Turning 24

Last year, I wrote about the value of ageing. I wrote about hope, about hoping for and getting more. I based my post off of a John Patrick Shanley quote: “I’m looking for love. But if I can’t get love, I can get pizza. In short, I can get a lot, and still hope for more.”

I always want more. More time, more art, more love…more pizza. And in the past year, I got quite a lot more. I presented at two Sigma Tau Delta conferences; one regional in Mitchell, SD, and the annual convention in Cincinnati, OH. I organized and presented on a pedagogy panel for USD’s Frankenstein 200^th anniversary symposium. I won an award for my teaching, and I received a second consecutive playwriting award. One of my plays was published. Another was accepted to USD’s Milton Conference for a table read (happening in October). At the end of this week, I’ll be travelling to Wyoming to present a playwriting craft talk. I worked in the library’s archives, and I started working as a cook and a baker at a local restaurant I’ve adored for years. I made friends, and I lost some, too. I’m making steady progress on my thesis, I’m teaching literature again, and I love everything I’m doing.

But I’m struggling to write this because some of that more ended up being so poisonous.

You see, here’s my problem, dear reader. I wished for more. And boy, did I get it. I got more drama, more bullshit, more anxiety and stress than I ever wanted or could be prepared for.

Here goes.

I met someone this summer. We met at work, I asked him out, and the first date was so good. The next weekend he showed up at my door with my favorite wine and we watched Black Panther and fell asleep all cuddled up like…I could not believe. I felt so lucky, so safe. Like I didn’t have to try so hard to be someone I’m not. He accepts me and likes me exactly as I am. And he’s amazing. I adore this man. Spontaneous, funny, cute, fierce friend, great conversation, I could really go on and on. He doesn’t understand it. I don’t either, truthfully, but I’m okay with not having all the answers.

It’s funny, I was with him on my birthday and I guess I wasn’t as talkative as usual, because he asked me, “What’s up?” as though he thought something was wrong. But I said, “Nothing.” I immediately corrected myself: “I don’t mean ‘Nothing’ in the sense that ‘If I told you, you wouldn’t understand.’ I mean ‘Nothing’ in that I’m actually calm, and happy, and not worried about anything.” It’s really rare for me to feel still, you know. For all the messiness of my brain to slow down enough for me to enjoy the moment I’m in. And when I’m with him, it’s like the whole world slows down and I can actually breathe.

The more I get to know him, the more I value him as a whole person. I don’t just like specific things about him—if you only love a person’s qualities, you can love those qualities in someone else, and that person is replaceable. But if you love someone as a whole, unique person, they’re irreplaceable. The more I know him, the more irreplaceable he becomes. And that scares me. But I went for it. I decided to be brave—to get more—to recognize that this relationship might be more important, more wonderful, more fulfilling than my fear. So I went for it, all-in.

But the problems started when I confided about the new relationship in someone else, a friend at our workplace, who I thought I could trust. And she told…well, she told anyone who would listen, really. When you walk into work and get nothing but grief—“How’d you land her? She’s way out of your league.” “Why him, are you lonely? I never thought you’d date down.”—you start to dread going to work. You stop looking forward to seeing each other because you know that sooner or later, all of your private business will be made public.

The gossip mills at work killed us. And I admit, because I gave this friend the benefit of the doubt and kept telling her things, I played a part in making it worse. He didn’t want to take me on another date because he dreaded hearing about it from people who had no business knowing about it. He didn’t even stand too close to me when we had a shift together because he knew someone would say some shitty little comment about us. Sure, I listened when he said it made him uncomfortable, but I didn’t really hear him. And I don’t have the words to fully tell him how sorry I am for that. I can’t ignore the part I played in how this all fell apart.

So I got more—so much more, so much good—for a while. But it soured so quickly, and it kills me to think about what could have been. All those ifs, all those maybes.

I can’t take any of it back. I wouldn’t even if I could. The time I spent with this person was amazing. I’ll say it again: I adore him. It took me so long to let myself be open to any kind of relationship again, to let myself feel safe with someone, and even though it hurts so much that it’s him, I’m glad it’s him. He embraced me from the start. He’s protective of me, he cares about me so much, and—I don’t know if he remembers saying it, because he’d been drinking quite a bit—he loves me. I’ll cherish that, even if we aren’t together.

Despite the tremendous emotional stress of this relationship, I learned a lot from this job and these people.

First, you can be friendly with your coworkers, but not every coworker can be your friend. If your “best friend” at work tells everyone the things you privately confide in her, thus making the intimate details of your life little more than cannon fodder…then she isn’t your friend at all.

Secondly, the world is not a just place. It is only as kind, as positive, as loving, as welcoming as we make it, and that is a choice we must actively make every day. But if you are only kind to someone because you expect they will do something for you in return, or love you back because you’re just so nice, then you’re only doing it for that reward—the moral dessert—and you aren’t actually a good person.

Third of all, you cannot be someone’s friend and their therapist. You might be able to talk them down from harming themselves, but you are not equipped to help them healthily process the feelings that brought them to that point in the first place. All you’re doing is setting yourself up for a guilt trip you do not deserve.

Lastly, when you want more, it isn’t enough to take the first step. You have to keep moving. Set your sights on the Better Thing you know you deserve, and go after it.

It’s hard to tell the difference between a good more and a toxic more at first, because who can say how those chips will fall? But you and I, dear reader, are under no obligation to drink someone’s poison just to make them happy. We deserve a better more.

April: Weariness, Work, & The Promise of Goodness

April. The cruellest month. Also the last full month of my second year in graduate school.

April finds me weary. April finds me working. April finds me…and April loses me, too. April loses me in stacks of student papers that need grading. April loses me in the library’s literature stacks. April loses me even though I am right here, always, at work. And I lose April, too. Barely a week into the month, and I already know I will not experience it the way I want to. I will not be outside. My hands will not smell like topsoil at the end of the day. I will not go barefoot across the grass. I will be inside, in a basement, at a desk: working.

This semester is difficult. But what does difficult even mean? Recall Steiner: what do we mean by difficulty? Is something difficult because it contains words we do not know? Is something difficult because it references unfamiliar things? Is difficulty bad? Does experiencing difficulty mean we are, in some way, lacking?

No.

Difficulty, for this human, in this case, figures as that which does not challenge me in the ways I need to be challenged. It is difficult because it is not the type of difficulty I enjoy. Difficulty, here, now, this semester, for this human, in this case, means enduring joyless work. It is difficult because I am bored. And that is something only I can fix.

In the midst of this difficulty, I think about weariness. And work. And coercion.

I work. And as I work, I grow weary. (I grow old…I grow old…)

Education is, in many sly and subtle ways, coercive.

I assign my students a text with the promise that reading it will be good for them. I am required to take classes outside of my interests on the promise that doing so will be good for me.

I give my students a list of required texts: This is good for you.

I am given a list of required texts: This is good for you.

Am I bored because I do not truly believe in the goodness of this kind of reading and doing? Am I bored because I am unmoved, and am I unmoved because…

I don’t know. I do know that when I get bored, depression returns. I shut myself away. I stop exercising, I stop singing. I only eat once or twice a day, and when I do remember to eat, it is never something good for me. (There it is again: a promise of goodness. I am not enchanted.) I barely speak, and when I do speak it is seldom if ever well-received. I become convinced I am useless. I feel hollowed out and abandoned in the sun; I become uncomfortable empty space when bored.

Am I unmoved because I do not buy the promised goodness of this work?

I look to Sedgwick here: “Is it true that we can learn only when we are aware that we are being taught?” (Touching Feeling, 2003, p. 153). Can we only become aware that we are being taught when we are willing to be taught? At what point is the will to be taught genuine? Is it only ever generated through these coercive promises? Predictions of a future in which having taken these classes, having read these texts, will make us better? And would it have been worth it?

I remember reading Lyotard: “What is your ‘What is it worth?’ worth?” I wrote this quotation in a notebook margin last year and forgot to do due diligence re: a citation. I meant to. I will, soon.

I’m re-reading Lacan as I prepare to teach Edward Albee’s The Goat. I re-read and I am able to understand more, because as I return to Lacan I am willing to be challenged, I am willing to face the difficulty of these texts (the words I do not know, the references I do not recognize), I am willing to let this text teach me, because doing so is necessary for my teaching.

It will be good for me, because it will be good for my students, because my teaching theory will help my students navigate these (purportedly worthwhile texts) I have assigned with the promise that this class—this work—will be good for them.

They believe what I tell them.

Why can I not believe what I am told? Wouldn’t that be so much easier?

And wouldn’t belief make April less cruel?

The Pedagogy of Doubt

Hi, all. It’s been a long while.

I’ve begun noodling on a possible book project, tentatively titled The Pedagogy of Doubt. The book would be a collection of essays about a variety of texts I have taught or am currently teaching, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2005, film 2008). The main intellectual labor of this project is, simply put, to explore how these texts move students beyond the limits of the immediately recognizable and hold them in places of uncertainty, of doubt, places where real learning (problems of thinking differently, feeling differently) can begin.

Pedagogy began as a term paper for my literary criticism seminar last semester, when I sensed a tether between Shanley’s play and the writings of Michel Foucault. Over the course of roughly 18 pages, I tarried with the challenges of teaching Doubt and how pairing it with Foucault’s writings on confession, power, and panopticism might make the play more navigable in a classroom. Doubt does not offer a single right answer to its clearest “truth-problem.” In light of that absence of a definitive ending, students would understandably immediately question Father Flynn’s guilt or innocence, and subsequently never move beyond that truth-problem to ask harder questions about the world of the play and the people who inhabit it. Shanley’s play takes us (and his characters) beyond the limits of the immediately recognizable, and we are left to sort out our own way back. When students ask, “Did he do it?” they are searching for the clearest path back to clarity, to Truth. But when I teach the texts I seek to write about in Pedagogy, I find it is more valuable to destabilize one Truth into many potential truths, which is, I think, something Shanley does, too.

I will teach Shanley’s Doubt later this semester, in April, shortly after my class wraps up its discussion of Edward Albee’s The Goat. I am searching for a way to fold this text into my Pedagogy, too, as I find its examination of the limits of a purportedly liberal society/family unit and its interrogation of desire particularly compelling. And the tethers to Lacan cannot be ignored. My students, on the other hand, are just excited to, as they sometimes put it, “to read the goat-fucking play.” Sigh. Maybe I could do a chapter on how to get them to move beyond that.

Lastly, in this post anyway, I come to Frankenstein. I began teaching Shelley’s phenomenal novel this past Monday, and we’ve now finished Volume I. We have three more weeks to finish the novel, but those weeks are frustratingly truncated by holidays, impending bad weather or illnesses, and a program requirement to prepare for and then administer an in-class midterm exam. But the work my students and I have done so far is, I hope, useful to them. (I know it is useful to me.)

I teach Frankenstein alongside snippets of narrative theory. So far, we’ve gone over the more obvious nuggets, like Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Roland Barthes’ “Who is speaking thus?” I have also worked in, where I can, excerpts from Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse so that we may navigate the differences between content expressed and methods of expression. It is also my sense that my students enjoy Chatman’s description of kernels and satellites, that it helps them selectively focus on and do more work unpacking major events in a text. Our work with Frankenstein is, in its way, a Structuralist endeavor. We are parsing out what the story is and how it is expressed or assembled, how we are made aware of its incidents, and whose voice is charged with expressing those incidents to us.

As we wrapped up Volume I, I began to move my students into asking harder questions. We have determined what is immediately recognizable: the structure, the setting, the characters, major events, etc. Our surface work is done, and now we must move deeper, into and through our uncertainties. When we discussed Victor’s certainty that the Creature murdered William, I immediately asked my students to prove how they know it was the Creature and not Justine Moritz and not someone else. One directs us to the passage where Victor says that the possibility of the idea was proof. We endure a long pause together before I ask, “So we know this because Victor knows this. But how does Victor know?” A longer pause, then a different student raises his hand and says, “He doesn’t. He just assumes the Creature is evil and he jumps to a conclusion that he can’t really back up at all.”

And there it is.

We begin to doubt our narrator. When we doubt our narrator, whose voice we trust to guide us through the story-world unscathed, we move into the unrecognizable.

The novel trains us to believe certain things about certain characters or events in it. Once we recognize how Victor’s narrative trains us, and what his narrative wants us to believe, we can begin to ask harder questions of it (and him): To what extent is someone responsible for the actions of another; what does it mean, in this novel, to be human; who counts; what do the characters know, and how do they come to know it?

And in turn, we must ask harder questions of ourselves as readers.

What do we know?

How do we know it?

How can we know differently?

This is where learning, as I hope my book project will thoroughly explore, begins. When we are brought into uncertain territories that require us to think and feel differently about our relationship to the texts as readers, and our relationship with ourselves as thinking, feeling beings.

After all, per Foucault, “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on thinking and looking at all” (HSV1, 8).

 

 

Commonplacing, January 2018

“It is precisely because one does not want to lose one’s status as a viable speaking being that one does not say what one thinks” (xix-xx).

“Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we shall be taken up by it, find it is contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way by the thinking of the presumed enemy” (8).

“It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there…If I lose you, under these circumstances, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you? […] I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. […] What grief displays…is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us…a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing…Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (22-23).

–Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2006)

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“However, a public that shudders at train wrecks, that is familiar with earthquakes, plagues, revolutions, wars; that is sensitive to the disordered anguish of love, can be affected by all these grand notions and asks only to become aware of them, but on condition that it is addressed in its own language, and that its knowledge of these things does not come to it through adulterated trappings and speech that belong to extinct eras which will never live again” (75).

“But there are too many signs that everything that used to sustain our lives no longer does so, that we are all mad, desperate, and sick. And I call on us to react” (77).

“We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all” (79).

–Antonin Artaud, “No More Masterpieces” (Theatre and Its Double, 1958)

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“The tragic situation becomes grotesque when both alternatives of the choice imposed are absurd, irrelevant or compromising. The hero has to play, even if there is no game. Every move is bad, but he cannot throw down his cards. To throw down the cards would also be a bad move” (135).

“[Ionesco’s] The Radiant City exists and does not exist, or rather it has existed always and everywhere. And that is why it is so terrifying. Similarly, the Shakespearean precipice at Dover exists and does not exist. It is the abyss, waiting all the time. The abyss, into which one can jump, is everywhere” (145-6).

“There are no longer kings and subjects, fathers and children, husbands and wives. There are only huge Renaissance monsters, devouring one another like beasts of prey” (153).

Jan Kott, “King Lear or Endgame” (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1966)

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“…because [the Gothic] implies or demonstrates that these hidden depths could become visible, it creates a powerful interplay not so much between surface and depth as between surface and second surface…between what we see at first and the scandalous force of what could eventually be revealed” (411).

“Relationship, as it turns out, is a process of mutual preoccupation, such that each person carries one’s memory of the emotional state of the other, and, in turn, serves to inspire and produce further change in the other” (412).

–David Collings, “The force of indirection: ‘Tintern Abbey’ in the literary history of mood” (British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, 2015)

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“[Joanna] Bailie then argues that the subject or self can be constructed only in sympathetic relation to other selves, and that knowledge is produced, not from ‘objective’ or detached observation, but rather from empathetic identification, an identification that is then articulated through the stories we tell of what and whom we meet, what she calls ‘tattling'” (146-7).

“Bailie suggests that it is men who destroyed themselves through an excess of unchecked emotion and women who have the ability to free themselves from the follies and prejudices of their youth, to take up all standpoints, and to see a larger truth…it is finally the wise woman who combines national prudence with sympathetic understanding and thus acts best for the nation” (151).

Ann K. Mellor, “Theater as the school of virtue” (British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, 2015)

Student-Veterans in the College Classroom

We never know in advance how someone will learn: by means of what loves someone becomes good at Latin, what encounters make them a philosopher, or in what dictionaries they learn to think.

—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (165)

They have tentacles languidly stretching forth from their minds, feeling, vaguely for substance, & easily applied by a guiding hand to something that [they] could really grasp.

—Virginia Woolf, “Report on Teaching at Morley College” (203)

My primary concern when approaching this presentation on student-veterans in the classroom was a general one: to explore the educational necessities of the student who comes back. How can I, as an educator, best reach the student who has returned from living another life? Both my mother and father were student-veterans, having completed a year in the Air Force and “a little over four years” in the Marine Corps, respectively, so I have firsthand accounts of how isolated such nontraditional students felt on their campuses. How unprepared their universities were to address their academic and non-academic needs. How sparse, how virtually nonexistent were the conversations about PTSD and the difficulties of transitioning back to civilian life.

There were no student-veteran resource centers in the early 1990s—at least not at my parents’ schools. In fact, it was not until my uncle Bill Meirose returned to South Dakota after serving in the armed forces that the universities under the South Dakota Board of Regents began to offer such resources to student-veterans; Uncle Bill told me last fall that it was his work in adult education and veteran suicide-prevention that led the charge in establishing these centers on SDBOR campuses, including the University of South Dakota.

As I dove into my research for this presentation, I began to realize that my initial essential question (“What do these students need?”) was a perpetuation of a common problem in educative discourse about student-veterans. Michelle Navarre Cleary and Kathryn Wozniak write on the difference between a “deficit approach” and an “asset-based approach” (para 1). If one approaches educating a student-veteran with the consideration of what one/they already has/have, rather than what is missing or what is needed, then one destabilizes the common idea that in order to even begin to reach the student-veteran, one must acquire “specialized knowledge, instruction, funding, [or] research” (Cleary). One likely already has the resources, or at least some resources, to help reach that student.

The perceived deficit is not as wide or as difficult to bridge as many administrative committees would like to believe, since many of the challenges a student-veteran may face when returning to school are similar to, if not the same, as what transitional challenges a non-military nontraditional student may also encounter. While it is important to not totally divorce one’s perception of the student-veteran from his or her military service, it is important to shift one’s focus and view him or her as another kind of adult learner. We have the tools to help adult learners. So, let us begin there.

Currently, to my knowledge, I only have one student-veteran in my sections of ENGL 101 this semester. I would not have known he is a student-veteran had he not emailed me one Friday morning to let me know he would be absent from class because his unit would be gone all weekend for training. I never would have even suspected—although, I suppose his grin when I told my class I previously attended and worked at a military academy could have been an earlier sign that we had some shared experience. This student, whom I shall call Joe, was one of four students (out of my forty-two total) who earned full points on his first major paper. He was surprised about the grade, and asked me after class, “I’m not sure how to interpret this, because I know it wasn’t perfect.” I simply told Joe that his writing was thorough, thoughtful, and displayed a level of insightfulness and intellectual labor that earned an A. “I hope this is a paper you’re proud of,” I said, “because your work here was truly impressive.”

Joe is easily one of my strongest students. He participates in and often ends up doing most of the heavy-lifting during discussions of assigned readings (except on the day we discussed two articles about war; he was uncharacteristically silent; not angry, not disagreeing, just listening to his peers’ thoughts). He asks questions when he is unsure. Sometimes, Joe will rephrase and repeat back to me a concept I just introduced, so that he can be sure he gets it (though I often think he also does so to put the idea in simpler terms so his classmates have another way of approaching or understanding the material). I suppose it is like what my mother said when I asked her about her experience as a student-veteran: “That’s the thing about coming back…I’m not afraid of your homework assignment. I’ve been to war. Give me that damn homework assignment.”

One of the largest challenges which student-veterans face in their return to academia, according to Michelle Navarre Cleary and Kathryn Wozniak, is that “they often do not understand how or why they need to know how to write academic essays.” The challenge these assignments pose is one of difference: military vs. academic expectations. Military writing is brief, sticks to the facts, and is not analytical or interpretive, whereas academic writing is often perceived as “overly wordy and unnecessarily long with lots of padding.” What will resolve this dissonance, Cleary and Wozniak write, is the instructor taking time to explain the value of developing and supporting claims, thinking critically about information rather than taking it for granted. The clearer the instructor is with his or her expectations—length requirements, specific examples, etc.—the better prepared a student-veteran (or any student in general) will be when he or she begins to write. Student-veterans tend to think of writing as a “perishable skill,” so easing them back in with “explicit instruction, low-stakes writing, frequent feedback, and [models/templates] can help reduce the anxiety” that many student-veterans share with adult learners when it comes to academic writing.

Cleary and Wozniak also address the importance of acknowledging experience: “Encouraging students to write about their prior learning experiences signals acceptance of who they are.” This report also suggests that students complete an “experience portfolio” at the start of the semester, in which “they document their areas of expertise, review their writing experiences, and provide samples of their current writing.” This experience portfolio is of considerable interest to me as a Portfolio Composition instructor—I see as much value in the assemblage of one’s past work as a writer as I do in the process of developing more work and furthering one’s perception of oneself as a writer.

In “An Emerging Population: Student Veterans in Higher Education in the 21^st Century,” Mary E. Falkey immediately addresses the difficult of locating and applying to a “veteran-friendly school,” and the transitional difficulties student-veterans face in terms of the comparatively unstructured university atmosphere. Falkey also raises an important concern regarding the post-9/11 GI Bill: it “provides the most generous education benefits for military veterans since the first GI Bill was implemented in 1944…[but] benefits alone are not enough to help student veterans succeed in higher education” (29). The issue here, then, is that the government is providing financial assistance for veterans to return to school, but the schools are typically not providing effective/enough transitional assistance once the veteran arrives. Due to the additional/increased benefits of the post-9/11 GI Bill, universities will likely see an increase in their student-veteran populations, many of whom will have been in combat, so this presents an additional challenge re: access to treatment for PTSD and the delay of symptoms after the conclusion of the individual’s service.

Falkey writes on the correlation between high stress levels and impediments to learning, stating that “For student/veterans the risk of high stress levels is probably, especially for those returning from combat zones. These individuals may need assistance in identifying academic situations that could become stressful before they become problematic” (34). This speaks to the necessity of firm, fair, consistent, and clear course policies and classroom structure: the more the student-veteran knows about what will be asked of them, the better prepared they will be to approach these learning tasks and successfully engage with and complete them. The more structure an instructor can provide (rules, models, etc.), the more navigable the course becomes, and the less stress the coursework places on the student-veteran (or adult learner, or traditional learner). The military “language” is one of structure and discipline, and there is value in adopting/appropriating useful elements of that rigidity into one’s classroom: be clear in one’s expectations re: policies, assignments, etc., and hold one’s students and oneself accountable to those expectations.

Furthermore, Corrine Hinton writes that student-veterans complicate our ideas of what it means to be a “novice”: “The potential challenges for applying the novice-to-expert model to student veterans in first-year composition courses stem from the way in which first-year writers are expected to operate as new (almost) members of the community.” Student-veterans have already been members of communities (military cohorts: platoon, squad, company, battalion, etc.) in which they may see themselves as writers (of reports, of logistical strategies, of inventories, etc.). Hinton writes that “the revising processes of Marine student veterans suggest a position that is neither novice nor expert,” because of the way in which an individual is taught in a military educational structure: there is “a complex organizational learning system” which is designed to encourage the individual to “be critical, strategic, and reasoned thinkers; self-motivated; detail-oriented; and assertive, confident communicators in class,” “ask questions, participate actively, volunteer for leadership roles, and support struggling Marines.” Because of this educational system, when a veteran returns to academia following their enlistment, they are not starting as “fresh” as our freshman students.

Much of the structure and skills our courses are designed to impart, the student-veteran has already been developing these skills. Most of the Marine student-veterans Hinton interviewed for this article reported that they were already aware of the ways in which they have evolved as writers: “This self-awareness was demonstrated by [their] ability to (1) make connections between previous and current literacy habits […] (2) identify salient points of difference, (3) determine the origin of the changes they identified, and (4) connect those prior experiences and the changes that have occurred to current successes or failures.” The military writing style demands objectivity and structure, so the student-veteran has been trained to step outside of him- or herself and can then likely be more aware of their strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

Lastly, Allison Lighthall’s 2012 “listicle,” “Ten Things You Should Know About Today’s Student Veteran,” provides readers with an impressive overview of the student-veteran population in the United States. According to Lighthall, in addition to being a minority population on many campuses, student-veteran cohorts are highly diverse, featuring a wide range of religions, sexual orientations, political views, ages, and races. Lighthall also notes that even when student veterans are “psychologically struggling or physically wounded, they see themselves as powerful warriors,” so they struggle to ask for help in the classroom (82). Once a veteran is no longer attached to his or her brigade/battalion/company/platoon/squad/battle buddy, they often feel entirely alone in an unfamiliar social system with no clear chain of command; establishing a mentor-mentee program through student-veteran resource center may help them better navigate this adjustment.

Lighthall continues, writing that many student-veterans are “often unaware of their own mild traumatic brain injuries” which can hinder cognitive functions like memory, attention/concentration, abstract reasoning, etc.; the instructor can and should make his or her classroom more accommodating by such methods as posting notes online ahead of time, wearing a microphone if lecturing in a large hall, captioning lecture videos, and/or using texts that can be obtained digitally. When it comes to a student-veteran’s peers in the classroom, other students asking intrusive questions about the student-veteran’s experiences in war is oftentimes unavoidable, so taking measures to model awareness of other viewpoints and explaining how the “did you kill anyone?” questions/comments can be hurtful will ease the emotional/psychological transition. Item Five on Lighthall’s list specifically addresses the struggles of a female student-veteran: female veterans faced not only war traumas, but “at least 22 percent” also faced sexual harassment or assault while serving, and the female student-veteran suffers deeply and often in silence (86).

Despite the adjustment to a comparatively “boring” civilian life, student-veterans “value and honor authority figures,” so the instructor must not take the student-veteran’s adjustment behaviors personally, give him or her the space he or she needs to feel safe, and sometimes be the one to reach out to the student-veteran to determine where the gaps in his or her education may be (88). Lighthall concludes her list with the following: “Student veterans are one of America’s greatest untapped human resources,” in that they are emotionally mature, goal-oriented, mission-driven, and experienced leaders who search for answers and think globally (88).

…

Bibliography

Cleary, Michelle Navarre, and Kathryn Wozniak. “Veterans as Adult Learners in Composition Courses.” Composition Forum 28, 2013, http://compositionforum.com/issue/28/adult-learners.php

Falkey, Mary E. “An Emerging Population: Student Veterans in Higher Education in the 21^st Century.” Journal of Academic Administration in Higher Education, vol. 12, no. 1, 2016, pp. 27-39.

Hinton, Corrine. “‘The Military Taught Me Something about Writing’: How Student Veterans Complicate the Novice-to-Expert Continuum in First-year Composition.” Composition Forum 28, 2013, http://compositionforum.com/issue/28/novice-to-expert.php

Lighthall, Allison. “Ten Things You Should Know About Today’s Student Veteran.” The NEA Higher Education Journal, 2012, pp. 80-89.

 

Epigraphs

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. 1968. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia UP, 1994.

Woolf, Virginia. “Report on Teaching at Morley College.” Virginia Woolf: A Biography, by Quentin Bell, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, pp. 202-204.

 

 

On Food Writing

presented at the Vermillion Literary Project’s September LiTrash reading

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today,” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

What do I mean when I say this reading is themed around “Food Writing”? Outside of the description included in our advertisements, when I talk about food writing, I am usually talking about the sensual experience of eating written down. But food writing, like food studies, encompasses much more than just the act of eating. Food unites us. It is no coincidence that in Christian religious movements, to eat the body of Christ (however symbolically or literally your denomination takes that) is called communion. When we gather to share a meal, we are a community at that table. Food also divides us. There are socioeconomic stigmas attached to what one eats, and how often. I look to Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Bean Eaters.” The first time I was taught this poem, my professor said that the “old yellow pair” on whom the poem’s speaker focuses “eat beans mostly” because they are poor.

In the summer of 2016, I worked at a military academy in Virginia, and one of my cadets was an international student from China. She came to me after dinner one evening, her right hand closed tight around something very small. She slowly opened her hand to reveal that it was one of her back teeth. She said, “I was eating a Starburst and my tooth just came out.” I asked her if I could look at her mouth, where the tooth had been. It was a clean hole. No blood. No parts of tooth still stuck in the gum. Her tooth had just…rotted out. When I told my father later that night, he nodded slowly and said, “She’s probably malnourished.”

We are what we eat, and we eat what we are. And it is assumed that if one eats poorly, then one is poor. And vice versa.

Women are also stigmatized, even ridiculed, for their relationships to food. In her first Netflix special, War Paint, comedienne Iliza Shlesinger says that women cannot eat the way they want to eat in front of men, and that it is only after a man is deeply in love with a woman that she is free to reveal “the twelve-foot man-eating lizard [she] really [is]” (53:13). All joking aside, every encounter a woman has with food in a public space is performative. Every bite is scrutinized. Every portion size is judged by strangers. If she is perceived to be eating too much, she is shamed for her gluttony. She is called fat, pig-like, and she is set in society’s mind as someone embarrassing or pitiful. However, if she is perceived to have eaten too little, or that she is too skinny, too fit, she is policed just as quickly and ordered to eat a burger, put meat on her bones. Food, in relation to women, is a means of bodily control.

Food nourishes us, of course, but food also complicates us. Lisa Heldke describes her experimentation with multicultural cuisine as “cultural food colonialism,” writing that her enthusiasm for trying ethnic recipes

bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the attitude of various nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painters, anthropologists, and explorers who set out in search of ever “newer,” ever more “remote” cultures they could co-opt, borrow from freely and out of context, and use as the raw materials for their own efforts at creation and discovery. (328)

Upon deeper reflection about what might lie behind a seemingly-innocuous phrase like, “Let’s cook Thai,” Heldke became “seriously uncomfortable about…the tenacity with which [she collects] eating adventures—as one might collect ritual artifacts from another culture without thinking about the appropriateness of removing them from their cultural setting” (328). Think of it this way: how many recipes in the quintessentially American cookbook actually come from America? How much culinary art do we beg, borrow, and steal from other persons?

When creative writers enter the field of food studies, we tend to not only push the field further along, but we tend to problematize it as it develops. By bringing personal writing into the ring, there is a clash between what role those anthropologists, historians, etc. determine that food has in a certain culture, and voices from that culture taking to task their relationships to, encounters with, and memories of food. And that, I hope, is what tonight will do. We are here to read personal narratives, poetic narratives, creative narratives that will enhance our understanding of food’s role in our lives, in our culture…and perhaps even complicate it, too.

…

References

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “The Bean Eaters.” The Poetry Foundation, 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28110/the-bean-eaters

Heldke, Lisa. “Let’s Cook Thai: Recipes for Colonialism.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. Routledge, 2008. pp. 327-341.

Shlesinger, Iliza. War Paint. Directed by Jay Chapman. 2013. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70278877?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2Ca3a00f98bcd4d67c12d52da76e6ae9d93474f9ee%3A296316019eda2afee7c3908aaa56b0dd5d2bae2b

On Turning 23

I’ve come to enjoy the knowledge that I am still young. That I have so much time. But I am, on occasion, painfully aware of how quickly a single day goes by. 

Today was my 23rd birthday, and it felt over as soon as it began.

This is not to say that it is not special to age. I have now seen more birthdays than I once thought I would, and though birthdays become less of an elaborate, celebratory occasion as one gets older, I see each new year of my life as a tremendous gift.

I’ve begun to think harder about how I want to use this gift. “Something in the world forces [me] to think,” but I sense something else, quite a different thing, forces me to act.

This fall, I started teaching on my own for the first time. I’ve won an award for my playwriting. I’m working on creative submissions for several out-of-state conferences. At the end of this month, I’m set to host the first reading in the Vermillion Literary Project’s LiTrash series. I’ve always loved academia, but now I feel that academia loves me back.

How fortunate am I that my passion and my talent happen to be the same thing.

But I want to do more.

John Patrick Shanley writes: “I’m looking for love. But if I can’t get love, I can get pizza. In short: I can get a lot, and still hope for more.”

It is my sense that this year will be about that kind of hope. Recognizing that, yes, I’ve gotten quite a lot already. But I can still hope for, pursue, and get more.

And I do want more.

More time, more art, more love. (More pizza.)

I rise with the sun and hope that will make each day seem longer. I leave my cubicle and walk over to the English Department offices and hope that I will see someone I know, and have a chance to tell them how much I value our relationship. I select readings for my students and hope that they will be moved. (They sometimes aren’t.) I slowly expand my thesis project and hope that it will find the middle ground between what I’ve told people it will be and what it actually wants to be. I read complicated texts and hope that they will challenge me to grow. (They do.)

I am moved. I am frequently, pleasantly unsettled. Stubborn me, I am moved every day, especially by the patience, generosity, and supportiveness of my peers, my colleagues.

I am moved to more.

That, I believe, is the value of aging: being moved to hope for more.

IT: a moment

I went to see IT (round three!) with my friend Dillon this evening. Some Guy in front of us had been making little comments throughout the movie. A few times, he looked over his shoulder and sent some of these comments in my direction. Annoying, sure, but mostly harmless. Until the last scene.

Bill kisses Beverly. Guy says “aww.” Most in the audience do. Then, Beverly kisses Bill. Guy turns to all his buddies, some are in our row, and he says, “What a fucking slut! Fucking whore!” We make eye contact. I snap: “Hey, shut the fuck up, asshole.”

And then I have a moment in which I am more afraid of what this guy will say or do than I am of anything that happened during the movie.

The few seconds it took us all to process the exchange had stretched long. I watch Guy’s face. He seems more surprised than anything else. Time rushes forward again and Guy’s buddies start smacking his arms and saying, “Yeah, shut up, asshole!” I see a girl in their group clap her hands. Dillon says something like, “You tell him.”

The movie ends. Dillon and I are two of the first people out of the theater. As we leave, I say, “I can’t believe it took me so long to tell that guy to shut the fuck up.”

But I do believe it. And I know why I waited, and why I was so afraid. Because the unpredictability of how that man would react was something real that could hurt me. And there is no screeching crescendo in my life’s soundtrack to warn me that danger is coming. There is no red balloon that precedes the potential violence of a man’s reaction to a woman telling him to shut the fuck up. In front of his friends. In public.

On Waiting

Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (38).

Of late I dream of finality. Closing doors. Shuttered windows. Latched fence-gates. Ends of conversations.

I wonder: with how many people have I already had my last conversation?

I dream in this way because I have tired of waiting. Waiting, as Barthes writes, is an enchantment. An order not to move. I also think of waiting as a passionate exercise. Waiting is like doubting. To be certain is to shut the door. To doubt is to leave it indeterminately open. It requires daily effort and attention, it requires your commitment. Commitment. Now there’s a funny word. In waiting, one commits to a noncommittal. To an indefatigable uncertainty.

I dream in this way because I waited for a person for almost three years. I waited because our many near-misses strung me along with an unspoken promise that one day we might catch one another. When we finally were in the same place and the same time, I realized that he was telling me (without explicitly telling me) the exact same reasons for not wanting to be with me that he said in 2014. Back then, it sounded mature. On the recent evening in question, though, it sounded like a recitation. A script. A prefabricated request that I continue to wait.

But I cannot wait. I will not.

It is easy to believe that our problem was timing. But timing is for figure skaters and standup comics. You either want to be with someone, or you don’t. I wanted to be with him, to make a go of it, to at least try. But he did not want that. He did not want me.

And that’s okay.

I dream of finality because its arrival here was strange. I expected finality to come from him, for him to be the one to close the door, to end the conversation. For whatever reason, he could not do it. He would not do it. It had to be me. And I am trying now to recover from that.

To be the one who ends the passionate exercise of waiting is to be the one who must navigate a now-empty room. I shut the door on the room I made in my life for him, a room which he never intended to occupy. And now I have this empty space. How does one move forward? With what might one fill this space? Should one even try to fill it? Or should one simply tear it back down?

To wait is to receive orders not to move. But I have finally given myself instruction to forward march on feet that have fallen asleep and on legs that cannot remember which muscles are used to go on.

How does one recover? How does one locate happiness again, how does one’s theory of happiness have to change to accommodate this uninhabited room? I dream in this way because in shutting the door, in ending the conversation, in giving orders to move, I have freed myself from a prolonged enchantment. And I am uncertain what I want to do with my freedom first.

On Promises

Neitzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals that to make a promise is to make a prediction regarding one’s own future. To make a promise to someone else, if we follow that idea from Nietzsche, is to make a prediction regarding the couple’s entangled future. When that promise is broken, not only is it a betrayal of the trust it founded, but it also nullifies that future. It prevents it from ever coming to fruition.

I believe this is why breakups hurt the way they do. The person doing the leaving had promised something to the person being left. He promised her a future, and now he is taking that away after he made her wait for it. She planned for it, prepared for it, altered the course of her life for it. And when he recants, he undoes all of that hope. He takes her future away. How swiftly he can destroy a life she built but did not yet have the chance to live.