgh is something I think Hayes touches on his poem: the feeling of being an outsider. Pittsburgh is a big city but the people who live there are deeply loyal and that loyalty binds them. There is always a sense of displacement when you find yourself in a new place, but some places are easier to break into than others. I recognize I may be projecting a bit onto the poem considering that sometimes when I think about my early encounters with the city, my chest still tightens. I also recognize that some of the trouble I have with Pittsburgh is that gut deep loyalty to a place is somewhat alien to me. I didn’t grow up in the same place and I have several different houses that I associate with my childhood. I think it’s important to get out and live in other places. You never know what’s out there until you leave and it’s not like your hometown is going anywhere. This is a direct result of the way I was raised because my parents left their hometowns and never went back.

I have tried writing about Pittsburgh several times, but each time ends in frustration. I think it is because I’m trying to balance past and present feelings, which is tricky. I think this is also why I admire the poem Hayes wrote so much. He manages that balance.

Questions Surrounding Creative Nonfiction

Over the past few weeks in my creative writing course we’ve been examining the genre of creative nonfiction. I became interested in the genre when I took an intro level course my senior year in college. We read books like Cherry by Mary Karr, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, The Black Notebooks by Toi Derricote and The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster. I really loved the class and I quickly became enamored with the idea of creative nonfiction. When I was a graduate student, I signed up to take a creative nonfiction workshop and in addition to trying to write some of my own pieces (not quite sure where all that work went) I was discovered Annie Dillard, David Sedaris and Patricia Hampl. When I continued on with my MFA, I sat in on a discussion surrounding James Frey’s controversial book A Million Little Pieces and later the discussion turned to Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace.

Flash forward several years, and I find myself standing in front of a creative writing class trying to explain to my students what creative nonfiction is exactly. It’s not the easiest genre to discuss with new writers. The line between “creative” and “nonfiction” is blurry and it causes, understandably, some anxiety among my students in terms of trying to find a subject. 
One of the pieces we discuss is David Sedaris’s essay “What I Learned,” the commencement address he shared with a captive audience of Princeton grads. The essay details his admission to Princeton and his parents, especially his father’s, sheer joy at the prospect of their son’s admission into a prestigious university. The essay also describes their disappointment when he eventually settles on a major in comparative literature. That disappointment turns to despair and embarrassment when he eventually gives them a first edition of his first book of essays and they realize they are the main characters. 
My students love Sedaris. It’s hard not to. He’s witty and smart and astute. His stories are hilarious and endearing and easy to relate to. However, because he writes so much about his family, there are inevitably certain questions that arise about his choice of subject matter.  There are not easy answers to these questions. Does his family mind that he’s constantly writing about them? Some of his work suggests that they do. Does that keep him from writing about them? Not at all.
I was reminded of this conversation again this week when my new issue of The New Yorker arrived with a piece written by Sedaris. The essay, “Now We Are Five”, deals with death of Sedaris’s youngest sister, Tiffany, who committed suicide in May. He reveals in the essay that at the time of her death he and Tiffany had not spoken in eight years and that when his sister, Amy, had gone to Tiffany’s home in Massachusetts, among the few things found were some shredded family photographs. It is a sad piece, poignant in its loss but also injected with Sedaris’s quick wit. However, it returns to the same initial question: When do you draw the line? Is anything off limits? 

What I’m Reading

This quote from Stephen King came across my Twitter feed the other day, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” I’ve seen this quote many times and it got me to thinking about what I am currently reading. Recently I’ve tried to let go of my habit of finishing one book before starting another. While this is a good habit in the respect that it keeps me specifically focused on one text, it also limits the amount of books I  can read during the course of a semester or even a year. While it can be confusing to read several books at one time, I tend to have a wide variety of tastes in terms of books, so it isn’t proving to be a problem at the moment. Mr. King would be happy with the fact that out of the four books I’m reading right now, his work occupies two slots:


1. 11/22/63, Stephen King
2. Dr. Sleep, Stephen King
3. The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri
4. Fire to Fire: New & Selected Poems, Mark Doty 

In addition to these four, I also have Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward lined up and ready to go. These books are in addition to the articles and blog posts I read on the internet and the copies of The New Yorker & The Atlantic that come in the mail. Admittedly, I’m currently involved in a complicated relationship with my subscription to The New Yorker. I love the articles but at the end of the month, I usually find myself buried in issues and I hate when that happens. 

I know it is important to read work that interests you, work that you love and work that you don’t love because you learn from all three. In addition to trying to read multiple books at the same time, I’m also trying to get over the fact that if I start a book and don’t like it, I don’t necessarily have to finish it.  This happens often with book club selections that I’m less than enthralled with, but then I feel obligated to finish because we will eventually discuss the book in a group setting. I continue to feel this way, despite the fact that many of the people in said book club don’t ever finish the book, so I should probably get over it.

I do run into the problem of reading for “leisure” during the academic year. It isn’t a lack desire, but more an issue of stamina. I teach writing courses, which means I spend a lot of time reading the essays, poems, stories, plays and research papers of my students. It is interesting work but it is also labor intensive. Sometimes I just don’t have the brain power to pick up a novel or poetry collection after an afternoon of reading composition essays, but I also think I know what Mr. King would say to that complaint: “Suck it up.” 

I’m trying. 

Poems & A Cup of Coffee

First,a quick update from my last post on Wednesday. My student decided to drop the class she was currently enrolled in and enroll in my 8 week online course. I am pleased about her decision for two reasons: 1). She made it 2). It was a positive choice. Hopefully, this will give her more flexibility and allow her to successfully complete the course. 

This afternoon I spent several hours at Calvin Fletcher’s Coffee Company. If you live in Indy and have not visited this gem of a coffee shop located on Virginia Ave, you’re missing out. 
The front window @ Calvin Fletcher’s Coffee Company
Lunch. Noms.

Bus shelter on Virginia Ave.