Trigger Warnings in the Creative Writing Classroom

This past week several articles have circulated the internet regarding “trigger warnings.” The most prevalent is Jennifer Medina’s piece, Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm, which appeared in the New York Times. Not soon after that article ran, a response came in David L. Ulin’s post A Warning about Trigger Warning, which appeared on the LA Times website.

This issue interests me because I am an educator but also because I have a lot of students who have suffered a variety of traumatic incidents and they often write about those incidents in my class. When we begin to delve into the genre of creative nonfiction, typically the floodgates open and I receive essays and memoirs that concern but are not limited to sexual abuse, domestic violence, post traumatic stress syndrome, drug abuse and homelessness. More often than not, my class is the first time they have disclosed any of these traumas in any kind of detail, and while it usually appears first in the written word, it will usually become (if the student chooses to) more of a public event when the piece of writing moves into the workshop space.

The reason I find this to be an interesting piece of the argument is that most of the blog posts and articles that I’ve read have put trigger warnings in the context of literature texts that would appear on a syllabus. The most common examples I’ve seen are The Great Gatsby (issues of violence; alcoholism; misogyny) and The Merchant of Venice (anti-semitism). However, no one is talking about this issue as it pertains to writing courses (or at least I have yet to see anyone talk about it) and I think it brings up some interesting questions.

For example, should my veteran student from Afghanistan be asked to put a trigger warning on his personal essay about sniper shooting? Should my female student be asked to include a warning at the beginning of a poem she wrote about a sexual assault? Should my other student be asked to include a warning at the beginning of a short story that graphically details a character struggling with addiction? Also, should I ask these students to put trigger warnings on their work so I will be prepared to read this material?

It is true that my syllabus for my creative writing courses contains some reading that could be “triggers.” The first story that pops to mind is Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster Wallace, but there are others. I don’t put warnings on my syllabus. I never have. I don’t ask students to put warnings on their work. I always begin the semester by emphasizing to students that there will be work that they will read that they will not like (for whatever reason) but a just because they have a negative response to it, doesn’t mean that they can’t learn or take something valuable away from that piece of writing.

I would also say that if a student is brave enough to share a deeply traumatizing event with a class through a piece of writing, they should be encouraged and applauded for their courage. At the same time, we as members of the classroom community, have the duty to read and respond thoughtfully about the work they have put out into the public space.

I agree with Meredith Raimondo, associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Oberlin College, who was quoted in Medina’s article as saying ““I quite object to the argument of ‘Kids today need to toughen up,’ ” This is insensitive and more to the point, it doesn’t solve the problem. There are students entering our educational institutions that have experienced extreme trauma, and we have to figure out how to best serve them in the classroom. However, I wonder if placing warning labels over literature and possibly other student writing is giving them enough intellectual credit.

My students are often troubled by Wallace’s portrayal of the family in Incarnations of Burned Children, but while they acknowledge that the story is disturbing, they also understand why it is important not only because of its content but also because of its structure and style. They also begin to learn that being disturbed and uncomfortable can lead to greater learning and avoiding these pieces of writing because they have been “warned” may do more harm than good. I would even go further to say that many times when a student finds a piece of work that breaks into their own personal trauma, they often find an ally. Not an obstacle. They find a poem or an essay or a short story that speaks to their struggle, and in that way they begin to find their own voice and in that voice, sometimes they begin to heal.

So What Do You Do?

Last week I came across this article: Dispelling the Myth: Why All Writers Should Defend Their Craft by Lisa Marie Basile who is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. You will notice, if you clicked around on my blog, that I have a link to Luna Luna under writing blogs I follow, so I was interested the article right away.

Ms. Basile wrote a eloquent, intelligent article about why writers should embrace and celebrate their craft and work. Why they should not feel ashamed or guilty about being a “writer.” Why they should talk about their writing with other people who are not writers. Why they should hold their heads up high and talk with confidence about why they do what they do and how they do it.

My response to her declarations? Yes! Absolutely. Right on!

And then I found myself remembering all the times I had stood in mixed company at a dinner party or luncheon or volunteer meeting and when the inevitable question arose “so what do you do?” my answer would simply be “I teach creative writing at a community college.” The fact that I actively write poetry. That I’ve recently had poems picked up for publication. That I’m putting together a chapbook. That I received an MFA in poetry (for god sake). None of these things tumble out after the simple response of “I teach.”

Why?

I think some of it is what Ms. Basile addresses in her article. I know the stereotypes all to well. I teach an intro level creative writing course. I know what my students think of poetry and the people who write it. I spend most of my time trying to take those neat little stereotypes and tear them apart, but I’m still vulnerable to them.

I think the other issue for me is perhaps a more specific one, but I often find myself defending the profession of teaching and more specifically of teaching at a community college. This is a whole other post in itself, but when I find myself in these conversations, I often think to myself “well, if these people don’t think teaching is valuable occupation, wait till they hear I’m a poet.” In other words, there is only so much punishment I can bear in one conversation. It’s exhausting.

This idea is best illustrated by a conversation I had with my husband’s current boss when I first met him about a year ago. He’s a lovely man and a fellow lover of poetry, so his response was especially disheartening/irritating. After making small talk for a few minutes, he says to me “RJ tells me you teach at (insert my community college). What’s your specific area of focus?” When I responded with creative writing with a concentration in poetry, he replied “So when are you going to law school?”

Are you kidding me?

Now, the point of this post is not to throw a pity party for myself or to get other people to throw it for me, but these were thoughts that coursed through my head while reading Ms. Basile’s article. But after all those thoughts shuffled out of my brain, I thought to myself, you know what? This is BS.

So from now on, when people ask me what I do? I’m a poet and and teach creative writing.

Boom

Love is feathered like a bird

My interest in tattoos began in college when my fellow peers started showing up with various images and/or text etched into their skin. Admittedly some of the tattoos fell into the cool/interesting/quirky category (a typewriter on the back on a calf , a song lyric winding around an ankle or flower blooming over the bicep) and some of them fell into the “what the hell?” category (Chinese characters or anything involving a rose). I began to seriously consider getting my own ink towards the end of my senior year in college, but the road toward my own tattoo had some detours.

Tattoos cost money and I was a student for about 7 1/2 years straight (BA, MA & MFA), so that proved to be a bit of a challenge during my 20’s. The bigger challenge was deciding what tattoo I was going to get and where. As I do with most of my major life decisions, I turned to my younger sister for advice. She produced a detailed rendition of a goldfish, complete with hundreds of scales, that her friend had sketched out for her. We thought it was a cool picture but at the end of the day, we didn’t like it enough to follow through. In the following years I considered the image of sweet peas. These were to commemorate my aunt who passed away from ovarian cancer. They were her favorite flower. Then I thought about the greek muses and the idea of lyric poetry. My favorite response to this idea came from my mother, who when I presented the idea/image to her said, “I think that would make beautiful stationery.” While this didn’t deter my desire to get a tattoo, it did convince me this wasn’t my best idea.

Eventually two things happened to inspire me: my sister got her own tattoo. A music note tucked neatly behind her ear. And I discovered the website The Word Made Flesh. Why it didn’t occur to me to think about “literary” tattoos in the first place I don’t know, but the images on this site made me realize that the only tattoo that made sense for me was something to do with poetry. This focused the whole brainstorming process quite a bit because once I realized a line of poetry was the way to go, there was really only one poet that I could look to: Elizabeth Bishop.

Bishop is my touchstone. She’s the first poet I discovered in college that I really love. I’ve read all her poetry. I’ve read her letters. I’ve read her essays. I’ve looked at her paintings. I read the fictional story based on her love affair with Lota de Macedo Soares. I’ve heard it rumored they might be making a movie based on that book (The More I Owe You) and I’ll be one of the first in line if that happens. If you follow my blog, you know I write about her a lot. I love her.

This is all to say, that when I was thinking about lines of poetry that would be permanently pierced into my skin, it didn’t take long to locate a line from Bishop. The line is chose is from her poem “Three Valentines” and reads “…love is feathered like a bird.” “Three Valentines” is from Bishop’s uncollected poems and it is written in three sections, hence the three valentines. The entire first stanza where this line appears reads:

Love is feathered like a bird/To keep him warm,/To keep him safe from harm,/And by what winds or drafts his nest is stirred/They chill not Love./Warm lives he:/No warmth gives off,/Or none to me.

As for my tattoo, it contains that line of poetry and five birds: one for my husband, one for my sister, one for parents, one for my grandparents and one for my aunt (the one I mentioned above). It begins on my left shoulder, continuing towards the middle of my back. I love it.

Taken about an hour after my appointment.

The actual act of being tattooed isn’t as interesting as the tattoos themselves. I went to a reputable studio here in Indy, Metamorphosis and scheduled an appointment. The appointment wound up coming a few days after my 33rd birthday, and the whole process from start to finish took about 20 minutes. It didn’t hurt that much. The tattoo wasn’t very red or irritated nor was the skin surrounding it. I followed the aftercare instructions and it healed well.

Will I get another one?

Never say never but for now, I am more than happy to have a piece of Miss. Bishop permanently pressed to my left shoulder.

Borrowing From PCHH: Things That Are Making Me Happy (Poetry Edition)

I love podcasts and one of my favorite podcasts I discovered through my friend and colleague (Thanks, Janet!). It is called Pop Culture Happy Hour (PCHH) and it’s an NPR podcast about all things pop culture. At the end of every podcast, the lovely host, Linda Holmes, asks the panel “What is making you happy this week?” The answers are always varied and interesting. I decided to take a cue from them and give you “Things That Making Me Happy” (Poetry Edition).

1. Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself by Allen Crawford. If you love Whitman, you must buy this book. If you love books, you must buy this book. If you love beautiful art, you must buy this book. If you love Tin House, then you must buy this book. In short? You must buy this book. As I said in my Facebook post, “look at all the beautiful! I could take a picture of every page!” Seriously. I’ve shown this book to everyone I know. I’ve tweeted about it. I’ve posted on FB. Now I am blogging about it. Buy this book. Right now.

One of my favorite illustrations from Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself by Allen Crawford

2. Twitter. This is in reference to my rediscovered love for networking with poets and lit journals on Twitter. There is so much interesting, inspiring and downright cool stuff going on in the poetry/literary world and I think Twitter is a fine forum to take in all that coolness. Come find me @BriPike

3. Poetry Online. I love that when I open up my email in the morning I have poems waiting from The Academy of American Poetry, Poetry Daily & Linebreak. Access to new poets and the ability to revisit established poets is one of my favorite things about the point where poetry and the internet converge.

4. My recent order of Marion McCready’s Tree Language. I’ve been looking forward to this book since I read some of her work in Poetry. Can’t wait for it to get here.

5. A new round of submissions out for the summer and a chance to spend some time on New Pages and read their excellent lit mag reviews.

Something Old, Something New

After my post about Plath last week, I continued to think about her and I as I was working my way back through Ariel, I came across this poem:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The Child’s Bath, Mary Cassatt 1893

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Too its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows are safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Over the past twelve months (or so) four women I know have had four babies, all of them boys, even though the gender of the child has no bearing on this poem one way or the other. I like the poem because it feels gritty and real. Not the sunshine and rainbows version of motherhood that often comes off, to me at least, as sterile and dishonest. You can love your children and still be frustrated and exhausted by them, or at least I would think that to be the case.

I’ve also been reading two book by Adrian Matejka, The Devil’s Garden & Mixology. I just finished The Devil’s Garden and I was surprised to find that Matejka teaches at Indiana University (just down the road about an hour in Bloomington) and he was a Cave Canem fellow. This last fact is interesting because I greatly admire another Cave Canem fellow, Gary Jackson, and his first book Missing You in Metropolis. I came across Adrian Matejka’s work in the January issue of Poetry and was particularly taken with this poem:

Gymnopedies No. 1

That was the week
it didn’t stop snowing.

That was the week
five fingered trees fell

on houses and power lines
broke like somebody waiting

for payday in a snowstorm.
That snow week, my daughter

& I trudged over the broken branches
fidgeting through snow

like hungry fingers through
an empty pocket.

Over the termite-hollowed stump
as squat as a flat tire.

Over the hollow
the fox dives into
when we open the back door at night.

That was the week of snow
& it glittered like every
Christmas card we could
remember while my daughter

poked around for the best place
to stand a snowman. One

with a pinecone nose.
One with thumb-pressed

eyes to see the whole
picture once things warm up.

I had to look up “Gymnopedies,” which are three piano compositions written by the French composer, Erik Satie. I love the imagery in this poem and the way it closed in the final stanza, so I found two of his books and dove in. Some of my favorite poems from The Devil’s Garden: “Crap Shoot,” The Meaning of Rpms,” ” Her Gardens,” “Pigment,” “Eight Positions Mistaken as Love,” “Understanding Al Green” & “Insect Precipitate.”

I also came across this beautiful poem by Marion McCready, whose first book, Tree Language, is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing.

Wild Poppies

And how do you survive? Your long throat,
your red -rag-to-a-bull head?

You rise heavy in the night, stars drinking
from your poppy neck.

Your henna silks serenade me
under the breath of the Pyrenees.

You move like an opera,
open like a sea of anemones.

You are the earth’s first blood,
How the birds love you,

I envy your lipstick dress.
You are as urgent as airmail, animal red,

Ash Wednesday crosses tattooed on your head.
Your butterfly breath

releases your scent, your secrets,
bees blackening your mouth

as your dirty red laundry
all hangs out.

These poems make me want to write. Excellent.

Poppies, Near Argenteuil, Claude Monet

Flowers in Winter

Aphrodite Amaryllis.

Rediscovering Sylvia Among the Tulips

In the January 2014 issue of Poetry there is a poem entitled “Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath” by Sina Queyras I don’t know why the poem hit me so hard. It might be because Plath died at the age of thirty and this March I’ll be thirty-three. It might be because by the time she died she had two children, a book of poems and was embroiled in a tumultuous marriage with Ted Hughes. It might be because as I read Sina Queyras’s beautiful poem I was immediately, shockingly sad. The sadness was heavy. It pressed on my chest as I sat at my desk in my office at school. It pressed so hard that I felt my eyes water for a woman who has been dead for over fifty years.

I have always found Plath’s story heartbreaking. Partially it is because we will never know the poems she could have written. Also, as a thirty some year old woman who is thinking about starting a family and who is also a poet and a professor, I find myself empathizing with her loneliness and her isolation. It is upsetting that that she couldn’t overcome her illness and I suppose now I find myself identifying with her more as a woman rather than an enigma. She was not just this brilliant, tragic poet. She was, as it turns out, a woman made of blood and bone.

Sylvia Plath with her two children, Nicolas and Frieda, in 1963.

Immediately upon finishing this elegy I went back and read the poem “Tulips.” and was reminded of how gorgeous and devastating that poem truly is. There is such isolation: “There smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. Even love hurts. What must it be like to live this way? That flowers give you pain and that health is a far away place you know you cannot reach. At the same time, the poem is so beautiful and carefully rendered. So precise in it’s language. That such beauty can come from such pain is hopeful. I just wish it could have kept her alive.

After reading “Tulips,” I wanted to revisit more of Plath’s work, so I pulled out my copy of Ariel. My copy is the restored version which contains a foreword by Plath’s daughter, Frieda. This edition also contains notes and drafts that Plath left behind after her death. I had forgotten, until I opened the book, that it was a gift from a friend. At the time I was given this edition of Ariel, my friend was studying Philosophy and I was studying English at Allegheny College. My friend had a flare for the dramatic and included two quotes at the front of the book: “All, everything that I understand, I only understand because I love” ~Leo Tolstoy & “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.”~Sophocles.

Still life with flowers by Paul Cezanne.

Unfortunately, my friend and I are no longer in contact. I don’t know why.

And yet as I read his inscription, I am briefly sad about our lost friendship but the sadness is quickly replaced by anger. These quotes have no business in this book. Love couldn’t free Plath. Love fought bravely, but in the end her disease was stronger. This is especially arresting given that Ariel is dedicated to Plath’s two children, Nicholas & Frieda, and Nicholas Hughes committed suicide in 2009. It is difficult because love gave us so many of Plath’s wonderful poems but so did despair.

I feel like there’s probably a poem in here somewhere. Maybe several poems.

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.