Wings, Writing, Witchcraft

Here is the chapel I gave at my school in September 2019. It’s a meditation on the talents (witchcraft, if you will) lurking within each of us.

Picture this: You’re in a cramped attic room at 2 am. You’ve been up all night trying to stitch together the disparate threads of your thoughts. The essay simply will not obey. Your ideas simply won’t cohere into reasonable sentences and paragraphs. 

I think we’ve all been there in writing hell. 

In this particular moment, I was trying to write a chapter of my dissertation. This chapter was all about a book called The Damnation of Theron Ware. It’s a loopy novel about religion, feminism, and insanity. I highly recommend it. Anyway, my ideas about this loopy book were all over the place, so at 2 am that night, I printed out the 34 pages of confusion and physically cut out every topic sentence with a pair of pinking shears. Once I had every claim sentence cut out (they looked pretty fancy with their ruffled edges), I taped them to the wall, moving them around and around, trying to see the right sequence. I had no idea how to find the right order, I was panicking that every other doctoral student in the world possessed some kind of magic that let them write beautifully–I didn’t have any magic. I was beginning to think that I had no business being in graduate school, no business writing a dissertation, and probably no business writing a grocery list.

 By 3 am, I should have given up and gotten some sleep. By 4 am, the paint had begun to peel, sticking to each piece of tattered tape, leaving polka dots trailing across the wall. By 5 am, my thoughts had folded in upon themselves, like an origami labyrinth. Finally, at 6 am, my roommate (who luckily was literally deaf and had slept through the entire misadventure) he found me and sent me to bed.

I spent a week avoiding that room. 

Eventually, I realized that all I had to do was delve back into my words. I had to play with the sentence patterns, with the syntax. Instead of seeing my thoughts as I had already written them–re-seeing them over and over–instead, I had to manipulate the words and phrases. So I began to re-orchestrate the pieces. And so I found joy in moving the end phrases to the beginning, joy in starting with a participial phrase, cutting the adverbs, pruning away the unnecessary, and feeling power gather as my prose became sharper. In short, I discovered that the tools I needed were already on the page, but I had to let them dance into place. I had to let magic enter the page.

(PS: You can and should do this, too, whenever you write about a book.)

At the time, I did not know the name of the magic spell I had used to solve the dissertation crisis. It’s a mantra: “My challenges are my greatest devices.” Like the best of mantras, this one was a gift, passed on to me by a friend I discovered in the weird back alleys of the inter-webs. The basic idea is twofold: (1) The tools for solving a problem are hidden in the problem itself. So solving my writing problem required looking in the books again. And (2) the tools you discover through problem solving–those tools, skills, devices–they’re yours. They are the wands you will use in your own magic.

As luck would have it, I received this mantra the same day I read a revelatory passage in Madeline Miller’s Circe, which is a re-imagining of the life of the sorceress who delayed Odysseus on his journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. In the tellings most of us know best, the tellings from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s The Iliad (there, are, of course, other tales that Dr. Jones could surely expound upon), Circe is a dangerous woman. The daughter of the sun god Helios, Circe becomes a powerful enchantress, who lives on an isolated island. When Odysseus arrives, she turns his men into swine. Of course, Odysseus–with the help of Hermes, the god of travel–commands her to change them back into men, and then he stays on with her for a year. For her part, Circe descends from her power as a witch into a mortal serving girl, feeding and caring for all these men like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. In these tellings, Circe has been put in her place: transforming men into pigs is wrong, assuming power over Odysseus is wrong, sorcery is wrong. 

The tale is different in Madeline Miller’s hands. In her version, the interlude with Odysseus is not the most important part of Circe’s story. Rather, it is the discovery of her own magical powers, her sorcery, her witchcraft. In Miller’s imaginings, Circe is banished to her island because she used magic. (She turned the lovely nymph Scylla, her rival for a minor sea-god’s love, into a sea monster. As one does.) 

Yet it is on the island–all alone with wild animals and wild plants–that Circe discovers who she truly is: a witch who can manipulate nature: 

Little by little I learned to listen better: to the sap moving in the plants, to the blood in my veins. I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to  add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. This was the moment I lived for, when it all became clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.

Luckily, she has thousands of years to teach herself sorcery, and she learns it not only through trial and error but also–and more importantly–through patient awareness of each plant’s sap and her own blood. Indeed, her magic, her devices, lies in her greatest challenges, because if she had not been banished to the island, she never would have found her talents. And it’s interesting to me how closely her practice of witchcraft resembles the practice of writing: the mingling of plant’s sap and sorceress’s blood mirrors the mingling of word and thought–the power gathering as the phrasing twists and falls into proper place.

Trust me on this next connection. I promise it connects: I don’t know how many of you are avid fans of figure skating. If you are, you likely remember Adam Rippon. He was the break-out star from the 2018 Winter Olympics. Late to the sport, he did not start skating until he was 10 years old, he finally make the US Olympic team at the age of 28 (which is geriatic), he caught the world’s attention with his grit and determination to make his skate matter–not for a medal but for himself–to prove himself after seasons riddled with injuries and equipment failures. So in South Korea, he performed a gorgeous short skate (that’s the one where you have 2 minutes and 40 seconds to execute 7 absurdly difficult elements perfectly if you even want to think about cracking the top ten, and nowadays, you’d better have at least three quadruple jumps). Afterwards, a sports reporter asked him to explain how he had done so well, and Rippon quipped: “I can’t explain witchcraft.”

Obviously, like Circe, Rippon had put in the time, overcoming ankle injuries and concussions, overcoming a reputation for crashing into other skaters at warm-ups (hence, the concussions), overcoming snide remarks from people afraid of the LGBTQ+ community. Just as she learned to listen to her blood corresponding with the plants, Rippon learned to listen to his muscles communing with the ice. And when his right foot crisped backwards across the ice, shifting to an inside edge milliseconds before lifting into the tight spiral of a triple lutz, he must have felt like he had wings:

The wings unheard
                                       felt as a rush of air,
                            of air withdrawn, the breath
taken–
                            The blow falls,
                            feather and bone
I am felled,
                            rise up
                            with changed vision,
            a singing in my ears. (from Denise Levertov, “Wings of a God”)

If I were a witch, I would need to embrace my new territory, I would need to see the secret iridescence of my own magic. If I were an Olympic-class figure skater, I would need to surrender to the joy of carving perfect arcs into the ice before counter-rotating into an elegant lutz. In point of fact, I am neither a sorceress nor a skater, I am a writer, so my storyline runs a little differently.

For me, sorcery lies in pens and paper–real ink and real wood pulp. When I write, when I write in ways that tell the truth about myself, about how I see the world, about my dreams, about my fears, about how The Damnation of Theron Ware is really about feminism, I feel the ink on the page spelling out the blood in my veins or the electrical flashes in my brain that signal the presence of an inspiring voice. Inspiring. In spire. Breathe in. To draw in breath–perhaps the breath of the Holy Spirit or the cosmic wind of the universe come to stitch my ideas together.

*********

Why am I telling you this?

Because everyone of us has this kind of sorcery with in us. I can’t possibly know what your magic is, but I do know that every one of you can tap into your magic. Perhaps the right mantra or a new perspective is all it takes. Move the words around, cull the plant at a different hour, twist into the jump with both arms in the air this time. 

Why am I telling you this?

Because I want you to have that kind of epiphany, too. Because I want you to “Feel the beating of the wings / Unheard.” Because I want you to “rise up / with changed vision, / a singing in [your] ears.”

Because you are, in fact, beautiful, because you shine and sparkle like a star set in the darkening folds of the evening sky as night falls and you slip into your dreams, full of the rattling skeletons of your past crimes and fears and anxieties–the voices whispering that you’re not good enough or skinny enough or smart enough or anything enough

And I am doing this, I am telling you this secret, because you also shine and sparkle 

Like a skater carving perfect arcs into the ice, 

before counter-rotating into an elegant lutz, 

crisp, 

sharp,

free.

********

Becoming Circe

During our recent beach vacation, I read Madeline Miller’s Circe. In her imagining of this Greek goddess’s life, Miller compelling tells how Circe transformed others into monsters (including the famous Scylla) and her subsequent exile. Once banished to her island, however, Circe discovers that she can bend the plants, animals, and the very air around her to her will. She embraces her craft as a witch, thus gaining power not only over the natural word and the gods who assail her, but also–and most importantly–over herself and her self-narrative.

Serendipitously, as I read the book, a friend of mine passed on a powerful meditation mantra: “My challenges are my greatest devices.” Although I am a poor meditator (I strive!), this mantra speaks volumes to me, especially as a teacher. I immediately saw Circe as following this teaching: set on her island, she turned her challenges of exile and isolation into her devices–she became a witch, a devisor, an artist. Most of us are not witches (more on that word, perhaps in October), but each of us can turn our own challenges to hand. We can fashion our own art or artifice from them.

So how might this mantra affect my teaching practice? I think it comes down to a fostering a growth mindset in each student, so that they see their challenges as fodder for art or skill. How, for example, might I turn a student’s self-narrative from “I can’t write” into “I can write unlike anyone else”? Surely the answer lies in knowing each student well, in differentiating the instruction, and in re-envisioning their “weaknesses” as opportunities to articulate the assignments differently.

This is where my thoughts dwell this week. I hope to post a few concrete ideas in a few days.

Resurrection 2.0: Differentiation

So it seems I have let this blog go silent for almost three years! It’s time to return to posting about my practice as a teacher. This past week, I attended the SIAD (the Summer Institute on Academic Diversity) conference about differentiated learning. If you’re not familiar with DI, I would say that in a nutshell the idea is that we clarify our learning objectives, align those with our assessment (which should be pitched to our most advanced students), and then thoughtfully scaffold multiple paths for students coming in with varying degrees of readiness to approach those goals. The work I have done over the years with my Humanities 10 teaching team has definitely been differentiated, particularly in our work to offer core and honors students what they need. I’ve come away from the conference with a twofold vision:

(1) As a department chair charged with clarifying the scope & sequence of our writing curriculum, grades 5-12, this year, I feel much more confident about articulating the vision for differentiating that curriculum. Every child deserves a full-year’s worth of academic growth each year, and as our demographics change to include more students with significant skill gaps, we can no longer rely on outside-the-classroom, one-on-one meetings to close those gaps. We simply don’t have the time, as a practical point. More importantly, our instructional practices ought to change when the people we teach need more scaffolding.  Let’s start by re-structuring the curio assignment (more on that next time) and the research paper unit. It simply isn’t ethical to make a child sit through a mystifying class.

(2) As a teacher in my own classroom, I am excited to push my seniors even further with respect to creative alternative assessments. I think we have the formal writing assignments all set, but the alternative assessments need a bit more clarity. This year, I’d like to add to the enduring understandings something like “Artistic responses [well, art] express emotional truths” and/or “Different genres of writing invite different modes of response” (e.g., a poem can invite conversation, drama can invite performance, etc.). I hope that adding this understanding to my thought process, I will better inspire my students to respond to, say, The Sympathizer or The Merry Wives of Windsor with greater depth.

So here’s what’s on my reading list to help me help my colleagues along this journey:

The Art of Coaching Teams, by Elena Aguilar

Understanding by Design, by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins

Differentiation in Middle and High School, by Kristina Doubet and Jessica Hockett

The Differentiated School, by Carol Ann Tomlinson, Kay Brimijoin, and Lane Narvaez

The Devastating Sentence Story

So I am resurrecting this blog after two years of rather mind-boggling work developing a Humanities curriculum, essentially from scratch, with the best team ever assembled! Truly, my co-teachers keep me sane and have given me the most phenomenal professional development in the disciplines of History, Religious Studies, and Art History. I’ll tell you more about that journey in another post.

Today I want to share an assignment that derives from something I once read about Graham Greene: He was called “the master of the devastating sentence” (hyperlink to come!). What s title! I think Truman Capote is another master of the devastating sentence, the sentence that cracks open your head to new possibilities of truth and beauty.

At that time, I was teaching Capote’s In Cold Blood, and I wondered what would happen if I asked students to write original short stories “seeded” with some of Capote’s sentences.

Here’s what happened: The ghost of Capote haunted their stories, his syntax infected their own, their own writing became more nimble, and I read a lot of gratuitous (usually hilarious) cat scenes.

Here’s the gist of the assignment:

Using the three sentences below AND two others of your own choice from In Cold Blood, compose a short story.  You MAY change pronouns, such as “he” to “she,” or nouns to pronouns, such as “Perry” to “he.”  You MAY also change verb tenses.  Please do NOT underline or otherwise indicate which sentences are Capote’s, because as a class we will try to guess.

With a little luck, we should be able to tease out some of the ramifications (or perhaps the hidden lives lurking behind some) of Capote’s sentences.

1.  However one viewed it, his situation was curious, his excuses questionable.

2.  Though she’d wanted to release it, the cat’s eyes, radiant with pain and hatred, had drained her of pity and filled her with terror.

3.  Open a map, point your finger–maybe that’s it.

In grading your short story, I will be especially interested in the arc of your story—does it, for example, have rising action that leads, inevitably, inexorably, towards a climax?  I will also be interested in your use of literary techniques common to short stories, such as foreshadowing, symbolism, and characterization.  As always, I will be interested in your writing style, including syntactical fluency (that’s a fancy term for using a variety of sentence structures).

Swanky Words Icebreaker

Like many teachers, I like to begin the new school year with an icebreaker, but I don’t like to ask “so, what did you do this summer?”  I am interested in everyone’s adventures, but I worry that at a school with a lot of financially privileged families, the less wealthy students will feel awkward from day one.  

Moreover, the students in my senior-level honors class already know each other quite well.  My goal is less of a “get-to-know- your-neighbors” and more of a “right, this is what can happen in an English classroom” moment.

So this year, I began by giving each student a list of 13 swanky words and asking them to work in pairs (we did have a few teams of three and a few lone wolves) to write a poem in 10 minutes, using all of those words.  here’s the list, in case you want to play along:

• tessellation
• crystalline
• meld
• chrome
• constellation
• gargoyle
• defenestration
• opaque
• chronology
• osmosis
• warp and weft
• recursive
• obsidian

They could add as many words as they liked, alter the form of the words, turn nouns into verbs, etc. Then I asked them to select the words from the swanky list that became most significant in their poem, use that word as the title, and find an image online to illustrated the poem (this moment marked the end of technology in our classroom–from here on, we embrace the analog world).

In seconds, they were poring over dictionaries, writing original lines of poetry, twisting those lines back on themselves, (sometimes) trying to rhyme, (mostly) trying to create a tone or sound experience. Fantabulosity erupted! 

“Defenestration” provoked the most startling images, from defenestrated souls to slowly defenestrated chrome-tipped gargoyles.  One student even created a spoken word poem, which may show up in this blog later in the year.  Here’s just one example of a full poem:

“Gargoyle,” by Erin

The warp and weft of the fabric of time,

creating tessellations and constellations,

opaque and chrome, obsidian and crystalline all at once

The recursive chronology of everything,

melding through some cosmic osmosis

Time is the water that drips from the mouth of the gargoyle

The weave of the dress in which a cadaver is laid to rest

The shattered pieces of glass post-defenestration

 

Thirteen Ways

The brilliant Wallace Steven‘s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” has, I know, inspired many writers and teachers.  In our Voice and Vision seminar, it was the inspiration of one of our first assignments.  After reading and discussing the poem together, we (that is, my co-teacher and I) asked each student to choose a “blackbird” of her own, acquire an Instagram account, and create a photographic poem:  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at [some topic of your own choice].”   You can explore them using such hashtags as #vandv, #13ways, and #ekphrasis.  Be forewarned, of course, that you’ll also see a lot of photos that have nothing to do with our project!

I was delighted at what became a”blackbird,” everything from light to shadow, and even the concept of what is “disturbing,”  Actually, the student who pursued the disturbing blackbird was fairly convinced that she was not artistic, that she couldn’t write, and that her imagination was far too dark to be academically acceptable.  What a lovely surprise, then, to see her blossom under the mentorship of teachers who encouraged her to explore the Gothic, to delve into the dark shadows, and to discover not only that her voice and vision matter but also that she herself has much to contribute. 

By design, the assignment was very open–very few guidelines or constraints.  This, of course, frustrated those students who like to check off boxes on a rubric.  We pushed each individual student to find a topic meaningful to her, to take lots and lots of photos before choosing the most provocative, to let her ideas evolve, twist, and twine around what she didn’t expect to find compelling.  In the end, of course, we circled back to Stevens, realizing that, like him,

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

The poem-out-of-the-blue assignment

For the second ekphrastic assignment in Voice and Vision, I gave each student a different poem, ranging from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” to an excerpt from Susan Howe’s sprawling “Hinge Picture.” Each student had to respond to his or her poem without using words. Sketches, three-dimensional collages, a vixen (the fox sort, not the woman sort) painted on plexiglass, a wooden box filled with mysterious objects, even white onesies hanging from a clothesline showed up. Howe’s poem inspired by far the most riveting artifact. Although I had given that student, Lainey, the choice to focus on just a section of the poem, she spent days pouring over its entirety, teasing out its themes and motifs, learning about emigration from Ireland, meditating on the harmony and loss that is family. When she unveiled a series of photographic diptychs, we all lost our breath. You can see the series—and enjoy more of Lainey’s brilliant work in film, poetry, textiles, etc.—here, at her blog, magdalenaglobal.com. I visit often.

So here is where I should reflect upon my practice as a teacher. Well, in this case, I simply gave each student a poem and gave two constraints: (1) no words, (2) finish in 10 days. Other than that, I simply practiced my active listening skills, tried to locate my inner Tim Gunn, and got out of their way. I believe the constraints are important in focusing the creative energies, much like the rigorous formal requirements of a sonnet unleash rather than stifle the imagination.

Voice and Vision (creative class number three)

(yes, I know I have not yet written posts on creative classes numbers one and two, but a girl has to start somewhere!)

During the 2013-2014 school year, I had the privilege of designing and teaching a class with a good friend, Janet. Our class focused on ekphrasis, with which we played pretty fast and loose, broadly defining it as the creative act of responding to an artistic work with an original artwork in another genre. So our students spent the year composing poems in response to photography (and vice versa), writing flash fiction in response to Gothic images, performing spoken word poetry in response to the course as a whole. A study of avant-garde architects evolved into building models of libraries that incorporated “signatures” of those architects. We visited cemeteries and the home of Anne Spencer, a poet significant to the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia. We criticized Alexander McQueen’s Baroque Angel Shoes as too fussy but adored Iris Van Herpen’s Water Dress. We called our class Voice and Vision, and we all had a fabulous time!

The Great Epistolary Book Club

Over the past four years, I have been blessed with some especially phenomenal students, students who travelled with me through not only core English courses but also independent studies.  Together, we studied how e. e. cummings’s style evolved over his lifetime, and I challenged them to write cautionary fairy-tale poems (in the spirit of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”).  This May, they graduated.  So….  we have founded the Epistolary Book Club.  Feel free to play along.  Here are the ground rules:  

Welcome to the Epistolary Book Club

To help us keep in touch and continue our delightfully digressive conversations about all things literary, I invite you to join the Epistolary Book Club!

Here’s the plan:  I have given each of you a copy of Wilkie Collins’s brilliant Woman in White.  We will all read the book, of course, and then, preferably within two weeks each of you will:

1. Craft a letter* responding to the book as she sees fit.
2. Send that letter to another person in our book club. Try to choose a different recipient each time, but feel free to send epistles to more than one person.
3. Optional:  submit next-book ideas to me to post on this blog (see below).

Please send me copies whenever you can, so that I can make a super-fabulous entry about them on “Liminal Creativity.” 

Make sure you visit my blog occasionally to find out the title of the next book! 

*About the letter:  I’m defining the term “letter” quite broadly.  Perhaps you will choose to write a letter, perhaps you will choose to write a poem or a postcard, perhaps you will choose to draw or collage or something I cannot yet predict.  If what you create is not easily mailed, consider printing a photograph of it.  Whatever it is, it must be physically mail-able.  Unless you’re overseas, in which case we’d still all love to receive something in the mail, but we completely understand if you need to send it electronically. Just make it swanky.  Not a boring email message.  At least add a gratuitous cat scene.

If you wish to opt out, just let me know.

To keep our club vibrant, we may wish to invite in new members someday.  I have no idea what the vetting process should be, but I am confident one of you will have a thought.