Rewriting

I have a funny relationship with rewriting my work. When I am crafting the first draft of a poem, an essay, or a story, I long to have a complete piece with which to work--I long for revision. And when that initial draft is finished, I am relieved. I can still think; I can still write. I return to the work joyfully, anxious to examine every line, consider the images, and hone the rhythm. That pleasure lasts for one or two rewrites, then I arrive at a difficult crossroad. The writing is "good enough" to sit as it is, and I tend to be pleased with my erudite thoughts. But this is dangerous thinking because it is at this place where I must look again, ask myself if I am happy because it represents my thinking or if I have found the integrity of the piece itself. Is the writing ready to go out into the world with its own character, prepared to engage with readers?

Usually the answer is no.

That is when the writing must be left for a time--I need the threads of emotional connection to fade enough that I can snip and reshape, so I can grow the piece into itself. When talking to beginning writers or writers who have never thought much about revision, it is hard to identify the emotional process in which one must engage. It can be difficult to understand the writing is not about oneself, especially in an era all about the individual and her or his achievements. And how does one even describe what that feeling is like when every writing event is different, when our emotional connections vary from form to form and from topic to topic? We can think of it as no less than an epiphany as James Joyce describes it:

First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relationship of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. (Grudin, 1990, p. 58)

The challenge of rewriting, of considering writing an art form, has long obsessed me. The closest I have ever been able to come with sharing this process was in my paper, Rewriting the Poem, available online in Textorium and published in How We Work (Morris, Doll, & Pinar, 1999).

In writing about rewriting, I understand the process more clearly; nevertheless, I feel that this work will always be a draft in process.

I Love Grammar

I don't meet too many people who say they love grammar and, like anyone with an obsession, I have to wonder why there are not more aficionados of the practice.

Perhaps the answer lies in contrasting grammar with mathematics. I have a friend who is a brilliant mathematician, and I can see that when he talks about his field, a world opens up. Mathematics takes him below the surface into the magic of the universe. For me, math was always difficult and I could not understand why one needed to know this language beyond the practicalities of arithmetic. But through my association with my friend, I have come to understand that my passion for grammar equates to his for mathematics. For me, grammar opens up language, gives me a sense of power in my fingertips, helps me to express those emotions and ideas that always teeter on the incommunicable.

Interestingly, I think grammar and mathematics are taught similarly in school--it seems to be rare to have a teacher who deeply understands or feels a passion for either. While the passion is important, it is the deep understanding that facilitates teaching. I was fortunate to have been encouraged to write freely in my early years and then later be taught by someone who understood grammar very well. From the beginning, I grasped the fun and the facility that grammar brought to my language play. The same did not happen for me with mathematics.

I have no easy answers for how we might "fix" this as teachers. As someone who has wondered on a Monday morning what to do with a class, I understand the appeal of skill sheets and drills. Is it enough to hope that at least once in your education, you have the privilege to taste the potential and see what lies beneath? I do know as a teacher educator, that it is not enough to provide the evidence to my students through studies or student quotations or my own experience. They have to somehow feel it for themselves. But how that happens best? There is no formula and, as with most teaching, one can never know the reverberations your work will have throughout a student's life.

Further to our discussion in class last week, here is a Grammar Girl (my favourite daily fix) post about "that" as a subordinate conjunction. Grammar Girl

Street Haunting

We did a close reading in class of Virginia Woolf's short piece  Street Haunting: A London Adventure. I was amazed how, in a very short time, we could be immersed in the meandering, yet beautifully crafted sentences. Opening up a Virginia Woolf text in this way, one is able to see the precise skill she brings to create rhythm and imagery through punctuation, description, and figurative language. As is typical of Woolf, she is fascinated by the workings of human consciousness. The narrator in the story follows her mind into byways, lingers on objects and characters, and remembers. The whole piece has a sensation of the incredible richness of the city, but also its shadows and darker underbelly. As one of the students noted, it is cinematic. I had not thought of that piece in quite that way before, but of course as you read there is the sense of movement, just like a camera. That is the beauty of close reading skillful writing together. Everyone brings something different to the noticing and we are all richer for it.

Writing Rooms

I read Virginia Woolf's essay "Room of One's Own" around the time I was deciding that I would be serious about writing, that I needed to become a writer. My first "room" was a little wooden desk my husband built for me in the corner of our very small bedroom. The surface of the desk folded down to hold my typewriter (yes, it was a typewriter and not a computer), and could easily be closed back up to hide my mess of papers. The desk did what it needed to do for me--created a space that allowed me to portion a part of my life to writing a novel (filed in a drawer) and short stories (some published). As we moved houses and cities and even provinces, my desks got bigger and fancier and my typewriter was replaced by a computer. First a rather large and clunky desktop that had floppy disks and later Windows and later still a small Mac laptop. The house where I live now has a room dedicated to my writing. I have a large desk that looks out across the lake where we live. I have two full bookshelves. My great-aunt's rocker sits in the corner and I have an old dresser full of drafts (and old floppy disks--don't ask me why). Still I find that most of my time is spent writing in other places--at my kitchen table, in an easy chair, on the deck in the summer. Having a laptop has seemed to change how I write. Although I love my dedicated room and will go there for long stretches when I need to get away from daily life, I now realize that I don't need that room for writing. What I have learned to do over the years is create a mental space for writing. That is something I can do anywhere. And now when I reread Woolf's essay, I recognize that much of what she was saying really was about creating that sensibility: that a time to write, the right to write is what creates a room of one's own.

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/writersrooms for some interesting writing rooms.

My Writing Room